Henry David Thoreau refuses to pay his poll tax and is imprisoned, an experience that inspires his essay “Civil Disobedience.” |
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On July 23, 1846, Henry David Thoreau was walking into town from his cabin at Walden Pond when he ran into the Concord constable, one Sam Staples. Thoreau had not paid his compulsory poll tax for six years—in protest against Massachusetts’ support of slavery and the Mexican War—and Staples asked him for it. When Thoreau refused, Staples took him to the local jail.
There Thoreau spent the night, and also “pumped” his cellmate for “the history of the various occupants of that room,” finding “that ... there was a history and a gossip which never circulated beyond the walls of the jail.” But much to Thoreau's irritation, he was released in the morning; someone—he never found out who—had paid his tax for him.
“Thoreau had hoped for more time behind bars, convinced that incarceration would draw attention to his protest,” wrote Joseph Thorndike. “But he was at least locked up long enough to shame his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, for his moral timidity. ‘Henry, why are you here?’ Emerson asked the younger man during a brief visit to the jail. ‘Why are you not here?’ Thoreau asked pointedly in return.”
(By the way, Thoreau wasn’t the first Concordian not to pay his poll tax as a form of protest; among others, his friend Amos Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May Alcott) had been arrested in 1843 for the same crime, though Alcott hadn’t even gotten the night in jail.)
Disappointing as the experience was, Thoreau drew on his brush with the law when he wrote his now-famous essay “Civil Disobedience,” which was originally published in 1849 as “Resistance to Civil Government” in Elizabeth Peabody’s Æsthetic Papers.
“I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave's government also,” he wrote in the essay. |
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It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and . . . not to give it practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too.
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His work would inspire abolitionists and activists for years to come. |
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