Context
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was a philosopher and writer best known for his
attacks on American social institutions and his respect for nature and simple
living. He was heavily influenced by the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, who
introduced Thoreau to the ideas of transcendentalism, a philosophy central
to Thoreau's thinking and writing. In addition to Civil Disobedience
(1849), Thoreau is best known for his book Walden (1854), which documents
his experiences living alone on Walden Pond in Massachusetts from 1845-1847.
Throughout his life, Thoreau emphasized the importance of individuality and
self-reliance. He practiced civil disobedience in his own life and spent a
night in jail for his refusal to pay taxes in protest of the Mexican War. (Thoreau
was opposed to the practice of slavery in some of the territories involved.) It is
thought that this night in jail prompted Thoreau to write Civil Disobedience.
Thoreau delivered the first draft of the treatise as an oration to the Concord
Lyceum in 1848, and the text was published in 1849 under the title Resistance to Civil Government.
The two major issues being debated in the United States during Thoreau's life
were slavery and the Mexican-American War. Both issues play a prominent
part in Thoreau's essay. By the late 1840s, slavery had driven a wedge in
American society, with a growing number of Northerners expressing anti-slavery
sentiments. In the 1850s, the country became even more polarized, and the
introduction of slavery-friendly laws such as the Fugitive Slave Law
, prompted many abolitionists to protest the government's actions via various forms of
civil disobedience. (Slavery was only to come to an end a generation
later when the abolitionist North would win the Civil War (1861-1865), Abraham
Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation would free all slaves in Confederate
territory; eventually, the 13th Amendment would ban slavery everywhere.) In
addition to this domestic conflict, the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) proved
a point of much contention: Precipitated by boundary disputes between the
United States and Mexico, the war was ultimately fought in order to expand
American territory--many Americans felt it was our "Manifest Destiny" to seize
all the land we could--and as a result the United States gained much of the
present American Southwest, including California, Nevada and Utah. Thoreau and
other opponents of the war argued that the campaign constituted an unnecessary
act of aggression and that it was pursued on the basis of arrogance rather than
any philosophically justifiable reasons.
Civil Disobedience enjoyed widespread influence, both in the United
States and abroad. Most famously, the work inspired Russia's Leo Tolstoy and
India's
Mahatma Gandhi. Later, it lent force to the
American Civil Rights Movement.
