R Few Political Protests Have Achieved So Little in Their Time and Gained So
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QUIET WAR WITH THE STATE HENRY DAVID THOREAU AND CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE ROBERT A. GROSS Few political protests have achieved so little in their time and gained so much subsequent renown as Henry David Thoreau’s gesture of ‘‘civil disobedience’’ against the Mexican War, now ap- proaching its 160th anniversary in July 2006. A year into his sojourn at Walden Pond, on the outskirts of Concord, Massachu- setts, and several months after the start of hostilities, so the famil- iar story goes, Thoreau took the radical step of refusing to pay his taxes in order to protest the war. For that act of conscience, he was taken by the town constable and locked up in the local jail, where he spent the night, only to be released the next day after someone, probably his aunt, paid the tax on his behalf. Thoreau then re- turned to Walden woods to continue the experiment of indepen- dent living in nature that he would ultimately transform into a literary classic. Walden, published in 1854, established his endur- ing reputation as a writer. The political protest made him equally famous. In 1849, Thoreau published an account of his anti-war action in an obscure publication with the unlikely name Aesthetic Papers. Originally called ‘‘Resistance to Civil Government,’’ the essay has become known worldwide as ‘‘Civil Disobedience,’’ the title it was given in an 1866 collection of Thoreau’s writings issued R 1 2 GROSS two years after his death. O√ering a principled justification for conscientious refusal to comply with immoral laws, ‘‘Civil Disobe- dience’’ has entered our political lexicon and made its mark on history through its influence on twentieth-century movements for nonviolent, democratic change, from Mahatma Gandhi’s cam- paign for Indian independence to Martin Luther King’s leader- ship of the civil rights cause in the United States. Russian anar- chists, members of the Danish resistance in World War II, early opponents of South African apartheid have all claimed Thoreau as an inspiration. Appropriately, in Mexico he has been heralded as a key source for the nonviolent challenge of native peoples to federal and state laws on indigenous rights and culture. ‘‘The ghost of Henry D. Thoreau walks proudly through the indigenous regions of Mexico,’’ declared Luis Hernández Navarro in La Jornada on 4 September 2001. ‘‘His example has spread to all corners.’’ Yet, for all the acclaim it has won, Thoreau’s act of civil disobe- dience was utterly irrelevant to the course of events in Mexico starting with the annexation of Texas by the United States in December 1844 and culminating in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hi- dalgo in February 1848. Although it occurred not long after the conflict had begun and well before the dramatic victories by U.S. forces at Monterrey and Veracruz, and although it took place in New England, the heart of American opposition to the Polk ad- ministration’s aggressive policy, Thoreau’s anti-war gesture came and went without any public impact. The local newspaper, the Concord Freeman, said nothing about the arrest, nor did anybody in the Boston press, not even the militant abolitionist periodical The Liberator, whose editor William Lloyd Garrison was quick to condemn the war as one ‘‘of aggression, of invasion, of conquest, and rapine – marked by ru≈anism, perfidy, and every other fea- ture of national depravity.’’ Thoreau provided no public explana- tion of his action until late January 1848, when he came before his neighbors at the Concord Lyceum and delivered a lecture on ‘‘The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to Government.’’ By then, the war had wound down, and peace lay at hand. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was already a year old by the time the lecture finally appeared in print. No one can accuse Thoreau of seeking publicity. Surprisingly, once he did get around to explaining himself, Y QUIET WAR WITH THE STATE 3 Thoreau had hardly anything to say about the very event – the war between the United States and Mexico – that triggered his ‘‘Resistance to Civil Government.’’ Opponents of ‘‘Mr. Polk’s War’’ regularly denounced the administration for starting the conflict and then lying about its cause; newly elected Whig congressman Abraham Lincoln demanded to know the exact ‘‘spot’’ where Mex- ican troops had invaded U.S. territory and spilled ‘‘American blood on American soil.’’ Thoreau eschewed such concerns. He took it for granted that top o≈cials had gotten the nation into an illegal and undemocratic war. The conflict was ‘‘the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for, in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure.’’ Let others worry, too, about the corrupting e√ects of the war on American character. To Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Transcenden- talist sage, Anglo-Saxon civilization, with its irrepressible ‘‘race- drive,’’ was destined to spread across the continent. Far better to await the inevitable triumph of American culture than to prevail by violence and risk contamination by an alien people he deemed ‘‘degraded and corrupt.’’ Thoreau, the erstwhile disciple of Emer- son, avoided all such speculation about causes and consequences. He kept his focus on the essential design of the war: to expand the empire of slavery. ‘‘When a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law,’’ he thundered, ‘‘I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.’’ This was the common sentiment among New England abolitionists, and Thoreau never deviated from that line. If the anti-war protest was belated, it was also something of an afterthought. Thoreau had actually stopped paying his taxes sometime in 1842 or 1843, while Texas was still an independent republic and war with Mexico was not on the horizon. He did so without fanfare, withdrawing his support for a state he considered hostile to individual freedom. This action expressed a militant spirit of anarchism stirring among radical abolitionists in the Bos- ton area, who denied the right of any institution – church, state, or family – to coerce the individual. Prominent among them was Thoreau’s Concord neighbor the Transcendentalist Bronson Al- cott, who joined in founding the New England Non-Resistance R 4 GROSS Society in 1839. The group was dedicated to the principle of ‘‘gospel love’’; taking the Sermon on the Mount as their guide, they renounced every exercise of force and violence, whether im- posed by government or committed by private persons. ‘‘I look upon the Non-Resistance Society as an assertion of the right of self-government,’’ Alcott proclaimed. ‘‘Why should I employ a church to write my creed or a state to govern me? Why not write my own creed? Why not govern myself?’’ In this spirit, Alcott also stopped paying his local taxes, for which he was briefly arrested in 1843, only to be released within a few hours after a fellow towns- man intent on avoiding a public scandal picked up the debt. The episode was a dress rehearsal for Thoreau’s act of tax resistance, and Alcott may well have been his model. But Thoreau never embraced the cause of Non-Resistance; in fact, he argued against it in a debate at the Concord Lyceum, with Alcott on the opposing side. Far from turning the other cheek, he was prepared to defy authority, when necessary, and to court confrontation. And so it was that when Samuel Staples, the town constable, finally caught up with Thoreau in the summer of 1846 and demanded payment of four years’ back taxes, the young radical provoked a crisis. Staples, an occasional hunting companion of Thoreau’s, o√ered to lend him the money, if that was the problem. But Thoreau re- fused. The constable then warned his recalcitrant friend that he was risking arrest. ‘‘As well now as any time, Sam,’’ was the reply. Had Staples been more attentive to his duties and dunned the delinquent taxpayer sooner, Thoreau might have gone to jail in 1844 or 1845 – before the war with Mexico had even begun. Even the tax he refused to pay had nothing to do with slavery or the war. It was a local poll tax, assessed annually on all males over age sixteen in every Massachusetts township, in order to pay the costs of town, county, and state government. In the 1840s, the charge was usually $1.50, two or three days’ wages for a common laborer – the amount levied on Thoreau, which local tax records from early 1842 show him as paying. It took some tortuous reason- ing to connect this ancient tax, dating back to the Puritans, to the support of the federal government or to the financing of an ‘‘un- righteous and unjust’’ war. The Polk administration paid for its volunteer troops in Mexico by raising tari√s on imported goods. For this reason, Ralph Waldo Emerson was ba∆ed by his young Y QUIET WAR WITH THE STATE 5 friend’s vehicle of protest. ‘‘Refusing payment of the state tax does not reach the evil so nearly as many other methods within your reach,’’ Emerson reflected in his private journal. ‘‘The [Massachu- setts] state tax does not pay the Mexican War. Your coat, your sugar, your Latin & French & German book, your watch does.’’ If Thoreau really meant to deprive the government of funds to fight the war, he should refrain from buying these goods. It is hardly surprising that, apart from a few intimates and a couple of casual onlookers, nobody bothered to remark on Tho- reau’s brief confrontation with the law.