Civil Disobedience

In the essay ‘Civil Disobedience’ (1849), Henry David Thoreau contends that an individual should not allow the government to overrule their conscience, and that it is incumbent upon every one to avoid acquiescence when the government attempts to make one an agent of injustice. It is thought that his motivation for writing the essay was, at least in part, due to his revulsion with slavery and with the Mexican–American War of 1846 to 1848: "This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people." He also argues that it is not appropriate to postpone one’s opposition to injustice until a future election, but that one ought to rather take immediate action to oppose a system as wicked as slavery.

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Henry David Thoreau
American essayist, poet, and practical philosopher, best-known for his autobiographical story of life in the woods, WALDEN (1854). Thoreau became one of the leading personalities in New England Transcendentalism. He wrote tirelessly but earned from his books and journalism little. Thoreau's CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE (1849) influenced Gandhi in his passive resistance campaigns, Martin Luther King, Jr., and at one time the politics of the British Labour Party. Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, which was center of his life, although he spent several years in his childhood in the neighboring towns and later elsewhere. He died of tuberculosis, and he is buried in his family's plot near the graves of his friends Hawthorne, Alcott, Emerson, and Channing on Author's Ridge in Concord's Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.
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Civil Disobedience

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