Civil Disobedience under the scpoe of Henry David Thoreau

In "Civil Disobedience," philosopher Henry David Thoreau argues that citizens must
disobey the rule of law if those laws prove to be unjust. He draws on his own experiences
and explains why he refused to pay taxes in protest of slavery and the Mexican War.
Thoreau this becomes a model for civil disobedience.

 For years, the United States government chooses to ignore Thoreau's failure to pay taxes.
Then he's arrested and thrown in jail, where he refuses to pay his back taxes.

 Someone pays the taxes for Thoreau, who is set free the next morning. Supposedly, the
philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson visited him in jail and asked why he was there.

 Thoreau then argues that there are two laws: the laws of men, and the higher laws of God
and humanity. If the laws of men are unjust, then one has every right to disobey them.

Thoreau wrote “Civil Disobedience,” first titled “Resistance to Civil Government” when it
was published in the periodical Aesthetic Papers, in response to questions about why he
had gone to jail. As an abolitionist, he had objected to the Massachusetts poll tax and
refused to pay it as a protest against slavery. When the Mexican War broke out in 1846,
he protested against it as an aggressive war of conquest aimed in part at adding new
slave territories to the United States, and for this reason as well, he refused to pay the
tax.

For several years, the authorities ignored Thoreau’s nonpayment, but in July of 1846,
Concord constable Sam Staples ordered Thoreau to pay up. When Thoreau still failed to
comply, Staples arrested him on July 23 or 24 and imprisoned him in the Middlesex
County jail. That evening some unknown person paid Thoreau’s fine, but Staples kept
Thoreau in jail until after breakfast before releasing him. Emerson called Thoreau’s action
“mean and skulking, and in bad taste,” and there is an apocryphal story that Emerson,
visiting Thoreau in prison, asked, “Henry David, what are you doing in there?” to which
he replied, “Ralph Waldo, what are you doing out there?” Bronson Alcott, however, called
Thoreau a good example of “dignified noncompliance with the injunction of civil powers.”

In the essay, Thoreau argues that laws, being human-made, are not infallible, that there
is a higher divine law, and that when those laws conflict, one must obey the higher law.
Hence slavery, no matter how legal (and it remained legal until 1865), was always unjust
in its violation of the integrity and divine soul of the enslaved. So long as the American
government upheld slavery, Thoreau said, one “cannot without disgrace be associated
with it. I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which
is the slave’s government also.”

Carrying to extreme the logic of the Declaration of Independence, Thoreau argues, in

effect, that each individual should declare independence from unjust laws, that citizens
must never surrender their conscience to the legislators, and that “[i]t is not desirable to
cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.” Most people, he feared, served
the state as soldiers do, like unthinking machines.

He does not, however, argue for violent revolution; he advocates nonviolent resistance.
(Later, Thoreau would contradict such a philosophy in three essays championing John
Brown, who endorsed and practiced violence.) The disobedient must be prepared to
accept punishment, if necessary: “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the
true place for a just man is also a prison.” Thoreau concludes:The authority of government
. . . must have the sanction and consent of the governed. It can have no pure right over
my person and property but what I conceded to it. There will never be a really free and
enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and
independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats
him accordingly.

This doctrine has always been repellent to authoritarians of the far Right and Left, who
tolerate no dissent and have had protesters beaten, imprisoned, and even killed. In the
seventeenth century, Governor John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony
reproved his constituents for daring to criticize him, calling them naturally depraved and
maintaining that the authorities are instituted by God and that to criticize them constitutes
treason and atheism.

In Billy Budd, Foretopman (1924), Herman Melville satirically presented the authoritarian
military point of view when Captain Vere insists that those in uniform must obey without
question: “We fight at command. If our judgments approve the war, that is but
coincidence. . . . For that law and the rigour of it, we are not responsible. Our vowed
responsibility is in this: That however pitilessly that law may operate, we nevertheless
adhere to it and administer it.” Vere’s is the defense of all war criminals—that they were
only carrying out orders and cannot be expected to disobey. The rationale behind war
crimes trials, however, is that even the military are subject to a higher law.

Civil disobedience is at least as old as Socrates, who preferred to die rather than yield to
an order to stop asking questions that embarrassed the authorities, to whom he said, “I
shall obey God, rather than you.” The Christian martyrs who refused to deny their God
and worship Caligula, Nero, or some other depraved Roman emperor were practicing civil
disobedience. All abolitionists, members of the Underground Railroad, and those who
refused to obey the Fugitive Slave Act were practicing civil disobedience. History and
literature are full of examples. Huckleberry Finn resolved to defy his upbringing and “go
to hell” in order to rescue his best friend, a runaway slave. Mahatma Gandhi was an
admirer of Thoreau and adopted his policy of nonviolent resistance to oppose racism in
Africa and imperialism in India. American civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
patterned nonviolent resistance after Gandhi.

In fact, the U.S. government’s system of checks and balances sometimes requires its
citizens to break the law, for the only way to challenge the constitutionality of a law is to
break it and try a test case, as Dr. King and his followers repeatedly did. Dr. King was
frequently imprisoned and called a criminal for violating local statutes that instituted racial
discrimination, but he believed in the higher law of the Constitution and wrote, “Words
cannot express the exultation felt by the individual as he finds himself, with hundreds of
his fellows, behind prison bars for a cause he knows is just.” During the Vietnam War, an
increasingly large number of people protested that the war was unjust, and many of draft
age refused to serve in the armed forces and went to prison or into exile rather than be
forced to kill or be killed in Vietnam. The government’s position was that they were
cowards or traitors, but a majority of the U.S. population came to agree with the
protesters.

One problem with Thoreau’s doctrine is that it is not always easy to determine whether a
law is just or unjust. Thoreau never advocated the indiscriminate breaking of laws; civil
disobedience applies only in cases of fundamental moral principle. Not all individuals are
necessarily right in defying the government. For example, during the Civil Rights
movement of the 1960’s, some southern governors defied court orders to desegregate
schools and other institutions, arguing that segregation was the will of God.

Frequently it is liberals who endorse civil disobedience, but in the late 1980’s, members
of the conservative Iran-Contra conspiracy defended their breaking of laws and lying to
Congress on the grounds that they were serving a higher law. Similarly, opponents of
abortion rights have argued that a higher law requires them to break laws that prohibit
them from harassing those who sanction abortion rights. Thus the debate continues;
through it all, Thoreau’s essay remains one of the most potent and influential ever written