Walden and Civil Disobedience

WALDEN AND CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Henry David Thoreau

CONTENTS

Title Page

History of Collins

Life & Times

Walden

Economy

Where I Lived, and What I Lived For

Reading

Sounds

Solitude

Visitors

The Bean-Field

The Village

The Ponds

Baker Farm

Higher Laws

Brute Neighbors

House-Warming

Former Inhabitants and Winter Visitors

Winter Animals

The Pond in Winter

Spring

Conclusion

On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from the Collins English Dictionary

Copyright

About the Publisher

History of Collins

In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.

Soon after, William published the first Collins novel, Ready Reckoner, however it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.

Aged 30, William’s son, William II took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly ‘Victorian’ in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and The Pilgrim’s Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time. A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopaedias and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.

In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of ‘books for the millions’ was developed. Affordable editions of classical literature were published and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.

HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.

Life & Times

Slavery is always driven by economics. In order to maximize profits, it is unnecessary to attract a labour force, it is unnecessary to pay wages, and it is unnecessary to provide more than the most basic utilities. The Atlantic slave trade began at a time when there were burgeoning commercial interests between European and New World nations, which meant that access to an unlimited workforce at relatively low expense was enough to initiate a trade-triangle that was to last for around 300 years. European trading ships would sail to the west coast of Africa, where they would purchase shipments of slaves from Arab slavers in exchange for cargoes of European products. The ships would then sail to the Caribbean and North America, where the slaves were sold for profit to plantation owners. The ships would then return to Europe laden with commodities to be sold for further profit.

Plenty of people made a great deal of money directly from the slave trade and that money filtered down to all levels of society in the West, supported by all manner of secondary and tertiary industries. In effect, the modernization of the West’s infrastructure was significantly funded by the free labour of African slaves. Thankfully, that process of modernization also included moral and ethical developments. Public consciousness became enlightened enough to see that slavery had to end.

When the Atlantic slave trade began it was a different story. Africa was regarded as a mysterious wilderness populated by peoples primitive in both culture and mind. Africans were consequently viewed as animal-like, and hence treating them as livestock was considered reasonable. They were viewed as the perfect workforce – human enough to be capable of useful work and to understand orders, yet not human enough to warrant comfort, wellbeing, and freedom. The myth of the inferior Negro mind was perpetuated because it suited those who had something to gain. In time, the idea became so ingrained in Caucasian populations that it became self-perpetuating, with the oppressed behaviour of the Negroes satisfying negative stereotypes and thereby affirming beliefs.

This vicious circle still lies vestigial in the ugly face of modern-day racism, but in the late 18th and early 19th centuries the tide was turning for the better thanks to an increasing number of liberally minded intellectuals who saw through the illusion of Caucasian racial superiority upon which the slave trade relied. In Britain the leading light was William Wilberforce. He headed a parliamentary campaign to abolish slavery, which eventually succeeded in 1807 with the Slave Trade Act. This act aimed to abolish slavery within the British Empire and this was finally achieved in 1833.

In the US, where slavery was a part of everyday life, the abolition cause took longer to foment. In 1849, a seminal essay was published by Henry David Thoreau, entitled ‘Civil Disobedience’, in which the author vented his discontent with the US establishment. In part, his motivation was his opposition to slavery. The following year the government added fuel to the fire by announcing the Fugitive Slave Act. As the divide between the North and South was already in evidence, and many slaves were seeking refuge in the North, the directive was that all runaway slaves should be returned to their ‘owners’. This was viewed as an awkward compromise by a government trying to preside over two vastly different ideologies. The 1850 act was so despised by the abolitionists that it was dubbed the ‘Bloodhound Act’, in allusion to the tracking dogs used to hunt down the slaves.

Tensions between northern and southern states would continue to rise for another decade, before the American Civil War broke out in 1861, lasting for four bloody years. In 1860, the newly elected president Abraham Lincoln launched a campaign to restrict the practice of slavery and the scene was set for a showdown. Bellicose sentiments finally came to a head and all-out war was the result. It proved so divisive that even family members found themselves enlisting on opposite sides, ready to kill kith and kin for the sake of their heartfelt beliefs.

It wasn’t about slavery per se, but about what slavery represented. In the northern states it was generally thought that progressive, enlightened people should know that slavery was an unethical practice. Thus, the anti-slavery cause was as much about being superior of mind as it was about achieving manumission for the Negro. The opposite was true in the southern states. They clung to more traditional values and resisted change, and thus the anti-slavery campaign seemed emblematic of the more sophisticated northerners’ habit of telling them what they should and shouldn’t do.

‘Civil Disobedience’ itself might be described as a passive-aggressive directive. In essence, Thoreau suggests that the way to affect change is by non-cooperation, or disobedience, because the outcome is then the disempowerment of government. He observes that regimes are self-supporting structures, so proactive opposition has the effect of strengthening that structure. Non-cooperation, on the other hand, has an undermining quality because the integrity of the structure relies on those who form the foundations. As they begin to perceive the regime as ineffectual, they walk away and the structure collapses. So, to Thoreau, the most important thing is to establish a clear moral basis on which to object to an ensconced governmental system and then allow it to erode its own footings.

Thoreau’s gripe wasn’t about party politics, but the general approach to government in the US. Thus, the message of ‘Civil Disobedience’ infiltrated the upper echelons of power, causing politicians to analyze their common views objectively. In fact, all those who read it found themselves reflecting on their collective behaviour and wondering whether Thoreau might be right. ‘Civil Disobedience’ became a catalyst for cultural change, which is why the slavery issue took centre stage. It was the most obvious blot on the new cultural landscape that Thoreau had inspired people to hope for. Slavery became what less refined people practised, because they lacked the ethical and moral fibre to understand their wrongdoing.

This drive towards a better way of acting and reacting to the world became known as transcendentalism. At its root was the fundamental idea that humanity is good when stripped back to basics, and that society, culture, and religion only serve to corrupt this goodness when left unchecked. As humans are generally deferential in nature, they are easily drawn into regimes and the danger comes when no one knows any different. When normality is never contrasted with other ways of viewing the world, people lose the ability to reflect and alter the status quo. Thoreau encouraged people to transcend normality to achieve a better way of living life, by looking inwards at the basic human condition. Therein lies his basic argument against slavery: all humans are equal when societal and cultural layers are stripped away. When we take things down to what lies beneath, we are all nothing more than members of the same species.

Due to the insightful nature of ‘Civil Disobedience’, it has often been referenced when populations have been driven to civil unrest by governments or regimes. It has universality because it has a generic message that applies to any era. For that reason, Thoreau’s wisdom has lived on in his writing. It seems that humanity has a habit of settling on unsatisfactory societal norms, but that is because society is a human construct. There is no one right way of running society, but there are plenty of wrong ways, and Thoreau’s words are all about maintaining the process of self-monitoring in an effort to do our very best in perpetual pursuit of the ideal. The act of civil disobedience is therefore the driver to keep things evolving, while civil obedience only allows a society to become set in its ways, so that the rot sets in.

Thoreau himself was very much a renaissance man. He was a polymath and lived a life intellectually removed from popular society. He put his own theory into practice a few years before his death. He built a cabin in a remote location and lived there for two years, so that he could get back to nature and become lost in his thoughts. His rationale was that he could be more objective by living a self-reliant lifestyle. He documented the results in his book Walden, published in 1854. Among the people who visited his cabin was a runaway slave. The author helped him flee to Canada, where slavery was not practised. This event is among many that generate deep philosophical discussion in the book, about how American society should emerge into the modern world. He died in 1861, just when the great cultural shift in America was being played out in the theatre of battle.

WALDEN

ECONOMY

When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.

I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning my mode of life, which some would call impertinent, though they do not appear to me at all impertinent, but, considering the circumstances, very natural and pertinent. Some have asked what I got to eat; if I did not feel lonesome; if I was not afraid; and the like. Others have been curious to learn what portion of my income I devoted to charitable purposes; and some, who have large families, how many poor children I maintained. I will therefore ask those of my readers who feel no particular interest in me to pardon me if I undertake to answer some of these questions in this book. In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me. Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.

I would fain say something, not so much concerning the Chinese and Sandwich Islanders as you who read these pages, who are said to live in New England; something about your condition, especially your outward condition or circumstances in this world, in this town, what it is, whether it is necessary that it be as bad as it is, whether it cannot be improved as well as not. I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways. What I have heard of Bramins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the heavens over their shoulders “until it becomes impossible for them to resume their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach”; or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on the tops of pillars – even these forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which I daily witness. The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor. They have no friend Iolaus to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra’s head, but as soon as one head is crushed, two spring up.

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man’s life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and woodlot! The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before. It is said that Deucalion and Pyrrha created men by throwing stones over their heads behind them:—

Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum,

Et documenta damus qua simus origine nati.

Or, as Raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way,—

“From thence our kind hard-hearted is, enduring pain and care,

Approving that our bodies of a stony nature are.”

So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throwing the stones over their heads behind them, and not seeing where they fell.

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance – which his growth requires – who has so often to use his knowledge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him. The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.

Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some of you who read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour. It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by experience; always on the limits, trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the Latins aes alienum, another’s brass, for some of their coins were made of brass; still living, and dying, and buried by this other’s brass; always promising to pay, promising to pay, tomorrow, and dying today, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offenses; lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in the brick bank; no matter where, no matter how much or how little.

I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both North and South. It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself. Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the highway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir within him? His highest duty to fodder and water his horses! What is his destiny to him compared with the shipping interests? Does not he drive for Squire Make-a-stir? How godlike, how immortal, is he? See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate. Self-emancipation even in the West Indian provinces of the fancy and imagination – what Wilberforce is there to bring that about? Think, also, of the ladies of the land weaving toilet cushions against the last day, not to betray too green an interest in their fates! As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new. Old people did not know enough once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the phrase is. Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living. Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must believe; and it may be that they have some faith left which belies that experience, and they are only less young than they were. I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything to the purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors said nothing about.