Henry David Thoreau 14.05.2025
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was of Huguenot and Scotch descent, grew up in Concord, Massachusetts.
He attended Harvard College (1833-1837) and spent most of his life in Concord, studying its natural environment.
Thoreau was initially seen as a naturalist due to his extensive botanical observations, but this view is now considered too limited.
He immersed himself in Ralph Waldo Emerson's Transcendentalism, viewing physical facts as reflections of spiritual truths.
Emerson urged grasping the universe's spirituality through nature's transparency; Thoreau embraced this teaching consistently.
Thoreau retreated to Walden Pond (1845-1847) to study nature and uncover moral and spiritual lessons, later documented in Walden.
Walden solidified Thoreau's literary reputation through its refined and figurative prose.
Thoreau critiqued pre-Civil-War America's values from his Transcendental perspective.
He deplored environmental destruction, the materialistic implications of industrialism, and the dehumanization of slavery.
Thoreau was aware of Kant's and Coleridge's philosophical systems, contemporary political and economic theories, and emerging scientific concepts.
He presciently foresaw future value crises.
Thoreau is relevant to modern readers due to his insights into timeless human dilemmas.
Thoreau considered himself a writer, publishing only two books in his lifetime.
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) recounts a river excursion with reflections on various subjects, but lacks cohesion.
Walden (1854) elevated Thoreau as a major American author, offering unique self-knowledge.
Walden transcends Emersonian Transcendentalism, employing poetic devices and rigorous refinement for profound insights.
Resistance to Civil Government advocates individual resistance to immoral government actions, influencing figures like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
Thoreau's essay was provoked by his jailing for refusing to pay poll tax supporting slavery.
He defines the boundary between individual rights and state authority, prioritizing individual morality over the Constitution's condoning of slavery.
Thoreau embraces an eighteenth-century "higher law" akin to Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, valuing individual moral supremacy.
By 1859, Thoreau shifted to militancy, supporting John Brown's attack on Harpers Ferry, suggesting passive resistance was insufficient against entrenched evils like slavery.
Thoreau admired Brown's opposition to slavery and, in "A Plea for Captain John Brown," elevates Brown to a mythical hero who shocked the North and South into recognition of slavery's moral depravity.
Thoreau's John Brown essays are charged with outrage at slavery, preceding the Civil War.
He did not live to see the Emancipation Proclamation.
Thoreau died of tuberculosis in 1862. His writings were published posthumously by his sister, friend, and Emerson, contributing to his growing fame.
As death neared, Thoreau expressed no regrets about his life, facing it with defiance and acceptance.
Primary Works
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 1849
Walden, 1854
Posthumously published
The Maine Woods, 1864
Cape Cod, 1865
Letters to Various Persons (edited by Emerson), 1865
A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers, 1866
The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, 1906, 20 vols. (includes the Journal)
Writings of Henry David Thoreau, 1971 (Princeton Edition, includes augmented Journal)
Resistance to Civil Government
Thoreau endorses the motto, "That government is best which governs least."
He envisions a government that ultimately governs not at all when people are ready for it.
Government is an expedient, often misused and perverted, like a standing army.
The Mexican War is an example of a few individuals manipulating the government.
The American government is losing integrity, lacking the vitality of a single man.
It's a symbolic tool that could backfire if used against each other.
The people need complicated machinery to satisfy their idea of government.
Governments succeed in deception, even self-deception, for their own benefit.
Government hinders enterprise, freedom, settlement, and education.
Government is an expedient for people to let each other alone.
Trade and commerce overcome legislative obstacles.
Legislators obstructing trade should be punished like those obstructing railroads.
Thoreau advocates for a better government, not immediate anarchy.
People should voice the kind of government they desire.
Majority rule persists due to physical strength, not necessarily because it is right or fair.
A just government should not always be based on majority rule.
Citizens should act according to their conscience, not blindly follow legislators.
Respect for the right is more important than respect for the law.
The only obligation is to do what one thinks is right.
Conscientious individuals form a corporation with a conscience.
Laws do not make people more just; they can even make well-intentioned people agents of injustice.
Undue respect for law leads soldiers to act against their conscience.
Men serve the state as machines, not exercising judgment or morality.
Statesmen and legislators rarely make any moral distinctions, and are as likely to serve the devil as God.
A few serve the State with their consciences, and so necessarily resist it for the most part.
The few are treated as enemies by the state.
It is not enough to give oneself partially to others; doing so is pronounced and benefactor, that is, pronounced unselfish and beneficial.
Association with the current American government is disgraceful because it supports slavery.
All recognize the right of revolution against tyranny.
When a sixth of the population are slaves and the country is unjustly invaded, rebellion is justified.
The duty to rebel is more urgent when the invading army is one's own.
Paley resolves civil obligation into expediency.
Duty of Submission to Civil Government
Obedience to established government is divinely mandated until resistance causes public inconvenience.
Paley appears never to have contemplated those cases to which the rule of expediency does not apply, in which a people, as well as an individual, must do justice, cost what it may.
Drowning man example as to injustice; restitution even if death results is the right action.
Nations agree with Paley in practice; most will not take the risk.
The opponents to reform in Massachusetts are merchants and farmers more interested in commerce and agriculture than in humanity.
Improvement is slow because the few are not wiser or better than the many.
It is not important that many should be as good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere; for that will leaven the whole lump.
Most do nothing effective to put an end to slavery and war in practice.
At most, they give only a cheap vote, and a feeble countenance and God-speed, to the right, as it goes by them.
All voting is a sort of gaming, a playing with right and wrong and betting naturally accompanies it.
Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it if it lacks vital concern.
The majority eventually vote for the abolition of slavery when they are indifferent to it.
Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote.
The American
An independent, intelligent, and respectable man is hardly to be found.
The respectable man adopts one of the candidates selected as the only available one, proving that he is himself available for any purposes of the demagogue.
The American has dwindled into an Odd Fellow, lacking intellect and cheerful self-reliance, seeing to the alms-houses, and collecting a fund for the support of the widows and orphans that may be.
It is everyone's duty to wash their hands of wrong, and not to give it support.
The soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war.
We are all made to pay homage to and support our own meanness.
The virtues of patriotism are liable to reproach.
Those who yield allegiance and support to the character and measures of a government, are frequently serious obstacles to reform.
Dissolve the union between themselves and the State, and refuse to pay their quota into its treasury.
Action from the perception of right is revolutionary and changes things and relations, and does not consist wholly with anything which was.
Action from principle divides states and churches, it divides families; aye, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.
They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil, but it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil.
Government should not crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels.
If a man who has no property refuses but once to earn nine shillings for the State, he is put in prison for a period unlimited determined only by the discretion of those who placed him there; but if he should steal ninety times nine shillings from the State, he is soon permitted to go at large again.
You may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil, but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.
What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.
The ways provided to adopt for remedying wrongs take too much time, and a man's life will be gone.
The support of abolitionists should be withdrawn in person and property, and not wait till they constitute a majority of one to suffer the right to prevail through them.
This is not a way: its very Constitution is the evil.
It is enough if they have God on their side, without waiting for that other one. Moreover, any man more right than his neighbors, constitutes a majority of one already.
Deny tax gatherings and their demands.
I am not speaking only to parchment.
How shall he ever know well what he is and does as an officer of the government, or as a man, until he is obliged to consider whether he shall treat me, his neighbor, for whom he has respect, as a neighbor and well-disposed man, or as a maniac and disturber of the peace.
If one honest man only, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America.
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
If any think loss is influence through just action
They do not know by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person.
Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence cast your ballot with your whole weight.
If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose.
If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.
This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible. If the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, "But what shall I do?" my answer is, "If you really wish to do any thing, resign your office."
When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished. But even suppose blood should flow. Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded?
To those without much property, the state offers comparatively small service, and a slight tax is wont to appear exorbitant, particularly if they are obliged to earn it by special labor with their hands.
If there were one who lived wholly without the use of money, the State itself would hesitate to demand it of him.
Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue; for money comes between a man and his objects, and obtains them for him; and it was certainly no great virtue to obtain it.