Civil Disobedience

Henry David Thoreau was one of the major authors, lecturers, students, and thinkers of the American Transcendentalist movement. He was born in 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts, the son of a pencil-maker and storekeeper father and an abolitionist and homemaker mother. After graduating Harvard in 1837, Thoreau kept a journal in which he would jot down his thoughts, observations, and encounters with nature. Many of the essays and lectures he wrote were adapted from his journal entries, and his writings often blend the journal format with the lecture format.

In 1838 Thoreau opened a private school in Concord where he and his brother taught a traditional curriculum blended with hands-on projects and frequent field trips to nature. On one such trip Thoreau and his brother boated down two rivers, an experience that led to Thoreau’s first published piece of writing, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Shortly thereafter, Thoreau met the love of his life, Ellen Sewall. She declined his marriage invitation (and he never would marry) but introduced him to Lidian Emerson and her husband Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Emerson became a friend and teacher to Thoreau, who took a job as the Emersons’ live-in handyman after closing his school. With Emerson’s instruction, Thoreau studied Transcendentalism, and under Emerson’s aegis, Thoreau began to focus on writing instead of teaching. Thoreau, however, disappointed Emerson by not seeking literary success as Emerson hoped he would. After briefly living in New York and publishing some articles, Thoreau moved back to Concord and focused on lecturing at the Concord Lyceum and improving his family’s pencil-making business.

In 1844 Emerson bought land at Walden Pond, and Thoreau moved there to focus on writing and living self-sufficiently. His book about those experiences, Walden, is among his best celebrated works today. Contrary to popular myth, he did not live as a hermit hiding from society. Instead, he made frequent trips to town and often visited friends and family. While at his cabin, though, he spent his time observing nature, thinking, and writing.

“Civil Disobedience” was written at Walden Pond. In the essay Thoreau recounts being jailed for not paying taxes; he was arrested at Walden and returned there after his one-night prison stay. He delivered the original lecture at the Concord Lyceum in January 1848 and published the essay in the sole issue of Aesthetic Papers, published by Transcendentalist and educator Elizabeth Palmer Peabody in May 1849.

In the decade after the essay was published, Thoreau focused on reworking Walden. He also took part in the Underground Railroad by escorting runaway slaves to the railroad station and the train that would take them to Canada. Additionally, he became an active admirer of radical abolitionist John Brown and lectured on his and other abolitionists’ behalf. He also traveled a lot, though he rarely made money speaking on the lecture circuit despite his popularity as a lecturer in Concord. Though he wrote all through his life, Thoreau only had a modest income from writing and was not terribly famous in his lifetime. He died in 1862 of tuberculosis. His writings became more celebrated posthumously and have inspired Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as countless authors and political organizers who were stirred by his deep commitment to his beliefs and virtue.