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The Thoreau Institute
at Walden Woods Library
About Thoreau's Life and Writings
Texts and Links
including Thoreau's contemporaries, his readings, current
scholarship and
related documents
Henry D. Thoreau
Brief Overviews: Thoreau,
His Writings: "Civil Disobedience"
—Wesley
Mott
Henry D. Thoreau was arrested and imprisoned in Concord for one night in 1846 for
nonpayment of his poll tax. This act of defiance was a protest against slavery and against
the Mexican War, which Thoreau and other abolitionists regarded as a means to expand the
slave territory. Individual resistance to the State has a long historical foreground,
reaching back to Sophocles' play Antigone, through many episodes of religious dissent
against authority, to Thoreau's friend Bronson Alcott's arrest in 1843-also for refusing
to pay his poll tax.
Thoreau's classic essay popularly known as "Civil Disobedience" was first
published as "Resistance to Civil Government" in
Aesthetic Papers
(1849).
Thoreau has no objection to government taxes for highways and schools, which make good
neighbors. But government, he charges, is too often based on expediency, which can permit
injustice in the name of public convenience. The individual, he insists, is never obliged
to surrender conscience to the majority or to the State. If a law "is of such a
nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another," he declares,
"then, I say, break the law." The essay makes it clear that this stance is not a
matter of whim but a demanding moral principle.
The appeal of civil disobedience in the North grew in the wake of the Compromise of
1850, which included the hated Fugitive Slave Law, requiring all citizens to aid in the
return of escaped slaves to their owners. Though civil disobedience is usually associated
with passive resistance, Thoreau came to endorse the more direct action of John Brown,
whose ill-fated raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, was intended to incite a slave
insurrection.
Thoreau's essay has had a profound influence on reformers worldwide, from Tolstoy in
Russia and Gandhi in South Africa and India; to Martin Luther King, Jr's civil rights
movement and the opposition to the Vietnam War in the United States; to recent
demonstrations for civil rights in the former Soviet Union and China.
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