An Essay Nobody Read Until It Mattered

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Henry David Thoreau delivered the lecture that became Resistance to Civil Government after spending a night in the Concord jail for refusing to pay a poll tax he associated with slavery and the Mexican American War. Published in 1849, the essay made little impression at the time; it did not reach a wide readership until 1866, four years after Thoreau's death, when it was reissued under the title history remembers, Civil Disobedience. Its argument was blunt: a citizen who lets his own conduct be legislated by a majority he believes wrong is not being law-abiding, he is being complicit, and the only honest response to an unjust law is to stop obeying it, openly, and accept whatever the state does in return. Mahatma Gandhi is often credited with drawing the idea of civil disobedience from Thoreau, but Gandhi himself denied it: in a 1935 letter, he wrote that the statement that he had derived his idea of Civil Disobedience from the writings of Thoreau was wrong, and that his resistance campaigns in South Africa were already well advanced before he ever encountered the essay. What Thoreau supplied Gandhi was a name he found useful for explaining an existing struggle to English readers, not the reasoning or the tactic itself.