Henry David Thoreau → his writings → his journals

I’ve been adding more to my collection of excerpts from the journals of Henry David Thoreau, chronologically. I’m up through most of 1851 now.

I’m choosing excerpts in which Thoreau most directly confronts the themes of law, government, man in society, war, economics, duty, and conscience. These are scattered about in his journals, sometimes as aphorisms salted amongst his reflections on the natural world, occasionally as extended rants, such as those prompted by the case of fugitive slave Thomas Sims.

Some time ago, I read Sandra Harbert Petrulionis’s study of how Thoreau had used his journal as a source for the essay Slavery in Massachusetts. Petrulionis wrote:

A comparison of the text of Slavery in Massachusetts with the Journal from which it derives reveals that Thoreau curtailed the Journal’s stridency, revising or cutting more than twenty passages that with few exceptions can be categorized as blasphemous, revolutionary, or, at best, politically incautious. In the Journal, among other infractions, Thoreau equates the suffering of slaves with Christ’s, and he unequivocally advocates violence in the fight to end slavery.

I’m eager to reach 1854 in the journals so I can read Thoreau’s original, “strident” drafts. I’m curious also whether A Plea for Captain John Brown — which compares Brown with Christ and which unequivocally advocates violence in the fight to end slavery — exists in a yet more vigorous draft in the journals.

It seems as though this project of compiling Thoreau’s writings on political philosophy must have been done before and that I must be reinventing the wheel, but if it has, I have not discovered it. In any case, I haven’t found anything like this on-line (where the journals themselves only seem to exist as scanned page-images).

Thoreau’s journals, almost all of them, were finally published in a 14-volume set in 1906. The 1962 version I’m working with compresses this into two books by printing on each page, four pages from the 1906 set.

The first of these books was checked out fifteen times between 4 February 1981 and 20 June 1995, according to the rubber-stamped card glued to the page facing the inside front cover — about once a year. Perhaps it was referred to more than it was brought home (it is a heavy volume, after all) — it is full of smudges and stains and seems appropriately well-loved.

I suspect that some of Thoreau’s most dangerous insights may be found in these journals. He wrote:

We forget to strive and aspire, to do better ever than is expected of us. I cannot stay to be congratulated. I would leave the world behind me. We must withdraw from our flatterers, even from our friends. They drag us down. It is rare that we use our thinking faculty as resolutely as an Irishman his spade. To please our friends and relatives we turn out our silver ore in cartloads, while we neglect to work our mines of gold known only to ourselves far up in the Sierras, where we pulled up a bush in our mountain walk, and saw the glittering treasure. Let us return thither. Let it be the price of freedom to make that known.

You can read “Thoreau’s most dangerous insights” in The Price of Freedom: Political philosophy from Thoreau’s journals.

I hope to discover some the gold that Thoreau uncovered but didn’t or couldn’t publish.

Do I do justice to his writing to make a collage of it? On the one hand, his journals often read as though they were meant to be fodder for a cut-and-paste job like this — a paragraph break for him might as well be the opening of a new volume. On the other hand, sometimes a closer look at the paragraphs surrounding one of his seemingly-out-of-the-blue political aphorisms reveals, if not an explicit metaphor, a train of thought that runs better with engine and caboose still attached.

Thoreau himself wondered about this:

I do not know but thoughts written down thus in a journal might be printed in the same form with greater advantage than if the related ones were brought together into separate essays. They are now allied to life, and are seen by the reader not to be far-fetched. It is more simple, less artful. I feel that in the other case I should have no proper frame for my sketches. Mere facts and names and dates communicate more than we suspect. Whether the flower looks better in the nosegay than in the meadow where it grew and we had to wet our feet to get it! Is the scholastic air any advantage?

Thoreau’s entry of 4 September 1851, for instance, in which he reflects on how as people have domesticated animals there seems to be a dimension on which we and our drudge-beasts have met somewhere half-way… there are so many other places in that day’s lengthy entry in which men and beasts take each others’ places: squirrels gamboling like human performers, men walking in the road’s horse-track with two more in the wheel-ruts, the dog in whose eye Thoreau “see[s] the eye of his master.”

The previous day, he wrote sympathetically about a work-horse who was carting dirt for his owner. Most of the horse’s effort was spent doing his master’s labor, “though his tail was brushing off the flies,” and Thoreau tried to imagine the race of horses before they were subdued by man. There is a continuity between this and his more explicit thoughts the following day that is more poignant when both passages are read, but I also want to try to maintain a tight focus for the sake of brevity and so I have left out much that on a close reading might prove to be very much to the point.

It is wise to write on many subjects, to try many themes, that so you may find the right and inspiring one. Be greedy of occasions to express your thought. Improve the opportunity to draw analogies. There are innumerable avenues to a perception of the truth.… It is not in vain that the mind turns aside this way or that: follow its leading; apply it whither it inclines to go. Probe the universe in a myriad points.… He is a wise man and experienced who has taken many views; to whom stones and plants and animals and a myriad objects have each suggested something, contributed something.

So be it. I may have opportunities to second-guess and regret my editorial decisions, but I will also have opportunities to revise if need be.

The collection of excerpts from Thoreau’s journals that I’m working on is really too big for a web page.

I like the advantages of being able to insert links to sources of information elsewhere on-line — for instance when Thoreau references William Gilpin’s Remarks on Forest Scenery, and Other Woodland Views or Benjamin Mirick’s History of Haverhill, Massachusetts I can link directly to page-images of the text, thanks to Google’s ongoing project of scanning in old books.

And I like that I can now link directly to a particular journal entry, if, for instance, I want to argue that Thoreau anticipated Nietzche or some such crazy thing.

But as a collection to be read over and pondered at leisure, it would read much better as a book of the pages between covers variety. Maybe I’ll fancy it up in some sort of layout software and submit it to one of those newfangled print-on-demand book publishing outfits. Anyone out there have any advice on this?

In my ongoing project of excerpting those sections of Thoreau’s journals in which he discusses politics, economics, civil disobedience and the like, I have just reached the point at which he gave the speech that he published as Slavery in Massachusetts.

He used his journal to write rough drafts of much of the rhetoric he would use for that speech and essay, starting with his reaction to the reenslavement of Thomas Sims in 1851 (see Thoreau’s undated journal entries in April 1851, and his entry for 26 April 1851), and then with the similar case of Anthony Burns in 1854 (see Thoreau’s journal entries for 29 May 1854, 4 June 1854, 9 June 1854, 16 June 1854, 17 June 1854, and 18 June 1854)

While reading these entries, I was reminded of poor, deluded, Constitutionalist tax protester Ed Brown, who is waving a Waco wick at that big matchbook in Washington and getting ready to go out in a blaze of gunfire because, though the judge disagreed, Brown knows there’s no law on the books that requires him to pay taxes. “Show me the law and I’ll pay the taxes”:

The judges and lawyers, all men of expediency, consider not whether the Fugitive Slave Law is right, but whether it is what they call constitutional. They try the merits of the case by a very low and incompetent standard. Pray, is virtue constitutional, or vice? Is equity constitutional, or iniquity? It is as impertinent, in important moral and vital questions like this, to ask whether a law is constitutional or not, as to ask whether it is profitable or not. They persist in being the servants of man, and the worst of men, rather than the servants of God. Sir, the question is not whether you or your grandfather, seventy years ago, entered into an agreement to serve the devil, and that service is not accordingly now due; but whether you will not now, for once and last, serve God, — in spite of your own past recreancy or that of your ancestors, — and obey that eternal and only just Constitution which he, and not any Jefferson or Adams, has written in your being. Is the Constitution a thing to live by? or die by? No, as long as we are alive we forget it, and when we die we have done with it. At most it is only to swear by. While they are hurrying off Christ to the cross, the ruler decides that he cannot constitutionally interfere to save him.

(I used to just laugh at the weird legal theories of the Constitutionalist tax protesters, but now that I’ve heard the sort of creative Constitution reading practiced by none other than the United States Attorney General, I think the Ed Browns of America are probably as qualified as the next guy to interpret the Highest Law in the Land.)

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.

I’m nearing the end of my project of excerpting Thoreau’s journals. I’ve finished 1859, the year of John Brown’s raid and execution, in which Thoreau spoke on several occasions — using the event to try and radicalize the abolitionist movement, which had lately been distracted into electoral politics by forming the anti-slavery Republican Party, and which was unsure whether to embrace Brown as a martyr or to reject him as an embarrassment, leaning toward the latter.

For those with an appreciation for obsessive-compulsive concordances, I give you a table showing how Thoreau assembled A Plea for Captain John Brown from the raw material he wrote in these journal entries. I find it interesting to see how he worked, mosaic-fashion, jotting down useful bits of rhetoric as he crafted them, and then fitting them together into a coherent whole.

Using paragraph #57 from the essay as an example:

Reform and the Reformers, which I’ve just added to the Thoreau collection here at The Picket Line, is a real gem.

It deserves to be included alongside Civil Disobedience, Slavery in Massachusetts, A Plea for Captain John Brown, and Life Without Principle in any collection of Thoreau’s better political writings.

The essay was never published in his lifetime, and has been cobbled together from existing lecture notes that Thoreau himself picked over for his other writings, such as Walden and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Probably for this reason it hasn’t received nearly as much attention as his more well-known essays.

But it is much more readable than some of the other writings I’ve been collecting. That is to say that the modern reader can read the essay and follow Thoreau’s arguments without at the same time having to unravel their references to figures of regional notoriety or to political controversies that have long since been forgotten. And it expands on Thoreau’s political philosophy and shows off some good examples of his rhetorical wit.

The lecture reflects Thoreau’s frustration with the multitude of reformers — prohibitionists, utopian communists, free love advocates, religious revivalists, and the like — who were roaming about New England at the time hawking their prescriptions for a better world. (As an aside, Thoreau’s journal entry of 17 June 1853 is a particularly amusing rant about this.)

Thoreau’s audience in Boston were of the open-minded liberal variety — people who were typically the most interested in and the most vulnerable to the charms of these reformers — and so Thoreau begins his lecture slyly with a fairly superficial but probably sympathetic attack on the Reformer’s great enemy: the Conservative. Further disarming his audience with a witticism or two, he then turns on them by spending the rest of the lecture attacking the major genre of lecturers that they more typically come to hear: the Reformer.

His major complaint is much the same as the one he expressed when reviewing John Etzler’s technological utopianism (see The Picket Line 15 February 2007) — that the utopianists, and Reformers in general, are too concerned with exerting control over and reshaping The World, or Society, or The Government, or The Family, and not concerned enough about better using the control they already exercise over themselves:

The Reformer who comes recommending any institution or system to the adoption of men, must not rely solely on logic and argument, or on eloquence and oratory for his success, but see that he represents one pretty perfect institution in himself, the center and circumference of all others, an erect man.

I ask of all Reformers, of all who are recommending Temperance, Justice, Charity, Peace, the Family, Community or Associative life, not to give us their theory and wisdom only, for these are no proof, but to carry around with them each a small specimen of his own manufactures, and to despair of ever recommending anything of which a small sample at least cannot be exhibited: — that the Temperance man let me know the savor of Temperance, if it be good, the Just man permit to enjoy the blessings of liberty while with him, the Community man allow me to taste the sweets of the Community life in his society.

He suspects that these Reformers are acting from some subconscious motive (or, using less psychoanalytic terms: “some obscure, and perhaps unrecognized private grievance”) that is overtly philanthropic, but covertly a scheme for avoiding the real necessity for self-reform.

He reminds the Reformers that they speak with their deeds more than with their words — that if “the lecturer against the use of money is paid for his lecture, … that is the precept which [men] hear and believe, and they have a great deal of sympathy with him” — and noting that it’s easy to lecture about “non-resistance” but the proof of the pudding is when “one Mr. Resistance” steps forward to take part in the debate.

He notes:

For the most part by simply agreeing in opinion with the preacher and Reformer I defend myself and get rid of him, for he really asks for no sympathy with deeds — and this trick it would be well for the irritable Conservative to know and practice.

So he recommends that Reformers, and those interested in Reform, instead work on themselves. He anticipates the objection that would invert his argument by saying that he is recommending a narcissistic evasion of responsibility for grappling with social problems. The problems of the social order, of the political order, of the family, and so on, Thoreau insists, are rooted in individuals — the corrupt institutions are only the symptom:

The disease and disorder in society are wont to be referred to the false relations in which men live one to another, but strictly speaking there can be no such thing as a false relation if the condition of the things related is true. False relations grow out of false conditions.

I’ve also added to the collection Wendell Phillips Before Concord Lyceum. This letter-to-the-editor is full of praise for Phillips, and its contrast with the scolding Reformers essay marks some boundaries of what Thoreau considered valuable in political debate.

I’ve finished transcribing the excerpts from Thoreau’s journals in which he touches on topics of political philosophy. This turned out to be more of a project than I’d counted on — sifting through something like 6,800 pages of transcripts for those moments when he’d look away from his turtles and trees and telegraph harps, gaze with contempt on civilization, and make an observation or two about how people treat each other.

He tells the following anecdote of muster-time in Concord, when the State militia came out for their semiannual practice:

I went to the store the other day to buy a bolt for our front door, for, as I told the storekeeper, the Governor was coming here. “Aye,” said he, “and the Legislature too.” “Then I will take two bolts,” said I. He said that there had been a steady demand for bolts and locks of late, for our protectors were coming.

One advantage to being a self-employed technical writer is that I have an excuse to pick up some top quality layout and publishing software. And one advantage to it being 2007 is the emergence of the print-on-demand publishing industry.

If you head over to lulu.com, you can see where I’ve turned some of my recent months’ work of compiling Thoreau’s political philosophy into a pair of books of the dead tree variety.

One, The Price of Freedom includes the excerpts from Thoreau’s journals that touch on political philosophy and that I’ve collected here. This will please those of you who don’t like reading long works on computer screens, and it comes with a meticulous index, which my on-line version lacks.

The phrase “The Price of Freedom” is the sort of cliché that usually gets used as the caption to sanctimonious memorial day political cartoons of headstones at Arlington. I thought twice about using it as a title. But Thoreau didn’t think “the price of freedom” was measured in bodies sacrificed on Freedom’s altar, but as the work of the living — the price of freedom is to use it to the utmost:

We forget to strive and aspire, to do better ever than is expected of us. I cannot stay to be congratulated. I would leave the world behind me. We must withdraw from our flatterers, even from our friends. They drag us down. It is rare that we use our thinking faculty as resolutely as an Irishman his spade. To please our friends and relatives we turn out our silver ore in cartloads, while we neglect to work our mines of gold known only to ourselves far up in the Sierras, where we pulled up a bush in our mountain walk, and saw the glittering treasure. Let us return thither. Let it be the price of freedom to make that known.

It seemed a particularly appropriate phrase to use to title his uncensored private thoughts on political matters — those mines of gold known only to himself.

The second book I’ve titled My Thoughts are Murder to the State after a phrase from Thoreau’s essay Slavery in Massachusetts. This book compiles Thoreau’s essays concerning political philosophy, and is fairly bare-bones: no introduction, no footnotes, pretty much just Thoreau from cover to cover. The essays in this collection are:

• Resistance to Civil Government (Civil Disobedience)
• Slavery in Massachusetts
• A Plea for Captain John Brown
• The Last Days of John Brown
• Remarks After the Hanging of John Brown
• Herald of Freedom
• Life Without Principle
• Sir Walter Raleigh
• Reform and the Reformers
• Paradise (to be) Regained
• Wendell Phillips Before Concord Lyceum
• The Service

I’m very happy with the on-demand publishing results. The books appear to me to be indistinguishable in quality of binding and materials from any other paperback you’ll see in the bookstore, and the price seems very reasonable.

Today is the 100^th anniversary of the birth of Wallace Floyd “Wally” Nelson.

Ten years ago, when he received the “Challenge and Change Award” from the Men’s Resource Center of Western Massachusetts, he reflected back on fifty years of tax resistance — which was just one facet of his life of integrity and activism:

He served time in federal prison as a conscientious objector during World War Ⅱ, and has refused to pay federal income taxes since 1948. “I decided it was ridiculous to pay for what I was in prison protesting.” Nelson maintains that the U.S. government uses taxpayers’ money to fund “premeditated killing” around the world, as well as “rape, mayhem, and mass destruction.” “I said no to all those things,” he once said, but typically disavowed lofty motives, focusing instead on the personal choice involved. “I do not expect to save the world. I do expect to save Wally Nelson from doing some very stupid things.”

For the past 25 years, Wally and Juanita have lived on Woolman Hill in Deerfield, engaged in subsistence farming and living without electricity, a telephone, or running water. In 1997 they joined with four other area farmers to form Community Supported Agriculture, a farming cooperative in which customers subscribe in advance to buy produce each growing season. The Nelsons’ simple lifestyle goes hand-in-hand with their tax resistance and other principles.

“It helps us reflect on consumption,” explains Juanita, “and [makes] us feel we want to live more and more simply. Tax refusal is part of a process. It can lead you on to do other things.”

“[Resisting war taxes] is the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” says Wally. “It gave me the freedom to open my mind to anything. Because once you face this tax question, you know then you’re living on the brink. If you can develop that skill, you’ve got it made.”

On another occasion, he said: “I guess a long time ago I got it out of my head I was going to save the world. So I act to save Wally and his integrity. Sometimes it’s in a situation that’s dangerous and sometimes not so dangerous. But I would hope that other people would be inspired to do what they ought to do.”

Which reminds me of what Thoreau wrote in his journal 61 years before Nelson’s birth day:

“If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. But do not care to convince him. Men will believe what they see. Let them see.” — Henry David Thoreau, 27 March 1848

Those of you in the Greenfield, Massachusetts area can attend a centenary celebration of the life of Wally Nelson this Sunday.

The U.S. torture policy has been buzzing around in my head like an angry wasp these last few days, making it hard for me to enjoy anything else.

I haven’t read the newly-released memos or followed the talking heads or read Obama’s recent speech at CIA head­quarters. I’ve only caught hints of this and that in headlines and blog commentary. I feel like I got the message in its essentials a long time ago, and the emerging details are starting to become just atrocity porn.

On the other hand, lots of people don’t seem to have gotten the message, or it doesn’t mean the same thing to them that it means to me. They don’t think it concerns them, or, at any rate, any further than requiring of them that they select an opinion to wear on appropriate occasions.

Others, smoking the same pipe Obama’s smoking, dream themselves a fantasy in which all the nastiness is behind us and we don’t have to much worry ourselves about it anymore except perhaps on rainy days when a sigh of melancholy reflection sounds like just the thing to match the weather.

I was reminded of what Thoreau wrote in his jour­nals as he was preparing what he would later deliver as Slavery in Mas­sa­chu­setts:

The effect of a good government is to make life more valuable — of a bad government, to make it less valuable. We can afford that railroad and all merely material stock should depreciate, for that only compels us to live more simply and economically; but suppose the value of life itself should be depreciated. Every man in New England capable of the sentiment of patriotism must have lived the last three weeks with the sense of having suffered a vast, indefinite loss.…

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

Thoreau is referring to the Anthony Burns fugitive slave case, in which Mas­sa­chu­setts — ostensibly a “free state” — arrested Burns and returned him as property to his owner, with the full cooperation of the state government.

…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 per cent. 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. Suppose you have a small library, with pictures to adorn the walls — a garden laid out around — and contemplate scientific and literary pursuits, &c, &c, and discover suddenly that your villa, with all its contents, is located in hell, and that the justice of the peace is one of the devil’s angels, has a cloven foot and a forked tail — do not these things suddenly lose their value in your eyes? Are you not disposed to sell at a great sacrifice?

I went out back on an unusually hot afternoon yesterday to do some weeding in the garden and try to keep my mind from dwelling on waterboarding and sleep deprivation. It’s Spring and everything is coming up, and the garlic are so vigorous they look almost like cornstalks, and on two occasions I lifted border-bricks and found clutches of wriggling baby salamanders, and Jay Bybee sits on the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals.

I am surprised to see men going about their business as if nothing had happened, and say to myself, “Un­for­tu­nates! they have not heard the news;” that the man whom I just met on horseback should be so earnest to overtake his newly bought cows running away — since all property is insecure, and if they do not run away again, they may be taken away from him when he gets them. Fool! does he not know that his seed-corn is worth less this year — that all beneficent harvests fail as he approaches the empire of hell? No prudent man will build a stone house under these cir­cum­stances, or engage in any peaceful enterprise which it requires a long time to accomplish. Art is as long as ever, but life is more interrupted and less available for a man’s proper pursuits. 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.

There is a fine ripple and sparkle on the pond, seen through the mist. But what signifies the beauty of nature when men are base? We walk to lakes to see our serenity reflected in them. When we are not serene, we go not to them. Who can be serene in a country where both rulers and ruled are without principle? The remembrance of the baseness of pol­i­ti­cians spoils my walks. My thoughts are murder to the State; I endeavor in vain to observe nature; my thoughts involuntarily go plotting against the State. I trust that all just men will conspire

Kirkus Discoveries reviews The Price of Freedom: Political Philosophy from Thoreau’s Journals:

A compilation of excerpts from the journals of American icon Henry David Thoreau.

Thoreau’s writings have endured via syllabi on college campuses, through the activism of Martin Luther King Jr., in the environmental stewardship of the green movement and in this volume. Editor Gross takes a tip, and his title, from Thoreau’s belief that the best of one’s thoughts are unvarnished, stripped of the gloss that makes them palatable to the masses: “Let it be the price of freedom to make that known.”

The book presents Thoreau’s reflections, circa 1837 to 1861, on the church, government, the media and many other topics, generously footnoted by Gross. Although Thoreau died a few years before the Civil War settled the slavery issue, a number of entries concern abolitionist John Brown, who was executed in 1859, and much of this material was reworked and appeared in The Last Days of John Brown.

In Price, there emerges a man who loved nature, who enjoyed his own company and thoughts and perhaps engaged in social intercourse as much out of duty as desire. A few passages suggest the underlying tenor: “Society is always diseased, and the best is the sickest.” Elsewhere, Gross includes Thoreau’s remark, “I believe that in this country the press exerts a greater and more pernicious influence than the church.”

Thoreau’s thoughts on the Panic of 1857 are also applicable to the current crisis: “The merchants & banks are suspending & failing all the country over, but not the sand banks, solid & warm, & streaked with bloody blackberry vines… Invest, I say, in these county banks. Let your capital be simplicity & contentment.” Though more than a century has passed since Thoreau set these thoughts to paper, Gross reminds readers of the man’s continued relevance.

Classic Thoreau presented in a thorough, illuminating volume.

I’ve admired Crispin Sartwell’s writing here before: notably, a reality check he gave to a conference of young Democrats after the 2004 presidential election, and a review of his thought-provoking book Extreme Virtue: Truth and Leadership in Five Great American Lives.

So I was thrilled to find that Sartwell has read and enjoyed my book The Price of Freedom: Political Philosophy from Thoreau’s Journals. Here’s what he has to say about it:

For many years, I’ve been hoping to get time to comb Thoreau’s massive journals for expressions of his political views. David Gross has done it for me, and done it in an extremely clear and thorough way, with excellent notes and references.

Of course, Thoreau’s reputation as a pre-eminent American (and anarchist) political thinker depends on his great essay “Civil Disobedience.” Here, we see many sources of that essay, and developments out of it. Here too, you see the connections that Thoreau himself made between his political positions — his advocacy of freedom, especially in opposition to slavery in every sense — and his naturalism, or indeed, his whole understanding a reality, truth, and humanity. And one sees, as well, the very essence of American individualism, formulated centrally by Emerson (more or less Thoreau’s mentor and best friend), but expressed as profoundly by Thoreau as by anyone in history.

Thoreau is among the best political thinkers — and certainly among the best writers — in our language. David Gross has done us all a service in truly displaying the depth and clarity of this thought.

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.