Civil Disobedience

I guess I missed the fact that this was supposed to be on anything but literature. Oh well, I guess I'll do something different for Thursday.

Henry David Thoreau is best known for his role in furthering what has been called American Transcendentalism. Transcendentalism is a philosophical ideal which focuses on listening to personal emotional intuition rather than reason and rationale as a source of guidance and direction in life. It is believed that a person should obey their own personal intuition and moral code over one that is man-made in order to achieve the highest state of living. The three most notable transcendentalists are Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman.

After graduating from Harvard in 1837 and struggling through several failed teaching jobs, Thoreau decided that he was meant to be a poet and an essayist of nature. It was then that he was introduced to Ralph Waldo Emerson who became a valued mentor and close friend. It was through Emerson’s transcendentalist magazine The Dial that most of Thoreau’s writings were published. During this time, he decided to set out on his famous experiment of spending two years at Walden Pond. At Walden, he lived as simply as possible in an attempt to try and discover the essence of human fulfillment. Though not well received by readers at the time, today his book –Walden, or Life in the Woods– is viewed as an American Classic.

Of all his works, Walden is only surpassed in fame by the essay Civil Disobedience. Originally published under the title Resistance to Civil Government, this essay springs from an experience which Thoreau had one year into his roughly two year stay at Walden Pond. One day Thoreau came upon the local tax collector Sam Staples who asked him to pay his six-year-delinquent poll-taxes. Thoreau refused to pay because of his disgust with the Mexican-American War and slavery. Consequently, Staples had him arrested and he spent one night in the local jail until an unknown person (probably his aunt Maria) came and paid the taxes for him the next day. It was this experience which prompted him to write the essay which is best known for the phrase “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”

This essay has since fueled the imaginations of peaceful protesters throughout the decades and lays claim to having influenced a list including: Tienanmen Square, Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi, among hundreds of others. It is plain to see the immense impact that this philosophy has had upon history and civil rights.