Civil Disobedience (1846, by Henry David Thoreau)

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE (1846, by Henry David Thoreau)

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From 4 July 1845 to 6 September 1847, the writer Henry David Thoreau lived in solitude on Walden Pond in Massachusetts, in a cabin he built himself. The cabin was situated on a plot of land given to him by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was Thoreau's aim to demonstrate he could live in the woods without the benefits of industrial society. It was during this time that the United States went to war with Mexico, a conflict bitterly opposed by the growing antislavery movement. Like other abolitionists, Thoreau was horrified by the war, believing it a Southern attempt to expand and extend the institution of slavery. To protest the war, Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax. (He had actually failed to pay his poll tax for three successive years; it was only in 1846 that he linked it to the larger issues of war and slavery). For this action, Thoreau was arrested and jailed. Within hours, his aunt paid the tax and the following day he was released. In total, he spent one night in jail.

From this experience came his famous essay, "Civil Disobedience." Of the essay, the historian Robert D. Cross has written: "Thoreau makes a powerful case for the duty of an individual not to violate his own convictions by acquiescence; there are times when the individual must not only say no but act on his refusal.…He shared Emerson's horror of becoming embroiled in mass crusades, however elevated the avowed purpose. Yet when the state, or any part of it, commits what a man deeply believes is absolute wrong, Thoreau would sanction any form of resistance."

Robert Jakoubek,
Independent Scholar

See also Civil Disobedience .

I HEARTILY accept the motto—"That government is best which governs least;" and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,—"That government is best which governs not at all;" and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government. The standing army is only an arm of the standing government. The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it. Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure. …

All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. But almost all say that such is not the case now. But such was the case, they think, in the Revolution of '75. If one were to tell me that this was a bad government because it taxed certain foreign commodities brought to its ports, it is most probable that I should not make an ado about it, for I can do without them. All machines have their friction; and possibly this does enough good to counter-balance the evil. At any rate, it is a great evil to make a stir about it. But when the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer. In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is that fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.

…No man with a genius for legislation has appeared in America. They are rare in the history of the world. There are orators, politicians, and eloquent men, by the thousand; but the speaker has not yet opened his mouth to speak who is capable of settling the much-vexed questions of the day. We love eloquence for its own sake, and not for any truth which it may utter, or any heroism it may inspire. Our legislators have not yet learned the comparative value of free trade and of freed, of union, and of rectitude, to a nation. They have no genius or talent for comparatively humble questions of taxation and finance, commerce and manufactures and agriculture. If we were left solely to the wordy wit of legislators in Congress for our guidance, uncorrected by the seasonable experience and the effectual complaints of the people, America would not long retain her rank among the nations. For eighteen hundred years, though perchance I have no right to say it, the New Testament has been written; yet where is the legislator who has wisdom and practical talent enough to avail himself of the light which it sheds on the science of legislation.

The authority of government, even such as I am willing to submit to—for I will cheerfully obey those who know and can do better than I, and in many things even those who neither know nor can do so well—is still an impure one: to be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consent of the governed. It can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it. The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual. Even the Chinese philosopher was wise enough to regard the individual as the basis of the empire. Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which I have also imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.

SOURCE: Thoreau, Henry David. Collected under this title in A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866.