This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The essay that gave civil disobedience its name grew out of one night Henry David Thoreau spent in the Concord, Massachusetts jail in July 1846, for a debt he had chosen not to pay.
Thoreau had stopped paying his poll tax as a deliberate protest against two things he held the United States government complicit in: the continuation of slavery, and the Mexican American War, which he and other opponents viewed as a war of conquest meant to expand slaveholding territory. A local tax collector had him arrested and jailed for the unpaid tax; a relative paid it against his wishes the next day, and Thoreau was released, reportedly annoyed that his protest had been cut short before he intended it to end.
Thoreau did not write the essay immediately from that single night. He first worked the reasoning out as a lecture, The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to Government, delivered at the Concord Lyceum in January and February 1848, roughly a year and a half after the arrest, giving him time to develop the argument rather than simply recount the event. He revised the lecture into essay form, and Elizabeth Peabody published it in the first and only issue of her journal Aesthetic Papers in May 1849, under the title Resistance to Civil Government; the title Civil Disobedience, by which the essay is known today, was applied only after Thoreau's death, in an 1866 posthumous collection.
The essay's central claim outlasted the specific war and the specific tax that prompted it: that a government resting on majority rule has no special claim to moral correctness, and that a citizen who believes a law unjust has an obligation to refuse it openly rather than let personal convenience, or the law's own machinery, decide the question instead. It is that general claim, not the poll tax dispute itself, that later reached Gandhi and King.