Henry David Thoreau → his writings → Resistance to Civil Government (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. [¶1]

This Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment, — what is it but a tra­di­tion, though a recent one, en­deav­or­ing to trans­mit it­self un­im­paired to pos­ter­ity, but each in­stant losing some of its in­teg­rity? It has not the vi­tal­ity and force of a sin­gle liv­ing man; for a sin­gle man can bend it to his will. It is a sort of wooden gun to the peo­ple them­selves; and, if ever they should use it in ear­nest as a real one against each other, it will surely split. But it is not the less nec­es­sary for this; for the peo­ple must have some com­pli­cated ma­chin­ery or other, and hear its din, to sat­isfy that idea of gov­ern­ment which they have. Gov­ern­ments show thus how suc­cess­fully men can be im­posed upon, even im­pose on them­selves, for their own ad­van­tage. It is ex­cel­lent, we must all al­low; yet this gov­ern­ment never of it­self fur­thered any en­ter­prise, but by the alac­rity with which it got out of its way. It does not keep the coun­try free. It does not set­tle the West. It does not ed­u­cate. The char­ac­ter in­her­ent in the Amer­i­can peo­ple has done all that has been ac­com­plished; and it would have done some­what more, if the gov­ern­ment had not some­times got in its way. For gov­ern­ment is an ex­pe­di­ent by which men would fain suc­ceed in let­ting one an­other alone; and, as has been said, when it is most ex­pe­di­ent, the gov­erned are most let alone by it. Trade and com­merce, if they were not made of In­dia rub­ber, would never man­age to bounce over ob­sta­cles which leg­is­la­tors are con­tin­u­ally put­ting in their way; and, if one were to judge these men wholly by the ef­fects of their ac­tions, and not partly by their in­ten­tions, they would de­serve to be classed and pun­ished with those mis­chie­vious per­sons who put ob­struc­tions on the rail­roads. [¶2]

But, to speak prac­ti­cally and as a cit­i­zen, un­like those who call them­selves no-gov­ern­ment men, I ask for, not at once no gov­ern­ment, but at once a bet­ter gov­ern­ment. Let ev­ery man make known what kind of gov­ern­ment would com­mand his re­spect, and that will be one step to­ward ob­taining it. [¶3]

Af­ter all, the prac­ti­cal rea­son why, when the power is once in the hands of the peo­ple, a ma­jor­ity are per­mit­ted, and for a long pe­ri­od con­tinue, to rule, is not be­cause they are most likely to be in the right, nor be­cause this seems fair­est to the mi­nor­ity, but be­cause they are phys­ic­ally the strong­est. But a gov­ern­ment in which the ma­jor­ity rule in all cases can­not be based on jus­tice, even as far as men un­der­stand it. Can there not be a gov­ern­ment in which ma­jor­it­ies do not vir­tu­ally de­cide right and wrong, but con­science? — in which ma­jor­it­ies de­cide only those ques­tions to which the rule of ex­pe­di­ency is ap­pli­ca­ble? Must the cit­i­zen ever for a mo­ment, or in the least de­gree, re­sign his con­science to the leg­is­la­tor? Why has ev­ery man a con­science, then? I think that we should be men first, and sub­jects af­ter­ward. It is not de­sir­a­ble to cul­ti­vate a re­spect for the law, so much as for the right. The only ob­li­ga­tion which I have a right to as­sume, is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a cor­po­ra­tion has no con­science; but a cor­po­ra­tion of con­sci­en­tious men is a cor­po­ra­tion with a con­science. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their re­spect for it, even the well-dis­posed are daily made the agents of in­jus­tice. A com­mon and nat­u­ral re­sult of an un­due re­spect for the law is, that you may see a file of sol­diers, colo­nel, cap­tain, cor­po­ral, pri­vates, pow­der-mon­keys and all, march­ing in ad­mi­ra­ble order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their com­mon sense and con­sciences, which makes it very steep march­ing in­deed, and pro­duces a pal­pi­ta­tion of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a dam­na­ble busi­ness in which they are con­cerned; they are all peace­a­bly in­clined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small mov­a­ble forts and mag­a­zines, at the serv­ice of some un­scru­pu­lous man in power? Visit the Navy Yard, and be­hold a ma­rine, such a man as an Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts, a mere shadow and rem­i­nis­cence of hu­man­ity, a man laid out alive and stand­ing, and al­ready, as one may say, bur­ied un­der arms with fu­neral ac­com­pa­ni­ments, though it may be

“Not a drum was heard, not a fu­neral note,
    As his corse to the ram­parts we hur­ried;
 Not a sol­dier dis­charged his fare­well shot
   O’er the grave where our hero we bur­ied.” [¶4]

The mass of men serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but as ma­chines, with their bod­ies. They are the stand­ing army, and the mi­li­tia, jail­ers, con­sta­bles, posse com­i­ta­tus, &c. In most cases there is no free ex­er­cise what­ever of the judge­ment or of the moral sense; but they put them­selves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can per­haps be man­u­fac­tured that will serve the pur­pose as well. Such com­mand no more re­spect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are com­monly es­teemed good cit­i­zens. Others, as most leg­is­la­tors, pol­i­ti­cians, law­yers, min­is­ters, and of­fice-hold­ers, serve the State chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral dis­tinc­tions, they are as likely to serve the devil, with­out in­tend­ing it, as God. A very few, as he­roes, pa­tri­ots, mar­tyrs, re­form­ers in the great sense, and men, serve the State with their con­sciences also, and so nec­es­sa­rily re­sist it for the most part; and they are com­monly treated by it as en­e­mies. A wise man will only be use­ful as a man, and will not submit to be “clay,” and “stop a hole to keep the wind away,” but leave that of­fice to his dust at least: — 

“I am too high-born to be prop­er­tied,
 To be a sec­ond­ary at con­trol,
 Or use­ful serv­ing-man and in­stru­ment
 To any sov­er­eign state through­out the world.” [¶5]

He who gives him­self en­tirely to his fel­low-men ap­pears to them use­less and self­ish; but he who gives him­self par­tially to them is pro­nounced a ben­e­fac­tor and phi­lan­thro­pist. [¶6]

How does it be­come a man to be­have to­ward this Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment to-day? I an­swer that he can­not with­out dis­grace be as­so­ci­a­ted with it. I can­not for an in­stant re­cog­nize that po­lit­i­cal or­gan­i­za­tion as my gov­ern­ment which is the slave’s gov­ern­ment also. [¶7]

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 coun­ter­bal­ance 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. [¶8]

Paley, a com­mon au­thor­ity with many on moral ques­tions, in his chap­ter on the “Duty of Sub­mis­sion to Civil Gov­ern­ment,” re­solves all civil ob­li­ga­tion into ex­pe­di­ency; and he pro­ceeds to say, “that so long as the in­ter­est of the whole so­ci­ety re­quires it, that is, so long as the es­tab­lished gov­ern­ment can­not be re­sisted or changed with­out pub­lic in­con­ven­iency, it is the will of God that the es­tab­lished gov­ern­ment be obeyed, and no longer.” — “This prin­ci­ple be­ing ad­mit­ted, the jus­tice of ev­ery par­tic­u­lar case of re­sis­tance is re­duced to a com­pu­ta­tion of the quan­tity of the dan­ger and griev­ance on the one side, and of the prob­a­bil­ity and ex­pense of re­dres­sing it on the other.” Of this, he says, ev­ery man shall judge for him­self. But 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. If I have un­justly wrested a plank from a drown­ing man, I must re­store it to him though I drown my­self. This, ac­cord­ing to Paley, would be in­con­ve­nient. But he that would save his life, in such a case, shall lose it. This peo­ple must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mex­ico, though it cost them their ex­is­tence as a peo­ple. [¶9]

In their practice, na­tions agree with Paley; but does any one think that Mas­sa­chu­setts does ex­actly what is right at the pres­ent cri­sis?

“A drab of state, a cloth-o’-sil­ver slut,
 To have her train borne up, and her soul trail in the dirt.”

Prac­ti­cally speak­ing, the op­pon­ents to a re­form in Mas­sa­chu­setts are not a hun­dred thou­sand pol­i­ti­cians at the South, but a hun­dred thou­sand mer­chants and farm­ers here, who are more in­ter­ested in com­merce and ag­ri­cul­ture than they are in hu­man­ity, and are not pre­pared to do jus­tice to the slave and to Mex­ico, cost what it may. I quar­rel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, co-op­er­ate with, and do the bid­ding of those far away, and with­out whom the lat­ter would be harm­less. We are ac­cus­tomed to say, that the mass of men are un­pre­pared; but im­prove­ment is slow, be­cause the few are not ma­te­ri­ally wiser or bet­ter than the many. It is not so im­por­tant that many should be as good as you, as that there be some ab­so­lute good­ness some­where; for that will leaven the whole lump. There are thou­sands who are in opin­ion op­posed to slav­ery and to the war, who yet in ef­fect do noth­ing to put an end to them; who, es­teem­ing them­selves chil­dren of Wash­ing­ton and Frank­lin, sit down with their hands in their pock­ets, and say that they know not what to do, and do noth­ing; who even post­pone the ques­tion of free­dom to the ques­tion of free-trade, and qui­etly read the prices-cur­rent along with the latest ad­vices from Mex­ico, af­ter din­ner, and, it may be, fall asleep over them both. What is the price-cur­rent of an hon­est man and pa­triot to-day? They hes­i­tate, and they re­gret, and some­times they pe­ti­tion; but they do noth­ing in ear­nest and with ef­fect. They will wait, well dis­posed, for others to rem­edy the evil, that they may no longer have it to re­gret. At most, they give only a cheap vote, and a fee­ble coun­te­nance and God-speed, to the right, as it goes by them. There are nine hun­dred and ninety-nine pa­trons of vir­tue to one vir­tu­ous man; but it is eas­ier to deal with the real pos­ses­sor of a thing than with the tem­po­rary guard­ian of it. [¶10]

All vot­ing is a sort of gam­ing, like che­quers or back­gam­mon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a play­ing with right and wrong, with moral ques­tions; and bet­ting nat­u­rally ac­com­pa­nies it. The char­ac­ter of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, per­chance, as I think right; but I am not vi­tally con­cerned that that right should pre­vail. I am wil­ling to leave it to the ma­jor­ity. Its ob­li­ga­tion, there­fore, never ex­ceeds that of ex­pe­di­ency. Even vot­ing for the right is do­ing noth­ing for it. It is only ex­pres­sing to men fee­bly your de­sire that it should pre­vail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to pre­vail through the power of the ma­jor­ity. There is but lit­tle vir­tue in the ac­tion of mas­ses of men. When the ma­jor­ity shall at length vote for the ab­o­li­tion of slav­ery, it will be be­cause they are in­dif­fer­ent to slav­ery, or be­cause there is but lit­tle slav­ery left to be ab­o­lished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can has­ten the ab­o­li­tion of slav­ery who as­serts his own free­dom by his vote. [¶11]

I hear of a con­ven­tion to be held at Bal­ti­more, or else­where, for the se­lec­tion of a can­di­date for the Pres­i­dency, made up chiefly of ed­i­tors, and men who are pol­i­ti­cians by pro­fes­sion; but I think, what is it to any in­de­pen­dent, in­tel­li­gent, and re­spect­able man what de­ci­sion they may come to, shall we not have the ad­van­tage of his wis­dom and hon­esty, nev­er­the­less? Can we not count upon some in­de­pen­dent votes? Are there not many in­di­vid­u­als in the coun­try who do not at­tend con­ven­tions? But no: I find that the re­spect­able man, so called, has im­me­di­ately drifted from his po­si­tion, and de­spairs of his coun­try, when his coun­try has more rea­sons to de­spair of him. He forth­with adopts one of the can­di­dates thus se­lected as the only avail­able one, thus prov­ing that he is him­self avail­able for any pur­poses of the dem­a­gogue. His vote is of no more worth than that of any un­prin­ci­pled for­eigner or hire­ling na­tive, who may have been bought. Oh for a man who is a man, and, as my neigh­bor says, has a bone in his back which you can­not pass your hand through! Our sta­tis­tics are at fault: the pop­u­la­tion has been re­turned too large. How many men are there to a square thou­sand miles in the coun­try? Hardly one. Does not Amer­ica offer any in­duce­ment for men to set­tle here? The Amer­i­can has dwin­dled into an Odd Fel­low, — one who may be known by the de­vel­op­ment of his or­gan of gre­gar­i­ous­ness, and a man­i­fest lack of in­tel­lect and cheer­ful self-re­li­ance; whose first and chief con­cern, on com­ing into the world, is to see that the alms-houses are in good re­pair; and, be­fore yet he has law­fully donned the virile garb, to col­lect a fund for the sup­port of the wid­ows and or­phans that may be; who, in short, ven­tures to live only by the aid of the mu­tual in­sur­ance com­pany, which has prom­ised to bury him de­cently. [¶12]

It is not a man’s duty, as a mat­ter of course, to de­vote him­self to the erad­i­cat­ion of any, even the most enor­mous wrong; he may still prop­erly have other con­cerns to en­gage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it prac­ti­cally his sup­port. If I de­vote my­self to other pur­suits and con­tem­plat­ions, I must first see, at least, that I do not pur­sue them sit­ting upon an­other man’s shoul­ders. I must get off him first, that he may pur­sue his con­tem­plat­ions too. See what gross in­con­sis­tency is tol­er­a­ted. I have heard some of my towns­men say, “I should like to have them or­der me out to help put down an in­sur­rec­tion of the slaves, or to march to Mex­ico, — see if I would go;” and yet these very men have each, di­rectly by their al­le­giance, and so in­di­rectly, at least, by their money, fur­nished a sub­sti­tute. 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; is ap­plauded by those whose own act and au­thor­ity he dis­re­gards and sets at nought; as if the State were pen­i­tent to that de­gree that it hired one to scourge it while it sinned, but not to that de­gree that it left off sin­ning for a mo­ment. Thus, un­der the name of order and civil gov­ern­ment, we are all made at last to pay hom­age to and sup­port our own mean­ness. Af­ter the first blush of sin comes its in­dif­fer­ence; and from im­moral it be­comes, as it were, un­moral, and not quite un­nec­es­sary to that life which we have made. [¶13]

The broad­est and most prev­a­lent error re­quires the most dis­in­ter­ested vir­tue to sus­tain it. The slight re­proach to which the vir­tue of pa­tri­ot­ism is com­monly li­a­ble, the no­ble are most likely to in­cur. Those who, while they dis­ap­prove of the char­ac­ter and meas­ures of a gov­ern­ment, yield to it their al­le­giance and sup­port, are un­doubt­edly its most con­sci­en­tious sup­port­ers, and so fre­quently the most se­ri­ous ob­sta­cles to re­form. Some are pe­ti­tion­ing the State to dis­solve the Union, to dis­re­gard the req­ui­si­tions of the Pres­i­dent. Why do they not dis­solve it them­selves, — the union be­tween them­selves and the State, — and re­fuse to pay their quota into its trea­sury? Do not they stand in the same re­la­tion to the State, that the State does to the Union? And have not the same rea­sons pre­vented the State from re­sist­ing the Union, which have pre­vented them from re­sist­ing the State? [¶14]

How can a man be sat­is­fied to en­ter­tain an opin­ion merely, and en­joy it? Is there any en­joy­ment in it, if his opin­ion is that he is ag­grieved? If you are cheated out of a sin­gle dol­lar by your neigh­bor, you do not rest sat­is­fied with know­ing that you are cheated, or with say­ing that you are cheated, or even with pe­ti­tion­ing him to pay you your due; but you take ef­fec­tual steps at once to ob­tain the full amount, and see that you are never cheated again. Ac­tion from prin­ci­ple, — the per­cep­tion and the per­for­mance of right, — changes things and re­la­tions; it is es­sen­tially rev­o­lu­tion­ary, and does not con­sist wholly with any thing which was. It not only di­vides states and churches, it di­vides fam­i­lies; aye, it di­vides the in­di­vid­ual, sep­a­rat­ing the di­a­bol­i­cal in him from the di­vine. [¶15]

Un­just laws ex­ist: shall we be con­tent to obey them, or shall we en­deavor to amend them, and obey them un­til we have suc­ceeded, or shall we trans­gress them at once? Men gen­er­ally, un­der such a gov­ern­ment as this, think that they ought to wait until they have per­suaded the ma­jor­ity to alter them. 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. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to an­tic­i­pate and pro­vide for re­form? Why does it not cher­ish its wise mi­nor­ity? Why does it cry and re­sist be­fore it is hurt? Why does it not en­cour­age its cit­i­zens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do bet­ter than it would have them? Why does it always cru­cify Christ and excommunicate Co­per­ni­cus and Lu­ther, and pro­nounce Wash­ing­ton and Frank­lin rebels? [¶16]

One would think, that a de­lib­er­ate and prac­ti­cal de­nial of its au­thor­ity was the only of­fense never con­tem­plated by gov­ern­ment; else, why has it not as­signed its def­i­nite, its suit­able and pro­por­tion­ate pen­alty? 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 by any law that I know, and 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. [¶17]

If the in­jus­tice is part of the nec­es­sary fric­tion of the ma­chine of gov­ern­ment, let it go, let it go: per­chance it will wear smooth, — cer­tainly the ma­chine will wear out. If the in­jus­tice has a spring, or a pul­ley, or a rope, or a crank, ex­clu­sively for it­self, then per­haps 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. Let your life be a counter fric­tion to stop the ma­chine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend my­self to the wrong which I con­demn. [¶18]

As for adopt­ing the ways which the State has pro­vided for rem­edy­ing the evil, I know not of such ways. They take too much time, and a man’s life will be gone. I have other af­fairs to at­tend to. I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad. A man has not ev­ery thing to do, but some­thing; and be­cause he can­not do ev­ery thing, it is not nec­es­sary that he should do some­thing wrong. It is not my busi­ness to be pe­ti­tion­ing the gov­ernor or the leg­is­la­ture any more than it is theirs to pe­ti­tion me; and, if they should not hear my pe­ti­tion, what should I do then? But in this case the State has pro­vided no way: its very Con­sti­tu­tion is the evil. This may seem to be harsh and stub­born and un­con­cil­i­a­tory; but it is to treat with the ut­most kind­ness and con­sid­er­ation the only spirit that can ap­pre­ci­ate or de­serves it. So is all change for the bet­ter, like birth and death which con­vulse the body. [¶19]

I do not hes­i­tate to say, that those who call them­selves ab­o­li­tion­ists should at once ef­fec­tu­ally with­draw their sup­port, both in per­son and prop­erty, from the gov­ern­ment of Mas­sa­chu­setts, and not wait till they con­sti­tute a ma­jor­ity of one, be­fore they suf­fer the right to pre­vail through them. I think that 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. [¶20]

I meet this Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment, or its rep­re­sen­ta­tive the State gov­ern­ment, di­rectly, and face to face, once a year, no more, in the per­son of its tax-gath­erer; this is the only mode in which a man sit­u­ated as I am nec­es­sa­rily meets it; and it then says dis­tinctly, Rec­og­nize me; and the sim­plest, the most ef­fec­tual, and, in the pres­ent pos­ture of af­fairs, the in­dis­pens­ablest mode of treat­ing with it on this head, of ex­pres­sing your lit­tle sat­is­fac­tion with and love for it, is to deny it then. My civil neigh­bor, the tax-gath­erer, is the very man I have to deal with, — for it is, af­ter all, with men and not with parch­ment that I quar­rel, — and he has vol­un­tar­ily cho­sen to be an agent of the gov­ern­ment. 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, and see if he can get over this ob­struc­tion to his neigh­bor­li­ness with­out a ruder and more im­pet­u­ous thought or speech cor­re­spond­ing with his ac­tion. I know this well, that if one thou­sand, if one hun­dred, if ten men whom I could name, — if ten hon­est men only, — aye, if one hon­est man, in this State of Mas­sa­chu­setts, ceas­ing to hold slaves, 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. For it mat­ters not how small the be­gin­ning may seem to be: what is once well done is done for ever. But we love bet­ter to talk about it: that we say is our mis­sion. Re­form keeps many scores of news­pa­pers in its serv­ice, but not one man. If my es­teemed neigh­bor, the State’s am­bas­sa­dor, who will de­vote his days to the set­tle­ment of the ques­tion of hu­man rights in the Coun­cil Cham­ber, in­stead of be­ing threat­ened with the pris­ons of Car­o­lina, were to sit down the pris­oner of Mas­sa­chu­setts, that State which is so anx­ious to foist the sin of slav­ery upon her sister, — though at pres­ent she can dis­cover only an act of in­hos­pi­tal­ity to be the ground of a quar­rel with her, — the Leg­is­la­ture would not wholly waive the sub­ject the fol­low­ing win­ter. [¶21]

Un­der a gov­ern­ment which im­pris­ons any un­justly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. The prop­er place to-day, the only place which Mas­sa­chu­setts has pro­vided for her freer and less de­spond­ing spirits, is in her pris­ons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have al­ready put them­selves out by their prin­ci­ples. It is there that the fu­gi­tive slave, and the Mex­ican pris­oner on pa­role, and the In­dian come to plead the wrongs of his race, should find them; on that sep­a­rate, but more free and hon­or­able ground, where the State places those who are not with her but against her, — the only house in a slave-state in which a free man can abide with honor. If any think that their in­flu­ence would be lost there, and their voices no longer af­flict the ear of the State, that they would not be as an en­emy within its walls, 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. A mi­nor­ity is pow­er­less while it con­forms to the ma­jor­ity; it is not even a mi­nor­ity then; but it is ir­re­sist­ible when it clogs by its 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 any­thing, 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? Through this wound a man’s real man­hood and im­mor­tal­ity flow out, and he bleeds to an ever­lasting death. I see this blood flow­ing now. [¶22]

I have con­tem­plated the im­pris­on­ment of the of­fender, rather than the sei­zure of his goods, — though both will serve the same pur­pose, — be­cause they who as­sert the pur­est right, and con­se­quently are most dan­ger­ous to a cor­rupt State, com­monly have not spent much time in ac­cu­mu­lat­ing prop­erty. To such the State ren­ders 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. But the rich man — not to make any in­vid­ious com­par­i­son — is al­ways sold to the in­sti­tu­tion which makes him rich. Ab­so­lutely speak­ing, the more money, the less vir­tue; for money comes be­tween a man and his ob­jects, and ob­tains them for him; it was cer­tainly no great vir­tue to ob­tain it. It puts to rest many ques­tions which he would other­wise be taxed to an­swer; while the only new ques­tion which it puts is the hard but su­per­flu­ous one, how to spend it. Thus his moral ground is taken from un­der his feet. The op­por­tu­ni­ties of liv­ing are di­min­ished in pro­por­tion as what are called the “means” are in­creased. The best thing a man can do for his cul­ture when he is rich is to en­deav­our to carry out those schemes which he en­ter­tained when he was poor. Christ an­swered the Hero­di­ans ac­cord­ing to their con­di­tion. “Show me the tri­bute-money,” said he; — and one took a penny out of his pocket; — If you use money which has the image of Cæ­sar on it, and which he has made cur­rent and valu­able, that is, if you are men of the State, and gladly en­joy the ad­van­tages of Cæ­sar’s gov­ern­ment, then pay him back some of his own when he de­mands it; “Ren­der there­fore to Cæ­sar that which is Cæ­sar’s, and to God those things which are God’s,” — leav­ing them no wiser than be­fore as to which was which; for they did not wish to know. [¶23]

When I con­verse with the freest of my neigh­bors, I per­ceive that, what­ever they may say about the mag­ni­tude and se­ri­ous­ness of the ques­tion, and their re­gard for the pub­lic tran­quil­lity, the long and the short of the mat­ter is, that they can­not spare the pro­tec­tion of the ex­ist­ing gov­ern­ment, and they dread the con­se­quences of dis­o­be­di­ence to it to their prop­erty and fam­i­lies. For my own part, I should not like to think that I ever rely on the pro­tec­tion of the State. But, if I deny the au­thor­ity of the State when it pres­ents its tax-bill, it will soon take and waste all my prop­erty, and so ha­rass me and my chil­dren with­out end. This is hard. This makes it im­pos­si­ble for a man to live hon­estly and at the same time com­fort­ably in out­ward re­spects. It will not be worth the while to ac­cu­mu­late prop­erty; that would be sure to go again. You must hire or squat some­where, and raise but a small crop, and eat that soon. You must live within your­self, and de­pend upon your­self, always tucked up and ready for a start, and not have many affairs. A man may grow rich in Tur­key even, if he will be in all re­spects a good sub­ject of the Turk­ish gov­ern­ment. Con­fu­cius said, — “If a State is gov­erned by the prin­ci­ples of rea­son, pov­erty and mis­ery are sub­jects of shame; if a State is not gov­erned by the prin­ci­ples of rea­son, riches and hon­ors are the sub­jects of shame.” No: un­til I want the pro­tec­tion of Mas­sa­chu­setts to be ex­tended to me in some dis­tant south­ern port, where my lib­erty is en­dan­gered, or un­til I am bent solely on build­ing up an es­tate at home by peace­ful en­ter­prise, I can af­ford to re­fuse al­le­giance to Mas­sa­chu­setts, and her right to my prop­erty and life. It costs me less in ev­ery sense to in­cur the pen­alty of dis­o­be­di­ence to the State, than it would to obey. I should feel as if I were worth less in that case. [¶24]

Some years ago, the State met me in be­half of the church, and com­manded me to pay a cer­tain sum to­ward the sup­port of a cler­gy­man whose preach­ing my father at­tended, but never I my­self. “Pay,” it said, “or be locked up in the jail.” I de­clined to pay. But, un­for­tu­nately, an­other man saw fit to pay it. I did not see why the school­mas­ter should be taxed to sup­port the priest, and not the priest the school­mas­ter; for I was not the State’s school­mas­ter, but I sup­ported my­self by vol­un­tary sub­scrip­tion. I did not see why the ly­ceum should not pres­ent its tax-bill, and have the State to back its de­mand, as well as the church. How­ever, at the request of the se­lect­men, I con­de­scended to make some such state­ment as this in writ­ing: — “Know all men by these pres­ents, that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be re­garded as a member of any in­cor­po­rated so­ci­ety which I have not joined.” This I gave to the town-clerk; and he has it. The State, hav­ing thus learned that I did not wish to be re­garded as a member of that church, has never made a like de­mand on me since; though it said that it must ad­here to its orig­i­nal pre­sump­tion that time. If I had known how to name them, I should then have signed off in de­tail from all the so­ci­e­ties which I never signed on to; but I did not know where to find a com­plete list. [¶25]

I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this ac­count, for one night; and, as I stood con­sid­er­ing the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grat­ing which strained the light, I could not help be­ing struck with the fool­ish­ness of that in­sti­tu­tion which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. I won­dered that it should have con­cluded at length that this was the best use it could put me to, and had never thought to avail it­self of my serv­ices in some way. I saw that, if there was a wall of stone be­tween me and my towns­men, there was a still more dif­fi­cult one to climb or break through, be­fore they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a mo­ment feel con­fined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mor­tar. I felt as if I alone of all my towns­men had paid my tax. They plainly did not know how to treat me, but be­haved like per­sons who are un­derbred. In ev­ery threat and in ev­ery com­pli­ment there was a blun­der; for they thought that my chief de­sire was to stand the other side of that stone wall. I could not but smile to see how in­dus­tri­ously they locked the door on my med­i­ta­tions, which fol­lowed them out again with­out let or hin­drance, and they were really all that was dan­ger­ous. As they could not reach me, they had re­solved to pun­ish my body; just as boys, if they can­not come at some per­son against whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog. I saw that the State was half-wit­ted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her sil­ver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my re­main­ing re­spect for it, and pit­ied it. [¶26]

Thus the State never in­ten­tion­ally con­fronts a man’s sense, in­tel­lec­tual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with su­pe­rior wit or hon­esty, but with su­pe­rior phys­i­cal strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe af­ter my own fash­ion. Let us see who is the strong­est. What force has a mul­ti­tude? They only can force me who obey a higher law than I. They force me to be­come like them­selves. I do not hear of men be­ing forced to live this way or that by mas­ses of men. What sort of life were that to live? When I meet a gov­ern­ment which says to me, “Your money or your life,” why should I be in haste to give it my money? It may be in a great strait, and not know what to do: I can­not help that. It must help it­self; do as I do. It is not worth the while to snivel about it. I am not re­spon­si­ble for the suc­cess­ful work­ing of the ma­chin­ery of so­ci­ety. I am not the son of the en­gi­neer. I per­ceive that, when an acorn and a chest­nut fall side by side, the one does not re­main in­ert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flour­ish as best they can, till one, per­chance, over­shad­ows and de­stroys the other. If a plant can­not live ac­cord­ing to its na­ture, it dies; and so a man. [¶27]

I’ve mentioned before how I was inspired to embark on my experiment in tax resistance by reading Henry David Thoreau’s 1849 essay Resistance to Civil Government (more popularly known as Civil Disobedience).

Today I came across an study written a few years ago about Thoreau’s essay — The Theory, Practice, and Influence of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience by Lawrence Rosenwald. It is a very good look at the historical and biographical context of Thoreau’s essay, and of how Thoreau’s understanding of resistance compares to other theories that were current at that time, and with the understandings of people like Gandhi who were inspired by Thoreau later on.

Thoreau’s writings on tax refusal, and Rosenwald’s “On War Tax Resistance” can be found in the book We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader.

Rosenwald is himself a war tax resister. He withholds the portion of his federal income taxes that he believes goes to support war, and then the government seizes a similar amount from him after some intervening bureaucracy. Like me, Rosenwald was eventually won over to tax resistance by Thoreau’s persuasiveness. He tells the story this way:

I often teach [Thoreau’s works] in my classes. I used not to teach Civil Disobedience, but only Walden; I admired Civil Disobedience very much, but couldn’t bring myself to teach it. It is an essay intended as an argument; I knew that if I taught it I would present it as an argument, as an argument I found reasonable and compelling, and then, I thought, some alert and nervy student would ask, “if you think it’s such a good argument then why are you paying your taxes?” And then I’d either mutter something about how times have changed, or say I was a coward, and I knew I wouldn’t like myself in either case.

Now he does teach Civil Disobedience — and if his study is any indication, it must be one hell of a class. I’ve read Thoreau’s essay many times, but I’ve always felt like I’ve been viewing it through a keyhole because of my chronological distance from Thoreau and his time. Now I feel like I have a much better understanding of who Thoreau was addressing his essay to and what arguments he was responding to and amplifying.

Rosenwald writes elsewhere about how things have changed since Thoreau’s time and how the tax resister today has a different set of concerns, and confronts a different sort of tax collecting apparatus. Thoreau wrote:

I meet this American government… directly, and face to face, once a year — no more — in the person of its tax-gatherer… for it is, after all, with men and not with parchment that I quarrel — and he has voluntarily chosen to be an agent of the government. 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.…

But the state now confronts the tax resister more with laws and faceless bureaucracies and electronic seizures of bank accounts — this meeting of peers on equal ground is a thing of the past. Rosenwald finds little satisfaction in confronting the dumb behemoth that has replaced Thoreau’s tax-gatherer:

[T]he IRS has instituted an Automatic Collection Service, and we have been collected on three times, once by a levy on my salary and twice by levies on our bank accounts; each time the levy took not only the original refused tax but also penalties and interest. Even now the IRS occasionally fumbles; before levying my salary it attempted to levy a bank account I had closed out fifteen years previously, and between the first bank levy and the second it refunded the levied money with interest. But this clumsy, capricious power frets me more than a more efficient and so more predictable bureaucracy might have done…

Rosenwald also notes that Thoreau chose tax resistance reluctantly and in an attempt to avoid getting involved with politics. He eventually concluded that where taxes were concerned, a political choice could not be avoided (in Rosenwald’s words, “in paying taxes abstinence just isn’t a choice, because you either pay them and collaborate with the state or refuse to pay them and defy the state, but in any case you do politics”).

Today’s Thoreau-ish tax resister is confronted by many more of these entanglements than Thoreau was. Thoreau could imagine that “I meet this American government, or its representative, the State government, directly, and face to face, once a year — no more — in the person of its tax-gatherer; this is the only mode in which a man situated as I am necessarily meets it.” Today you meet the tax-gatherer and other coercive agents of the state on a daily basis. Getting from the unexamined life to a place where you can plant your feet and “[l]et your life be a counter friction to stop the machine” is arguably much more difficult today.

Yesterday evening, I sent this email to a list devoted to war tax resistance:

Partners—

It’s sure been hard to drum up much interest for tax resistance over these last several months. Everybody’s been so wound up about the election and how important it is that it’s made everything else seem like a distraction.

Now that’s over, and the people who last week were telling us to please, please, please vote for the fellow who voted for the Patriot Act and the war resolution (and to please save our funny ideas for the annual April 15^th war tax resistance fifteen-minutes-of-fame show), are now shuffling around like war refugees themselves, feeling angry and repentant and wondering what to do next.

Meanwhile, the people who covered up Guernica at the U.N. Security Council are planning to paint a new one in Falluja.

We have an opportunity now to reach out and say “you tried voting for the lesser of two evils, and you put your heart into it, but there’s a stronger vote you can cast every day and we can help show you how.”

On November 2^nd, the Republicans extended their control of Congress, Dubya retained his control of the White House, and the majority of voters condoned and even vindicated the belligerence and disregard for life and liberty that has been on display for the last four years. But as awful is that millions of people who should know better woke up on November 3^rd and cast another vote — to continue sending their money to be spent by that terrible bunch.

I feel like we need to challenge these people. I’m in no mood to join another Bay Area protest march with the same old “People! United!” marching under the banner of “Our Opinions Sure Are Right!”

Next time there’s a march, I want to see us marching upstream, with signs saying “And When You’re Serious About It, Get Back To Us!”

Meanwhile, the time to turn up our volume is right now — the gut-felt anguish of these voters hasn’t gone away yet and we’ve got what they’re looking for.

I appended an excerpt from Thoreau’s Resistance to Civil Government that seemed to speak extremely well to today’s election aftermath from a perspective about a hundred and fifty years back (I’ve taken the liberty of chopping paragraphs more finely than in the original, for ease of on-line reading):

I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, co-operate with, and do the bidding of, those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless.

We are accustomed to say, that the mass of men are unprepared; but improvement is slow, because the few are not materially wiser or better than the many. It is not so important that many should be good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere; for that will leaven the whole lump.

There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing; who even postpone the question of freedom to the question of free trade, and quietly read the prices-current along with the latest advices from Mexico, after dinner, and, it may be, fall asleep over them both. What is the price-current of an honest man and patriot today? They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret.

At most, they give up only a cheap vote, and a feeble countenance and Godspeed, to the right, as it goes by them…

All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency.

Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.

There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote.

I hear of a convention to be held at Baltimore, or elsewhere, for the selection of a candidate for the Presidency, made up chiefly of editors, and men who are politicians by profession; but I think, what is it to any independent, intelligent, and respectable man what decision they may come to? Shall we not have the advantage of his wisdom and honesty, nevertheless? Can we not count upon some independent votes? Are there not many individuals in the country who do not attend conventions?

But no: I find that the respectable man, so called, has immediately drifted from his position, and despairs of his country, when his country has more reasons to despair of him.

He forthwith adopts one of the candidates thus selected as the only available one, thus proving that he is himself available for any purposes of the demagogue. His vote is of no more worth than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hireling native, who may have been bought.

O for a man who is a man, and, and my neighbor says, has a bone is his back which you cannot pass your hand through!

Our statistics are at fault: the population has been returned too large. How many men are there to a square thousand miles in the country? Hardly one.…

It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even to most enormous, wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.

If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man’s shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too.

See what gross inconsistency is tolerated. I have heard some of my townsmen say, “I should like to have them order me out to help put down an insurrection of the slaves, or to march to Mexico — see if I would go”; and yet these very men have each, directly by their allegiance, and so indirectly, at least, by their money, furnished a substitute.

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; is applauded by those whose own act and authority he disregards and sets at naught; as if the state were penitent to that degree that it hired one to scourge it while it sinned, but not to that degree that it left off sinning for a moment.…

Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform. Some are petitioning the State to dissolve the Union, to disregard the requisitions of the President. Why do they not dissolve it themselves — the union between themselves and the State — and refuse to pay their quota into its treasury?

Today, only a brief report, since instead of my usual Picket Line activities, I decided to tackle a project that had been on my to-do list for a while: to put a better version of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience on-line.

There are many, many versions of Civil Disobedience on-line, but I was never very happy with any of them. Most, if not all, suffered from copying errors, for one thing — missing words or phrases, mistyped words (“humanity” for “humility”), and the like. I don’t claim that my version is free from such errors, but at least as I catch them I can fix them.

I took the liberty also in my version of inserting hyperlinks in the text to source documents that Thoreau quotes (a speech of Daniel Webster’s, works of Shakespeare, a poem of Charles Wolfe, etc.), as well as to Wikipedia or other explanatory articles that give more context about the Mexican-American war, 19^th Century American politics, and such. As a final touch, I labeled each paragraph with a marker so that they can be individually referenced in a hyperlink — for instance, you can link directly to the paragraph that begins

I do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their support, both in person and property, from the government of Massachusetts…

by using the following link: https://sniggle.net/TPL/index5.php?entry=rtcg#p20 — change the “20” in “#p20” to another number if you want to link to a different paragraph.

Wendy McElroy has written an interesting overview of the ideas and context of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience over at LewRockwell.com.

I’ve added some of Thoreau’s thoughts on John Brown to The Picket Line’s growing collection of Thoreau’s writing on political topics.

Because Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience proved so inspirational to the nonviolent resistance campaigns of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., and because much of his writing on the natural world is of a soothing, meditative sort, many people have come to assume that Thoreau himself was a pacifist.

Late last year, I took a look at the Wikipedia page on Thoreau and saw him described in paragraph one as “an American author, development critic, naturalist, transcendentalist, pacifist, tax resister and philosopher…” The “pacifist” tag had been added in July, 2005 and it hadn’t occurred to any of the subsequent editors that it was incorrect.

And if you were to read only Thoreau’s nature writing and Civil Disobedience, you might assume that this pacific writer was pacifist as well. But in his defense of the violent, insurrectionary, terrorist abolitionist John Brown, he explicitly repudiates pacifism:

I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable.

From here he goes on to mock the qualms of superficial pacifists who want to avoid bloodshed in the name of “peace” without recognizing that the peace they are defending is created and sustained by violence. “What is the character of that calm which follows when the law and the slaveholder prevail?”

We preserve the so-called peace of our community by deeds of petty violence every day. Look at the policeman’s billy and handcuffs! Look at the jail! Look at the gallows! Look at the chaplain of the regiment! We are hoping only to live safely on the outskirts of this provisional army. So we defend ourselves and our hen-roosts, and maintain slavery.

“It was [Brown’s] peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave,” Thoreau wrote. “I agree with him.”

Thoreau doesn’t just make excuses for Brown’s violent rebellion at Harper’s Ferry (and elsewhere, though Thoreau was probably not wholly aware of the extent of Brown’s actions in Kansas) — he doesn’t say this rebellion was “understandable” or “perhaps justified under the circumstances” or any such weasel-words as these.

Instead, he excoriates timid (“sane”) “Republican editors” — such as William Lloyd Garrison of The Liberator — for distancing themselves from Brown, and says that Brown was not only justified, not only right, but that “[n]o man in America has ever stood up so persistently and effectively for the dignity of human nature… He could not have been tried by a jury of his peers, because his peers did not exist.…”

“I rejoice that I live in this age, that I am his contemporary.”

These men, in teaching us how to die, have at the same time taught us how to live. If this man’s acts and words do not create a revival, it will be the severest possible satire on the acts and words that do. It is the best news that America has ever heard.

Along with “A Plea for Captain John Brown” (from which I pulled the quotes above), I also have included two lesser-known and harder-to-find pieces of Thoreau’s concerning John Brown: Thoreau’s Remarks After the Death of John Brown (a more solemn, memorial reading), and “The Last Days of John Brown” (Thoreau’s post-hanging reflections on the case).

I’m past the half-way mark in my stroll through 7,000 pages of Thoreau’s journals, searching for those bits of political philosophy he’s salted in along with his poetic enthusiasm for Nature and his relentless observations about her.

These bits I’m collecting in one place — something that hasn’t been done before to my knowledge, in the hopes that it’ll help those of us with an enthusiasm for Thoreau’s political philosophy to trace its evolution and to find evidence of trains of thought Thoreau did not pursue in his more-finished writing.

In doing this, I’ve had to draw the line somewhere — including some entries that only tangentially touch on political issues, and leaving out others that are interesting and suggestive but that deal with mostly personal as opposed to interpersonal virtue.

Thoreau would have preferred not to think of political issues at all. He didn’t like politics, or government, or society, and was frequently disappointed even by his friends. But the last decades of legal slavery in America were an impossible time for an American to be honestly aloof and neutral.

Civil Disobedience is partially an attempt by Thoreau to withdraw from politics at the same time he is engaging in it — he has a utopian daydream of a State that he can be allowed to ignore:

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.

He knows the current State won’t allow this, but he hopes he can just go along to the extent it demands:

I do not wish to quarrel with any man or nation. I do not wish to split hairs, to make fine distinctions, or set myself up as better than my neighbors. I seek rather, I may say, even an excuse for conforming to the laws of the land. I am but too ready to conform to them. Indeed, I have reason to suspect myself on this head; and each year, as the tax-gatherer comes round, I find myself disposed to review the acts and position of the general and state governments, and the spirit of the people to discover a pretext for conformity.

But finally he realizes that there is no way to cooperate with the state without at the same time contributing to its injustice:

If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man’s shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too.

This same cycle repeats again and again in the journals. Thoreau expresses his disdain for “Man and his affairs, — Church and State and school, trade and commerce and agriculture, — Politics…”

I would fain let man go by and behold a universe in which man is but as a grain of sand. I am sure that those of my thoughts which consist, or are contemporaneous, with social personal connections, however humane, are not the wisest and widest, most universal. What is the village, city, State, nation, aye the civilized world, that it should concern a man so much?

He is disgusted that in this “strange age of the world… empires, kingdoms, and republics come a-begging to our doors and utter their complaints at our elbows. I cannot take up a newspaper but I find that some wretched government or other, hard pushed and on its last legs, is interceding with me, the reader, to vote for it” and he declares defiantly and hopefully that while “the newspapers devote some of their columns specially to government and politics without charge… I never read those columns.”

But then he sees a fugitive slave tried and found guilty of escaping, in the courts of his “free” state, Massachusetts, with the courthouse defended against abolitionist rescuers by Massachusetts guardsmen, and a Massachusetts judge returning the slave in chains to his owner. Then he must take pains to distinguish his desire for aloofness from a complicit passivity:

Do what you will, O Government, with my mother and brother, my father and sister, I will obey your command to the letter. It will, indeed, grieve me if you hurt them, if you deliver them to overseers to be hunted by hounds, and to be whipped to death; but, nevertheless, I will peaceably pursue my chosen calling on this fair earth, until, perhaps, one day I shall have persuaded you to relent. Such is the attitude, such are the words of Massachusetts. Rather than thus consent to establish hell upon earth, — to be a party to this establishment, — I would touch a match to blow up earth and hell together.

He concludes:

I had never respected this government, but I had foolishly thought that I might manage to live here, attending to my private affairs, and forget it. For my part, my old and worthiest pursuits have lost I cannot say how much of their attraction, and I feel that my investment in life here is worth many percent less since Massachusetts last deliberately and forcibly restored an innocent man, Anthony Burns, to slavery. I dwelt before in the illusion that my life passed somewhere only between heaven and hell, but now I cannot persuade myself that I do not dwell wholly within hell. The sight of that political organization called Massachusetts is to me morally covered with scoriæ and volcanic cinders, such as Milton imagined. If there is any hell more unprincipled than our rulers and our people, I feel curious to visit it. Life itself being worthless, all things with it, that feed it, are worthless.…

I feel that, to some extent, the State has fatally interfered with my just and proper business. It has not merely interrupted me in my passage through Court Street on errands of trade, but it has, to some extent, interrupted me and every man on his onward and upward path, on which he had trusted soon to leave Court Street far behind. I have found that hollow which I had relied on for solid.

…It is time we had done referring to our ancestors. We have used up all our inherited freedom, like the young bird the albumen in the egg. It is not an era of repose. If we would save our lives, we must fight for them.

One of Thoreau’s earliest surviving finished works is The Service, which I’ve just added to the collection here at The Picket Line.

The essay uses war and military discipline as metaphors that, as Thoreau would have it, can instruct us in how to order and conduct our lives.

It’s in part a contrarian swipe at the many pacifist writers and lecturers whose teachings on “nonresistance” were then very much in vogue, in part thanks to Christian anarchist and pacifist Adin Ballou who spoke on the subject at the Concord Lyceum on occasion and who founded the New England Non-Resistance Society (of which William Lloyd Garrison was also a leader, and a Lyceum speaker as well).

Thoreau debated the subject “Is it ever proper to offer forcible resistance?” in a formal Lyceum debate (arguing the affirmative) in 1841, and surviving records of the Lyceum note that the subject came up many times in debates, discussions, and lectures.

Thoreau’s own views were very much influenced by these non-resistants, and are often confused with them even today. When Bronson Alcott resisted his taxes to protest war and slavery, three years before Thoreau would resist his taxes over the same issues, Alcott’s action was explained within the context of “non-resistant” philosophy. When Thoreau explained his own tax resistance, he took pains to distinguish his theory from theirs, titling his essay “Resistance to Civil Government”

In The Service, Thoreau tosses barbs at the non-resistance preachers, warning his readers that pacifism can be a temptation to passivity:

Better that we have some of that testy spirit of knight errantry, and if we are so blind as to think the world is not rich enough nowadays to afford a real foe to combat, with our trusty swords and double-handed maces, hew and mangle some unreal phantom of the brain. In the pale and shivering fogs of the morning, gathering them up betimes, and withdrawing sluggishly to their daylight haunts, I see Falsehood sneaking from the full blaze of truth, and with good relish could do execution on their rearward ranks, with the first brand that came to hand. We too are such puny creatures as to be put to flight by the sun, and suffer our ardor to grow cool in proportion as his increases; our own short-lived chivalry sounds a retreat with the fumes and vapors of the night; and we turn to meet mankind, with its meek face preaching peace, and such non-resistance as the chaff that rides before the whirlwind.

Of such sort, then, be our crusade, — which, while it inclines chiefly to the hearty good will and activity of war, rather than the insincerity and sloth of peace, will set an example to both of calmness and energy; — as unconcerned for victory as careless of defeat, — not seeking to lengthen our term of service, nor to cut it short by a reprieve, — but earnestly applying ourselves to the campaign before us.

Several of Thoreau’s early journal entries express a romantic admiration for soldiers. For instance, on the fourth of July, 1840, when he writes of a nearby encampment in which the “bugle and drum and fife… seems like the morning hymn of creation” and “[e]ach man awakes himself with lofty emotions, and would do some heroic deed.” He concludes:

The whole course of our lives should be analogous to one day of the soldier’s. His Genius seems to whisper in his ear what demeanor is befitting, and in his bravery and his march he yields a blind and partial obedience.

On 12 August 1840, too, his journal tweaks the Christian pacifists, in a poem that reads in part: [I]n these days no hero was abroad / But puny men, afraid of war’s alarms, / Stood forth to fight the battles of their Lord, / Who scarce could stand beneath a hero’s arms.

There is a mix of metaphor (“our lives should be analogous to… the soldier’s”) and genuine admiration for the soldier in these early journal entries. The first of these fades away, and the latter he quickly repudiates. By the time he writes Resistance to Civil Government, the admiration is long gone:

A common and natural result of an undue respect for the law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences… They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power? Visit the Navy Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts, a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments…

…In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens.

Watching Thoreau develop his attitudes toward war, soldiery, and pacifism has been one of the more interesting things that my project of excerpting his journals has uncovered for me. I’m up to mid-1857 now, and Thoreau’s skepticism about war and armies has been increasing.

In 1852, he observes a battle between two ant nations and writes that “certainly there is no other fight recorded in Concord in that will bear a moment’s comparison with this. I have no doubt they had as just a cause, one or even both parties, as our forefathers, and that the results will be as important and memorable. And there was far more patriotism and heroism.”

In the secular American religion of patriotism, this is high blasphemy. Concord is where “the shot heard ’round the world” was fired in 1775.

But Thoreau has become very skeptical of such patriotic stories as these. On 5 February 1852, he suggests: “Read the Englishman’s history of the French and Indian wars, and then read the Frenchman’s, and see how each awards the meed of glory to the other’s monsters of cruelty or perfidy.” Then, he takes up his own challenge, and on 6 February & 7 February contrasts the stories of a single skirmish from those wars by historians of each side.

By 1856, Thoreau is sometimes speaking of war with a pacifist idealism that I suspect his earlier self would have ridiculed: “Will it not be thought disreputable at length, as duelling between individuals now is?

I am curious as to how his opinions will change as the Civil War approaches. Many Northern abolitionists who had pacifist (or even secessionist) leanings before the war came to strongly support the Union during the struggle.

In my increasingly-obsessive project of collecting Thoreau’s political writings on-line, I’ve taken a detour into his surviving school-age essays.

I sure wouldn’t want my political philosophy judged by what I turned in to my professors, or even on what I wrote on my own time back when I was in school, so I try to be cautious on the one hand and forgiving on the other when reading this stuff.

Thoreau wrote these pieces between the ages of 17 and 20, while he was attending Harvard University. Most are short essays on particular themes, and I don’t know to what extent his treatment of the themes was his own choice and to what extent it was dictated by his professors.

One essay in particular, on conformity, seems to show that Thoreau was already rehearsing the themes that would come out in Resistance to Civil Government a dozen years later.

Others of the essays show Thoreau as an astute wrestler with ethical philosophy, choosing his words carefully and being skeptical of philosophies that presumed to have come up with a rulebook that would make conscience obsolete, or those whose moral precepts were asserted to have been proved when they were merely intuitions backed with logical arm-waving.

When nonviolence advocates recommend their tactics as superior to violent ones, someone inevitably says something like “but of course that would never have worked against the Nazis.” And when they do, the nonviolence advocates point out that nonviolent techniques were rarely attempted in any sustained and organized fashion against the Nazis, and when they were, they had remarkable success, for instance in Denmark.

Hannah Arendt discussed the case of Denmark in Eichmann in Jerusalem and suggested it “as required reading in political science for all students who wish to learn something about the enormous power potential inherent in non-violent action and in resistance to an opponent possessing vastly superior means of violence.” Today, in fact, Nazi-occupied Denmark is a favorite case study in the literature of nonviolent resistance theory.

There’s another side to the story, though, and it’s told in part by an anonymous member of the Danish resistance in one of a set of reflections on Thoreau that were published on the centennial of his death:

What was the special appeal of Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” for some members of the Danish resistance movement during the German occupation of Denmark in the Hitler-war? Here is my personal testimony of what Thoreau meant to me as an individual during that time.

For five years, starting in April 1940, Denmark was occupied by the Nazis, in spite of an old, often renewed non-aggression pact. The occupation, unfortunately, met without appreciable resistance. The Danish government, desiring not to make matters worse, forbade resistance, commanding submission and obedience to the huge, superior German force. It was my resentment against the mean treatment of shot-down, wounded English and Canadian airmen that first forced me into the resistance. With my knowledge of foreign languages and as a former telegraph operator in my youth, I was at once put into a team having direct communication with London for the last three years of the war.

“I lent Thoreau’s books to friends, told them about him, and our circle grew. Railroads, bridges, and factories that worked for the Germans were blown up.”

Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” stood for me, and for my first leader in the resistance movement, as a shining light with which we could examine the policy of complete passivity which our government had ordered for the whole Danish population. The German Wehrmacht behaved well if not provoked, but the Gestapo was boundlessly cruel. Non-violence, as a means of resistance, was completely unfit for this scum of the worst gangsters of Germany from whom they were all recruited. I lent Thoreau’s books to friends, told them about him, and our circle grew. Railroads, bridges, and factories that worked for the Germans were blown up.

Since the Hitler-war, too, “Civil Disobedience” has been of very great interest for us resistance people. We are all disgusted with the seemingly endless expedience of politics, with politicians and statesmen who never have unambiguous attitudes. Integrity makes it impossible sometimes for many of us to even vote in local and general elections.

My teacher of English as an undergraduate had learned English from a considerable philosopher, Aage Werner, the son of a rich businessman in Copenhagen. Werner was an outstanding teacher, the first Dane who used phonographic wax cylinders carrying the voices of teachers and famous actors whom he had met in London during his student years in England. Werner’s textbooks are still used. He died in 1910, only forty-two years old. He was aflame with enthusiasm for Thoreau, took pride in living as simply as possible, so that his pecuniary and physical needs were minimal. He spent his great fortune to relieve the distresses of others. He never charged for his teaching, avoided “society,” but spoke readily to the common man. Like Thoreau, he lived unmarried, because, as he said, “God will not revenge himself on my children unto the third and forth generation.”

Thoreau, during the thirty-seven years I have read his books, has continually influenced very deeply the conduct of my life. He has increased my natural reticence towards the man in the street, whose ravenous materialism I loathe. I like to call on the man of the sea, the sailor and the fisherman. Their occasional life-and-death struggles often show us a religious instinct and a more earnest outlook than the farmer’s and the townsman’s.

All detestation is despicable, but since the Hitler-war I have undergone a daily inward struggle to quell a profound spite against that nation that twice in my days has set fire to the world, and now manages with one of the hardest currencies of all, wallowing in the grossest materialism.

Though I am a bad disciple of Thoreau, rather than visit the Acropolis I would go to Walden and to his grave.

Pacificus’s essay can also be found in the book American Quaker War Tax Resistance.

A Quaker writer going by the pen name “Pacificus” complained in The Friend (14 February 1835) that some Quakers were coming up with shady ways of getting around that point of Quaker Discipline that disallowed paying militia exemption fines.

This piece is remarkable, I think, for the suggestion it makes about the power of civil disobedience to reform a nation — something that is commonly heard nowadays, but that I don’t see much of before this essay. “Pacificus” writes: “If Friends were faithful to maintain their testimony against war in all respects… in a very little time the system would be exploded. Were nothing to be gained but the incarceration of peaceable citizens in prison for conscience sake — no reward but the accusations of a troubled spirit — no honor but the plaudits of militia officers, and the averted looks of the considerate of all classes, it would require stout hands and unfeeling hearts long to support the system.”

Compare this to Thoreau’s words fifteen years later: “A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its 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 Friends were faithful to maintain their testimony against war in all respects… in a very little time the system would be exploded”

Here’s what “Pacificus” wrote:

From a knowledge of the character of the present collector of militia fines in the city of Philadelphia, and the unusual efforts recently made to collect them, taken in connection with the very small number of cases sent up to our late quarterly meeting, I have been led to fear that our Christian testimony against war has not been maintained as it should have been. Perhaps there are not many (are there not some?) who deliberately pay the demand, and openly violate the testimony of the Society; yet it may reasonably be feared, that under our name are to be found individuals who connive at its payment by others, and secretly rejoice that they can thus avoid suffering, without putting the Christian principle of peace to open shame. Such are not only injuring themselves, but bringing reproach upon truth. “Have you no friend to pay it for you?” is the enquiry of the collector; “Friend so-and-so always has his paid.” “Mr. S—— is a Friend, and he pays me his fine; so does Mr. T——; they never make a disturbance about it.”

The secret payment of this fine in lieu of military service or training, or the connivance at its payment by others, is a direct encouragement of the onerous militia system. If Friends were faithful to maintain their testimony against war in all respects, even keeping in subjection a warlike spirit in relation to this very oppression, and no one through mistaken kindness being induced to pay the fine for them, in a very little time the system would be exploded. Were nothing to be gained but the incarceration of peaceable citizens in prison for conscience sake — no reward but the accusations of a troubled spirit — no honor but the plaudits of militia officers, and the averted looks of the considerate of all classes, it would require stout hands and unfeeling hearts long to support the system. Yes! let it be impressed upon the weak and complying among us, that they are supporting this oppressive system — that it is to them, mainly, that the militia system, as far as regards Friends, is prolonged — that they are binding their fellow professors with this chain; and that if entire faithfulness was maintained on the part of all our members in refusing to pay these fines, or allowing others to do it, the spoiling of our goods and the imprisonment of our members for this precious cause — the cause of peace on earth — would soon be a narrative of times that are past.

Is not this testimony worth suffering for? “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you,” — especially when the consolatory reason is given, “that you may be the children of your Father which is in heaven!”

One weakness begets another — the laying waste of one part of the enclosure of the Society, enfeebles and makes way for the prostration of another portion of the hedge. When called upon to pay militia fines, some of our members who have already departed from plainness of dress and address, are ashamed — yea, ashamed — to acknowledge the motive which should induce them to refuse compliance with these demands, from a consciousness that they do not look like Quakers, that if they are sheep, they are not in their clothing, and, through weakness begotten of this very cause, they fancy themselves compelled to act in accordance with their appearance.

It is very much to be desired that the testimony to the peaceable nature of Christ’s kingdom on earth may not be lowered in our Society, at a time too when the views so long peculiar to Friends in this respect, are spreading with others; but that all, more especially those who can no longer be ranked among the youth, the middle aged, may be aroused to the importance of having clean hands in this respect. It is not a mere matter of business between you and the collector; you are not to solace yourselves with the belief that no harm will come of it; every fine paid in this manner goes to encourage and sustain the system, to weaken your own hands, to bind fetters upon your brethren, to lay waste the testimonies of the Society, and to prepare for yourselves moments of bitter reflection when the unflattering witness comes to commune with you in the cool of the day.

Many of the younger class of our Society, it is encouraging to believe, have a proper view of the unlawfulness of war for Christians, and are endeavoring to walk worthy in this respect of their vocation, and while these may be encouraged to continued faithfulness, it is desired that some who are a few years their seniors may profit by their example.

Milton Mayer, whose book On Liberty I reviewed a few days back, was a war tax resister. In his essay The Tribute Money (The Progressive, March 1953), he explained why. Excerpts:

I cannot see why I should not persist in my folly. Like every other horror-stricken American I keep asking myself, “What can a man do? What weight does a man have, besides petition and prayer, that he isn’t using to save his country’s soul and his own?” The frustration of the horror-stricken American as he sees his country going over the falls without a barrel is more than I can bear just now. He tries to do constructive work, but all the while he is buying guns. I have thought as hard as I can think. I have thought about, for example, anarchy. Not only am I not an anarchist, but I believe in taxes, in very high taxes, and especially in a very high graduated income tax. I realize that a man who believes in taxes cannot pick and choose among them and say he will not spend 50 per cent of them on guns just because he doesn’t need guns. I realize that anarchy is unworkable and that that is why the state came into being. And I realize, too, that the state cannot be maintained without its authority’s being reposed in its members’ representatives. I realize all that. But in this state — and a very good state it is, or was, as states go, or went — I cannot get anybody to represent me. My senators will not represent me. My congressman will not represent me. I am opposed to taxation without representation.

Were I God I would turn Milton into a pillar of salt for how many times he looked back behind him on those patriotic liberal platitudes (“its members’ representatives”) and rose-lit recollections (“a very good state it is, or was”) as he was walking away to dissidence.

Don’t tell me that I am represented by my vote. I voted against the national policy. Having done so, I am constrained in conscience to uphold my vote and not betray it.…

Methinks he misunderstands what a vote is. As Thoreau explained, “voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail.” If you are “constrained in conscience” to go beyond this, you’re not a democrat but an anarchist. Good for you. But embarrassing for Milton:

If my offense is anarchy — which I dislike — I can’t help it. If the preservation of society compels me to commit worse evils than anarchy, then the cost of preserving society is too high. Society is not sacred; I am.…

Would that he would extend the realm of the sacred so as to let other people participate in it, rather than making his conscience king of his own money while advocating “a very high graduated income tax” for others.

My first responsibility is not to preserve the state — that is Hitlerism and Stalinism — but to preserve my soul. If you tell me that there is no other way to preserve the state than by the implicit totalitarianism of Rousseau’s “general will,” I will reply that it is the state’s misfortune and men must not accept it. I have surrendered my sovereignty to another Master than the general will — I do not mean to be sanctimonious here — and if the general will does not serve Him it does not serve me or any other man.

In so far as there is any worldly sovereign in the United States, it is not the general will, or the Congress, or the President. It is I. I am sovereign here. I hold the highest office of the land, the office of citizen, with responsibilities to my country heavier, by virtue of my office, than those of any other officer, including the President. And I do not hold my office by election but by inalienable right. I cannot abdicate my right, because it is inalienable. If I try to abdicate it, to the general will, or to my representatives or my ministers, I am guilty of betraying not only democracy but my nature as a man endowed with certain inalienable rights.

I have thought about all this, in the large and in the little. I have thought about my wife and children and my responsibility to them. War will not even save them their lives, not even victorious war this time. And it will lose them their most precious possession, their souls, if they call a man husband and father who has lightly sold his own. I have thought of the fact that better men than I, much better men, disagree with me. That grieves me. But I am not, in this instance, trying to emulate better men.

I have thought about my effectiveness. A man who “makes trouble for himself,” as the saying is, is thought to reduce his effectiveness, partly because of the diversion of his energies and partly because some few, at least, of his neighbors will call him a crank, a crook, or a traitor. But I am not very effective anyway, and neither, so far as I can see, is anyone else. If anything is effective in matters of this sort, it is example. I go up and down the land denying the decree of Caesar that all able-bodied men between eighteen and twenty-five go into the killing business and urging such men as are moved in conscience to decline to do so. If a million young men would decline, in conscience, to kill their fellow men, the government would be as helpless as its citizens are now. Its helplessness then would, I think, be at least as contagious abroad as its violence is now. Other governments would become helpless, including the Russian, and thus would we be able to save democracy at home and abroad. Victorious war has failed to do it anywhere.

But how can a million old men who themselves will not decline to hire the killing expect a million young men to do it? How can I urge others to do what I do not care to do myself? …

“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.”

Of course the government doesn’t want me for military service. I am overage, spavined, humpbacked, bald, and blind. The government doesn’t want me. Men are a dime a dozen. What the government wants is my dime to buy a dozen men with. If I decline to buy men and give them guns, the government will, I suppose, force me to. I offer to pay all of my taxes for peaceable purposes, the only purposes which history suggests will defend democracy; the government has, I believe, no way, under the general revenue system, to accept my offer. I like the out-of-doors and I do not want to go to jail. I could put my property in my wife’s name and bury my money in a hole or a foreign bank account. But I am not Al Capone. I am… an honest man. And I am not mathematically minded; if I did try deceit, I’d be caught.

There is only one other alternative, and that is no alternative either. That is to earn less than $500 a year and be tax-free. I’d be paying taxes anyway on what I bought with $500, but that doesn’t bother me, because the issue is not, as long as I am only human, separation from war or any other evil-doing but only as much separation as a being who is only human can achieve within his power. No, the trouble with earning less than $500 a year is that it doesn’t support a family. Not a big family like mine. If I were a subsistence farmer I might get by, but I’m a city boy.

I would be hard put to answer if you asked me whether a man should own property in the first place, for a government to tax. If I said, “No, he should not,” I should stand self-condemned as a Christian Communist. It is illegal, under the McCarran Act, to be either a Christian or a Communist, and I don’t want to tangle with both the Internal Revenue Act and the McCarran Act at the same time, especially on the delicate claim to being a Christian. Still, the Christian Gospels are, it seems to me, passing clear on the point of taxes. When the apostle says both that “we should obey the magistrates” and that “we should obey God rather than man,” I take it that he means that we should be law-abiding persons unless the law moves us against the Lord.

The problem goes to the very essence of the relationship of God, man, and the state. It isn’t easy. It never was. History, however, is on the side of us angels. The primitive Christians, who were pacifists, refused to pay taxes for heathen temples. They were, of course, outlaws anyway. The early Quakers, who were pacifists, refused to pay tithes to the established church and went to prison. But the war tax problem seems not to have arisen until 1755, when a considerable number of Quakers refused to pay a tax levied in Pennsylvania for the war against the red Indians.

The Boston (and New York and Baltimore and Charleston) “tea parties” of the 1770’s were, of course, a vivid and violent form of tax refusal endorsed, to this day, by the Daughters of the American Revolution. Seventy-five years after the Revolution, Henry David Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax because the government was waging both slavery against the Negroes and war against the Mexicans. Thoreau was put in jail overnight, and the next day Emerson went over to Concord and looked at him through the bars and said, “What in the devil do you think you’re dong, Henry?” “I,” said Thoreau, “am being free.” So Emerson paid Thoreau’s poll tax, and Thoreau, deprived of his freedom by being put out of jail, wrote his essay on civil disobedience. Seventy-five years later, Gandhi read Thoreau’s essay and worked it into a revolution. It could happen here, but it won’t. The place was propitious for Gandhi, a slave colony whose starving people had no money or status to lose, just as the time was propitious for Thoreau, a time of confidence and liberality arising from confidence. Totalitarianism was unthinkable and parliamentary capitalism was not in danger. The appeal to the rights of man was taken seriously, and McCarthyism, McCarranism, and MacArthurism were all as yet unborn.

I doubt that anybody will be able to bring me more light in this matter than I now have. The light I need will come to me from within or it won’t come at all. When George Fox visited William Penn, Penn wanted to know if he should go on wearing his sword. “Wear it,” said Fox, “as long as thou canst.” I hasten to say that I feel like Penn, not like Fox. I know I can’t say that you ought to do what I can’t do or that I’ll do it if you do it. But I don’t know if I can say that you ought to do what I do or even if I ought to do it. I am fully aware of the anomaly of refusing to pay 50 per cent of my taxes when 50 percent of the 50 per cent I do pay is used for war. I am even fuller aware of the converse anomaly of refusing to pay 50 per cent of my taxes when 50 per cent of the 50 per cent I won’t pay would be used for peaceable purposes. In addition, if the government comes and gets it, and fines me, as I suppose it might, it will collect more for war than it would have in the first place.

Worst of all, I am not a good enough man to be doing this sort of thing. I am not an early Christian; I am the type that, if Nero threw me naked into the amphitheatre, would work out a way to harass the lions. But somebody over twenty-five has got to perform the incongruous affirmation of saying, “No,” and saying it regretfully rather than disdainfully. Why shouldn’t it be I? I have sailed through life, up to now, as a first-class passenger on a ship that is nearly all steerage. By comparison with the rest of mankind, I have always had too much money, too many good jobs, too good a reputation, too many friends, and too much fun. Who, if not I, is full of unearned blessings? When, if not now, will I start to earn them? Somebody will take care of me. Somebody always has. The only thing I don’t know is who it is that does it. I know who feeds the young ravens, but I know, too, that the Devil takes care of his own.

Some brief notes from here-and-there:

• More details about the upcoming South-East War Tax Resistance Gathering around the Georgia/Florida border at the end of the year
• Some good, Thoreauvian observations on individual responsibility from Wendy McElroy
• Fafblog tells you all you need to know about U.S. policy in Afghanistan
• David R. Henderson brings us the good news from his efforts to maintain a left/libertarian anti-war coalition in Monterey County
• The New York Times covers the rise of the barter economy

Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience is one of the most influential works of American philosophy, but is more often misunderstood than understood.

Martin Luther King, Jr. called it his “first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance,” and wrote: “The teachings of Thoreau came alive in our civil rights movement.” Gandhi developed satyagraha under its influence, and said the essay was “written for all time. Its incisive logic is unanswerable.”

Although the essay has strongly influenced the tradition of nonviolent direct action, Thoreau wrote it, in part, to distinguish his motives from those of firmly nonviolent resisters.

American pacifists at the time called themselves “non-resistants” because most based their pacifism on Jesus’s instruction to “resist not evil” but instead to turn the other cheek. During Thoreau’s lifetime, Civil Disobedience was published as “Resistance to Civil Government.” The title indicated Thoreau’s challenge to “non-resistance” theory.

A later reprint changed the title to “Civil Disobedience,” which made “civil” ambiguous — did it mean disobedience to civil authorities (as in the original title), or disobedience conducted in a civil manner? This, and the influence the essay had on nonviolent resistance leaders like Gandhi and King, causes many to mistake Thoreau for a pacifist and his essay as a manifesto of nonviolent resistance.

Thoreau’s actual views on war and pacifism show a remarkable evolution, and present a challenge to pacifists that is as relevant today as it was in the turbulent years preceding the Civil War when Thoreau was writing.

You can also find these journal excerpts in The Price of Freedom: Political phi­los­o­phy from Thoreau’s jour­nals.

When Thoreau was in his early twenties he began writing a journal. Some of his earliest mentions of war show him fawning over soldiers during their annual drills, and holding romantic ideas that betray that most of what he knew of war came from the Greek classics.

War, to him, was “heartiness and activity,” while peace was “insincerity and sloth.” “I have a deep sympathy with war,” he wrote, “it so apes the gait and bearing of the soul.” “Every man is a warrior when he aspires.” “The whole course of our lives should be analogous to one day of the soldier’s.”

Peace he considered to be an ideal only for “puny men, afraid of war’s alarms.”

In the 1840s, Thoreau’s attitude matured. He stopped paying the poll tax, in what he later explained was a protest against a government that enforced slavery and that invaded Mexico in order to extend slaveholder territory. Around the time he spent a night in jail for refusing to pay his taxes, Thoreau wrote:

There probably never were worse crimes committed since time began than in the present Mexican war… yet I have not learned the name or residence, and probably never should, of the reckless villain who should father them… [T]he villainy is in the readiness with which men, doing outrage to their proper natures, lend themselves to perform the office of inferior & brutal ones.… Any can command him who doth not command himself.

In this journal entry is the seed that would grow into Civil Disobedience.

In the years before Thoreau began resisting the poll tax, Massachusetts transcendentalists Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane were jailed for refusing to pay their taxes, in acts they justified as pacifist “non-resistance.” Thoreau followed their practice, but with a different theory, and his essay distinguished his tax resistance from theirs.

While the non-resistants based their practice on Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount and relied on a faith in the power of nonviolence, Thoreau’s argument was secular and applied equally to violent or nonviolent techniques.

But though he was distancing himself from pacifists, Thoreau was becoming increasingly cynical about war and soldiers. “Read the Englishman’s history of the French and Indian wars,” he wrote in his journal, “and then read the Frenchman’s, and see how each awards the meed of glory to the other’s monsters of cruelty or perfidy.” A few days later he took up his own challenge, and found it was just as he anticipated: The histories were irreconcilable — the savage brutes of one were the chivalric heroes of the other.

One day he observed a battle between two ant hives and wrote:

I should not wonder if they had their respective musical bands stationed on some chip and playing their national airs the while to cheer the dying combatants… I was myself excited somewhat, even as if they had been men. The more you think of it, the less the difference. And certainly there is no other fight recorded in Concord that will bear a moment’s comparison with this.

To the extent that American patriotism is a religion, this is high blasphemy. “The Shot Heard ’Round the World” that began the American Revolution was fired at Concord, and every Concord child, Thoreau included, was brought up to revere the heroes of that battle. But:

I have no doubt [the ants] had as just a cause, one or even both parties, as our forefathers, and that the results will be as important and memorable. And there was far more patriotism and heroism.… I have no doubt it was a principle they fought for as much as our ancestors, and not a threepenny tax on their tea.

Thoreau had no respect for soldiers who fought not for a principle but as a career. When the militia of Massachusetts, a “free state,” cooperated with the Fugitive Slave Law to send Anthony Burns back into slavery in Virginia in 1854, Thoreau’s contempt for the government’s soldiers grew: “While the whole military force of the State, if need be, is at the service of a slaveholder to enable him to carry back a slave, not a soldier is offered to save a citizen of Massachusetts from being kidnapped.… The marines and the militia whose bodies were used lately were not men of sense nor of principle; in a high moral sense they were not men at all.”

The mid-1850s was the closest Thoreau approached to pacifism. He’d given up hope of finding heroes among the government’s uniformed “powder monkeys” and he felt that nations going to war were exhibiting something akin to insanity on a national scale. Might not war come to be thought of as a shameful relic of barbaric times, he wondered, “as duelling between individuals now is?”

But the most interesting evolution in Thoreau’s views on violence and nonviolence — and his most severe challenge to pacifism — was yet to come.

In 1859, John Brown led a raid on the Harpers Ferry armory, hoping to distribute the arms captured there in order to start a slave uprising. The planned insurrection was crushed by government forces, and Brown was captured, tried, and executed.

Abolitionist leaders distanced themselves from Brown, many citing nonviolent principles. Horace Greeley, writing for the New York Tribune, an organ of the newly-formed, abolitionist Republican Party, wrote that “the way to universal emancipation lies not through insurrection, civil war, and bloodshed, but through peace, discussion, and quiet diffusion of sentiments of humanity and justice.”

Thoreau was furious at this timidity, and took the lead in defending Brown, calling out these abolitionists for defending a “peace” that was no peace at all:

It galls me to listen to the remarks of craven-hearted neighbors who speak disparagingly of Brown because he resorted to violence… They preserve the so-called peace of their community by deeds of petty violence every day. Look at the policeman’s billy & handcuffs! Look at the jail! Look at the gallows!…

If the government is enforcing injustice by force, then to cry “peace!” when someone tries to violently resist is not to side with peace, but to side with one variety of violence over another: to side with the victors over the vanquished. Thoreau asked those who pleaded for calm: “What is the character of that calm which follows when the law and the slaveholder prevail?”

The slave-ship is on her way, crowded with its dying hundreds; a small crew of slaveholders is smothering 4 millions under the hatches; & yet the politician asserts that the only proper way by which deliverance is to be obtained is by “the quiet diffusion of sentiments of humanity,” without any “outbreak”! And in the same breath they tell us that all is quiet now at Harper’s Ferry. What is that that I hear cast overboard? The bodies of the dead, who have found deliverance. That is the way we are diffusing humanity, & all its sentiments with it.

To truly side with peace you must renounce allegiance to the violent status quo — only then have you earned the right to criticize violent rebellion. This means not relying on those violent means like “the policeman’s billy & handcuffs” that maintain the government and enforce the legal privileges of its citizens.

Thoreau did renounce his government and its “protection.” He endeavored to eliminate his complicity with the violent status quo, and so he earned the right to criticize violent rebellion. But he would not do so: “I do not complain of any tactics that are effective of good,” he wrote, “whether one wields the quill or the sword, but I shall not think him mistaken who quickest succeeds to liberate the slave. I will judge of the tactics by the fruits.”

Thoreau challenged the pacifists of his time to make sure their non-resistance was not a disguised collaboration with violence, and also to make their action effective so that it would most quickly succeed to end injustice. These challenges still stand.

The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee have put together a new study kit, designed for educators, on Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience and those who have taken it to heart.

History doesn’t have to be, well, old. With this study kit, students will see how Thoreau’s actions and writings have inspired countless people around the world for more than 160 years, including individuals who today are refusing taxes and risking jail to protest war.

Contents

• On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau (A.J. Muste Institute Pamphlet Series)
• Death & Taxes DVD, a 30-min. 2010 award-winning video about war tax resisters carrying on Thoreau’s tradition in the United States today (produced by National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee)
• Study Guide questions challenging students to consider if Thoreau’s actions and words are still relevant
• Historic Civil Disobedience Actions — A select list of 60 actions (and practitioners) since the time of Thoreau, with resources for further study

I’ve been enjoying Tolstoy’s last novel, Resurrection. It’s an interesting story — part “perils of Pauline”-style potboiler, part redemption narrative, part an attempt by Tolstoy to imagine his ideals into the world in an attractive and realistic way. It’s much shorter than his more well-known novels, and focuses on a single main character (Nekhludoff).

I bring it up today because he includes a shout-out to Thoreau at the beginning of Book Ⅱ, Chapter 29:

He remembered the thought of the American writer, Thoreau, who at the time when slavery existed in America said that “under a government that imprisons any unjustly the true place for a just man is also a prison.” Nekhludoff, especially after his visit to Petersburg and all he discovered there, thought in the same way.

“Yes, the only place befitting an honest man in Russia at the present time is a prison,” he thought, and even felt that this applied to him personally, when he drove up to the prison and entered its walls.

This is not the first time Tolstoy mentioned Thoreau. In an 1896 letter to conscientious objector Eugen Heinrich Schmitt, he wrote:

As far back as fifty years ago a little-known, but very remarkable American author, Thoreau, not only clearly enunciated this incompatibility [between service to the state and Christianity] in his beautiful article on the duty of a man not to obey the government, but also in practice showed an example of this disobedience. He refused to pay the taxes demanded of him, as he did not wish to be an abettor and accomplice of a state that legalized slavery, and was put in prison for it.

Thoreau refused to pay the taxes to the state. Naturally a man may on the same ground refuse to serve the state, as you beautifully expressed it in your letter to the minister, when you said that you did not consider it compatible with moral dignity to give your labour to an institution which serves as the representative of legalized murder and rapine.

Thoreau, I think, was the first to say so fifty years ago. At that time no one paid any attention to this his refusal and article, — they seemed so strange. The refusal was explained on the ground of eccentricity. Your refusal already provokes discussion and, as always at the enunciation of new truths, double amazement, — wonderment at hearing a man say such strange things, and, after that, wonderment at this: “Why did not I come to think of what this man speaks, — it is so plain and unquestionable?”

I’ve finally started putting out some Kindle editions. If you’re a Kindler, you might want to add to your bookshelf such titles as:

• Rebecca and Her Daughters by Henry Tobit Evans
• Refusing to Pay Wicked Taxations Vindicated by Alexander Shields
• Resistance to Civil Government by Henry David Thoreau

There’ll be more on the way as I find the time, assuming there really is an audience for this sort of thing.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• A little while back, Peter J. Reilly, at his Forbes blog on taxes, mentioned the case of war tax resister William Ruhaak, who recently lost a court case in which he was trying to get legal recognition for his tax stand. He mentioned the case in passing, and in kind of a flippant way, so I didn’t bother to link to it here at first. But apparently he struck a nerve, and has since responded to his reader feedback with the first post of what he promises will be “a fuller discussion of tax resistance as a form of war protest” — mostly a paean to Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience. Reilly isn’t particularly sympathetic to war tax resistance, as he seems happy to take patriotic myths about America’s military adventures at face value, but so far he’s giving a reasonably fair shake to the idea of tax resistance.
• The Tax Policy Center has crunched the numbers to try and figure out how the ranks of “lucky duckies” (those American households who aren’t required to pay income tax) will expand or shrink in the coming years based on some different policy options. They project that for 2012, for instance, between 45.7% and 46.3% of households will pay no federal income tax.

One way a tax resistance campaign can get a leg up is through the acts of sympathizers within the tax collection bureaucracy itself. After all, they’re taxpayers too, and may feel more loyalty to their fellow-subjects than to the government they’re subjected to.

To this end, some tax resistance campaigns have made strides by encouraging resignations, defections, and goldbricking among those responsible for carrying out the tax laws.

In this, they’re following the lead of Thoreau, who wrote:

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 anything, resign your office.”

Today I’ll give some examples of tax resistance campaigns that tried to persuade the tax collector to switch teams.

Free Keene

A group of activists in Keene, New Hampshire, ranging from Christian anarchists to “Free State Project” ballot-box libertarians, has been experimenting with a number of creative civil disobedience projects.

In 2006, Russell Kanning went to the Keene branch of the Internal Revenue Service and tried to hand out leaflets to the employees there. The leaflets quoted from the tribunal that presided over war crimes trials in Japan after World War Ⅱ to the effect that people are obligated personally to disengage from the crimes of their governments, and then provided a sample letter these employees could send to resign from their jobs.

Kanning was arrested by agents from the Department of Homeland Security and charged with distributing materials in a federal building and failure to obey a lawful order. After he was booked and released, he immediately returned to the IRS office to try again (without the leaflets, which had been confiscated). He was arrested again and charged with disorderly conduct.

A few months later, Dave Ridley followed-up on Kanning’s action, at the Nashua IRS office. He silently held up a sign that read “Is it right to work for the IRS?” and passed a leaflet through the window that read in part:

I have the right to remain silent. IRS agents have the right to quit their jobs. If that is not possible, they have a responsibility to work as inefficiently as possible when taking our money, and as quickly as possible when returning it.

The police were summoned and hustled him out of the building. They later cited him for “distribution of handbills.”

Kat Kanning and Lauren Canario were the next activists in line, going to the Keene IRS office with a “Taxes pay for torture” sign and a stack of leaflets. They were charged with “disorderly conduct and loitering, failure to obey a lawful order.”

At every stage in the process, they tried to directly but non-aggressively confront not only the IRS employees, but also the Homeland Security officers, court bailiffs, judges, and other government collaborators: asking them why they were interfering with American citizens “petitioning their government for redress of grievances,” and asking them to consider taking up a more honorable line of work.

The first intifada

At the launching of the first “intifada” resisting Israeli rule over Palestinians, Palestinians who worked for the tax department under the Israeli occupation resigned their posts. As a result of this and of organized tax resistance, only about 20% of Palestinians subject to Israeli taxes in the West Bank paid their taxes in 1993, the last year before Israel relinquished taxing authority there to the Palestinian Authority.

Greek tax and customs officials

Complicating the Greek government’s campaign to bring in more tax revenue during the recent Euro-region financial brouhaha, bureaucrats in the Greek tax and customs office periodically went on strike between 2010 and 2011 to protest the accompanying austerity measures that cut funding for state employees.

British nonconformists

British members of nonconforming Christian sects who did not want to see their tax money going towards schools that taught children the official, government supported faith, resisted their taxes. The newspapers reported:

In Lincolnshire, the sitting magistrate recently refused to try cases of resistance, and left the bench. Difficulty is experienced everywhere in getting auctioneers to sell the property confiscated.

Whiskey Rebellion

As I mentioned earlier this month, part of the problem the fledgeling United States government had when trying to enforce its excise tax against the Whiskey Rebels was that it had a devil of a time convincing anyone to serve as a prosecutor or exciseman.

From the beginning, the Whiskey Rebels counted on being able to convince their neighbors not to help the federal government enforce the tax. George Washington’s Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton complained to him:

The opposition first manifested itself in the milder shape of the circulation of opinions unfavorable to the law, and calculated by the influence of public disesteem to discourage the accepting or holding of offices under it…

Annuity Tax resisters

During the resistance against the Annuity Tax in Edinburgh, Scotland, a number of members of the town council who were members of churches other than the tax-supported establishment church resigned rather than be party to administering the act that enacted the tax.

Auctioneers whom the government usually could call upon to preside at tax auctions refused to take the contracts, and carters whom ordinarily could be contracted to cart the goods refused, and so the town had to hire someone new at a higher rate, and purchase new vehicles to haul seized property about.

Tax Day has come and gone… twice! — since the IRS had to extend it by a day at the last minute when their on-line payment system went down.

• War tax resisters around the country dusted off their penny poll jars and protest signs and did what they could to remind people of the cruelty and destruction that results from their tax compliance.
• Author Alice Walker (The Color Purple) wrote a poem for an anti-war march in Oakland, California, which reads in part:

  How do grownups
  Truly say No
  To War?
  
  By not paying for it.
  
  Some so-called grownups will harass you when
  You attempt to do this: Not Pay For War. But do not be discouraged.
  As your elder, it is my job to help you think
  Your way around this obstacle of taxes
  That have the blood of the children
  Of the world on them.
  

  The poem goes on to encourage an “I Don’t Need It” movement in which concerned people withdraw from the consumer economy. “We can stop war by not shopping our way through the bad news of it; as it creeps ever closer to our door. We can stop war by not funding it.”
• The Freedom Highway show on Radio Kingston interviewed Gabe Roth from Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings about the song he wrote for the group: “What If We All Stopped Paying Taxes?” and also interviewed war tax resister Daniel Woodham.
• The School of Life has released a video summarizing the context and arguments of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience.
• WHMP’s Bill Newman Show features war tax resister Aaron Falbel (his segment starts about a half-hour into the show).
• John Vibes gives his take on the thousands who refuse to pay war taxes, and give the money to charity instead.
• Reason’s Brian Doherty gives a rundown of some of the more pettily infuriating uses of our taxes, and experiments with describing them in terms of how many American taxpayers had to pay taxes all year so that, for example, EPA head Scott Pruitt could install a soundproof booth in his office to take his phone calls in, or so that the New England Foundation for the Arts could put on a version of Hamlet performed by dogs.
• In the Greek Orthodox Church, Tax Day, April 17th is also the feast of Saint Shimon bar Sabbae, who was martyred in 345 for refusing to cooperate with the Persian shah’s attempt to extort taxes from the Christian community. Nicholas Sooy, at In Communion: Website of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship, reflects on the tax resistance of Saint Shimon, and on tax resistance and conscientious objection in Christian history.
• Sarah Vowell managed to put a meandering and mostly-pointless op-ed in the New York Times encouraging people to read their Thoreau on tax day, or something.

In other news…

• The Italian group Addiopizzo organizes and promotes businesses that refuse to pay the pizzo protection money to the mafia. They’ve now extended this from brick-and-mortar businesses and recently announced an on-line Addiopizzo store. (Alas, when I tried to use it they didn’t have shipping options to the United States, but you might be luckier if you live somewhere in the European Union.) They encourage people to buy from non-mafia-tainted businesses as an action they call consumo critico (critical consumption) in order to make sure the profits from resistance exceed the risks.
• Spanish war tax resisters created a video to showcase the little school (esquelita) they funded with redirected taxes. The school helps children in a neglected school district, has a food pantry, and also offers Spanish language instruction for immigrants.

The following excerpt comes from Taylor Stoehr’s Nay-saying in Concord: Emerson, Alcott, and Thoreau (1979). I thought it very helpfully put Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” in context, explaining the arguments and objections Thoreau was anticipating or responding to in his essay:

The most famous political encounter of transcendentalism was Thoreau’s refusal of his tax bill in 1846, with its consequent night in jail, and the immortal explanation of his behavior in “Civil Disobedience.” Here were Alcott’s exemplary act, Emerson’s vow of disobedience, and Thoreau’s own ironic afterword — all in a single organic episode.

Not everyone considered the act exemplary. Emerson had not yet warmed to his abolitionist fervor of 1851, and his initial response to his friend’s protest against slavery and the Mexican War was less than enthusiastic. Shortly after Thoreau’s release Emerson wrote to his friend Elizabeth Hoar, who, since she was visiting in New Haven, could not yet know about their neighbor’s adventure. (There were those who thought that her father “Squire” Hoar had paid Thoreau’s tax to get him out of jail, just as two years earlier he had kept him out of trouble when he and young Edward Hoar had carelessly set fire to the Concord woods.) Emerson begins facetiously, treating his letter as an excuse “for counting up how many times I have been to Boston since you were in Concord, how many hayrigging parties we have made to the Whortleberry Pasture, and all other important adventures.” He continues in the same vein: “Mr. Channing has returned, after spending 16 days in Rome; Mr. Thoreau has spent a night in Concord jail on his refusal to pay his taxes; Mr. Lane is in Concord endeavoring to sell his farm of ‘Fruitlands’ Mr. E — but I spare you the rest of the weary history. It seems the very counting of threads in a beggar’s coat, to tell the chronicle of nothings into which nevertheless thought & meaning & hope contrive to intervene and it is out of this sad lint & rag fair that the web of lasting life is woven.”⁶⁵

Frivolous as these sentences may appear, especially in the light of the more serious reflections he was entering in his journal, Emerson’s account here is nonetheless instructive, for it helps us chart the relative boiling points of transcendentalists confronted with the brute facts of war and slavery. Only three years earlier Thoreau himself had written a similarly jocular report to Emerson of Alcott’s archetypical encounter with the friendly minion of the state, tax collector Sam Staples. His paragraphs are worth comparing with Emerson’s:

I suppose they have told you how near Mr. Alcott went to the jail, but I can add a good anecdote to the rest. When Staples came to collect Mrs. Ward’s taxes, my sister Helen asked him what he thought Mr. Acott meant, — what his idea was, — and he answered, “I vum, I believe it was nothing but principle, for I never heard a man talk honester.”

There was a lecture on Peace by a Mr. Spear (ought he not be beaten into a ploughshare?), the same evening, and, as the gentlemen, Lane and Alcott, dined at our house while the matter was in suspense, — that is, while the constable was waiting for his receipt from the jailer, — we there settled it that we, that is, Lane and myself, perhaps should agitate the State while Winkelried lay in durance. But when, over the audience, I saw our hero’s head moving in the free air of the Universalist church, my fire all went out, and the State was safe as far as I was concerned. But Lane, it seems, had cogitated and even written on the matter, in the afternoon, and so, out of courtesy, taking his point of departure from the Spear-man’s lecture, he drove gracefully in medias res, and gave the affair a very good setting out; but, to spoil all, our martyr very characteristically, but, as artists would say, in bad taste, brought up the rear with a “My Prisons,” which made us forget Silvio Pellico himself.⁶⁶

Some allowance, as always, must be made for Thoreau’s habitual tone. After all, he did intend to join Lane in his denunciations at the lecture that night — “perhaps” — and no doubt he sympathized with the position that his friends had taken. On the other hand, he had clearly not yet reached the point when he too would march off to jail. We find Alcott in 1843, Thoreau in 1846, Emerson in 1851, each saying his “nay” to the state: “I will not obey it, by God.”

It has become the habit with commentators on these events to regard Alcott’s as the seminal act, somehow germinating and coming to flower in Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” — Emerson figuring merely as a bemused botanist. But the chronology itself is not so orderly as I have made it seem (Thoreau in fact stopped paying his taxes the same year as Alcott and Lane did), and even if it were, it need not imply influence. Indeed, such a view does all three — and especially Thoreau and Emerson — considerable injustice, since it tends to put their acts of conscience in the light of mere faddish postures, taken with an eye to opinions of the moment. Whatever feelings of mutual support may have circulated among them, transcendentalists were self-reliant if nothing else.

Some neighbor — it could have been either Thoreau or Alcott but it sounds more like Alcott — told Emerson in 1840 “that he had made up his mind to pay no more taxes for he had found that he owed nothing to the Government.”⁶⁷ There is something rather blithe about this announcement. The play on words is Thoreauvian, but the sentiment has the studied nonchalance of Alcott’s individualism. Let it stand, for the moment, as one extreme of the attitude toward taxes. At the opposite end of the spectrum we may place Squire Hoar, “the very personification of the State” as Charles Lane once characterized him.⁶⁸ Not only did the Squire pay, unasked, the taxes of Alcott and (conceivably) Thoreau — while his son Rockwood Hard paid Lane’s — but he once told Emerson, apropos of “some inequality of taxes in the town,” that “it was his practice to pay whatever was demanded; for, though he might think the taxation large and very unequally proportioned, yet he thought the money might as well go in this way as in any other.”⁶⁹ This generous cynicism, a principled disregard for principle, is a good match for the cavalier anarchism of Emerson’s unidentified neighbor. The choice between them seems pretty obviously a matter of simple economic prudence, wealth insuring its goods, poverty tightening its belt. But there was more political and social philosophy lurking in these positions than might first appear in their casual guise as Emersonian hearsay.

In Thoreau’s tickled synopsis of Alcott’s taxation, he mentions that Charles Lane “had cogitated and even written on the matter,” before the issue was known. Lane himself had also decided to pay no taxes, and one assumes their decisions must have been concerted, an emblem perhaps of their proposed withdrawal from society and venture into a new community of the regenerate at Fruitlands. In any case, Lane had thought about the question long enough to provide material for more than a mere impromptu harangue after a pacifist lecture. He wrote it up in installments, as letters to Garrison’s abolitionist and nonresistant newspaper, The Liberator. The first letter contained the announcement and interpretation of the event itself. According to Lane, Alcott’s act was “founded on the moral instinct which forbids every moral being to be a party, either actively or permissively, to the destructive principles of power and might over peace and love.” Vaporous as this explanation may seem, it was probably understood by readers of The Liberator, who would have agreed that it was “tyrannous” for “the human will… to be subject to the brute force which the majority may set up.”⁷⁰ Alcott’s refusal of his tax was an “act of non-resistance.”

“Non-resistance” was the name of the movement that had split the American pacifists in 1838, between the radicals led by Garrison and Henry Clarke Wright, and the conservatives in the tradition of William Ladd. While the latter had emphasized the need for nations to join together in some world federation, the nonresistants believed in more immediate and direct action. Since no existing government seemed likely to reform itself as completely as the radicals required — that is, the abandonment of all use of force, including that of police and tax officers — the New England Non-resistance Society advised noncooperation with the state in all its functions. Many became no-government men as well as nonresistants and abolitionists, and they saw their positions on these issues as mutually entailed. When Lane called Alcott’s an “act of non-resistance,” he meant, in modern terms, that it was pacifist, nonviolent, and anarchist — as we would say, “libertarian.” Chief of these motives in the actual event was the anarchist, and the ensuing series of letter-articles that Lane wrote for The Liberator was called “Voluntary Political Government,” an argument against most of the means and many of the functions of the state, which were to be transformed by making everything optional. Roads would be paved by those who wanted to use them, education would be the primary responsibility of the family (as Lane’s hero Pestalozzi had said it ought to be anyway), each township would handle its own criminals and insane. Essentially, the locus of social responsibility would be shifted away from governmental bodies entirely to more natural and organic units like the neighborhood and the family. Lane and Alcott called their principle of organization at Fruitlands “the consociate family,” and it was to figure as a model for a world without the state and all its evils.

Although Alcott himself did not say why he refused his taxes in 1843, he did write quite a bit in his journal about taxes and the state in 1846 and 1847, around the time of Thoreau’s brush with Sam Staples. It is interesting to see how much of Lane’s programmatic vision remained with Alcott after the failure of their community. Here for example, in February of 1847, he sounds very much like Emerson’s neighbor of 1840, who “owed nothing to the Government”: “The State is man’s pantry, at best, and filled at an immense cost — a spoliation of the human commonwealth. Let it go. Heroes will live on nuts, and freemen sun themselves under the clefts of the rocks, sooner than sell their liberty for the pottage of slavery. We few honest neighbors can help each other; and if the State desires any favours of us we will take the matter into consideration and, at a proper time, give them a respectful answer.”⁷¹ One might have expected Alcott to have taken a somewhat harder line, in reaction to the Mexican War and its resultant extension of slavery into Texas. These, of course, were among the reasons Thoreau gave for refusing his taxes the preceding year. Alcott too had considered withholding his in 1846, but his motives were unchanged from those reported by Lane in 1843:

Staples, the town collector, called to assure me that he should next week advertize my land to pay for the tax, unless it was paid before that time. Land for land, man for man. I would, were it possible, know nothing of this economy called “the State,” but it will force itself upon the freedom of the free-born and the wisest bearing is to over-bear it, let it have its own way, the private person never going out of his way to meet it. It shall put its hand into a person’s pocket if it will, but I shall not put mine there on its behalf.⁷²

Much as this sounds like a decision to refuse to pay, in fact Alcott’s land was not in his name at all, but in trust for his wife, and he knew that his taxes would be paid for him, if not by Squire Hoar again, then by those relatives of Mrs. Alcott who also supported him in other ways. What is significant is not the refusal but the manner of it. This may be regarded as merely a further extension of nonresistance — ignoring the state if one cannot quite defy it. “Resist not evil” is taken to include the state as well as ordinary thieves and murderers.

When Alcott and Emerson discussed Thoreau’s tax refusal not long after, Alcott viewed his friend’s act as he would his own. “E[merson] thought it mean and skulking, and in bad taste. I defended it on the grounds of a dignified non-compliance with the injunction of civil powers.”⁷³ For Alcott, the injustice lay chiefly in the state’s treatment of the individual taxpayer, less in the evils of slavery and war perpetrated on others.

Here again we may survey the range of civic obligations felt by the transcendentalists. In December Alcott told a convention of the Non-resistance Society that citizens could “rightfully refuse” to pay for the Mexican War, but his aim was not the end of that war so much as “a laying of the foundations of a new commonwealth, based on a catholicism commensurate with the needs of mankind.”⁷⁴ Thoreau seemed to have his eye on the invasion of Mexico and the plight of the oppressed. “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.… It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race, should find them.…”⁷⁵ This was not a non-resistant position. Thoreau had never been a pacifist, and in that 1841 debate at the Concord Lyceum it had been Henry and his brother upholding the affirmative of “Is it ever proper to offer forcible resistance?” He took special pains in “Civil Disobedience” to distinguish his position from Alcott’s anarchism as well as his pacifism; “Unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government.”⁷⁶ Indeed, the first title of the essay, when it was published in Elizabeth Peabody’s short-lived journal Æsthetic Papers, was “Resistance to Civil Government” — verbally, at least, almost the opposite of the stance that Alcott had taken in 1846 when he resigned himself to letting the state rob him of his taxes.

In spite of these distinctions, Alcott very much approved of Thoreau’s act, and he apparently went twice in 1848 to hear the resulting lecture, then called “The Rights & Duties of the Individual in relation to Government.” The issue of resistance and nonresistance was not yet forced in the title, and Alcott seemed happy enough to see the Mexican War and slavery received a good deal of attention, so long as his own protest in 1843 was also mentioned: “His allusions to the Mexican War, to Mr. Hoar’s expulsion from Carolina, his own imprisonment in Concord Jail for refusal to pay his tax, Mr. Hoar’s payment of mine when taken to prison for a similar refusal, were all pertinent, well considered, and reasoned. I took great pleasure in this deed of Thoreau’s.”⁷⁷

When Thoreau finally came to publish the lecture under the new title, he excised his allusions to Alcott’s precedence over him and, while retaining the reference to Samuel Hoar’s expulsion from South Carolina as a Northern agitator, he failed to mention the Squire’s payment of the taxes of Alcott, merely noting that in his own case “some one interfered.”⁷⁸ It would have been awkward for Thoreau to ignore Alcott’s “similar refusal” in a speech delivered before a Concord audience. Presumably many of their neighbors would know what Thoreau states in his essay without comment, that he himself had not paid taxes for “six years,” that is, not since the time Alcott and Lane were arrested for not paying theirs. Whether Thoreau acted in concert with the Fruitlanders, or in response to their gesture, cannot be finally settled. The tone of his remarks on Alcott’s exploit suggests a later commitment, perhaps the following year. According to Lane, Alcott had not paid his for several years before his arrest — another bit of evidence that he was the “neighbor” who in 1840 told Emerson he would pay no more taxes. In any case it must have seemed more in keeping with Thoreau’s focus on the individual in “Civil Disobedience” to diminish those aspects of his position that might make it appear part of a movement.

Again, this is important because it helps distinguish the stands taken by the transcendentalists. Lane would figure as the extreme case here, with his emphasis on every feature of Alcott’s tax refusal that suggested concert and community. Even his manner of broadcasting his views, in letters to the organ of nonresistance, Garrison’s Liberator, shows a regard for tactics and propaganda that would not have occurred to Thoreau. Alcott falls somewhere between Thoreau and Lane, eager for the golden age of “voluntary government” that Lane celebrated and that Fruitlands symbolized, yet still chiefly intent on his own single combat with the state. As Emerson said, “The fault of Alcott’s community is that it has only room for one.”⁷⁹ At bottom not one of them — Alcott, Lane, or Thoreau — could be called convivial, but surely the Timon of the three was Thoreau, whose interest in Mexico and slavery was, as he said, an anxiety to get off the “shoulders” of his fellowmen, so that he might go about his own business — to “wash his hands” of humanity’s dirt.⁸⁰

From a few hints so far, something of Emerson’s stance on these questions may also be gathered. As usual there is a good bit of ambiguity to deal with. His attitude toward Alcott’s “community” is ironic but not especially hostile, whereas his response to Thoreau’s defiance of the state is full of annoyance — if we can take the words “mean and skulking” as literally his. Emerson’s journal tends to substantiate Alcott’s report.

At first Emerson appears to approve of Thoreau’s act, as a protest against the Mexican War:

Mr. Webster told them how much the war cost, that was his protest, but voted the war, & sends his son to it. They calculated rightly on Mr. Webster. My friend Mr. Thoreau has gone to jail rather than pay his tax. On him they could not calculate. The abolitionists denounce the war & give much time to it, but they pay the tax.⁸¹

Yet a few pages later Emerson’s second thoughts seem to find Thoreau almost as much in the wrong as Webster himself:

Don’t run amuck against the world. Have a good case to try the question on. It is the part of a fanatic to fight out a revolution on the shape of a hat or surplice, on paedo-baptism or altar-rails or fish on Friday. As long as the state means you well, do not refuse your pistareen. You have a tottering cause: ninety parts of the pistareen it will spend for what you think also good: ten parts for mischief. You can not fight heartily for a fraction. But wait until you have a good difference to join issue upon. Thus Socrates was told he should not teach. “Please God, but I will.” And he could die well for that. And Jesus had a cause. You will get one by & by. But now I have no sympathy.⁸²

Emerson characteristically peers round every corner of motive and consequence. He must have known that Thoreau had stopped paying his tax about the time that Alcott had been arrested by Staples, several years earlier. Accordingly, the announced motives of the refusal, the Mexican War and the annexation of Texas, must have counted as rather after-the-fact in his eyes. Thoreau was spoiling for a fight, playing “the part of a fanatic to fight out a revolution on the shape of a hat or surplice.” He had a grudge against the state, and was looking for some cause to use as a cudgel against it. In this he seemed to differ from Alcott, who simply waited for the state to request his taxes, and then refused on the ingenuous grounds that he did not want its services. Thoreau lay in ambush for the state, expecting it to overstep its bounds. One implication seems to be that Thoreau recognized legitimate as well as illegitimate functions of government. Another is that he was not quite candid in suggesting that he only wanted to mind his own business and had no philosophic axe to grind.

Even granting the Mexican War as Thoreau’s occasion for refusing his taxes, Emerson complained further “that refusing payment of the state tax does not reach the evil so nearly as many other methods within your reach. The state tax does not pay the Mexican War. Your coat, your sugar, your Latin & French & German book, your watch does. Yet these you do not stick at buying.” This is mere byplay, however, since Emerson was convinced that Thoreau had other motives. “The abolitionists ought to resist & go to prison in multitudes on their known & described disagreements from the state. They know where the shoe pinches; have told it a thousand times; are hot headed partialists. I should heartily applaud them; it is in their system.… But not so for you generalizers. You are not citizens.… Reserve yourself for your own work.” At this point Alcott is dragged into the dock too:

A.B.A. thought he could find as good a ground for quarrel in the state tax as Socrates did in the Edict of the Judges. Then I say, Be Consistent, & never more put an apple or a kernel of corn into your mouth. Would you feed the devil? Say boldly “There is a sword sharp enough to cut sheer between flesh & spirit, & I will use it, & not any longer belong to this double faced equivocating mixed Jesuitical universe.”

⋮

The Abolitionists should resist because they are literalists; they know exactly what they object to, & there is a government possible which will content them. Remove a few specified grievances, & this present commonwealth will suit them. They are the new Puritans, & as easily satisfied. But you, nothing will content. No government short of a monarchy consisting of one king & one subject, will appease you. Your objection then to the state of Massachusetts is deceptive. Your true quarrel is with the state of Man.⁸³

It is difficult to separate the antagonists here — and in the long run perhaps it is unnecessary. We can hear echoes of the epigram on Alcott’s “community of one,” written only a few months earlier, but the “you” addressed must at least include the “you” chastised elsewhere in these observations, that is, Thoreau. His choice of going to jail rather than paying his taxes is equated with Alcott’s dissatisfaction with the universe. “This prison,” Emerson concludes, “is one step to suicide.”

Whatever hard words Emerson had for Thoreau in 1846, by the time his crime had been turned into a lecture Emerson was softening the criticism. Typical of his growing ambivalence is an anecdote from his trip to England not long after, recounted in English Traits. The occasion was “a very rainy day,” when Carlyle and Arthur Helps asked “whether there were any Americans? — any with an American idea, — any theory of the right future of that country?”

Thus challenged, I bethought myself neither of caucuses nor congress, neither of presidents nor of cabinet-ministers, nor of such as would make of America another Europe. I thought only of the simplest and purest minds; I said, “Certainly yes; — but those who hold it are fanatics of a dream which I should hardly care to relate to your English ears, to which it might be only ridiculous, — and yet it is the only true.” So I opened the dogma of no-government and non-resistance, and anticipated the objections and the fun, and procured a kind of hearing for it. I said, it is true that I have never seen in any country a man of sufficient valor to stand for this truth, and yet it is plain to me that no less valor than this can command my respect. I can easily see the bankruptcy of the vulgar musket-worship, — though great men be musket-worshippers; — and ’t is certain as god liveth, the gun that does not need another gun, the law of love and justice alone, can effect a clean revolution. I fancied that one or two of my anecdotes made some impression on Carlyle.⁸⁴

It is hard to imagine a sterner test of Emerson’s best hopes for America than the question put to him, as a representative voice, by these formidable Englishmen. All this preface and apology for “the law of love and justice” suggests that he was more than a little intimidated by his company and their question, defensive about his country and its “purest minds,” who resist its laws and taxes. In his anticipation of “objections and fun” he is uncomfortable rather than gleeful, and the edging back and forth between seriousness and embarrassed cynicism provides a guide to his own problems of belief in the doctrines of his friends. Yet his answer, whatever its tonalities, nonetheless names nonresistance and no-government as the American contributions to the history of the race. That surely is a significant footnote to his journal of 1846.

In Emerson’s journal, the interest in nonresistance went back a long way. In 1831 he was wishing that “the Christian principle, the ultra principle of nonresistance and returning good for ill might be tried fairly.” Nor was he apologetic in 1844, when he published his essay on “Politics”:

The tendencies of the times favor the idea of self-government, and leave the individual, for all code, to the rewards and penalties of his own constitution; which work with more energy than we believe whilst we depend on artificial restraints. The movement in this direction has been very marked in modern history.… The power of love, as a basis of a State, has never been tried. We must not imagine that all things are lapsing into confusion if every tender protestant be not compelled to bear his part in certain social conventions; nor doubt that roads can be built, letters carried, and the fruit of labor secured, when the government of force is at an end.⁸⁵

Why this expectant vision should have given way to the annoyed reasonings of 1846 and the embarrassed defenses of 1848, it is difficult to say. In 1844 he could not “call to mind a single human being who has steadily denied the authority of the laws, on the simple ground of his own moral nature.”⁸⁶ Apparently neither Thoreau’s nor Alcott’s individualist stand gave him the example of “valor” and “truth” he awaited, for the same messianic expectation is reaffirmed in English Traits — rather compulsively and fainter by half, but still the hope America gives rise to, scarcely a dozen years before the Civil War.

Then, to complicate matters still more, in 1849 Emerson agreed to the printing of his own major defense of the doctrine of nonresistance in its pacifist bearings, a lecture entitled “War” that he had delivered under the auspices of the American Peace Society in 1838. That was the year that the New England Non-resistance Society split off from the Peace Society. Garrison, who was engineering the schism, made a point of praising Emerson’s speech to Alcott, as well he might. The argument came out mildly but chiefly for the nonresistant position, and paid only the most polite lip service to the Congress-of-Nations projects of the conservative elements in the Peace Society. That Emerson agreed to the printing of the essay in 1849, given the European context of war and revolution, is much; that it appeared in Elizabeth Peabody’s Æsthetic Paper, along with Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government,” is a great deal more. Of course he must have known that Miss Peabody was printing Henry’s essay along with his, and that the two would be considered as mutually reinforcing. How could a sentence like the following not apply to Thoreau? “The man of principle, that is, the man who, without any flourish of trumpets, titles of lordship, or train of guards, without any notice of his action abroad, expecting none, takes in solitude the right step uniformly, on his private choice, and disdaining consequences, — does not yield, in my imagination, to any man.”⁸⁷ Or again, remembering the accusation lodged in his journal that “No government short of a monarchy consisting of one king & one subject, will appease you,” how does this sound?

…a man should be himself responsible, with goods, health, and life, for his behavior;… should not ask of the State, protection; should ask nothing of the State; should be himself a kingdom and a state; fearing no man; quite willing to use the opportunities and advantages that good government throw[s] in his way, but nothing daunted, and not really the poorer if government, law and order went by the board; because in himself reside infinite resources; because he is sure of himself, and never needs to ask another what in any crisis it beho[o]ves him to do.⁸⁸

Few if any readers would be able to compare these opinions with Emerson’s journal, but surely everyone would see the resemblance to a passage in “Resistance to Civil Government”:

For my own part, I should not like to think that I ever rely on the protection of the State. But, if I deny the authority of the State when it presents its tax-bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. This is hard. This makes it impossible for a man to live honestly and at the same time comfortably in outward respects. It will not be worth the while to accumulate property; that would be sure to go again. You must hire or squat somewhere, and raise but a small crop, and eat that soon. You must live within yourself, and depend upon yourself, always tucked up and ready for a start, and not have many affairs.⁸⁹

Thoreau pretends, for rhetorical purposes, to find such conditions “hard,” but the evidence of Walden all goes to show that “squatting,” “raising but a small crop,” and “living within yourself” were his preferences. These are the virtues of self-reliance, and so it is appropriate that Emerson praise “the man of principle,” “disdaining consequences”; but Thoreau had actually chosen and enjoyed both the principles and their consequences. It is as if Thoreau supplied the acts, Emerson the theory and the appreciation.

Yet, as we have already seen, Emerson was continually foretelling the appearance of this king and kingdom, without recognizing (or really desiring?) their advent. He agreed that “the less government we have the better,” and argued that “the State exists” only to “educate the wise man” — “with the appearance of the wise man the State expires.… The wise man is the State.” But apparently the time was not yet, and Thoreau not the man.

We live in a very low state of the world, and pay unwilling tribute to governments founded on force. There is not, among the most religious and instructed men of the most religious and civil nations, a reliance on the moral sentiment and a sufficient belief in the unity of things, to persuade them that society can be maintained without artificial restraints, as well as the solar system; or that the private citizen might be reasonable and a good neighbor, without the hint of a jail or a confiscation. What is strange too, there never was in any man sufficient faith in the power of rectitude to inspire him with the broad design of renovating the State on the principle of right and love. All those who have pretended this design have been partial reformers, and have admitted in some manner the supremacy of the bad State.⁹⁰

Emerson made the point often enough; one supposes Thoreau heard it. In any case, it is likely that Thoreau had access to many of Emerson’s criticisms, expectations, and denials before he sat down to turn his confrontation with the state into literature. Perhaps his decision to leave Alcott out of the published version reflects a desire, stimulated by Emerson’s commentaries, to separate himself from the nonresistant movement in general and Alcott’s special purist version of it in particular. He is not one of the no-government men, he explains at the outset, and then he tries to find a path between Alcott’s anarchism and Emerson’s pragmatism. “It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong.” That answered Alcott. Next, addressing Emerson, he goes on to say that it is his duty, “at least, to wash his hands of it.”⁹¹ But the abolitionists and nonresistants would have denied the first proposition, and Emerson had already questioned the possibility of approaching the second without compromise. Was Thoreau willing to give up his coat? his books? What accessory of existence could remain untainted in a nation one-sixth slave?

A few paragraphs later Thoreau has a more telling formulation, perhaps because it is less guarded: “I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.”⁹² The virtue of this axiom is that it cuts both ways, answering both Alcott and Emerson. It is Thoreau’s business neither to make the revolution nor to exhaust himself in conventional dissent. He too holds Emerson’s opinion, that it is the particular duty of the abolitionists to withdraw their financial support as well as their moral assent from a government that fosters slavery and aggressive war: “if one honest man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, 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.”⁹³ But by making this point, he seems to separate himself and his responsibilities from the antislavery movement. So why did he go to jail? How was this “living” his own life?

In his journal Emerson had compare the state to “a poor good beast who means the best: it means friendly. A poor cow who does well by you, — do not grudge it its hay. It cannot eat bread as you can, let it have without grudge a little grass for its four stomachs. It will not stint to yield you milk from its teat. You who are a man walking cleanly on two feet will not pick a quarrel with a poor cow.”⁹⁴ This put the question another way — not in terms of ethical responsibility, how to “live with yourself,” but rather as a matter of tolerance and common sense, “live and let live.” Thoreau had an answer for such arguments.

I think sometimes, Why, this people mean well; they are only ignorant; they would do better if they knew how: why give your neighbors this pain to treat you as they are not inclined to? But I think, again, this is no reason why I should do as they do, or permit others to suffer much greater pain of a different kind. Again, I sometimes say to myself, When many millions of men, without heat, without ill-will, without personal feelings of any kind, demand of you a few shillings only, without the possibility, such is their constitution, of retracting or altering their present demand, and without the possibility, on your side, of appeal to any other millions, why expose yourself to this overwhelming brute force? You do not resist cold and hunger, the winds and the waves, thus obstinately; you quietly submit to a thousand similar necessities. You do not put your head into the fire. But just in proportion as I regard this as not wholly a brute force, but partly a human force, and consider that I have relations to those millions as to so many millions of men, and not of mere brute or inanimate things, I see that appeal is possible, first and instantaneously, from them to the Maker of them, and, secondly, from them to themselves. But, if I put my head deliberately into the fire, there is no appeal to fire or to the Maker of fire, and I have only myself to blame. If I could convince myself that I have any right to be satisfied with men as they are, and to treat them accordingly, and not according, in some respects, to my requisitions and expectations of what they and I ought to be, then, like a good Mussulman and fatalist, I should endeavor to be satisfied with things as they are, and say it is the will of God. And, above all, there is this difference between resisting this and a purely brute or natural force, that I can resist this with some effect; but I cannot expect, like Orpheus, to change the nature of the rocks and trees and beasts.⁹⁵

This is one of the strongest passages in “Civil Disobedience,” because it grapples with the ambiguities of the subject — “this double faced equivocating mixed Jesuitical universe.” The transformation of Emerson’s “poor cow” into Thoreau’s “brute force” is crucial. It allows the analysis of the state as “millions of men” — not simply a helpless well-meaning beast and yet not Alcott’s thieving ruffian either. It also paves the way for that disclaimer, in the end, of any desire to “change the nature of the rocks and trees and beasts,” that is, the universe. Who now is the most reasonable and acquiescent in the nature of things, Emerson or Thoreau?

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65. Emerson’s Letters Ⅲ 339–40.
66. Thoreau’s Correspondence, pp. 77–78.
67. Emerson’s Letters Ⅱ 335.
68. Letter from Charles Lane, “State Slavery — Imprisonment of A. Bronson Alcott — Dawn of Liberty,” Liberator 13, no. 4 (27 Jan. 1843), 16.
69. See Emerson’s Letters Ⅲ 230; Emerson’s Works 1903 edn. Ⅹ, 440.
70. Lane, “State Slavery…,” p. 16.
71. Alcott’s Journals, p. 189.
72. Ibid., p. 179.
73. Ibid., pp. 183–84.
74. This passage, not printed in Odell Shepard’s edition of Alcott’s Journals, is quoted by the kind permission of Mrs. F.W. Pratt, and the Houghton Library of Harvard University, owners of the manuscript.
75. “Resistance to Civil Government,” Æsthetic Papers. 1 (1849), 199–200.
76. Ibid., p. 190.
77. Alcott’s Journals, p. 201.
78. “Resistance to Civil Government,” p. 205.
79. Emerson’s Journals Ⅸ, 323.
80. “Resistance to Civil Government,” p. 195.
81. Emerson’s Journals Ⅸ, 445.
82. Ibid., Ⅸ 446.
83. Ibid., Ⅸ 446–47.
84. English Traits, Emerson’s Works 1903 edn., Ⅴ 286–87.
85. “Politics,” Emerson’s Works 1903 edn., Ⅲ 219–20.
86. Ibid., p. 221.
87. “War,” Æsthetic Papers, (1849), 48–49. For Garrison’s praise, see Emerson’s Works 1903 edn., Ⅺ, 578.
88. Ibid., pp. 47–48.
89. “Resistance to Civil Government,” pp. 201–202.
90. “Politics,” Emerson’s Works 1903 edn., Ⅲ 215–26, 220–21.
91. “Resistance to Civil Government,” p. 195.
92. Ibid., p. 198.
93. Ibid., p. 199.
94. Emerson’s Journals Ⅸ, 267.
95. “Resistance to Civil Government,” pp. 207–208.