1846 How to describe Thoreau? He was one of that group of American Transcendentalists who included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott and Margaret Fuller. They flourished around the middle of the 19th century in Concord, Massachusetts – though only Thoreau was native to the town – just west of Boston.
But that allegiance was Thoreau’s least distinctive descriptor. He was also a surveyor, a self-taught, highly observant naturalist, an amateur builder and gardener, a thinker so original as to be taken – even by Emerson – to be contrary to the point of perverseness. But he is best summed up as a man who tested his thoughts and ideas in his everyday life.
In one of these living experiments he built a shack out of second-hand boards on the shores of Walden Pond, near Concord, living there on and off for two years, in order to test the relative merits of solitude and social interaction, to collect data on the flora and fauna of his native country, and even to try his hand at gardening. In another he chose to go to jail rather than to pay his poll tax.
Thoreau didn’t object to the local road tax, or other levies aimed at improvements around town. But for six years he refused to pay his poll tax, because it went to a federal government, which in 1846 had just declared an unjust war on Mexico, and under which one sixth of the population were slaves. Finally the authorities lost patience and locked him up in the local hoosegow.
That was alright by Thoreau, who would later write, in ‘Resistance to Civil Government’ (1849), that ‘Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison’. That essay set out his thesis that consent in government must be based on the individual conscience of the citizen. ‘I think that we should be men first and subjects afterwards’, he wrote. ‘Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.’ To be fair to Thoreau, these ideas were hard-won. To be fair to his fellow Americans, they would also be pretty hard to put into practice.
The prisoner spent the night chatting with his cell-mate (‘a first-rate fellow and clever man’, according to the jailer), hearing all about the history of former jailbreaks, and looking out of the window. The next morning he was let out because, as he put it, ‘someone interfered, and paid that tax’. That was an ungenerous judgement, but then Thoreau wasn’t known for his graciousness.