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WorkHenry David Thoreau

Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

Fourteen essays and speeches, among them the account of a night in jail that Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. later read as a method.

by Henry David Thoreau362 passages held

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First published
(published posthumously)
Original language
English

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Overview

Martin Luther King Jr. first read "Civil Disobedience" as a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, which he entered in 1944, and by his own account reread it several times. Gandhi had translated part of it for the readers of his newspaper in South Africa in 1907, though he said later that his campaign was well under way before he met the essay. It began with a tax bill. In July 1846 Sam Staples, the tax collector in Concord, Massachusetts, asked Thoreau for the poll tax, a flat sum charged per person, which Thoreau had not paid for six years. He refused, because the money supported a government that upheld slavery and was at war with Mexico, and he spent one night in the town jail before someone, probably his aunt, paid for him. Early in 1848 he explained himself to the Concord Lyceum, the town's lecture society, and the lecture was printed in 1849 as "Resistance to Civil Government." The title now used first appeared in 1866, four years after his death. The essay argues against William Paley, the English moral philosopher, who had taught that citizens should obey a government for as long as resisting it would cost the public more than the wrong it does. Thoreau answers that some wrongs cannot be weighed like that. When a law makes a person the agent of injustice to someone else, he must break it and accept prison; a state that has to jail all its just citizens or give up the wrong will give up the wrong. The later pieces go further. "Slavery in Massachusetts" was a speech given at Framingham on 4 July 1854, a month after federal marines and soldiers escorted Anthony Burns, who had escaped slavery in Virginia, through Boston to the ship that took him back. "A Plea for Captain John Brown" was delivered in Concord on 30 October 1859, two weeks after the abolitionist John Brown raided the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and it defends a man who had taken up arms. "Walking," which holds that people stay alive only through contact with wild land, appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in June 1862, a month after Thoreau died.

Key concepts

What is a 'majority of one'?

A majority of one is Thoreau's phrase for a single person who is more right than his neighbours. In 'Civil Disobedience' he tells opponents of slavery not to wait until they outnumber the other side before withdrawing support from the government. Right does not become right by being counted, so one person who acts on it already carries the authority that a majority claims. It is enough, he adds, to have God on one's side.

What does Thoreau mean by expediency?

Expediency is deciding what to do by weighing advantages against costs. Thoreau takes the word from William Paley, the English moralist, for whom a government should be obeyed as long as resisting it would cause more public inconvenience than the grievance. He grants the rule for small matters and denies it for justice. A plank unjustly taken from a drowning man must be returned even if one drowns, and a people must stop holding slaves whatever it costs them.

What does it mean to serve the state as a machine?

To serve the state as a machine is to give it one's body without using one's judgment or moral sense. Thoreau's examples are soldiers, jailers and constables, whom he puts on a level with wood and stones. Legislators and office-holders serve with their heads and seldom make moral distinctions. A very few, the heroes, martyrs and reformers, serve with their consciences too, so they mostly resist the state and are treated by it as enemies.

What does Thoreau mean by the Wild in 'Walking'?

The Wild is whatever in nature and in people has not been tamed or put to use, and Thoreau treats it as the source of all vigour. It is a quality as much as a place: the West he speaks of is only another name for it. He finds it in the books that attract us, in music, and in the friends he would choose, wild and not tame. All good things, he says, are wild and free.

What does Thoreau mean by getting a living?

Getting a living is the way a person earns what they need, and Thoreau holds that it is part of living and no mere means to it. If getting a living is not inviting and glorious, he writes, then living is not. So the test of work is whether it is done for its own sake. He would hire the man who works for love of it, and says a labourer paid only his wages is cheated.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

When conscience outranks the law

Must a citizen ever hand his conscience to the legislator? Thoreau answers no in 'Civil Disobedience', and asks what a person owes a government that does wrong in his name.

We should be men first and subjects afterward, Thoreau writes. Most serve the state as machines, with their bodies. An injustice that is mere friction in the machine of government may be let go; one that makes a person the agent of injustice to another must be met by breaking the law. Voting does not discharge the duty, being a sort of gaming. Against William Paley's rule of weighing costs he says a plank wrested from a drowning man must be given back though one drowns. Under a government that imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is a prison.

  • civil disobedience
  • conscience
  • political authority
  • justice
  • freedom

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Slavery, John Brown and the end of patience

What does a free state owe a man it sends back into slavery, and what may be done for him? Across the 1850s Thoreau's answer moves from refusal to the defence of armed rescue.

In 'Slavery in Massachusetts' Thoreau turns on his own state for returning a fugitive: the law will never make men free, he says, men have to make the law free, and he feels he has lost a country. Judges who ask only what the law permits he calls inspectors of a burglar's tools. Five years later 'A Plea for Captain John Brown' goes further. Brown held that a man may interfere by force to rescue the slave, and Thoreau agrees, preferring that philanthropy to one that neither shoots nor liberates. After the hanging he writes that Brown is more alive than ever.

  • slavery
  • abolitionism
  • moral courage
  • courage
  • heroism
  • public opinion
  • rhetoric

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Walking, and the wild that keeps us alive

What does a person lose who never leaves the road and the tilled field? In the nature essays Thoreau treats wildness as a need of the mind, and walking as the way to it.

'Walking' speaks, in its first sentence, a word for nature and absolute freedom against a merely civil freedom and culture. The walker Thoreau means is a saunterer, a word he derives from pilgrims to the Holy Land, and he must arrive in spirit as well as in body. The West he walks toward is another name for the Wild, and in wildness is the preservation of the world. So he puts his hope in the quaking swamp, and proposes a society for the diffusion of useful ignorance. 'A Winter Walk' and 'Night and Moonlight' take the same walk in snow and by moonlight.

  • nature
  • walking
  • human-nature relationship
  • civilization
  • perception
  • attention
  • knowledge

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Getting a living without losing the life

Is the way a person earns money any part of how well they live? Thoreau holds that it decides the matter, and that neither wages, gold nor machines can stand in for the work itself.

'Life Without Principle' begins from a complaint: this world is a place of business, and nothing is so opposed to poetry, to philosophy, to life itself. A man who walks in the woods is called a loafer, and one who cuts them down industrious. The ways of getting money almost without exception lead downward, and the rush for California gold is a lottery that disgraces mankind. Work should be done for love of it. Reviewing a scheme to abolish labour by wind and tide, he answers that it aims at gross comfort merely, and that nothing is effected but by one man.

  • labor
  • work
  • technology
  • utopianism
  • virtue
  • time

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Within this work

passages held
362
distinct concepts
623
by passages held, corpus-wide
#208

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “civil disobedience” and “slavery”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 17 pairings. 90 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
civil disobedienceslavery9
freedomnature7
civil disobedienceconscience6
justiceslavery6
abolitionismjustice4
conscienceslavery4
freedomslavery4
abolitionismcivil disobedience3
naturetechnology3
abolitionismslavery2
civil disobediencefreedom2
civil disobediencejustice2
abolitionismconscience1
civil disobediencenature1
consciencefreedom1
consciencejustice1
natureslavery1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1849 A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

    The first of Thoreau's two books, drafted at Walden Pond in memory of his brother John and printed at his own expense. Its failure to sell made him hold back Walden, which waited five more years.

     EN
  2. 1854 Walden

    The book Thoreau is known by, and the second of only two he published in his lifetime. It came out of the stay at the pond, during which he also finished the first draft of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, but was not published until 1854.

     EN
  3. 1863 Civil Disobedience and Other Essays you are here EN
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