ABSTRACT
In 1845, at the age of twenty-seven, Henry David Thoreau went to live in the woods by Walden Pond, not far from Concord, Massachusetts, where he was born. His account of his time spent there, Walden, or Life in the Woods, was published in 1854, and is now an established mainstream classic text that is encountered by most high-school students in the United States.1 Thoreau’s close observations of nature, and his philosophical ruminations that developed from them, are seen as foundational for ecological awareness and the ‘green’ sensibility, but it was probably his ‘Civil Disobedience’ essay that gave him his reputation for serious commitment and moral authority in the twentieth century, when its argument chimed with the Civil Rights movement and the counter-culture that challenged the involvement of the United States in the war in Vietnam. Thoreau presented the first public version of the essay’s argument in a lecture in Concord in February 1848.2 He had been arrested in July 1846, for non-payment of his taxes, having gone into Concord at a time when he was living by Walden Pond. He was held in prison overnight and released the next day, when someone paid the tax on his behalf. He refused to leave and had to be ejected. For the rest of his life, to avoid embarrassment, relatives paid Thoreau’s taxes.3 The reason why Thoreau refused to pay his taxes was that he objected to the Government’s support of slavery, to its treatment of Native Americans and to its prosecution of the war with Mexico (which resolved in 1848 and brought the territories of Texas, New Mexico and California into the Union). ‘Under a government that imprisons any unjustly,’ said Thoreau, ‘the true place for a just man is also a prison.’4
