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Introduction

I I was called to Milwaukee to tes-tify in the case of the Milwaukee Fourteen, a group ofpriests, nuns, and laypeople who had gone into a draftboard, taken thousands of its documents, and burnedthem in a symbolic protest against the war in Vietnam.As a historian of social movements, I was asked to dis-cuss the role of civil disobedience in American history.The judge was clearly uneasy, but he allowed me toanswer the question. I spoke of the principles of theDeclaration of Independence, and of its insistence thatwhen a government becomes destructive of basichuman rights, it is the duty of the people to “alter orabolish it.” I began to talk about Henry David Thoreauand his decision to break the law in protest against theU.S. invasion of Mexico in . At this point, JudgeLarsen interrupted. He pounded his gavel and said:“You can’t discuss that. That is getting to the heart ofthe matter.”

You will find in this volume (published previously inhardcover as Reform Papers) what are usually calledthe “political writings” of Thoreau. Indeed, he is deal-ing here with the incendiary issues of his time: theMexican War, the Fugitive Slave Act, the execution ofJohn Brown. The term “political,” however, does not dojustice to the breadth and depth of Thoreau’s ideas. Helooks beyond the immediate subjects of contention toask the fundamental questions pondered before andafter his time by the world’s great thinkers: Plato,Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, Tolstoy.That is, he addresses the obligations of the citizen togovernment, of law to justice, of human beings to oneanother.

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In this collection, he does something more—he asksthe most troubling question of human existence: howshall we live our lives in a society that makes beinghuman more and more difficult?

The words of Thoreau on all these issues, written acentury and a half ago, resound loud with meaning as I write this at the end of the year . The nation is atwar, as it was when Thoreau declared his resistance togovernment. This time, however, it is not a finite war,limited in time and space, but what seems an endlesswar, or series of wars, because the enemy has beendeclared to be “terrorism,” which cannot be confined to one place, or one time. All that Thoreau wrote solong ago speaks to us today and makes us wonder aboutour responsibility as citizens, as human beings.

It is well known that Thoreau spent a night in jail, inthe summer of , because he refused to pay histaxes in protest against the war with Mexico. It may beuseful, then, to take a close look at that war, to help usunderstand his action, his thinking.

Mexico, which had won its independence in a revolu-tionary war against Spain, was at that time much largerthan it is today. It included what are now the states ofTexas, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, California,and part of Colorado. In the year , Texas, aided bythe United States, declared its independence fromMexico, calling itself the “Lone Star Republic.” It wasbrought into the Union as a state by act of Congress in, and various influential newspapers and politi-cians became excited about the prospect of expandingwestward into Mexican territory. John O’Sullivan, edi-tor of the Democratic Review, wrote that it was thenation’s “manifest destiny to overspread the continentallotted by Providence for the free development of ouryearly multiplying millions.” The phrase took hold:Manifest Destiny.

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The following year, President James Polk, who on the night of his inauguration had confided to his secre-tary of the navy that he was determined to acquireCalifornia, sent troops to the southern border of Texas,as far as the Rio Grande River, into territory claimed byMexico, historically inhabited by Mexicans. A clashbetween Mexican and U.S. troops followed, and a U.S.patrol was virtually wiped out. Even before this inci-dent, a U.S. colonel on the southern front, Ethan AllenHitchcock, a reader of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Hegel,and Spinoza, wrote in his diary: “I have said from thefirst that the United States are the aggressors. . . . Itlooks as if the government sent a small force on pur-pose to bring on war, so as to have a pretext for takingCalifornia and as much of this country as it chooses.”

President Polk falsely claimed that Mexico hadinvaded the United States and asked Congress for adeclaration of war. The Whig Party was presumablyagainst slavery and against the war, but they were notagainst expansion, and they saw the acquisition ofCalifornia as commercially valuable. Thus they votedoverwhelmingly with the Democrats in Congress infavor of war. It was an early manifestation of the his-toric unity of both major parties in acquiescing in apresidential decision for war.

The war with Mexico intensified the bitter con-troversy already simmering in the United States overslavery. Ralph Waldo Emerson had predicted that “the United States will conquer Mexico, but it will beas the man swallows the arsenic, which brings himdown in turn. Mexico will poison us.” Commenting onEmerson’s warning, the Civil War historian JamesMcPherson has written: “He was right. The poison wasslavery.” Opposition to the war by the growing antislav-ery movement was based on the fear that the new terri-tories would expand the area of slavery in the country.

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The poet James Russell Lowell had his character HoseaBiglow say:

“They jest want this CalifornySo’s to lug new slave-states inTo abuse ye, an’ to scorn ye,An’ to plunder ye like sin.”

Thoreau lived in Concord, twenty miles from Boston,which was becoming a center of antislavery agita-tion. He graduated from Harvard in . Six years earlier, on January , , William Lloyd Garrison hadlaunched the first issue of the antislavery newspaperThe Liberator, declaring of slavery, “On this subject I do not wish to think or speak or write with modera-tion. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to givea moderate alarm.”

All about Thoreau there were ardent opponents ofslavery, including his mother and sisters. Ralph WaldoEmerson was a friend and mentor, and the two of themjoined forces, over the objection of conservative cura-tors of the Concord Lyceum, to invite the fiery aboli-tionist orator Wendell Phillips to speak. Thoreau’sreview of Phillips’s speech, and of his character, isincluded in this volume (“Wendell Phillips BeforeConcord Lyceum”). You will also find in this volumeThoreau’s Dial article in praise of NathanielRogers, editor of the New Hampshire abolitionist news-paper Herald of Freedom, who had written: “Slaverymust be cried down, denounced down, ridiculeddown.”

For six years before the Mexican War, in order toprotest a government that countenanced slavery,Thoreau had not paid his poll tax. But in the summerof , in the midst of his two-year stay at WaldenPond to write A Week on the Concord and Merrimack

Rivers and to commune alone with nature, he ventured

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into Concord to join a huckleberry-picking party.There, he encountered the local constable, who askedhim to pay his tax. He refused and was taken to thetown jail. That night, as he lay awake in his cell, theideas began to form about how an individual shouldbehave in relation to the government. The next day hewas told that someone had appeared to pay his tax (henever found out whether it was his friend Emerson orone of his aunts), and he reluctantly left the jail, toreturn to the huckleberry field.

The Mexican War ended in with the UnitedStates taking two-fifths of Mexican territory. But beforeit ended, there were protests against the war going farbeyond Thoreau’s mild act. The battle deaths andmutilations were not the only horrors of the war. A reg-imental surgeon of the Second Regiment of MississippiRifles saw his regiment packed into the holds of trans-ports and reported on what he saw and heard: “Thewild screams of the delirious, the lamentations of the sick, and the melancholy groans of the dying.”More than nine thousand soldiers deserted. There weremutinies against officers, resentment against the castesystem. One Pennsylvania volunteer wrote: “Some ofour officers are very good men but the balance of themare very tyrannical and brutal. . . . A soldier’s life is very disgusting.” On the road to Mexico City seven of General Winfield Scott’s eleven regiments, theirenlistment times up, faded away. The MassachusettsVolunteers, returning home with half their mendead, honored with a dinner, hissed their commandinggeneral.

Thoreau had left his cabin at Walden Pond in the fallof . A lecture that he gave soon after at theConcord Lyceum was called “The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to Government.” He keptrefining it, and it appeared in print in the spring of

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as “Resistance to Civil Government.” The title“Civil Disobedience” was used in the printing of theessay in , four years after Thoreau’s death; the titlemay or may not have been Thoreau’s. Authorial or not,it has become the standard title, the one by which mil-lions have known the essay.

How shall we define civil disobedience so that wemay have a common ground for discussing it? I willdefine it as the deliberate violation of a law in pursuitof some social goal. Thus Thoreau’s act of nonpay-ment of taxes fits that definition, his goal to make somesmall statement against war, against slavery. Gandhi’smarches in violation of British law had as their aimunseating British rule in India. The African Americanstudents who in “sat in” at lunch counters toprotest racial segregation were violating local law, andeven federal law, since the Supreme Court had notgiven constitutional approval to desegregation in pri-vate businesses.

At the center of Thoreau’s great essay (though hedoesn’t make the reference) is that stunning ideaexpressed in the Declaration of Independence: govern-ments are artificial creations, set up to serve the inter-ests of the people. That idea was soon overwhelmed bythe reality of the Constitution and the establishment ofan actual government. Now a small group of powerfulmen could use the government to advance their owninterests, to make war, to compromise with slavery. Butwhy should people of conscience defer to such a gov-ernment and its laws? Why should they not exercisetheir own moral judgment? When a government sup-ports evil, it is the duty of its citizens to withhold theirsupport from the government, to resist its demands.

The early s saw a series of militant acts of civildisobedience, in violation of the Fugitive Slave Act.There is no evidence of anyone’s referring to Thoreau,

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but clearly the idea of resistance to unjust laws wasbeing put into effect. The passage of the Fugitive SlaveAct in was part of a package of provisions in whatwas called the Compromise of , designed to satisfyboth sides of the slavery dispute. California was admit-ted to the Union as a nonslave state, but to appease theSouth, federal marshals were required to help slaveowners recapture their escaped slaves and were fined$, if they refused. Federal commissioners were todecide whether in fact a black person was an escapedslave; they were paid $ if they decided in favor of theslave owner, $ if in favor of the slave. During thatdecade of the s, federal commissioners returned blacks to slavery and declared free only . Therewas no statute of limitations: one black man in south-ern Indiana was apprehended, in front of his wife andchildren, and returned to a slaveholder who said hehad run away nineteen years before.

Almost as soon as the act went into effect and thefirst escaped slaves were apprehended, Northern aboli-tionists, black and white, set out to obstruct the law. A slave owner in Georgia sent two agents to recaptureWilliam and Ellen Craft, a husband and wife who hadescaped slavery two years earlier and were now livingin Boston, a center of abolitionism. Blacks and whitesjoined to protect the Crafts. Wendell Phillips declared:“We must trample this law under our feet.” The law,said the local antislavery society, “is to be denounced,resisted, and disobeyed.” The slave-catchers werewarned that they were not safe in Boston, and theyreturned to Georgia. William and Ellen Craft were puton a ship to England.

President Millard Fillmore threatened to send fed-eral troops to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, but the abolitionists defied him. The Reverend TheodoreParker, an abolitionist whose parish the Crafts had

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joined, wrote to Fillmore: “I would rather lie all my lifein jail, and starve there, than refuse to protect one ofthese parishioners of mine. . . . I must reverence thelaws of God, come of that what will come.”

There were more acts of defiance against the FugitiveSlave Act. A black man named Shadrach Minkins, whohad escaped from Virginia and was working as a waiterin a Boston coffeehouse, was captured by agents andtaken to a federal courthouse. A group of black menbroke into the courtroom, rescued Minkins, and puthim on the Underground Railroad to Canada. Eight ofthe rescuers, four black and four white, were indictedby a federal grand jury. But when they went to trial,juries refused to convict them.

In Christiana, Pennsylvania, a shoot-out took placeover the attempt of a slave owner and federal marshals toreturn two black men to slavery. Two dozen black menprotected the fugitives, and the slave owner was killed.President Fillmore called on the marines, who, with fed-eral marshals, searched the countryside and arrestedmore than thirty black men and a half-dozen whites.They were indicted, but the jury acquitted the firstdefendant and the government dropped the remainingcases.

Thoreau’s essay “Slavery in Massachusetts,” reprintedin this volume, was drawn from journal entries of and , and appeared in part in Garrison’s The

Liberator. That essay has been overshadowed by hismore famous one on civil disobedience, but it deservesclose attention. He was provoked by an incident in ,when President Franklin Pierce dispatched federaltroops, joined by state militia and local police, to captureAnthony Burns, a slave escaped from Virginia. Black andwhite abolitionists used a battering ram against the court-house doors but were repulsed. Burns was marched tothe waterfront, through streets lined with his supporters,

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to the sound of church bells tolling, and sent back to slavery.

In his essay, Thoreau plays on a theme that recurs inthe essays in this volume: the complicity of the govern-ment and the courts, the silence of citizens in the faceof that collusion (“I am surprised to see men goingabout their business as if nothing had happened”), andthe cowardice of the press. Thoreau does not expectthe government to act in the interests of justice andbelieves that in the long run this will be widely recog-nized: “A government which deliberately enacts injus-tice, and persists in it, will at length ever become thelaughing-stock of the world.” One cannot help recallingthat when the United States made war in Vietnam inthe s, it drew the opposition of people all over theworld, and that when it was on the verge of invadingIraq in , ten million people in fifty countriesaround the world protested on a single day.

Much as he reviles the government (“useless, orworse than useless”) and the soldier who serves theslave master (“a fool made conspicuous by a paintedcoat”), Thoreau has not much hope for them. But heexpects more from citizens and so is bitter about theirsilence when a fugitive slave, Thomas Sims, is returnedforcibly to slavery in . He notes that the people ofConcord—on the anniversary of the shot heard roundthe world in and just a week after the rendition ofSims—rang the liberty bells and fired the cannons. But“when the sound of the bells died away, their libertydied away also.” That could be a commentary on anycelebration in the midst of war.

Thoreau has no respect for the law when the law allows war and protects slavery, nor for the jus-tices of the Supreme Court, as they, obedient to theConstitution, affirm the legality of holding three mil-lion people as slaves. “The law will never make men

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free; it is men who have got to make the law free.”Such judges do not ask what the murderers’ tools arefor; they only inspect them to see whether they are “inworking order.” Such judges do not ask “whether theFugitive Slave Law is right, but whether it is what theycall constitutional.”

In “Slavery in Massachusetts” Thoreau wrote: “Whatis wanted is men, not of policy, but of probity—whorecognize a higher law than the Constitution, or thedecision of the majority.” (The title of the present vol-ume is taken from this quotation.) Thoreau’s attitudetoward law and toward the Constitution points verydirectly to the legal controversies of our own time,when certain Supreme Court justices and legal schol-ars insist their job is to decide what the FoundingFathers meant by the words they wrote in .Thoreau asks why, in deciding moral questions, wemust ask whether “your grandfather, seventy yearsago” entered into an agreement “to serve the devil” andtherefore you must abide by that agreement, regardlessof its human consequences.

Thoreau could have been speaking about Justice AbeFortas, who joined the Supreme Court majority in thespring of to uphold the conviction of a young manwho had publicly burned his draft card to protest thewar in Vietnam (a petty act of arson, one might say,compared to William Lloyd Garrison’s setting fire tothe Constitution in ). The court was not concernedwith whether the war was right (or even whether it wasconstitutional) but considered only whether O’Brienhad violated the Conscription Act.

That same year, in an essay on civil disobedience,Fortas wrote: “Thoreau was an inspiring figure and agreat writer; but his essay should not be read as a hand-book on political science.” His notion of “political sci-ence” clearly did not include moral philosophy but

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made the former a register of whatever regulations thepoliticians of the time might order.

In “Slavery in Massachusetts,” Thoreau is scathingabout the press. The newspaper, he said “is a Biblewhich we read every morning and every afternoon,standing and sitting, riding and walking.” Editors, hesaid, by their acceptance of the Fugitive Slave Act, “liveand rule only by their own servility.” Speaking of a cer-tain Boston newspaper and its response when ThomasSims was carried off to slavery, he wrote: “I have heardthe gurgling of the sewer through every column.”

What would Thoreau say if he were alive today? Inour time, too, the press (much of it controlled by hugefinancial conglomerates) is largely subservient to gov-ernment, especially in time of war, when a fervidnationalism distorts reportage, and criticism of govern-ment policy is often seen as unpatriotic. According to Daniel Hallin’s careful study, The “Uncensored

War”: The Media and Vietnam, television coveragethroughout the Vietnam War was “lopsidedly favorableto American policy in Vietnam,” even more so thanwhat he called the “remarkably docile print media.”

In the second Gulf War of , the major televisionchannels rushed to declare their support of the war.The Fox News Channel regularly showed the Stars andStripes in the upper-left-hand corner of the screen,and the words “War on Terrorism” blended into“Operation Iraqi Freedom.” According to a study byFairness and Accuracy in Reporting, even though at themoment of military victory percent of the publicremained opposed to the war, less than percent ofAmericans interviewed on the major television net-works were antiwar.

What Thoreau saw as a coldness in government andpress toward the black slave, an abysmal failure of com-passion for the “other,” persisted for a hundred years,

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even after the end of slavery, in the continued sub-ordination of black people in this country. To whiteAmericans they were shadowy presences, unknown ashuman beings.

Thoreau saw the national and local governments ofhis time collaborating with slavery. Until the s, wesaw the national government acquiescing in racial segregation, indeed in the violation of the Fourteenthand Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. Onlywhen black people in the South pushed themselves intoview, brought public attention by acts of civil disobe-dience, did government finally respond.

The invisibility of the “other” carries over into war,where the “enemy” is other than human and need not be considered when the casualties are counted up. Nowhere was this revealed more starkly than when atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima andNagasaki. The incineration and radiation of severalhundred thousand Japanese could be accepted byAmericans because they were not seen as humanbeings, not made visible as were the victims of Japan inthe Bataan Death March or, some time after the fact,the victims of Hitler in the death camps.

Similarly, the Vietnamese who died or were maimedor burned by napalm in the ferocious bombing of theircountry (more bombs were dropped there than in all ofWorld War II) were not visible to Americans for manyyears. Their deaths were recorded as statistics, but theydid not appear as human beings until the first photos ofthe My Lai massacre appeared a year after it was firstreported in .

When the first Gulf War ended in , GeneralColin Powell reported proudly that the United Stateshad suffered only several hundred casualties. When areporter asked him about Iraqi casualties, Powellreplied: “That is really not a matter I am terribly inter-ested in.” The narrow nationalism that permitted such

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callousness would have troubled Thoreau deeply. “Iwould remind my countrymen, that they are to be menfirst, and Americans only at a late and convenienthour.”

Civil disobedience is inherently antinationalist be-cause it is based on a refusal to accept as an absolutethe legitimacy of government; it considers the powersof government subordinate to human rights. The impli-cation is that these rights belong to all human beings,not just those of one’s own country. Black slaves were not quite of the United States. Indeed, they had been denied citizenship by the decision of theSupreme Court in the Dred Scott case of . YetThoreau declared their rights to be above the law of thenation, even above the highest law of the nation—theConstitution.

Thoreau’s essay propounded such a universal prin-ciple of human rights that it continues to be an inspi-ration for dissident thinkers and activists around the world. Tolstoy took note of “the savage Spanish-American war” and wrote of a “second war” wagedagainst the government, its powerful weapon being“the obedience of every man to his own reason andconscience.” Tolstoy wrote: “This, indeed, is so simple,so indubitable, and binding upon every man. ‘You wishto make me a participator in murder; you demand ofme money for the preparation of weapons; and wantme to take part in the organized assembly of murder-ers’ says the reasonable man—he who had neither soldnor obscured his conscience. ‘But I profess that law—the same that is also professed by you—which long agoforbade not murder only, but all hostility, also, andtherefore I cannot obey you.’”

Gandhi knew of both Thoreau and Tolstoy. Thoreau,he wrote, “has left a masterly treatise on the Duty ofCivil Disobedience.” The influence can be seen in thecampaigns Gandhi organized to protest British rule in

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India. In the British passed the Rowlatt Act(remarkably similar to the “Patriot Act” passed byCongress in ) which provided for preventive deten-tion, the arrest and confinement of persons who were“suspected of subversive activities.” Persons con-sidered “dangerous” could be detained indefinitely.Gandhi and his followers took a pledge: “We solemnlyaffirm that . . . we shall refuse civilly to obey theselaws.” In Gandhi and others participated in a civil disobedience movement against the governmentmonopoly on salt and the oppressive salt tax. Theymarched from Ahmedabad to the beach at Dandi andprepared salt from the sea, thus violating the salt laws.Gandhi was arrested, but the civil disobedience contin-ued for a year, in the course of which salt depots wereoccupied, and protesters were met with brutal policeattacks.

In the United States social movements throughoutthe twentieth century and into the twenty-first repeat-edly put moral principles ahead of the law. Thoreauhad written, “Must the citizen ever for a moment, or inthe least degree, resign his conscience to the legisla-tor? Why has every man a conscience, then? . . . It isnot desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so muchas for the right.”

In this spirit, labor organizers in the IndustrialWorkers of the World went to jail again and again indefiance of local laws. On the eve of World War I,women picketed in the nation’s capital in violation oflocal ordinances and were arrested for demanding theright to vote. In and workers in auto and rub-ber plants staged sit-down strikes to get recognition fortheir unions.

In the s and s, black people in the Southcarried out hundreds of acts of civil disobedience,refusing to obey the laws mandating racial segregation,

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defying the laws of trespass, disobeying the orders ofpolice. Thoreau had written: “I quietly declare warwith the State, after my fashion.” Black people in theSouth had concluded that the U.S. government wouldnot defend their constitutional rights under theFourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and theywould take action themselves.

A white city librarian in Montgomery, Alabama, wrotea letter to the Montgomery Advertiser, saying admir-ingly that the black people boycotting the city busesthat winter of “had taken a lesson from Gandhi,and from our own Thoreau, who influenced Gandhi.”The young seminary student John Lewis, who wasbeaten senseless in the attempted protest march in from Selma to Montgomery, had studied Gandhiand Thoreau.

No one brought alive the idea of civil disobedience inthe United States more than Martin Luther King, Jr.He was a student of philosophy and religion, and wasvery aware of Thoreau and Gandhi, and no doubt theirpowerful ideas reinforced his own thinking. But it wasthe reality of racial segregation that led him and thethousands of others in the Southern movement—thesit-inners, the Freedom Riders, the marchers and picketers—to defy the law again and again.

In King’s famous “Letter from Birmingham CityJail,” he distinguishes between “just and unjust laws”in the way that Thoreau had distinguished betweentaxes he was willing to pay because they went for con-structive public purposes, and taxes he would not paybecause they supported a government at war. King hadbeen arrested for violating a court injunction againstdemonstrations. “An unjust law,” he said, “is out ofharmony with the moral law.”

The practice of civil disobedience was carried overfrom the protests against racial segregation to the

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movement against the war in Vietnam. Indeed, amongthe first to resist the draft (and to receive especiallyheavy prison sentences) were young black men in theSouth. In mid-, as the war in Vietnam began esca-lating rapidly, blacks in McComb, Mississippi, who hadjust learned that a classmate had been killed inVietnam, distributed a leaflet: “No Mississippi Negroesshould be fighting in Vietnam for the White man’s free-dom, until all the Negro People are free in Mississippi.Negro boys should not honor the draft here inMississippi. Mothers should encourage their sons notto go.”

One of the most dramatic instances of civil disobedi-ence against the war was that of the heavyweight cham-pion Muhammad Ali, who refused to serve in what hecalled a “white man’s war.” As punishment, boxingauthorities took away his title as champion.

At no time in American history was there such a suc-cession of acts of civil disobedience as during the warin Vietnam. Young men burned their draft cards orturned them in to the government. They refused to beinducted into the armed forces, , of them by theend of . Hundreds of thousands, without publicrefusals, did not register for the draft.

Americans were deeply offended by these actions and argued that citizens should express themselves bygoing through legal channels, by voting. But Thoreauhad no faith that government officials would actmorally: “most legislators, politicians, lawyers, minis-ters, and office-holders, serve the State chiefly withtheir heads; and, as they rarely make any moral dis-tinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, withoutintending it, as God.” He was disdainful of voting andother orthodox remedies. “They take too much time,and a man’s life will be gone.”

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That spirit animated the priests, nuns, and laypeo-ple who throughout the war in Vietnam broke into draft boards, seized draft records, and destroyed them to dramatize their protest against the war. When theCatonsville Nine went into a draft board office inMaryland, removed records, and set them afire withhomemade napalm in the presence of reporters andonlookers, one of them, the priest and poet DanielBerrigan, delivered a meditation: “Our apologies, goodfriends, for the fracture of good order, the burning ofpaper instead of children.” In one of the many trialsthat followed, that of the Milwaukee Fourteen, a priestnamed Bob Cunnane told the court that he had tried togo through legal channels to help stop the war, that hehad visited his senator and was told that people inCongress were helpless. That decided him on an actionmore forceful, even if it meant breaking the law andgoing to prison.

Disobedience spread to the armed forces. One WestPoint graduate, early in the war, refused to board anaircraft that would take him to a remote Vietnamesevillage. Three army privates refused to embark forVietnam, denouncing the war as “immoral, illegal, andunjust”; they were court-martialed and imprisoned. Anarmy doctor refused to teach Green Berets, a SpecialForces elite, saying they were “murderers of womenand children.”

Tens of thousands deserted from the military, goingto Canada or to Western Europe. During the fiercebombings of Hanoi and Haiphong, in December ,B- pilots refused to go on missions. Earlier that year, out of GIs in one company refused to go out onpatrol.

After the war in Vietnam ended in , a deter-mined group of pacifists continued to protest the

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militarization of the country, the buildup of nuclearweapons, by acts of civil disobedience. Beginning in with a group called the Plowshares Eight (taking their name from the biblical injunction to beatswords into plowshares), they invaded nuclear facili-ties, committing small symbolic acts of sabotage. In thenext twenty-three years at least seventy-five similaractions were carried out, almost always resulting in jail sentences.

Although it was supported by most Americans, thefirst Gulf War in led to mass demonstrations ofprotest in American cities, as well as to refusals of military service by young men and women. A physiciannamed Lynda Reiser, explaining why she would defythe order sending her to Iraq, wrote: “I object to partic-ipation in war in any form. I believe in the preservationof life at all costs. . . . I cannot participate in war, eitheras a combatant or as a non-combatant, because mydoing so would represent my agreement with war.”

This is exactly what Thoreau advocated in the face of evils like slavery or war, that people should with-draw their support from the government. It is notenough to hold an opinion, he said. One must act.“When the subject has refused allegiance, and the offi-cer has resigned his office, then the revolution isaccomplished.”

Thoreau’s next sentences are disquieting and make itclear he is not an absolute pacifist. “But even supposeblood should flow. Is there not a sort of blood shedwhen the conscience is wounded?” He seems to haveaccepted that an evil as gross as slavery—the captivityof three million people—could not be overcome with-out some degree of violence.

John Brown’s life epitomized the belief that violencewould be necessary to abolish slavery. With a smallband of like-minded men, he went to Kansas, which

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had become a battleground between pro- and antislav-ery forces. There were killings on both sides, and atone point Brown and his men carried out a nighttimeraid on a pro-slavery settlement and killed five peoplein cold blood.

Thoreau delivered to the citizens of Concord his lec-ture “A Plea for Captain John Brown” twelve days afterBrown, with his sons and a small group of white andblack abolitionists, tried to seize the federal arsenal atHarper’s Ferry, Virginia. Their aim was to incite a gen-eral slave revolt, but the plan miscarried, they werecaptured, and Brown lay wounded, awaiting trial.

Thoreau’s passionate talk is not a defense of JohnBrown but, as he titled it, a plea, an expression of sym-pathy and admiration. It is very unlikely that Thoreauwould have participated in the kind of action Brownhad engaged in, yet he defended Brown’s “right tointerfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave.” Brown’s firearms, he said, “wereemployed in a righteous cause.”

Emerson, with a similar passion, said of John Brownthat “he will make the gallows glorious like the cross.”Emerson and Thoreau were both outraged at the rushby both the state of Virginia and the national govern-ment to execute Brown, and the “cold-blooded way,” asThoreau put it, that newspaper editors and others,even abolitionists, talked of the man as “dangerous”and “insane.” Shortly after John Brown was hanged forkilling people, believing he was advancing the cause offreedom for slaves, the U.S. government engaged in awar, presumably to abolish slavery, and , diedon the battlefields. Would any one dare to refer to theU.S. government as “dangerous” and “insane”?

Running through Thoreau’s essay about John Brownis a powerful theme that speaks to our own time: thehypocrisy of government officials who put to death

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those who have killed one, two, or ten persons, all withan air of righteousness, buttressed by the law, but who themselves plan and carry out wars in which mil-lions die.

“War is peace” was the slogan of the Big Brotherstate described in George Orwell’s novel 1984. We carryout wars in the name of peace. In the United States wekeep two million people in prison in the name of order.Thoreau’s words speak directly to our time: “We pre-serve the so-called ‘peace’ of our community by deedsof petty violence every day. Look at the policeman’sbilly and hand cuffs! Look at the jail! Look at the gallows!”

We are speaking not of totalitarian governments butof governments that call themselves democracies asdoes ours. We pride ourselves on having representativegovernment. But, as Thoreau says, still speaking ofJohn Brown, “what a monster of a government is thatwhere the noblest faculties of the mind, and the whole

heart, are not represented.”Thoreau’s great insight was that there is a moral

emptiness in government unless it is filled by theactions of citizens on behalf of justice. That corre-sponds exactly to the democratic philosophy of theDeclaration of Independence, in which governmentshave no inherent right to exist or to rule, but deserve todo so only when they fulfill the charge given them bythe people: to protect everyone’s equal right to “life,liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

In our time, that philosophy is realized in the actionsof those who, in defiance of government, in defiance oflaws they consider supportive of war and injustice,carry out acts of civil disobedience. That might meandamaging weapons of war, or refusing to pay taxes tosupport a huge military budget, or refusing to join amilitary campaign they see as destructive of human

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life. In the end, behind the hard actions of civil disobe-dience (soft in relation to the actions of government),there is a desire for a life in which all that will not benecessary. In these pages you will find Thoreau’s essay“Life without Principle,” published posthumously in in the Atlantic Monthly but expressing ideasdeveloped through a number of lectures he gavebetween and . Thoreau’s final working titlefor the piece was “The Higher Law”; published today, itprovides fresh insight into our very modern lives.

Here, he joins his criticism of government and soci-ety with his love of the natural world. How shall welive, he asks? “This world is a place of business.”Money rules our lives but does not enrich them. “Theways by which you may get money almost withoutexception lead downward.”

You read the newspapers, instead of walking in nature. The news we hear “is the stalest repetition.”It is about large events, about governments, aboutnations. “Nations! What are nations? . . . Like insects,they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make themmemorable.” Thoreau would have appreciated KurtVonnegut, who places nations among those unnaturalabstractions he calls “granfalloons” (Cat’s Cradle), “aseeming team that was meaningless in terms of theways God gets things done.” What is “our boasted com-merce,” Thoreau asks, but “the activity of flies about amolasses-hogshead”? As for politics, it is “compara-tively something so superficial and inhuman, that,practically, I have never fairly recognized that it con-cerns me at all.”

Are Thoreau’s ideas utopian? And are they there-fore useless in a world of technological marvels, globalcommerce, and powerful nations? Or is it perhaps that Thoreau is asking that technology be tamed toserve our existential needs for peace and beauty, that

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commerce serve not greed, but human life, that nationsbe communities and not war machines? He is notagainst the “things” of modern life but wants to changethe situation that Emerson described: “Things are inthe saddle and ride mankind.”

In the midst of the struggle for justice, however,Thoreau is convinced that right will prevail. Agitated ashe is about the evil of slavery—“Who can be serene in acountry where both the rulers and the ruled are with-out principle?”—he is brought back to himself when hescents a white water-lily and realizes that a season he“had waited for had arrived.” The lily “suggests whatkind of laws have prevailed longest and widest, and stillprevail, and that the time may come when man’s deedswill smell as sweet.”

—Howard Zinn

December, 2003

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