Saturday, August 14, 2021

The Civil Disobedience of Henry David Thoreau on this Day in History

 

Walden and Civil Disobedience

This day in history: Henry David Thoreau was jailed for tax resistance on this day in 1846. Thoreau left his cabin at Walden Pond for a brief walk into town and ended up in the Concord jail for refusing to pay the poll tax. The next morning after he was released, he was upset to learn that someone had paid the tax for him.

Thoreau wrote about this incident thusly: "I have paid no poll tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. I wondered that it should have concluded at length that this was the best use it could put me to, and had never thought to avail itself of my services in some way. I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax. They plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. In every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder; for they thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall. I could not but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without let or hindrance, and they were really all that was dangerous. As they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish my body; just as boys, if they cannot come at some person against whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog. I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it."

Thoreau is sometimes referred to as an anarchist and a libertarian. In his book "Civil Disobedience", Thoreau wrote: "I heartily accept the motto,—'That government is best which governs least;' and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,—'That government is best which governs not at all;' and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. [...] I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government."

Thoreau also wrote: "I was not born to be forced."

"There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly."

"Government...to be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consent of the governed. It can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it."

"Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform."

"Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice."

"The state...is not armed with superior honesty, but with superior physical strength."

"Government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted."

"If 1,000 men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. That is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible. If the tax-gatherer or any other public officer asks me, as one has done, 'But what shall I do?' my answer is 'If you really wish to do anything, resign your office.' When the subject has refused allegiance and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished."

Others have also gone to great extremes to prove that the income tax is even illegal and unconstitutional, notably Irwin Schiff who died in an American jail as a political prisoner.



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