Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau

First published: 1849, as “Resistance to Civil Government”

Type of work: Social criticism

The Work

The long autobiographical essay most commonly known as “Civil Disobedience” was first published as “Resistance to Civil Government” in the magazine Æsthetic Papers in 1849. The essay appeared under its common title in A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-slavery and Reform Papers (1866), a collection of his works. The essay grew out of a series of lectures, “The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to Government,” which Thoreau delivered to the Concord Lyceum in 1848.

Two years before the Lyceum lectures, in midsummer 1846, Thoreau spent a night in jail because he had refused to pay six years of delinquent poll taxes. He argued that he could not pay funds that helped to support the US government’s war with Mexico, nor could he pay a government that still accepted slavery in its Southern states. Thoreau regarded the war as unjust and staunchly opposed slavery. Over his protests, one of his relatives paid his taxes, and Thoreau was released.

Thoreau’s short stay behind bars helped inspire his great political essay. In it, he begins with an assertion of the desirability of limited government, subject to not only democratic will but also the conscience of the individual. The opening statement, “I heartily accept the motto, ’that government is best which governs least,’” establishes Thoreau as highly skeptical of political authority. He extends the criticisms of standing armies, which were often identified as instruments of tyranny in early American political thinking, to government itself, and argues that government is often an instrument of abuse against the people. Still, although Thoreau may be a philosophical anarchist, he specifically states that having no government at all will be practicable only when the people are prepared for such a situation, and he implies that, in his own day, they are not prepared. Nevertheless, he maintains that government is only an instrument through which people act, and that it should leave people alone as much as possible.

The laws passed by government, according to Thoreau, are only reflections of people, and he expresses no regard for law simply because it expresses the will or acceptance of a majority. Laws and government may be improved when they come from conscience, not when conscience follows laws or government. He asserts that the US government does not merit his support because of the war on Mexico and the existence of slavery in the South. Given Thoreau’s view of government, he does not believe that these injustices can be righted by the democratic means of voting, since voting simply expresses the acceptance of the will of a majority, not a dedication to the dictates of one’s own conscience.

The commitment to justice does not mean that Thoreau believes he has an obligation to right the wrongs of the world. In fact, he explicitly states that no one has the duty to eradicate even the greatest of wrongs. He says that he was born to live in the world, not to make it a better place to live. However, he also claims that the wrongs of the world continue to exist because people are willing to support them. His obligation is to refuse to be a party to the wrongdoing, and not to participate in political procedures for change. Thoreau’s essay, then, argues not for disobedience as a strategy of political engagement, but as an act of moral disengagement from politics.

Thoreau’s disengagement should not be confused with inaction, though. Instead, it is a type of face-to-face action. When the conscientious person meets the agent of the state, in the form of the tax collector, that person can refuse to be a party to wrongdoing by refusing to pay taxes. Furthermore, the objector should recommend that the tax collector resign the official position and also refuse allegiance to the state. If the government imprisons the objector or confiscates property as a response, then that government, which is engaged in immoral actions, simply reaffirms the moral position of the objector outside the state. According to Thoreau, because money itself is issued by the state, a truly virtuous person would be likely to have little money or property and therefore will show little concern over any confiscation. Each act of refusal undermines governmental power, since this power exists only in obedience.

After the theoretical discussion of his views on the relationship between the individual and the state, Thoreau describes his own experiences directly. He discusses first how he had previously refused to pay taxes to support his family’s church, which he himself did not attend. After someone else first paid that tax for him, he resolved the situation by giving local officials a written statement that he was not a member of the church and that he did not want to support any organization he had not voluntarily joined. He goes on to recount that he has paid no poll tax for six years.

He explains that his refusal to pay the poll tax led to his detention in jail for a night. In his mind, the walls between himself and his townspeople simply make him freer than the others, since he is acting in accord with his own thoughts. Thoreau’s description of his time in jail reads more like an account of a vacation than a punishment. He describes arriving at the jail and finding the prisoners chatting in the doorway until the jailer announces that it is lockup time. His cell-mate had been accused of burning a barn, but Thoreau says that the man had probably just fallen asleep in the barn while drunk and accidentally set fire to it with his pipe.

Thoreau compares being in jail to traveling to a far country, both because it is a new place to him and because it gives him a new perspective on his own town. From the windows of the jail, he says that Concord, Massachusetts, seems as strange as a medieval land. When he leaves the jail, he sees his neighbors as foreigners, guided by odd prejudices rather than by reason.

Thoreau ends the essay by returning to his political philosophy. His refusal to pay the tax, he explains, is a refusal of allegiance to the government. In this way, he quietly declares war on the state. In the end, he returns to the beginning of the essay with remarks on the future of government. The progress from absolute to limited monarchy and from limited monarchy to democracy, can be carried further by moving toward the individual as an independent source from which all power and authority are derived.

The government of the United States arguably did not evolve in the direction Thoreau wished; instead, it emerged from the American Civil War with a larger and more centralized political authority. The decades following Thoreau’s essay also saw the rise of the modern corporation, which challenged his style of individualism, even if it eventually produced great material abundance. Slavery, one of the two provocations for Thoreau’s act of refusal, did not end as a consequence of individual civil disobedience but as a result of the Civil War, which was led by officers of the Union and Confederacy who had learned military tactics in the war with Mexico. Still, Thoreau’s ideal of principled refusal continues to inspire thinkers and activists, and his version of individual autonomy remains a part of the self-image and values of many Americans.

Bibliography

Bankston, Carl L. "Thoreau's Case for Political Disengagement." Modern Age 52.1 (2010): 6–13. Print.

Bedau, Hugo Adam, ed. “Civil Disobedience” in Focus. New York: Routledge, 1991. Print.

Cain, William E., ed. A Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. Print.

Milder, Robert. Reimagining Thoreau. 1994. Reprint. New York: Cambridge UP, 2008. Print.

Petrulionis, Sandra Harbart. To Set This World Right: The Antislavery Movement in Thoreau’s Concord. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2006. Print.

Schneider, Richard J. "Henry David Thoreau." Critical Survey of Poetry: American Poets. Ed. Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman. Pasadena: Salem, 2011. Print.

Tauber, Alfred I. Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing. Berkeley: U of California P, 2001.

Traubel, Horace. "Celebrating Thoreau's Legacy: On the Duty of Civil Disobedience." Thoreau Society Bulletin 227 (2012): 22. Print.