henry david thoreau resistance to civil government

He also linked slavery to the Mexican-American War because Mexico refused to cede ownership of Texas, which had nonetheless been admitted to the Union as a slave state. Thoreau's refusal to pay the tax was intended as a direct protest against an unpopular tax and as an indirect protest against the government's condoning of slavery. Staples asked him to pay several years of overdue poll tax (not a true voting tax but a 'head' tax on every adult male over twenty years old). In July 1846, during the second summer of his residence at Walden Pond, Thoreau walked in from the pond to go to the cobbler and was stopped by Sam Staples, Concord's amiable tax collector and jail keeper. A crucial event was the night he spent in the Concord jail. Despite his clinging to the ideal of self-culture, however, when such issues came closer to home, he was sometimes forced to conclude that effective reform might depend on numbers. As he wrote to his friend Parker Pillsbury (1809–1898) about the war, 'I do not so much regret the present condition of things in this country (provided I regret it at all) as I do that I ever heard of it' ( Letters, p. In his last years even the Civil War could not convince him that the ideal of self-culture should give way to social action. What if these grievances exist? So do you and I' (p. In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) he complains: 'It is a great pleasure to escape sometimes from the restless class of Reformers. Thoreau was often impatient with reform movements and utopian communities. Paradoxically, Thoreau's ideal program of social action requires no direct action on society. To attempt to reform society without first perfecting oneself is to hack at the branches of evil while ignoring its roots. By striving for personal perfection, one leavens the whole loaf of humanity. These concerns occur throughout his writings and are rooted in the same transcendentalist self-culture that he espouses in Walden: an individual's highest duty is to perfect the spiritual connection to God within. 'Resistance to Civil Government' (often titled 'Civil Disobedience') was neither the first nor the last of Thoreau's writings on social and political reform. The truth lies somewhere between those extremes.

To some he is the patron saint of passive resistance, whereas to others he is an anarchist.

has ensured that Thoreau's views on social issues would be not only controversial but misunderstood.

Its influence on later writers and reformers such as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Next to Walden (1854), Henry David Thoreau's (1817–1862) essay 'Resistance to Civil Government' (1849) is his most famous work.

Henry david thoreau resistance to civil government