Thoreau, Henry David (1817–1862)

American philosopher, entrepreneur, early environmentalist, and proponent of civil disobedience, Henry David Thoreau still influences political thought and social mores to this day. His ideas have echoed throughout extremely different social movements such as the civil rights, anti-nuclear, libertarian, and anti-war movements. The popular image of the man who retreated from larger society to live at Walden Pond and espouse passive resistance to injustice reveals only part of the story of a deeply passionate and complex political thinker.

For “two years, two months and two days,” Thoreau lived at Walden Pond, in Massachusetts, more as an experiment in deliberate simple living than as a protest. His life there was never as secluded as commonly thought—he was known for engaging his neighbors in vigorous debate.

Thoreau's refusal to pay taxes in protest of the Mexican War, an act that earned him a grand total of one night in jail, is the act that he is most commonly identified with. Chronicled in the essay “Resistance to Civil Government” (later renamed “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience”), it outlined the themes that echoed throughout his entire body of work. The book sets forth a powerful argument for the individual's right and obligation to disobey unjust laws. While opposed to the war on principle, his primary objection was the potential to expand slave territories.

“Civil Disobedience” is a complicated essay, with a reach far beyond passive resistance. Writing with great moral clarity, he condemned Northern businesses, whose trade with goods produced by slave labor in the South created complicity in the institution of slavery. He belittled the notion that emancipation could come through electoral means, a theme that has recurred through anti-authoritarian social movements ever since. Thoreau would revisit this theme in the essay “Slavery in Massachusetts.”

The image of Thoreau as an unwavering advocate of nonviolent resistance is simply false. His abolitionist beliefs turned him into a staunch defender of John Brown, who led an armed raid against slaveholders in 1859. In A Plea for Captain John Brown, Thoreau wrote three separate essays in defense of Brown and, at numerous times, allowed his home to be used as a stop on the Underground Railroad for escaping slaves. It is more accurate to characterize Thoreau's tactical beliefs as favoring nonviolence, yet placing noncompliance with injustice above all other considerations.

Thoreau's writing on nature has earned him regard as one of the early American environmentalists. His depictions of the Concord River were stunning in their attention to detail, as were his observations on bird migrations and water fluctuations. He worked as a land surveyor, which provided material for his journals that totaled over 2 million words at his death. His writing during this time (e.g., “Wild Apples”) [Page 1381]predicted the later environmental movement's concern with extinction of species.

Thanks to a prosperous pencil-making business, which his father John co-owned, Thoreau enjoyed a comfortable, middle-class upbringing. Henry invented a key innovation to the development of pencils—adding clay to graphite to prevent smudging. Attending Harvard University as a young man, he was mentored by transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. Transcendentalism stressed that all humans possessed the ability to perfect a spiritual state that was beyond the understanding of science and empirical study. The fact that so many of its adherents opposed slavery have led some to speculate that the philosophy was an attempt to undermine the ideology of white supremacy, which relied heavily on biblical misinterpretations.

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