"Hardly the Voice of the Same Man": "Civil Disobedience" and Thoreau's Response to John Brown

How rarely meet with a man who can be free, even in thought! We live according to rule. Some men are bedridden; all, world-ridden. Henry David Thoreau. Journal, May 10, 1857 HENRY DAVID THOREAU LIVED in a society teeming with political strife. In introduction to Thoreau: People, Principles, and Politics, Milton Meltzer writes that was born in time to hear reminiscences of the American Revolution from local survivors of those battles, and he died as the War was creating another generation of veterans (ix). Thoreau's life was framed by that helped to shape the political and cultural borders of America. Further, he was witness to the use of violent action as a means of effecting political change. However, he himself was not an activist, at least not violent; rather, as Michael Meyer points out, his greatest strengths as a social critic was diagnoses (Black Emigration, 380). Rather than committing himself to any use of physical warfare, Meltzer continues, [h]e was committed to another ... against injustice and (ix). Meltzer contrasts Thoreau's inner war of conscience to the outer wars against the Indians and Mexico, that Thoreau took no active part in (unless one reads night in jail for refusing to pay taxes as an overt act). In either ease, what is important to note here is the non-confrontational nature of Thoreau's political activism. Although political injustice was a complaint as old as the country itself, slavery was bringing the country closer to imminent warfare. Fugitive Slave Law of 1851 increased the outrage of Northern abolitionists--including Thoreau--and helped to strike the match that would eventually help spark the War (1861-1865). An informed and civic-minded thinker who spent much time writing on own thoughts (often revising journals into public addresses), Thoreau's writings from the period reflect own understanding of and responses to various contemporary issues. Specifically, Thoreau's pieces in support of John reflect views on the issue of slavery in the United States. However, one cannot simply read A Plea for Captain John Brown (1859) and The Last Days of John Brown (1860) and appreciate Thoreau's political and ethical arguments. In order to understand the complexities and contradictions that are often noted in these two pieces, one must read them as a development in political thinking, specifically with regard to the issue of slavery--a development that runs through Civil Disobedience (1849) and in Massachusetts (1854). Although Thoreau's sympathies to John and violence are seemingly more extreme than earlier statements in Civil Disobedience, such a change reflects not a break with Transcendental ideals but rather the identification of metaphysical ideals in the person of John More specifically, Thoreau's seemingly contradictory attempts to link ethics to John Brown's acts represent the move from the abstract and more general world of ideas (Civil Disobedience) to the more concrete world of politics (Slavery in Massachusetts and A Plea for John Brown), before turning once again to the abstract and universal in The Last Days of John Brown. Thoreau was not the only public figure to champion Brown's friend Frederick Douglass voiced support in a now-famous letter of October 31, 1859, in the Rochester Democrat (though widely reprinted). Having fled to Canada for fear of arrest as an accomplice at Harpers Ferry, Douglass states that I am ever ready to write, speak, publish, organize, combine, and even to conspire against Slavery (qtd. in Quarles, 9). However, Douglass's letter was inspired primarily to answer a charge of cowardice made by John E. Cook, one of Brown's captured conspirators. Douglass notes that Mr. Cook may be perfectly right in denouncing me as a coward. have not one word to say in defense or vindication of my character for courage (8). …

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