In “Civil Disobedience,” he proclaimed an activist manifesto: Thoreau’s minor act of defiance caused him to conclude that it was not enough to be simply against slavery and the war. This incident prompted Thoreau to write his famous essay, “Civil Disobedience” (originally published in 1849 as “Resistance to Civil Government”). Someone, probably a relative, anonymously paid Thoreau’s taxes after he had spent one night in jail. In July 1846, the sheriff arrested and jailed Thoreau for his tax delinquency. The local tax collector had ignored his tax evasion, but decided to act when Thoreau publicly condemned the U.S. Thoreau had already stopped paying his taxes in protest against slavery. Thoreau and other Northern critics of the war viewed it as a plot by Southerners to expand slavery into the Southwest. In 1846, the United States declared war against Mexico. For the next few years, Thoreau lived simply off the land, meditated, and wrote about nature. In 1845, he built a hut at Walden Pond on property owned by Emerson. The leader of the movement was Ralph Waldo Emerson, a writer and lecturer.Īt first, Thoreau agreed with Emerson’s teaching that social reform begins with the individual. He soon joined a religious, philosophical, and literary movement called Transcendentalism. He worked a short while as a schoolmaster, but then began writing poetry. Henry David Thoreau, the son of a Concord pencil-maker, graduated from Harvard in 1837.
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