Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau went to the pond in July 1845, built a cabin on land Emerson owned, and stayed two years, two months and two days. Walden, published in 1854 after several rewritings, is not a diary of that stay but an argument built out of it, compressed into a single year that runs from summer through the ice to the spring thaw.

The argument is economic before it is spiritual, and the book opens with a table of expenses down to the half cent. His claim is that most people pay for their lives with their lives, working to support arrangements they never chose, and that the cost of a house, a diet and a wardrobe can be established experimentally by anyone willing to try. Having established it, he can ask what the remaining time is for.

The answer is a discipline without a church. Rising early, bathing in the pond, sitting in the doorway from sunrise to noon in what he calls a revery, watching the ice, measuring the depth of the water to settle a local legend that the pond was bottomless. He read the Bhagavad Gita there, and the passage in which he sets its philosophy beside the Ganges water and the Walden water, and imagines the servant of the Brahmin coming to his well, is one of the earliest serious American engagements with an Indian text. The seasons then supply the structure, and spring supplies the ending, on the ground that a life, like a year, is capable of beginning again.

In July 1846, while living at the pond, Thoreau was stopped by the local constable for failing to pay the poll tax. He had refused it for several years, on the ground that the government of Massachusetts supported slavery and was prosecuting a war against Mexico to extend it, and that a citizen who pays such a state is a partner in what it does. He spent one night in the Concord jail. Somebody, probably an aunt, paid the tax against his wishes and he was released the next morning, annoyed.

The lecture he gave about it in 1848, published as Resistance to Civil Government and known since his death as Civil Disobedience, argues that a person's first obligation is to do at any time what he thinks right, that a majority rules by strength rather than by justice, and that when the law makes you an agent of injustice to another you should break the law. He is not describing a technique of mass protest and had no interest in organising one.

Others found the technique in it. The essay was read by Tolstoy, and through him and directly by Gandhi, who reprinted it in South Africa, and later by the American civil rights movement. That reception has made a single night in a village lockup one of the most consequential in modern political history, and it happened to a man who spent the following morning going out to pick huckleberries.