“Civil Disobedience” 1057THorEau, HENry DaviD “Civil
Disobedience” (“resistance to Civil
Government”) (1849)
Henry David Thoreau’s classic essay about the
responsibilities of citizenship originated in 1848 as
a public lecture titled “The Rights and Duties of the
Individual in Relation to Government.” In 1849,
the piece was published in a minor periodical under
the title “Resistance to Civil Government,” and
in 1866, after Thoreau’s death, it was republished
as “Civil Disobedience,” the title now most often
used. The piece presents a serious argument engag-
ingly by mixing logic with personal narrative, satire,
social criticism, allusion, quotation, and wordplay.
Although Thoreau’s beginning statement seems
conservative because it advocates limited govern-
ment, his essay in fact favors radical activism, urging
individual citizens to oppose government policies
that seem unjust to them.
In the late 1840s, as the United States was fight-
ing the Mexican War (1846–48), northern states
including Massachusetts, where Thoreau (1817–62)
lived, still recognized slavery as legal in the South.
To protest such policies, Thoreau had refused to pay
his state poll tax and had been jailed overnight in
July 1846. This experience solidified his view that
governmental authority was “impure” and that any
citizen could confront its “superior physical strength”
by acting on principle to assert personal beliefs,
grounded in conscience. The essay shows Thoreau’s
cantankerousness, his sense of his own social alien-
ation from majority opinions, his skeptical realism,
and his idealistic hopes. His arguments have had a
far-reaching influence on modern civil rights move-
ments and have helped later generations see that
solitary acts of dissension can be powerful symbolic
forces for reshaping flawed public policies.
Roy Neil Graves
etHIcS in “Civil Disobedience”
Since ethics is the branch of philosophy that con-
siders questions of right and wrong, most good lit-
erature addresses ethical topics, and personal essays
often treat such topics head on. Henry David Tho-
reau’s essay “Resistance to Civil Government” origi-
nated in 1848 as an argumentative speech delivered
in his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts, and
titled “The Rights and Duties of the Individual in
Relation to Government.” After the author’s death,
his essay reappeared in published form as “Civil
Disobedience” (1866). All three variants of the title
point to Thoreau’s thesis: By resisting laws that go
against conscience, responsible citizens can encour-
age eventual legal reform even while registering
their own independence from misguided govern-
ment policies.
In modern times, the kind of ethical behavior
that Thoreau advocates, called “civil disobedience”
or “passive resistance,” has gained widespread accep-
tance, having been used successfully in the American
Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and in the ear-
lier drive for the independence of India from British
rule. When proposed, however, Thoreau’s argument
was a radical idea, partly because it seems to encour-
age social chaos by suggesting that any conscientious
person can decide which laws to respect and which
to break.
Thoreau uses the essay form in an engaging way
to raise a perennial ethical question that seemed
personally pressing to him in the late 1840s: “How
does it become a man to behave toward this Ameri-
can government to-day?” Mixing argument with
personal narrative, satire with other social criticism,
allusion with quotation, and skepticism with hope-
ful idealism, Thoreau speaks modestly but authori-
tatively, punctuating high-minded considerations
with wordplay and wit. His initial answer to his own
question is just the starting point for laying out a
fully nuanced argument: “I answer, that [a citizen]
cannot without disgrace be associated with [the
present government].”
Thoreau faced a classic ethical dilemma: whether
to be true to law or conscience. The historical back-
drop was the 1840s, when the United States was
waging the Mexican War, the U.S. Constitution still
made slavery legal, and northern states such as his
home state of Massachusetts did not interfere with
slavery in the South. Along with wronged Mexicans
and slaves, Thoreau also mentions American Indians
as victims of government. “Unjust laws exist,” he
says, and government is imperfect. Voting, “a sort of
gaming . . . with a slight moral tinge,” seems inef-
fective to him as a way of changing things because
a majority of voters, with family and property at