Thoreau's Political Speeches and Essays in Context

From Hermit to Activist. Henry David Thoreau left the woods, as he tells us, because he had "other lives to live." Those lives included travel, more work in the pencil factory, and, most significantly, speaking out about the wrenching dilemmas of his day. A few historical notes about those dilemmas are in order. Thoreau's movement from experimental hermit to fiery, vigorous, if not altogether consistent activist was not surprising. The seeds of what made Thoreau, in the words of his early biographer Henry Seidel Canby, "the woodchuck gritting his teeth until they are powdered" (382), are obvious in Thoreau's family history, which included his paternal grandfather, who served under Paul Revere; indeed, Thoreau's earliest published piece was an obituary of Concord's last survivor of the Revolutionary War.

Antislavery Protest and Fugitive Slave Legislation. Most glaring of the flaws in the independent country for which they fought was the status of slaves; the Constitution outlawed slavery in the North but said nothing about its extension to territories and new states. This question, along with that of the legislation for return of fleeing slaves, gathered organized protest in Thoreau's intellectual community and in his own household. By 1837 the annual Anti-Slavery Society meeting was held in Dr. Ripley's Meeting-House in Concord. The newspaper invited "friends of the cause" to attend and "local societies [to send] large delegations." We do not know that Thoreau attended, but the year was one in which Thoreau graduated from Harvard, taught briefly at Center School, and became a member of the "Hedge Club," composed of the major transcendentalists.

We do know that in 1844 Thoreau rang the bell to summon people to a speech by Emerson at a ceremony celebrating the emancipation of slaves in the British West Indies (Harding, Days 193). In 1845 Thoreau wrote for the Liberator in praise of Wendell Phillips's stand on the slavery-free admission of Texas, and, of course, in 1848, Thoreau refused to obey the government by not paying taxes that would support the extension of slavery. Meanwhile, he and his community were becoming increasingly enraged by the expansion of laws that obliged the public to aid in the return of escaped slaves. As early as 1793 legislation permitted—indeed encouraged—the federal government to punish those who helped fugitive slaves. In response, the Personal Liberty Law was passed in 1843 with the aim of reducing the government's role, making it a crime for any state official to aid in the detention of fugitive slaves and prohibiting the use of jails (Rosenblum xx).

What most angered Thoreau and others who opposed slavery was the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law as part of the Compromise of 1850. This law reversed the 1843 legislation, making it a federal crime to help fugitive slaves. Abolitionists saw this as legally obligating citizens in free states such as Massachusetts to support the institution of slavery. Resistance to the government that would subvert the ideals of the country pitted abolitionists such as Emerson, who declared, "I will not obey it, by God" (Harding, Days 196), against slave catchers who traveled to Boston to test the laws. Among those situations fired up the New England transcendentalist community was the runaway Fredric "Shadrach" Wilkins, who in February 1851 was seized while waiting on tables at a coffee house in Boston.

Liberated by other blacks from the court-house, "Shadrach" was probably helped en route to Canada by the Thoreau family and sheltered in the home of a Thoreau friend, Mrs. Mary Brooks. "Shadrach" was luckier than most. Every day, says Harding, "Negroes were being dragged back to the chains and cruelties of slavery. It was time to act" (Days 314). In April of that year Thomas Sims was marched to the wharf surrounded by 250 U.S. soldiers and sent back to Georgia. In September Henry Williams was bound back for Virginia when Thoreau himself helped to enable his escape.

In fact, says Walter Harding, "rarely a week went by without some fugitive being harbored overnight in town and sped along his way before daylight. Henry Thoreau, more often than any other man in Concord, looked after them" (Harding, Days 316). Three years later, in 1854, a jailed fugitive slave named Anthony Burns was guarded by an entire brigade of Massachusetts militiamen. In 1855 the Massachusetts Personal Liberty Law forbade anyone to act as counsel for a slave claimant. Increasingly citizens were enraged at federal judges such as Lysander Spooner, who made it his job to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law (Rosenblum xvi-xxi). Thoreau himself called the government's actions "maddening folly" (Kritzberg 546) and a "perfectly heartless business" (Kritzberg 548).

Territorial Politics and John Brown. The problem of the territories rankled abolitionists as much as the rendition laws. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of May 1854 left the decision of whether the Kansas territory would be slave or free to a popular vote there. Among those most angry over the attempts of pro-slavery people to tinker with the election was the 56-year-old John Brown. Thoreau met John Brown in 1857 at his mother's boardinghouse when Brown went to Concord to raise money for his cause, and he praised Brown's "courage to face his country herself when she was in the wrong" (Witherell 654).

By this time Brown, four of his many sons, and followers had already (in 1856) hacked to death five unarmed pro-slavery settlers at Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas. The real crisis for those attracted by Brown's passionate war on his government's slaveholding protectionists but temperamentally and ideologically sickened by violence occurred in October 1859, when word came of Brown's failed and fatal but heroic attack at Harpers Ferry. Along with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Thomas Parker, Wendell Phillips, and others, Thoreau defended the man, whom he saw as a transcendentalist with "a spark of divinity."

Civil Disobedience and Final Years. Three years before his own death, Thoreau, famous for espousing civil disobedience, became a passionate advocate for this militant (some thought it mad) disobedience. Whether or not this was a break with his earlier ideas is disputed by scholars. Thoreau, the individualist, did not join the societies that opposed such injustice, but he had already acted on his beliefs when he (as others had) accepted a jail sentence issued in response to his 1846 refusal to pay taxes in support of the Mexican War. What followed summed up "Civil Disobedience," his most famous speech, and others that were spoken and published in the later years of his brief life.