Thoreau, Henry David

THOREAU, HENRY DAVID (1817–1862). Among the American Left, possibly no single essay by an American has had as profound and enduring impact as Henry David Thoreau’s 1849 essay “Resistance to Civil Government.” (Retitled “Civil Disobedience” after his death, it was often published as “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” during the 1960s and was still published as a pamphlet by that title in the 1990s by the A. J. Muste Memorial Institute.) The essay was key to the development of the political strategies of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Although Thoreau is often presented in textbooks as an idiosyncratic rugged individualist, his ideas are a distillation in the American context of concepts central to the Enlightenment. Thoreau focused on the nature of citizenship, democracy, and free thought. He rejected the proposition that partaking in elections defined good citizenship. In fact, he derided electioneering as a kind of game. A genuine citizen was required to oppose the accumulation of power by government and the stifling of individual freedom. In that context, a citizen must oppose any political institution that supported an unjust moral order or legislation that supported injustice. Moreover, such opposition or disobedience must be active. The first forms of resistance might be public discourse, but good citizenship also meant not paying taxes to support unjust governments or wars. Creating an ideological framework that found considerable resonance in the 1960s, Thoreau approved any and all transgressions against a corrupt and corrupting status quo. This extended to violent as well as nonviolent acts. In this own day Thoreau wrote three essays in support of John Brown, arguing that even though Brown’s raid and his proposed guerrilla war were extreme responses, violence against injustice was sometimes preferable to peaceful compliance.

Thoreau’s observation, “That government is best which governs least,” was a statement regarding delegated power that was a rephrasing of Montesquieu and other theorists of government who had been the direct inspiration of the framers of the American Constitution. In that sense, the latter-day embrace of Thoreau by some conservative critics of the welfare state is disingenuous. Thoreau’s concern was not limiting governmental power per se but maximizing the environment for individual freedom. His immediate political connections were not with the Right but the pre-Marxist Left; and his work has always found great favor with the anarchist and antiauthoritarian Left.

The essay on civil disobedience arose directly from the struggle against slavery. Thoreau’s mother and sisters were politically active in various reform causes. Thoreau became a financial contributor to the Underground Railroad and a literary contributor to The Liberator, the most radical of the abolitionist journals. In 1840, Thoreau refused to pay a church tax, and in 1846, he refused to pay a poll tax on the grounds of Massachusetts’ complicity with slavery. In 1854, he wrote “Slavery in Massachusetts” and read it at the same convention at which William Lloyd Garrison burned a copy of the federal constitution, which he had characterized as a pact made with the devil. Characteristically, Thoreau’s opposition to slavery rested less on theories of racial equality than his categorical opposition to the ownership of one human being by another and the curtailment of the freedoms of any human being by another. The legalization of such relationships by government, much less the requirement by government that its citizens actively support these relationships on pain of punishment as in the Fugitive Slave Act, was simply intolerable.

Thoreau’s thought also prefigured other trends of the Left and reform movements. His A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and Walden (1854) combined personal narrative with philosophical discourse in a manner that has become characteristic of environmental writing. His work was widely cited by the conservation movement at the turn of the century, which was preservationist in its orientation and tended to idealize nature. The ecological movement that began to take shape in the 1960s also cited Thoreau, understanding more clearly than its predecessors the implications of his observations on the nature and purpose of work. Although consumer culture was still very much in its infancy in the pre–Civil War period, Thoreau was appalled by what the vulgar accumulation of objects meant to the individual and national psyche.

Thoreau had not gone to Walden Pond to escape the world but to better understand it. Rather than being an antimodernist conservative hankering to preserve the values of the past, Thoreau is the archetypal radical. The theme that runs through all his thinking is questioning that which is familiar, that which is the current norm, that which is presented as prescribed wisdom. These are not always found wanting, but they are always to be challenged. Thoreau believed custom and apparent common sense based on custom were coercive forces that ultimately put the mind to sleep. To be fully human required active resistance to these and all other forms of coercion.

Cameron, Sharon. Writing Nature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

Fox, Richard Wightman, and James T. Kloppenberg, eds. A Companion to American Thought. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995.

Harding, Walter. The Days of Henry Thoreau. New York: Dover, 1982.

Harding, Walter. “Thoreau’s Sexuality.” Journal of Homosexuality 21 (1991).

Thoreau, Henry David, writings. https://www.thoreau-online.org