RutherfordInstitute | July 14, 2010

John Whitehead dedicates this week's vodcast to Henry David Thoreau, whose Civil Disobedience essay is a must read for anyone who wants to exercise their right of responsible citizenship by speaking truth to power.

Henry
David Thoreau and “Civil Disobedience,” Part 1


by


Wendy McElroy, Posted July 25, 2005

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was an introspective man who wandered the woods surrounding the small village of Concord, Massachusetts,
recording the daily growth of plants and the migration of birds in his
ever-present journal. How, then, did he profoundly influence such
political giants as Mohandas Gandhi, Leo Tolstoy, and Martin Luther King
Jr.?

The answer lies in a brief essay that has been variously titled but which is often referred to simply as “Civil Disobedience” (1849).
Americans know Thoreau primarily as the author of the book Walden, or
Life in the Woods (1854) but it is “Civil Disobedience” that
established his reputation in the wider political world. It is one of
the most influential political tracts ever written by an American.

“Civil Disobedience” is an analysis of the individual’s relationship to the state that focuses on why men obey governmental law even when they
believe it to be unjust. But “Civil Disobedience” is not an essay of
abstract theory. It is Thoreau’s extremely personal response to being
imprisoned for breaking the law. Because he detested slavery and because
tax revenues contributed to the support of it, Thoreau decided to
become a tax rebel. There were no income taxes and Thoreau did not own
enough land to worry about property taxes; but there was the hated poll
tax — a capital tax levied equally on all adults within a community.

Thoreau declined to pay the tax and so, in July 1846, he was arrested and jailed. He was supposed to remain in jail until a fine was paid
which he also declined to pay. Without his knowledge or consent,
however, relatives settled the “debt” and a disgruntled Thoreau was
released after only one night.

The incarceration may have been brief but it has had enduring effects through “Civil Disobedience.” To understand why the essay has exerted
such powerful force over time, it is necessary to examine both Thoreau
the man and the circumstances of his arrest.

Thoreau the man

Henry David Thoreau was born into the modest New England family of a pen-maker. With a childhood surrounded by rivers, woods, and meadows, he
became an avid student of nature. His friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, offered the following psychological portrait:

He was bred to no profession; he never married; he lived alone; he never went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the State;
he ate no flesh; he drank no wine; he never knew the use of tobacco; and
though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun. He chose, wisely no
doubt for himself, to be the bachelor of thought and Nature.... No truer
American existed than Thoreau.

If it is possible for one word to summarize a man, then that word would be the advice he offered in Walden: “Simplify, simplify,
simplify.” Thoreau was a self-consciously simple man who organized his
life around basic truths. He listened to the inner voice of his
conscience, a voice all men possess but few men follow. As he explained
in Walden,

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its
dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust. It
is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but
practically.

Thoreau’s attempt to apply principles to his daily life is what led to his imprisonment and to “Civil Disobedience.” Oddly enough, his
contemporaries did not see him as a theorist or as a radical, viewing
him instead as a naturalist. They either dismissed or ignored his
political essays, including “Civil Disobedience.” The only two books
published in his lifetime, Walden and A Week on the Concord
and Merrimack Rivers (1849), both dealt with nature, in which he
loved to wander.

He did not have to wander far to find intellectual stimulation as well. During the early 19th century, New England was the center of an
intellectual movement called Transcendentalism. In 1834, while Thoreau
was a student at Harvard, the leading Transcendentalist moved into a
substantial house at the outskirts of Concord, thus converting the
village into the heart of this influential movement. That man was
Emerson.

There has never been rigorous agreement on the definition of Transcendentalism, partly because Emerson refused to be systematic; but
there are broad areas of agreement among Transcendentalists. As a
philosophy, it emphasizes idealism rather than materialism; that is, it
views the world as an expression of spirit and every individual as an
expression of a common humanity. To be human is to be born with moral
imperatives that are not learned from experience but which are
discovered through introspection. Therefore, everyone must be free to
act according to his conscience in order to find the truth buried
within.

Although Emerson’s focus on the individual must have appealed to Thoreau, there was
an inherent tension between Thoreau’s practical, earthy ways and the
abstract quality of Transcendentalism. Thoreau wanted to incorporate
principles into daily life; he wanted to taste and feel principles in
the air around him. He wrote in Walden,

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had
to teach, and not, when I came to die, to discover that I had not lived.
I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I
wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to
live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and
Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad
swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its
lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole
and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if
it were sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a
true account of it.

Despite their differences, Thoreau was deeply influenced by Emerson, whom he met in 1837 through a mutual friend. Four years later, Thoreau
moved into the Emerson home and assumed responsibility for many of the
practical details of Emerson’s life.

Transcendentalism became Thoreau’s intellectual training ground. His first appearance in print was a poem entitled “Sympathy” published in
the first issue of The Dial, a Transcendentalist paper. As
Transcendentalists migrated to Concord, one by one, Thoreau was exposed
to all facets of the movement and took his place in its inner circle. At
Emerson’s suggestion, he kept a daily journal, from which most of Walden
was eventually culled.

But Thoreau still longed for a life both concrete and spiritual. He wanted to translate his thoughts into action. While Transcendentalists
praised nature, Thoreau walked through it.
Especially in his later years, Emerson seemed distant from Thoreau’s
lusty approach to life, which he described as “the doctrine of
activity.” Given this difference of approach, it is no
wonder that Emerson did not embrace the ideas within “Civil
Disobedience.” Nor did he approve of Thoreau’s refusal to pay taxes.

Imprisoned for a night

“Civil Disobedience” was Thoreau’s response to his 1846 imprisonment for refusing to pay a poll tax that violated his conscience. He exclaimed
in “Civil Disobedience,”

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I
think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not
desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.
The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time
what I think right.

Imprisonment was Thoreau’s first direct experience with state power and, in typical fashion, he analyzed it:

The State never intentionally confronts a man’s sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit
or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be
forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the
strongest.

Prior to his arrest, Thoreau had lived a quiet, solitary life at Walden, an isolated pond in the woods about a mile and a half from Concord. He
now returned to Walden to mull over two questions: (1) Why do some men
obey laws without asking if the laws are just or unjust; and, (2) why do
others obey laws they think are wrong?

In attempting to answer these questions, Thoreau’s view of the state did not alter. It was that view, after all, which led him to prison in the
first place. Judging by the rather dry, journalistic account of being in
jail, his emotional reaction did not seem to alter significantly; he
was not embittered by the experience. The main criticism he expressed
was aimed at those who presumed to pay his fine, an act that the jailer
said “made him mad as the devil.”

Toward the men who were his jailers, Thoreau seems to have felt more disdain than anger, stating,

They plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are under-bred. In every threat and in every compliment there was a
blunder; for they thought that my chief desire was to stand the other
side of that stone wall.... I saw that the State was half-witted, that
it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not
know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for
it, and pitied it.

It was the reaction of the townspeople of Concord, his neighbors, that distressed Thoreau and made him dissect the experience so as to
understand their behavior. He ended his short, matter-of-fact account of
his night in prison with a commentary on the townsfolk, which expressed
how his eyes had been opened:

I saw to what extent the people among whom I lived could be trusted as good neighbors and friends; that their friendship was for summer weather
only; that they did not greatly propose to do right; that they were a
distinct race from me by their prejudices and superstitions.

There is no cynicism in Thoreau’s description of his neighbors, whom he admits he may be judging “harshly,” since “many of them are not aware
that they have such an institution as the jail in their village.”
Instead he was unsettled by the realization that there was a wall
between him and the townsfolk, a wall to which Gandhi referred in an
account of his second imprisonment in South Africa. Gandhi wrote,

Placed in a similar position for refusing his poll tax, the American citizen Thoreau expressed similar thought in 1849. Seeing the wall of
the cell in which he was confined, made of solid stone 2 or 3 feet
thick, and the door of wood and iron a foot thick, he said to himself,
“If there were a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was
still a more difficult one to climb or break through before they could
get to be as free as I was.”

Thoreau may have also brooded over the reaction of Emerson, who criticized the imprisonment as pointless. According to some accounts,
Emerson visited Thoreau in jail and asked, “Henry, what are you doing in
there?” Thoreau replied, “Waldo, the question is what are you doing out
there?” Emerson was “out there” because he believed it was shortsighted
to protest an isolated evil; society required an entire rebirth of
spirituality.

Emerson missed the point of Thoreau’s protest, which was not intended to reform society but was simply an act of conscience. If we do not
distinguish right from wrong, Thoreau argued that we will eventually
lose the capacity to make the distinction and become, instead, morally
numb.

Near the end of his life, Thoreau was asked, “Have you made your peace with God?” He replied, “I have never quarreled with him.” For Thoreau,
that would have been the real cost of paying his poll tax; it would have
meant quarreling with his own conscience, which was too close to
quarreling with God.

“Civil Disobedience” ends on a happy note. After Thoreau’s release and unpleasant experience with his neighbors, the children of Concord had
brightened his mood by urging him to join a huckleberry hunt.
Huckleberrying was one of Thoreau’s valued pastimes and his skill at
locating fruit-laden bushes made him a favorite with children. And,
should a child stumble, spilling berries, he would kneel by the weeping
child and explain that if children did not stumble, then berries would
never scatter and grow into new bushes.

He ended his chronicle of prison,

[I] joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour ... was in the midst of a
huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then
the State was nowhere to be seen.

Thus, Thoreau shed the experience of prison, but he could not shed the insight he had gained into his neighbors nor the questions that
accompanied his new perspective. The text of “Civil Disobedience”
constitutes the answer he discovered by listening to the “quiet voice
within.”

Wendy McElroy is a fellow at The Independent Institute and author of The Reasonable Woman: A Guide to Intellectual Survival (Prometheus
Books, 1998). For additional articles on current events by Ms. McElroy,
please visit the Commentary
section of our website.

This article was originally published in the March 2005 edition of Freedom
Daily.