Civil Disobedience

(RESISTANCE TO CIVIL GOVERNMENT)

(1848)

In response to the curiosity of his neighbors about the now-famous night he spent in jail for refusing to pay his poll tax in 1846, Thoreau delivered the lecture that many believe so powerful that its influence rippled outward to change whole governments. The next year he polished the essay, then titled “Resistance to Civil Government, ” for publication by Elizabeth Peabody in Aesthetic Papers. Finally, before he died, Thoreau edited the essay for inclusion in A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers (1866), where it appeared as “Civil Disobedience.” For all this editing, the essay maintained the vigor of a speech intended—as is so much else of Thoreau—to wake up his neighbors.

By the January night in 1848 when he first gave the speech, the July night he spent in jail in 1846 had become romanticized in his mind and had become emblematic of the power of individual action. Famously beginning with almost a call to anarchy, Thoreau radicalizes what he cites as a “ ‘motto’—‘That government is best which governs least, ’ ” changing it to “That government is best which governs not at all”. The reader pictures Thoreau’s listeners sitting up straighter, ready to protest or to cheer. By the end of his first paragraph, he makes clear that the (to him illegal) Mexican War is the stimulus to action. In the second paragraph, he carefully separates the government, which he relegates to “an expedient, ” from the citizens who compose it; they are the freedom fi ghters, the pioneers, the educators. With the third paragraph he backtracks to a reasonable, practical tone: “I ask for, not at once no government, but at once, a better government, ” and in the fourth, he weighs the power of a majority against the even greater power of a single person’s actions based on conscience. “The mass of men serve the state... not as men mainly, but as machines, ” Thoreau says, echoing his introduction to Walden, where he attacks “lives of quiet desperation.” He follows this with a brief history of the revolution and of political theory and then makes a point that will be repeated in later and angrier protest speeches: “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”.

From Walden to the latest of the John Brown essays, Thoreau’s mission is to wake up his own neighbors and urge them to consider taking “action from principle”. Admitting that many abuses of government may be borne with patience and inaction, Thoreau notes that there is a time when the individual must disobey. Here is the passage on which the whole essay depends: If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go.... 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.

Having set up the philosophical premise for his action, Thoreau explains to his audience/readers how he acted on this principle. “The only mode in which a man situated as I am, ” he says, meets his government is “directly, and face to face, once a year... in the person of its tax gatherer”. If the uses of his tax money will, as he said, cause one to be an agent of injustice to another, as would have been the case had the states acquired through the Mexican War become slave states, he must take action: “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison.” He urges all citizens to “cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence, ” as through such an action will the dictates of conscience be translated into meaningful action. “If a thousand men were not to pay their taxes this year, ” it would be a “peaceable revolution”. Riffing on these thoughts for two pages, Thoreau finally tells the story about which his neighbors are curious, recalling his refusal for six years to pay his taxes, the frustration of failing to arouse his neighbors, and his “novel and interesting” night in jail. Watching the stars from his cell window was not unpleasant, and drawing out his cellmate for stories of previous occupants, Thoreau says, made it “like travelling [ sic ] into a far country, such as I had never expected to behold”.

Thoreau’s meditations on citizens and governors, on true and false conformity, on genius and its opposite, lead to a somewhat hopeful concluding image: “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”. Released when “some one interfered” and paid the tax (the guilty party is in dispute), Thoreau emerged into a Concord noontime in July only to discover that his fellow citizens remained ignorant of the justice system—the jail—in their town square. Rather than regale them with his thoughts at that time, he set off on a huckleberry party and did not broach the subject until he was asked to make the speech that “was Gandhi’s textbook for his civil disobedience campaigns in Africa and India”; that became “a handbook of political action in the early days of the British Labour party in England”; that Martin Luther King, Jr., used as a guide to his movement toward greater civil rights; and that “has probably been more widely read than any other work by Thoreau”.

WALDEN

(1854)

What had Thoreau to do with plows? What kind of different furrow would he plow? The answers to these and many other questions are explored in the great book of Thoreau’s career, one of the great books of American literature. As did the Artist of Kouroo, a story Thoreau added to the last chapter late in the writing process, Thoreau took time to shape the best account he could: seven years and at least eight vigorously edited manuscripts to prepare for the publication on August 9, 1854, by Ticknor and Fields. Although Walden is now considered a masterpiece, it did not meet with immediate success. In Thoreau’s own (brief) lifetime sales averaged 300 copies a year; even though he was eulogized and his work was printed widely in essay form in the 10 years after his death, sales still failed to reach more than 3, 000 copies. By the 1920s, however, largely because the book was cited all over the world, primarily in Russia and France (Turgenev and Proust both admired it), the book received the approbation it so richly deserved. It was translated into at least 24 languages; in Japan, seven translations had been published by 1970.

Part of its problem and part of its power is its unusual structure. Charles Anderson has likened the structure to a circle and a web, both centered by the pond itself. It may also be read as poetry. Many read it as a practical how-to book, a collection of botanical and zoological observations, a collection of ruminations on great books and great thoughts. For all these somewhat contradictory identities, each justified, it has unity in that every chapter in its own way explores the question raised at the beginning, the question having to do with economy in the broadest sense: how to live so as to get the most (knowledge, inspiration, spiritual life, physical strength, truth) with the least expense of that which has little meaning (money, clothes, large house, meaningless work). Unlike A Week, which crammed so many mixed varieties of “plums” into only eight parcels (an introduction and seven chapters: Saturday–Friday), Walden’s 18 topical chapters sprinkle its plums in a more patterned manner. As in A Week the underlying movement is chronological; the move into the cabin takes place on July 4; the book ends with the ice cracking in spring, making it appear that the two years of Thoreau’s habitation took one year. But layered on the seasonal progression are well-developed essays, each of which can stand alone but each of which is enriched by its placement in the book as a whole.

Before the intricate arrangement begins, the reader meets Thoreau in the first two chapters, which contain widely quoted statements on “the mass of men” who “lead lives of quiet desperation” and in the profound paragraph that follows that passage. Thoreau also offers transcendentalisminspired thoughts on “all enterprises that require new clothes, ” followed by a riff on the silliness of new clothes; the puzzling identities of the lost hound, boy horse, and turtledove; the ridiculousness of following “the head monkey at Paris” in wearing “a traveller’s cap”; the praise of the Bhagavad Gita; the six-page rant on philanthropy; and the magnificent statement of why “I went to the woods.” “Where I Lived” ends with a passage that is at least as deservedly famous as “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.” Each paragraph pulls us into the next; thus, following a long paragraph that begins, “Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature” (echoing the famous “I went to the woods” passage seven paragraphs back), is this one: Time is but the stream I go a-fi shing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fi sh in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars.... The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things.... I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.

The remarkable words pull the reader into what it is that the narrator will “begin to mine”: The chapter called “Reading” follows.

As in A Week, the chapter “Reading” includes a dizzying array of recommended reading and instructions on how to read “deliberately.” In these passages, Thoreau castigates his neighbors for not being intellectually able to understand or be interested in the books on the list. Assuming that reading would best be conducted in silence, the next chapter is called “Sounds” and begins with a nod toward the reading of the previous chapter and moves forward to the beginning of the catalog of sounds: the sparrow’s “trill, ” the “tantivy of wild pigeons, ” “the bleating of calves and sheep, ” the barking of dogs, the ringing of bells of the village, “the distant lowing of some cow in the horizon, ” the whippoorwills as they “chanted their vespers for an hour”; the screech owls, whose noise Thoreau attempted to reproduce for three full pages; the cock crowing; and, most remarkably, in the middle of all these natural sounds, the railroad hoot, “sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer’s yard, informing me that many restless city merchants are arriving within the circle of the town”. Commentaries have noted that this “machine in the garden” is a paradigm of 19th-century American literature, and a special focus of work by Dickinson, Hawthorne, Melville, and others. Each, as Thoreau, both regrets and celebrates the invasion of the train into the pastoral idyll. Thoreau’s famous passage provides an excuse for transcendental preaching against the growing mercantilism, but Thoreau also speaks with a kind of awe and admiration for the transformation of the people who would not otherwise go “to Boston, ” much less arrive promptly. The tone is cheerful. To his other playful titles—The “Sojourner” (a pun on the French for “day”) or “Sainte a terre” (“Saunterer”)—Thoreau says he would like another, one presumably metaphoric of the moralist, as “a track-repairer somewhere in the orbit of the earth”.

Again, at the end of “Sounds, ” Thoreau gives an entry for the next chapter, “Solitude.” After 22 full paragraphs on the “Sounds” he did have, he lists those he did not have: “neither the churn, nor the spinning wheel, nor even the singing of the kettle.” Another person, he says, “would have lost his senses or died of ennui before this.” He lists more absences at the end of the chapter: “no path to the front-yard gate... no gate—no front-yard, —and no path to the civilized world! ” So it is that he begins his chapter answering the most common question put to him during his Walden years (was he lonely?): “I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude”. In reality Thoreau walked up to the village daily and looked for company, but his discussion of solitude is as much metaphysical as actual. He compares his solitude to that of stars in the Milky Way or to his house in the woods or to “leaves and vegetable mould.” He ends “Solitude” with a reference to the goddess Hebe, “the only thoroughly sound-conditioned, healthy, and robust young lady that ever walked the globe”. Because she carried spring, she was a welcome visitor, and the next chapter is, of course, “Visitors.”

One of Thoreau’s “Visitors” was Alek Therien, a French Canadian, unnamed in this passage but recognizable to biographers because he is so thoroughly described as a cheerful woodsman, well built and skillful and, although unschooled, wise in what mattered. There were others: “an inoffensive simple-minded pauper, ” “one real runaway slave, ” and “some guests” who, apparently, arrived begging and others who arrived out of curiosity (“men of almost every degree of wit called on me in the migrating season”). Biographers discuss Thoreau’s relationship with the woodsman and his rather elitist attitude toward the “mass of men, ” though he ends the chapter on a positive note, welcoming “all honest pilgrims, who came out to the woods for freedom’s sake”. From “Visitors” Thoreau moves to something done alone, working in the “Bean Fields, ” where he is proud to be the hoer (an anagram of hero). Many see in the detailed description of the preparing of the soil, the sowing, the protecting, the picking, the eating, and the selling of the beans a metaphor for the processes of the writer. Thoreau invites such a metaphor when he says of the beans “perchance, as some must work in fields if only for the sake of tropes and expression, to serve a parable-maker one day, ” and, as he says at the very end of the chapter, “These beans have results which are not harvested by me”.

The next chapter, “The Village, ” begins by nodding back to the previous three: “After hoeing, or perhaps reading and writing, in the forenoon, I usually bathed again in the pond... [and] strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip”. This chapter, then, provides the chance for Thoreau to tell his story about meeting the tax collector and famously refusing “to pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the state which buys and sells men, women, and children, like cattle at the door of its senate-house”. “The Ponds, ” which follows the account of civic life and responsibility, finds the poet/naturalist joining others to fish at the pond, to take a boat; playing the flute and watching the perch; and making of the pond—as of almost everything in his world—a metaphor. Throughout the journals (from which the book arose) and most of Thoreau’s public work, the reader finds the exactness of scientific observations—as that which begins, “It is a clear and deep green well, half a mile long” set against flights of poetry. So it is that this chapter’s description of the length, breadth, width, color, temperature, contents, inhabitants, and use of the ponds; the weather around them; and the contact of people with them are details set against the notion of Walden Pond as the “distiller of celestial dews”. “The Ponds” chapter is followed by the short chapter “Baker Farm, ” which is most interesting for its lengthy commentary on the Irishman John Field. As do those on Therien, these comments cause some to delve into questions of Thoreau’s attitudes—toward fellow citizens in general and toward immigrants such as the first-generation Irish American John Field in particular. A passage such as this causes much comment: “Poor John Field! —I trust he does not read this, unless he will improve by it.... With his horizon all his own, yet he [is] a poor man, born to be poor, with his inherited Irish poverty or poor life... and boggy ways, not to rise in this world”.

Having described a real person as all but stuck in a bog, Thoreau moves in the next chapter to “Higher Laws.” Influenced greatly by Eastern thought, this chapter explores exotic texts as related to diet (vegetarianism), sexual practices (chastity preferred), and other bodily functions as the “Hindoo lawgiver” prescribes. For this, one of the strangest chapters to most people—especially to students—Thoreau is indebted to his heterogeneous reading, especially to the Laws of Menu, which he had discovered in 1840 and had published in part in the Dial in 1843. By now the reader of Walden has caught on to the way Thoreau juxtaposes topic against topic as he moves through the book. “Higher Laws, ” therefore, is followed by “Brute Neighbors.” These, of course, are animals—some dozen of them—but they are preceded by the visit of “a companion, ” “Mr. Poet, ” who has been identifi ed as the transcendentalist Ellery Channing. One species of his “Brute Neighbors” allows Thoreau a parable: that of his famous ant fi ght. As most students who read Thoreau in anthologies know, the battle of red and black ants stands in for the stupidity of human wars: “I never learned which party was victorious, nor the cause of the war; but I felt for the rest of that day as if I had had my feelings excited and harrowed by witnessing the struggle, the ferocity and carnage, of a human battle before my door”. In this chapter, too, Thoreau offers a funny description of a laughing loon and the sociability of ducks in the pond.

Cold and warmth play against each other in the next chapter, “House Warming.” By this time it is fall merging into winter, time for Thoreau to talk about his chimney and about the palaver (talk) two or more people might have near its warmth. He also turns his pen to describing all the kinds of wood one might use, introducing this section with “Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection”. From the hearth Thoreau takes readers on a long walk to Lincoln in the chapter “Former Inhabitants.” In “Winter Visitors” he describes Brister Freeman, “a handy Negro, ” once a slave; Hugh Quoil, an Irishman who claimed to have fought at Waterloo; a wood chopper; and other locals present and past. Finally “Winter Animals” and “The Pond in Winter” lead to “Spring.” Here Thoreau’s sometimes prolix style features shorter, more direct, more vigorous sentences. There is much that is beautiful and lyrical in the long chapter “Spring, ” but the passage most quoted is in the “Conclusion, ” with which the book ends. Thoreau answers his neighbor’s question: “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives left to live”.

The “Conclusion” chapter is so densely packed with wise words that it seems the author has tried to put every well-considered thought into words before it is too late. Although he says he does not think that “John or Jonathan will realize all this, ” meaning that the Walden experiment was not for everyone, Thoreau is persuasive. Many a John, Jonathan, and Jean or Judy would want to follow his lead; in fact, there was a direct connection between this book and the experiments in simpler living that proliferated in the 1960s and 1970s. And who would not be affected by the passage of which this is the nub: “I learned this at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours”. The years at Walden, crucial as they were, were “an experiment, ” an experiment in economics among much else. “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, ” Thoreau says; he does not say that one will necessarily reach a goal, only that in going confidently toward the direction of that goal—to write a book that will change people’s lives, for example—that success will not necessarily be the one wanted, but it will be a success—one “unexpected in common hours, ” those hours when one lives an ordinary life of quiet desperation.

Finally, in the “Conclusion” we meet the Artist of Kouroo. The story, influenced by Thoreau’s studies in Eastern literature, is reworked by Thoreau so that the buzz of implication is autobiographical. The artist worked through the ages to perfect a staff: “He had made a new system in making a staff; a world with full and fair proportions; in which though the old cities and dynasties had passed away, fairer or more glorious ones had taken their places”. The fable is a primer for a writer, at least for the writer/philosopher/ascetic/truth-seeking Thoreau: The material is “truth. This alone wears well”; “however mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names”; “Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage... turn the old; return to them”; and so forth. Richard Lebeaux tells us that the story that so many take away from the book, that of the Artist of Kouroo, working his heart out with skill and patience, was not present until version number four, but the story seems a perfect introduction to the seven years Thoreau spent to complete the book. That book, like the staff, was a thing of beauty and a device for support on the journey of life.