Friday, 3 May 2013

Henry Thoreau and 'Civil Disobedience'

Henry Thoreau and 'Civil Disobedience'
by Wendy McElroy
Thoreau Reader:  Home - Civil Disobedience Intro - Civil Disobedience Text:  Part 1

Wendy McElroy is the editor of and a research fellow for The Independent Institute in Oakland, California. She is the author and editor of many books and articles, including Liberty for Women: Freedom and Feminism in the 21st Century (Ivan R. Dee / Independent Institute, 2002).

HENRY DAVID THOREAU was an introspective man, who wandered the woods surrounding the small village of Concord, Massachusetts, recording the daily growth of plants and the migration of birds in his ever-present journal. How, then, did he profoundly influence such political giants as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.? The answer lies in a brief essay that has been variously titled but which is most often referred to simply as "Civil Disobedience". Americans know Thoreau primarily as the author of Walden, but it is "Civil Disobedience" that established his reputation in the wider political world. It is one of the most influential political tracts ever written by an American.
[2]     "Civil Disobedience" is an analysis of the individual’s relationship to the state that focuses on why men obey governmental law even when they believe it to be unjust. But "Civil Disobedience" is not an essay of abstract theory. It is Thoreau’s extremely personal response to being imprisoned for breaking the law. Because he detested slavery and because tax revenues contributed to the support of it, Thoreau decided to become a tax rebel. There were no income taxes and Thoreau did not own enough land to worry about property taxes; but there was the hated poll tax – a capital tax levied equally on all adults within a community.[3]     Thoreau declined to pay the tax and so, in July 1846, he was arrested and jailed. He was supposed to remain in jail until a fine was paid which he also declined to pay. Without his knowledge or consent, however, relatives settled the “debt” and a disgruntled Thoreau was released after only one night. The incarceration may have been brief but it has had enduring effects through "Civil Disobedience." To understand why the essay has exerted such powerful force over time, it is necessary to examine both Thoreau the man and the circumstances of his arrest.

Thoreau the man
[4]     Henry David Thoreau was born into a modest New England family. With a childhood surrounded by rivers, woods, and meadows, he became an avid student of nature. His friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, offered the following psychological portrait:
He was bred to no profession; he never married; he lived alone; he never went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the State; he ate no flesh; he drank no wine; he never knew the use of tobacco; and though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun. He chose, wisely no doubt for himself, to be the bachelor of thought and Nature.... No truer American existed than Thoreau.
[5]     If it is possible for one word to summarize a man, then that word would be the advice he offered in Walden: “Simplify, simplify.” Thoreau was a self-consciously simple man who organized his life around basic truths. He listened to the inner voice of his conscience, a voice all men possess but few men follow. As he explained in Walden,
[6]     Thoreau’s attempt to apply principles to his daily life is what led to his imprisonment and to "Civil Disobedience." Oddly enough, his contemporaries did not see him as a theorist or as a radical, viewing him instead as a naturalist. They either dismissed or ignored his political essays, including "Civil Disobedience." The only two books published in his lifetime, Walden (1845) and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849); both dealt with nature, in which he loved to wander.[7]     He did not have to wander far to find intellectual stimulation as well. During the early 19th century, New England was the center of an intellectual movement called Transcendentalism. In 1834, while Thoreau was a student at Harvard, the leading Transcendentalist moved into a substantial house at the outskirts of Concord, thus converting the village into the heart of this influential movement. That man was Ralph Waldo Emerson.
[8]     There has never been rigorous agreement on the definition of Transcendentalism, partly because Emerson refused to be systematic; but there are broad areas of agreement among Transcendentalists. As a philosophy, it emphasizes idealism rather than materialism; that is, it views the world as an expression of spirit and every individual as an expression of a common humanity. To be human is to be born with moral imperatives that are not learned from experience but which are discovered through introspection. Therefore, everyone must be free to act according to his conscience in order to find the truth buried within.
[9]     Although Emerson’s focus on the individual must have appealed to Thoreau, there was an inherent tension between Thoreau’s practical, earthy ways and the abstract quality of Transcendentalism. Thoreau wanted to incorporate principles into daily life; he wanted to taste and feel principles in the air around him. He wrote in Walden,
[10]     Despite their differences, Thoreau was deeply influenced by Emerson, whom he met in 1837 through a mutual friend. Four years later, Thoreau moved into the Emerson home and assumed responsibility for many of the practical details of Emerson’s life.[11]     Transcendentalism became Thoreau’s intellectual training ground. His first appearance in print was a poem entitled “Sympathy” published in the first issue of The Dial, a Transcendentalist paper. As Transcendentalists migrated to Concord, one by one, Thoreau was exposed to all facets of the movement and took his place in its inner circle. At Emerson’s suggestion, he kept a daily journal, from which most of Walden was eventually culled.
[12]     But Thoreau still longed for a life both concrete and spiritual. He wanted to translate his thoughts into action. While Transcendentalists praised nature, Thoreau walked through it. Especially in his later years, Emerson seemed distant from Thoreau’s lusty approach to life, which he described as “the doctrine of activity.” Given this difference of approach, it is no wonder that Emerson did not embrace the ideas within "Civil Disobedience." Nor did he approve of Thoreau’s refusal to pay taxes.

Imprisoned for a night
[13]     "Civil Disobedience" was Thoreau’s response to his 1846 imprisonment for refusing to pay a poll tax that violated his conscience. He exclaimed in "Civil Disobedience,"
[14]     Imprisonment was Thoreau’s first direct experience with state power and, in typical fashion, he analyzed it:
[15]     Prior to his arrest, Thoreau had lived a quiet, solitary life at Walden, an isolated pond in the woods about a mile and a half from Concord. He now returned to Walden to mull over two questions: (1) Why do some men obey laws without asking if the laws are just or unjust; and, (2) why do others obey laws they think are wrong?[16]     In attempting to answer these questions, Thoreau’s view of the state did not alter. It was that view, after all, which led him to prison in the first place. Judging by the rather dry, journalistic account of being in jail, his emotional reaction did not seem to alter significantly; he was not embittered by the experience. The main criticism he expressed was aimed at those who presumed to pay his fine, an act that the jailer said “made him mad as the devil.”
[17]     Toward the men who were his jailers, Thoreau seems to have felt more disdain than anger, stating,
They plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are under-bred. 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 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.
[18]     It was the reaction of the townspeople of Concord, his neighbors, that distressed Thoreau and made him dissect the experience so as to understand their behavior. He ended his short, matter-of-fact account of his night in prison with a commentary on the townsfolk, which expressed how his eyes had been opened:
[19]     There is no cynicism in Thoreau’s description of his neighbors, whom he admits he may be judging “harshly,” since “many of them are not aware that they have such an institution as the jail in their village.” Instead he was unsettled by the realization that there was a wall between him and the townsfolk, a wall to which Gandhi referred in an account of his second imprisonment in South Africa. Gandhi wrote,
Placed in a similar position for refusing his poll tax, the American citizen Thoreau expressed similar thought in 1849. Seeing the wall of the cell in which he was confined, made of solid stone 2 or 3 feet thick, and the door of wood and iron a foot thick, he said to himself, “If there were a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was still a more difficult one to climb or break through before they could get to be as free as I was.”
[20]     Thoreau may have also brooded over the reaction of Emerson, who criticized the imprisonment as pointless. According to some accounts, Emerson visited Thoreau in jail and asked, “Henry, what are you doing in there?” Thoreau replied, “Waldo, the question is what are you doing out there?” Emerson was “out there” because he believed it was shortsighted to protest an isolated evil; society required an entire rebirth of spirituality.[21]     Emerson missed the point of Thoreau’s protest, which was not intended to reform society but was simply an act of conscience. If we do not distinguish right from wrong, Thoreau argued that we will eventually lose the capacity to make the distinction and become, instead, morally numb.
[22]    Near the end of his life, Thoreau was asked, “Have you made your peace with God?” He replied, “I did not know we had ever quarrelled.” For Thoreau, that would have been the real cost of paying his poll tax; it would have meant quarreling with his own conscience, which was too close to quarreling with God.
[23]   Civil Disobedience ends on a happy note. After Thoreau’s release and unpleasant experience with his   neighbors, the children of Concord had brightened his mood by urging him to join a huckleberry hunt. Huckleberrying was one of Thoreau’s valued pastimes and his skill at locating fruit-laden bushes made him a favorite with children. And, should a child stumble, spilling berries, he would kneel by the weeping child and explain that if children did not stumble, then berries would never scatter and grow into new bushes.
[24]     He ended his chronicle of prison,
[I] joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour ... was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.
[25]     Thus, Thoreau shed the experience of prison, but he could not shed the insight he had gained into his neighbors nor the questions that accompanied his new perspective. The text of "Civil Disobedience" constitutes the answer he discovered by listening to the “quiet voice within.”[26]     Although many Quaker writers had argued from conscience for civil disobedience against war and slavery, Henry David Thoreau’s "Civil Disobedience" essay is not tied to a particular religion or to a specific issue. It is a secular call for the inviolability of conscience on all issues, and this aspect may account for some of the essay’s enduring legacy. The personal quality of "Civil Disobedience" also contributes to its impact, as the essay exudes sincerity more commonly found in diaries and correspondence than in political tracts.
[27]     The opening sentence of "Civil Disobedience" sets the tone by paraphrasing the motto ofThe United States Magazine and Democratic Review – “That government is best which governs least.” Then Thoreau carries this logic one step further:
[28]     After what appears to be a call for anarchism, Thoreau pulls back and dissociates himself from “no-government men.” Speaking in practical terms and “as a citizen,” he states, “I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government.”[29]     Whatever his position on government, one point is clear: Thoreau denies the right of any government to automatic and unthinking obedience. Obedience should be earned and it should be withheld from an unjust government. To drive this point home, "Civil Disobedience" dwells on how the Founding Fathers rebelled against an unjust government, which raises the question of when rebellion is justified.
[30]     To answer, Thoreau compares government to a machine and the problems of government to “friction.” Friction is normal to a machine so that its mere presence cannot justify revolution. But open rebellion does become justified in two cases: first, when the friction comes to have its own machine, that is, when the injustice is no longer occasional but a major characteristic; and, second, when the machine demands that people cooperate with injustice. Thoreau declared that, if the government
[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.
[32]     But if government is “the voice of the people,” as it is often called, shouldn’t that voice be heeded? Thoreau admits that government may express the will of the majority but it may also express nothing more than the will of elite politicians. Even a good form of government is “liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it.” Moreover, even if a government did express the voice of the people, this fact would not compel the obedience of individuals who disagree with what is being said. The majority may be powerful but it is not necessarily right. What, then, is the proper relationship between the individual and the government?[33]     Perhaps the best description of Thoreau’s ideal relationship occurs in his description of “a really free and enlightened State” that recognizes “the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived.” It is a state that “can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor,” allowing those who did not embrace it to live “aloof.”

War and slavery
[34]     According to Thoreau, the government of his day did not come close to this ideal for two basic reasons: slavery and the Mexican-American war. It is important to remember that, although Thoreau’s imprisonment was a protest against slavery, "Civil Disobedience" was written after the outbreak of the Mexican-American war and protests both slavery and war. In fact, the opening paragraph of the essay mentions the war while saying nothing of slavery.
[35]     "Civil Disobedience" portrays the Mexican-American war as an evil comparable to slavery. The 1840s expressed a spirit of expansion called “Manifest Destiny” – the idea that it was the destiny of Americans to expand across the continent, civilizing the wilderness and the natives as they went. Part of the expansion was an annexation of Texas, which sparked a war with Mexico, which also claimed the area. The annexation was doubly offensive to Thoreau because it permitted slavery in the new territory.
[36]     Moreover, the domestic consequences of the conflict deeply disturbed him. Taxes soared; the country assumed a military air. Thoreau was horrified to learn that some of his neighbors actively supported the war. He was perplexed by those who did not support the war but who financed it through the taxes they paid. After all, he considered the war to be “the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool.” Without cooperation from the people, “a few individuals” would not succeed in wielding that tool.

Blind obedience to the state
[37]     In fact, the cooperation of the tool itself – the standing army – is required. Thoreau wonders about the psychology of men who would fight a war and, perhaps, kill others out of obedience. He concludes that soldiers, by virtue of their absolute obedience to the state, become somewhat less than human. He writes, “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.” This is how “the mass of men” employed by the state render service to it, “not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies.” In doing so, the men relinquish the free exercise of their moral sense and, so “put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones.”
[38]     Thoreau asks, How does it become a man to behave toward the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. But his “well-meaning” neighbors – even those who were opposed to slavery and the Mexican-American war – did associate with and obey the American government. Thoreau ascribes their behavior to ignorance and concludes, “They would do better if they knew how.”
The problem remains, however, why do people like Emerson – who cannot be called ignorant – render any obedience to laws with which they disagree?
[39]     One reason is obvious: the people who believe they need a government are willing to accept an imperfect one. Such people, Thoreau explains, accept government as a “necessary evil.” Other people support government out of self-interest; Thoreau specifically mentions merchants and farmers in Massachusetts who profit from the war and from slavery.
[40]     Still others obey because they fear the consequences of disobedience. This is the neighbor who says, “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.” Thoreau knows that his neighbor is correct in his assessment of what may happen. “When I converse with the freest of my neighbors,” he writes,
I perceive that ... they dread the consequences to their property and families of disobedience.... This is hard. This makes it impossible for a man to live honestly, and at the same time comfortably, in outward respects.
[41]     By his own lights, Thoreau was fortunate in this respect. He had neither property to be seized nor children to go hungry. Accordingly, he did not criticize men who reluctantly obeyed an unjust law out of fear for their families.
Thoreau’s criticism is aimed at the form of obedience that springs from a genuine respect for the authority of the state. This obedience says, “The law is the law and should be respected regardless of content.” Through such attitudes, otherwise good men become agents of injustice.[42]     Thoreau dissects the notion that “the law is the law and should be respected.” For one thing, not all laws are equal. Some laws exist for no other reason than to protect the government – for example, laws against tax evasion or contempt of court. Such laws often have more severe penalties than those that protect individuals against violence.
[44]     Thoreau concludes,
The lawyer’s truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency…. He well deserves to be called ... the Defender of the Constitution.... Still thinking of the sanction which the Constitution gives to slavery, he says, “Because it was part of the original compact, – let it stand.” [He] is unable to take a fact out of its merely political relations....
Thoreau holds such reformers personally responsible as well.

The problem with reformers

A duty to resist?
[52]     Does this mean men have a duty to pitch their life against an unjust state?
[55]     According to Thoreau’s interpretation of the 18th-century philosopher, Paley argues that all civil obligations derive from expediency. Since Thoreau attempts to show the opposite – that civil obedience is morally grounded – the title “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” may have played on Paley’s title.
[56]     The only political duty of a man is to correct any injustice he directly causes and to deny his cooperation to other injustice. This is the conclusion at which Civil Disobedience arrives.
If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself....
In short, Thoreau believed the state should never rank above the individual conscience or the business of living. But if the state demands a person’s first allegiance by asking him to violate his conscience and participate in an injustice, the person should disobey – not through violence but by removing his cooperation.
Thoreau’s legacy[57]     Thoreau’s political theories were not well known during his own time. They were usually presented as lectures to small audiences or as articles buried in small-circulation periodicals. Civil Disobedience, for example, was first rendered as a lecture at the Concord Meeting Hall. In 1849, it was published under the title “Resistance to Civil Government” in the first and only issue of Boston Aesthetic Papers.
[58]     After Thoreau’s death, his sister Sophia prepared his uncollected works for posthumous publication in multiple volumes by Ticknor and Fields. The political essays were held until last and, even then, they appeared to be added on to the volume entitled A Yankee in Canada with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers (1866). It included “Civil Disobedience,” which had been retitled “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.”
Thoreau’s death went relatively unnoticed. In November 1860, he caught a severe cold that slowly deepened into consumption from which he never recovered. On May 6, 1862, at the age of 44, Henry David Thoreau died.[62]     Months later, Emerson published a eulogy that concluded,
Copyright © 2005, Future of Freedom Foundation, and reprinted here with permission
