Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau

He began the tradition of non-violent protest that King is best known for continuing domestically. “Thoreau was the first American to define and use civil disobedience as a means of protest,” Brent Powell wrote for the magazine of the Organization of American Historians. While another line in the essay–'I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least’”–is also well known, it was his line of thinking about justice, when he argued that conscience can be a higher authority than government, that stuck with civil-rights leaders Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi.

He was released when a relative paid the tax for him, and went on to write the eminently quotable essay that included the line “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.” “He withheld the tax to protest the existence of slavery and what he saw as an imperialistic war with Mexico,” writes the Library of Congress. The cause of his incarceration was something which the philosopher found to be equally galling: he hadn’t paid his poll tax, a regular tax that everyone had to pay, in six years.īut Thoreau wasn’t just shirking. 'Civil Disobedience,' originally titled 'Resistance to Civil Government,' was written after Thoreau spent a night in the unsavory confines of the Concord, Massachusetts jail–an activity likely to inspire anyone to civil disobedience. A few decades later, aged 32, he wrote an essay that fundamentally influenced twentieth-century protest. Henry David Thoreau was born on this day 200 years ago.

Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau