Henry David Thoreau: a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible

Daguerreotype by Benjamin D. Maxham, 1856  tumblr.com

 

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. The proper place to-day, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race, should find them; on that separate, but more free and honorable ground, where the State places those who are not with her but against her,—the only house in a slave-state in which a free man can abide with honor. If any think that their influence would be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict the ear of the State, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person. Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand 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. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.

This is a characteristic excerpt from Henry David Thoreau's essay Civil Disobedience; it was first published in 1849, and is available in full at Wikisource. This text was pivotal to the development of a whole tradition of resistance; it influenced the political thinking and action of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, as well as attracted the attention of major writers and thinkers, including Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, and Ernest Hemingway. Henry David Thoreau was an author, a poet, and a philosopher, whose ideas remain relevant due to their originality and insightfulness. Walden, published in 1854, and also available in full at Wikisource, is another good example. I happen to know people who grew up a century and a half later on the other side of the Atlantic, having written the following excerpt on their bedroom wall; and there aren't many authors I can say that about.  

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.