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"Resistance to Civil Government" (often titled "Civil Disobedience") was neither the first nor the last of Thoreau's writings on social and political reform. 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 ...
Libertarianism portal. United States portal. v. t. e. Resistance to Civil Government, also called On the Duty of Civil Disobedience or Civil Disobedience for short, is an essay by American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau that was first published in 1849. In it, Thoreau argues that individuals should not permit governments to overrule or ...
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It is thought that this night in jail prompted Thoreau to write Civil Disobedience. Thoreau delivered the first draft of the treatise in which he publicly expounded his reasons for resisting state authority as an oration to the Concord Lyceum in 1848. The text was published in 1849 under the title Resistance to Civil Government.
The lecture was published under the title "Resistance to Civil Government" in Elizabeth Peabody's Aesthetic Papers, in May 1849. It was included (as "Civil Disobedience") in Thoreau's A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers , published in Boston in 1866 by Ticknor and Fields, and reprinted many times.
Men, generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse.
It is one of his most famous works and is now considered by many to be an American classic. Though it is less openly political than “Civil Disobedience,” Walden does have some similarities to the essay, especially when it discusses the virtues of living independently (and thus not having to depend on the State for certain needs).
That July, while living at Walden Pond, Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax as a protest against the conflict, for he saw the war as an effort to extend the realm of slavery. As a result, the local constable arrested him, and he spent the night in the Concord jail. The next day a relative—probably his aunt—paid the tax, and he was released.
