What was thoreau’s act of civil disobedience

He contends that people's first obligation is to do what they believe is right and not to follow the law dictated by the majority. When a government is unjust, people should refuse to follow the law and distance themselves from the government in general. A person is not obligated to devote his life to eliminating evils from the world, but he is obligated not to participate in such evils.

This includes not being a member of an unjust institution like the government. A person of conscience had to act. In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation, which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty, are slaves, and a whole country [Mexico] is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. Thoreau argued that the government must end its unjust actions to earn the right to collect taxes from its citizens.

As long as the government commits unjust actions, he continued, conscientious individuals must choose whether to pay their taxes or to refuse to pay them and defy the government. By not paying his taxes, Thoreau explained, he was refusing his allegiance to the government.

Unlike some later advocates of civil disobedience like Martin Luther King, Thoreau did not rule out using violence against an unjust government.

Alumni Volunteers The Boardroom Alumni. Click here for standards and skills for this lesson. This lesson focuses on that critique.

The first interactive exercise, recommended for use after you have conducted the close reading, reviews the central points of the textual analysis. You may want to use its first slide to direct whole class discussion in which you ask students to support their answers with evidence from the text. The second slide provides the correct responses with textual support.

The second interactive exercise asks students to write a contrast paragraph, which will require pen and paper. It also encourages vocabulary building and calls upon students to draw an inference.

It is most appropriate for individual work. He distrusted majority rule for the same reasons Thoreau did and held the same views of mass culture. For Thoreau the goal of any response to unjust policies is to insure that the individual does not, either directly or indirectly, advance them. His refusal to pay his poll tax to protest slavery and the Mexican War was an act of resistance that landed him in jail for a night.

He bases his analysis on two fundamental assertions. First, he maintains that the individual is the source of all moral authority. According to Thoreau, what is the basis of majority rule? He contends that majority rule is not based on justice or fairness but rather on nothing more than the fact that the majority is physically stronger than the minority. According to Thoreau, how do governments decide questions of right and wrong? They do so on the basis of majority rule, on mere numbers, on the simple fact that one side of a question gets more votes than the other.

Why does Thoreau object to governing through legislators? Although Thoreau asserts that a man has other, higher duties than eradicating institutional wrong, he must at least not be guilty through compliance. The individual must not support the structure of government, must act with principle, must break the law if necessary. Abolition can be achieved by withdrawing support from the government, which may be accomplished practically through the nonpayment of taxes. If imprisonment is the result, there is no shame in it — prison is the best place for a just man in an unjust society.

In the current state of affairs, payment of taxes is violent and bloody. Nonpayment constitutes a "peaceable revolution. He describes his experience in the Concord Jail in some detail, commenting upon the folly of the state's treatment of a man as if he were a physical entity only, rather than an intellectual and moral one.

A man can be compelled only by one who possesses greater morality. In Civil Disobedience as throughout his other writings, Thoreau focuses on the individual's ultimate responsibility to live deliberately and to extract meaning from his own life; overseeing the machinery of society is secondary. Thoreau asserts that he does not want to quarrel or to feel superior to others.

He wants to conform to the laws of the land, but current laws are not honorable from a higher point of view.