Civil Disobedience
Description
In 1848, Henry David Thoreau twice delivered lectures in Concord, Massachusetts, on "the relationship of the individual to the state." The essay now known as Civil Disobedience is a significant and widely admired contribution to abolitionist literature, as well as an anti-war tract, but Thoreau's focus is less on political organization and solidarity than it is on personal choice and individual responsibility. Cultivating personal integrity in the face of political injustice is the project Thoreau defends in Civil Disobedience; this focus has made the work highly influential for twentieth- and twenty-first-century political movements.
Bob Pepperman Taylor's new Introduction explains the work's specific political context, helping readers to understand the text as Thoreau wrote it. The edition also offers a number of historical documents on Thoreau's abolitionism; the war with Mexico; and Thoreau's philosophical development in relation to other thinkers.
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Appendix B: Abolitionism - Henry Highland Garnet, Address to the Slaves of the United States (1865)
- Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, Tea-Table Talk (1836)
- William Lloyd Garrison, Declaration of Sentiments of the American Anti-Slavery Society (1852)
- From William Lloyd Garrison, Declaration of Sentiments Adopted by the Peace Convention, The Liberator (28 Sept. 1838)
- William Lloyd Garrison, The American Union (1845)
Appendix C: Sectionalism and the Constitution - Samuel Hoar, Report on His Mission to Charleston, South Carolina (1845)
- From Daniel Webster, Speech in Senate, 12 August 1848
- From Daniel Webster, Speech at Capon Springs, Virginia, 28 June 1851
Appendix D: War with Mexico - From Abraham Lincoln, Speech in U.S. House of Representatives on War with Mexico (1848)
Appendix E: Moral and Philosophical Context - From William Paley, The Duty of Submission to Civil Government Explained (1822)
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Politics (1844)