Definition
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson in Concord, Massachusetts. On July 4, 1845, he moved into a house he had built by Walden Pond, and he later wrote Walden (1854) about living deliberately. For years he refused to pay a poll tax to a government that protected slavery, and in July 1846, with the country at war with Mexico, he spent a night in jail in Concord until someone paid the tax. He explained his protest in the essay Resistance to Civil Government, published in 1849 and later called Civil Disobedience; Mohandas Gandhi printed pieces of it in his newspaper, and Martin Luther King Jr. read it as a student.
Why it matters on the AP exam
Thoreau represents the individualism and moral protest of Transcendentalism, and his refusal to pay a tax connects to antislavery dissent and opposition to the Mexican-American War. Questions on Period 4 culture ask how Transcendentalists such as Thoreau and Emerson expressed American themes, and questions on reform and the sectional crisis use him as an example of individual conscience in politics. His essay later influenced nonviolent protest in India and in the American civil rights movement.
In the sources
“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”
Connections
- Ralph Waldo Emerson: his friend and fellow Transcendentalist in Concord
- Transcendentalism: the movement that placed truth in the individual and in nature
- Mexican-American War: the war during which he spent a night in jail for refusing to pay a poll tax