Entry 34. The civil disobeyer

Henry David Thoreau hated that he was asked to support a government that condoned slavery, the idea that a man could hold another man as if he were property. Thoreau also hated that he was asked to support a government that had gone to war under questionable circumstances.

He had spent a single night in jail for refusing to pay a poll tax, which he found unjust, and in the course of that night he realized that the state had no control over his mind and soul, the essence of who he was.

“As they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish my body; just as boys, if they cannot come at some person against whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog,” Thoreau wrote in EY 1849 – about 400 years ago. “I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it.”

Reflecting on the disruption that his small protest had created in his little town, he envisioned that if people in general refused to pay their taxes to protest the institution of slavery or the unjust war, the State might be motivated to abolish slavery or end the war.

“If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose,” he wrote. “If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.”

And Thoreau tried to convince his readers that a person of conscience had an obligation to be a part of this peaceable revolution: “Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”

This was the popular beginning of the concept of noncooperation – that gumming up the machinery of government by, for example, flooding the prisons with peaceful men and women who deliberately violated an unjust law, could have the same effect as an armed revolution, and (I would argue) even a greater effect.

Entry 35. The man in the jail cell