Civil Disobedience

Civil Disobedience, essay by Thoreau, originally delivered as a lecture and first printed as Resistance to Civil Government in Elizabeth Peabody's Aesthetic Papers (1849).

Asserting that “That government is best which governs not at all” and that “Government is at best but an expedient,” the author points to such injustices and abuses as the prosecution of the Mexican War, the treatment of native Indians, and the institution of slavery. To cooperate with government, even to the extent of paying taxes, he says, is to condone its crimes and participate in them, and an “honest man” must “withdraw from this co‐partnership.” Individual conscience, not law, is the moral arbiter; “under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.” He cites his own refusal to pay a tithing or poll tax, in order “to refuse allegiance to the State, to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually.” He will participate only in those governmental activities that he approves:
any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already…. 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….