88 full of the moon: September 5, 1846.
90 “Row, brothers”: from “A Canadian Boat Song” by Thomas Moore (1779-1852), an Irish poet who had visited Canada in 1804. Thoreau’s “Utawas’ tide” alters the original, “Ottawa’s tide,” the Ottawa being a river flowing into the St. Lawrence at the western tip of Montreal Island.
94 ferruled: strengthened by a ring or band.
94 Michaux: François André Michaux (1770-1855), French botanist. Thoreau read a three-volume translation of his work The North American Sylva (Paris: C. d’Hautel, 1819). All the quotations in this paragraph are from volume 3, pages 166-67.
94n “A steady current”: Springer, Forest Life and Forest Trees, p. 64.
95 “two lines”: about a sixth of an inch. In Michaux’s day the Paris line was the twelfth part of a French inch.
99 Oak Hall: a Boston clothing store.
100 Murch Brook: now called Katahdin Stream.
101 chivin: or “chevin,” a variety of chub, a river fish of the carp family.
101 roaches: In Europe the roach is a small freshwater fish (Leuciscus rutilus) of the carp family; in the United States various fish bear the name, including sunfish and chub.
101 cousin-trout: In his annotations to Thoreau’s journal, Robert Sattelmeyer suggests that “what Thoreau calls alternatively the chivin, the roach, and the cousin trout is probably the modern fall-fish (Semotilus corporalis).”
101 fluviatile: fluvial.
101 Proteus: the shape-shifter of Greek mythology.
101 Lescarbot: Marc Lescarbot (1570-1642), French explorer and author of Histoire de la Nouvelle-France. Thoreau read the second edition (Paris: Chez Jean-Millot, 1612).
101 Champdoré … de Monts: early French explorers of the coast of North America, the former being a ship’s captain, Pierre Angibault (but called Champdoré), the latter being Pierre du Guast, Sieur de Monts (1560?-1628?).
101 “qu’en mettant”: “that in putting the boiler on the fire, they had caught enough [fish] for them to eat dinner before the water was hot.”
102 “A quart”: from an anonymous poem, “The Dragon of Wantley,” which Thoreau knew from a one-volume edition of Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). Thoreau changes the original “aqua vitae” to “arbor-vitae.”
103 a large slide: Abol Slide.
104 Nimrod: in the Hebrew Bible, a mighty hunter.
104 Murch Brook: in fact, Abol Stream (“Abol” being short for “Aboljacknagesic”).
106 Satan’s … through Chaos: The reference is to Milton’s Paradise Lost, which Thoreau begins to cite below.
106 nipt: pinched.
106 bears’ dens: an unlikely assertion, in line with the passage’s Miltonic exaggeration.
106 “nigh founder’d, on he fares”: Milton, Paradise Lost II.740-42. Satan, vengeful and proud, is struggling up out of Chaos.
107 the summit: Katahdin has two peaks, Baxter (5,267 feet) and South (5,240 feet). Thoreau probably climbed to the saddle between the two, three or four hundred feet below the true summit.
108 Atlas: in Greek mythology a Titan condemned by Zeus to support the heavens on his shoulders.
108 Vulcan: Roman god of fire and metalworking.
108 Cyclops: in Greek mythology one of the three one-eyed Titans who forged thunderbolts for Zeus.
108 Prometheus: a Titan who stole fire from Olympus and gave it to humankind, for which Zeus chained him to a rock and sent an eagle to eat his liver, which grew back daily.
108 Caucasus: an extensive range of mountains in the northern part of Asia, lying between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea. From the stories of Prometheus and of the Argonauts, it appears that the Greeks regarded Caucasus as one of the extremities of the earth.
108 Æschylus: Greek tragic dramatist (525-456 B.C.). Thoreau’s translation of Aeschylus’s play Prometheus Bound appeared in the January 1843 issue of The Dial.
108 Titanic: of the Titans; that is, the giants of Greek mythology who sought to rule heaven and were overthrown by the family of Zeus.
109 “Chaos and ancient Night”: Milton, Paradise Lost II.970-74.
110 “mirror broken”: from J. K. Laski’s description of a botanical expedition to Katahdin. In a letter dated October 24, 1847, Thoreau wrote to thank his sister Sophia for clipping the account from the Bangor Daily Whig & Courier.
110 Gazetteer: The New England Gazetteer (1839) by John Hayward (1781-1862). The volume is unpaginated, but the entries are alphabetic, and Thoreau refers to the one for Penobscot County, Maine.
110 the boundary question: See the note for Thoreau’s mention of “some troops,” page 325 above.
110 Penobscot county: Hayward’s Gazetteer was outdated; in 1846 Katahdin lay in Piscataquis County, as it does today.
110 Murch Brook: actually Abol Stream.
111 Robinson Crusoe: eponymous hero of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel.
111 sitz: a bath in which one sits; a hip bath.
113 unhandselled: unused; untested; untried. The Oxford English Dictionary gives this sentence as the second of only two examples, the first being from Emerson: “Out of unhandselled savage nature … come at last Alfred and Shakespeare.”
113 lea: open meadow or pasture.
113 Matter: Thoreau is playing with the etymological link between “matter” and “mother.”
114 Balboa: Vasco Núñez de Balboa (1475-1519), Spanish explorer who first saw the Pacific from the Isthmus of Darien (now the Isthmus of Panama).
114 “When we first came”: from Hodge writing in Jackson’s Second Annual Report, p. 68.
115n instant: current.
119 of the first water: of the finest quality; the color or luster of a jewel being its water.
120 leucisci: generic name for freshwater whitefish—chub, dace, carp, minnows, and so on.
120 Cabot … Raleigh: British explorers or colonizers of North America: John Cabot (1450?-1498?), Bartholomew Gosnold (d. 1607), John Smith (1580?-1631), and Sir Walter Raleigh (1554-1618).
120 Americus Vespucius: Latin name of Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512), Italian explorer of the coast of South America.
120 New Holland: Australia.
121 Fulton: Robert Fulton (1765-1815) developed the first useful steamboat in 1807 and ran it up the Hudson River from New York to Albany.
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
Thoreau’s title for this essay changed over the years. A version was first given as a Concord Lyceum lecture on January 26, 1848, under the title “On the Relation of the Individual to the State.” When first published the next year in the journal Aesthetic Papers, it was called “Resistance to Civil Government.” In 1866, four years after Thoreau died, it was reprinted as “Civil Disobedience” in A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers. We do not know if Thoreau himself changed the title or if his family and publisher did.
The title “Civil Disobedience” is plausibly Thoreau’s, because he argues in the essay against William Paley, a British political philosopher whose book The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy has a chapter titled “The Duty of Civil Obedience.”
Whatever the later case, with the earlier “Resistance” title Thoreau distinguishes himself from the pacifist abolitionists who called themselves nonresisters (because they opposed resisting injury with injury, evil with evil). In a manuscript essay called “Reform,” Thoreau wrote that “after all the peace lectures and non resistance meetings it was never yet learned from them how any of the speakers would conduct in an emergency, because a very important disputant, one Mr. Resistance was not present to offer his arguments.” In this essay, Mr. Resistance speaks.
125 “That government is best”: motto on the tide page of a monthly journal, the United States Magazine, and Democratic Review, where the sentence reads “The best government is that which governs least.” The quotation comes from the introductory essay to the first issue of the journal (October 1837), written by the editor, John Louis O’Sull
ivan. Thoreau published the third essay in this collection, “Paradise (To Be) Regained,” in the Democratic Review in 1843. 1
25 standing army: a permanent army maintained in times of peace and war. Before the American Revolution there were two primary complaints against the standing armies that the king maintained in the American colonies. First, the British constitutional tradition held that a peacetime standing army should exist only by consent of the local community (the Declaration of Independence invokes that tradition when it complains that the king had kept armies in the colonies “without the consent of our legislatures”). Second was the question of civil liberties: What was to stop the government from using a standing army to police civilians? The Revolutionary War was fought by a combination of the Continental army and local militia. After the war, Congress cut the army to fewer than a hundred soldiers, believing that a large standing army was “dangerous to the liberties of a free people.”
125 the present Mexican war: 1846-1848, between the United States and Mexico. Many abolitionists opposed the war, fearing that territories won from Mexico would become slave states. Though not a “present war” in 1849, when the essay was first published, it had been so when Thoreau was arrested for refusing to pay his poll tax and when he delivered the earliest version of the essay as a lecture.
126 no-government men: Nonresisters such as William Lloyd Garrison and Adin Ballou subordinated “human government” to “divine government” and refused to participate in the former. “We recognize but one King and Lawgiver,” Garrison wrote. “We are bound by the laws of a kingdom which is not of this world.” Nonresisters would not hold government office, or bring actions at law, or vote, contending that all governments, even democracies, maintain themselves by coercion (jailing those who refuse to pay taxes, for example) and deeming such coercion contrary to the commands of the Gospel.
127 powder-monkeys: young soldiers employed to carry gunpowder from the storehouse to the guns.
127 Navy-Yard: the U.S. Navy Yard in Boston.
127 “Not a drum was heard”: from “The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna” by Charles Wolfe (1791-1823).
127 posse comitatus: a group of citizens summoned by a sheriff to aid in law enforcement.
127 to be “clay,” and “stop a hole”: Shakespeare, Hamlet V.i.236-37.
128 “I am too high-born”: Shakespeare, King John V.ii.79-82.
128 Revolution of ’75: The opening battles of the Revolution were fought in Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775.
128 a whole country is unjustly overrun: that is, Mexico.
128 Paley: William Paley (1743-1805), British Anglican priest and proponent of theological utilitarianism. Paley’s book The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785) was a standard text when Thoreau was a student at Harvard. At home in Concord, the pastor of the First Parish Church read to his parishioners from Paley when they began to stray, Paley’s then being a canonical voice of reasonable theology and politics. In the chapter Thoreau refers to, “The Duty of Submission to Civil Government Explained,” Paley sets out “to prove civil obedience to be a moral duty.” He considers and rejects the idea that such duty derives from an ancient and enduring social compact, then announces his own proposition: “We assign for the only ground of the subject’s obligation, THE WILL OF GOD, AS COLLECTED FROM EXPENDIENCY.” The logic that leads to this conclusion he outlines as follows:
The steps by which the argument proceeds are few and direct.—“It is the will of God that the happiness of human life be promoted:”—this is the first step, and the foundation, not only of this, but of every moral conclusion. “Civil society conduces to that end:”—this is the second proposition. “Civil societies cannot be upheld, unless in each, the interest of the whole society be binding upon every part and member of it:”—this is the third step, and conducts us to the conclusion, namely, that “so long as the interest of the whole society requires it, that is, so long as the established government cannot be resisted or changed without public inconveniency, it is the will of God (which will universally determines our duty) that the established government be obeyed,”—and no longer.
This principle being admitted, the justice of every particular case of resistance is reduced to a computation of the quality of the danger and grievance on the one side, and of the probability and expense of redressing it on the other.
Paley calls his conclusion the “rule of expediency” and says its goal is to augment “the sum of public prosperity.”
Paley’s book was first published in 1785, and the American Revolution was much on his mind, as was the earlier Puritan Revolution. He needs to allow for those events, and thus for fundamental political change, and when he does so, he seemingly supports Thoreau’s own position. In particular he admits exceptions to the duty of “submission to civil government”:
It may be as much a duty, at one time, to resist government, as it is, at another, to obey it; to wit, whenever more advantage will … accrue to the community, from resistance, than mischief.
But Paley’s resistance is not Thoreau’s resistance, as becomes apparent when Paley turns to the American Revolution. His defense of civic duty includes the clause “the interest of the whole society [should] be binding upon every part and member of it,” and he returns to the point later in discussing “the question of right between Great Britain and her revolted colonies.” He argues that colonies should judge their actions with a view toward increasing the prosperity of the whole. “Had [he] been an American,” he writes, he would have felt obliged to ask if “the whole happiness of the empire was likely to be promoted” by the Revolution and concludes that it would not. After all, the empire was large and the colonies small and “thinly populated.”
Paley elaborates the tension between part and whole by way of colony and empire, but his point applies as well to conflict between individuals and the nation, citizens being urged to judge any impulse toward resistance in terms of “the whole society.” In this manner, Paley’s utilitarianism provides the moral and theological rationale for majority rule.
This is precisely where an American interested in ongoing revolution parts company. Thoreau was one of many at the time who worried that democracy ran the risk of replacing the despotism of kings with the despotism of the crowd. His scorn of expediency is thus linked to his refusal to submit matters of conscience to majority rule. Paley proposes an obligation of civic duty that allows for change, even for revolution, but he contains both of these with the arithmetic of collective happiness. Thoreau marks the containing strategy and refuses it. In considering civic obligations, Paley looks first to the good of the collective; Thoreau looks first to his conscience. Thoreau, if forced to choose, would rather preserve rectitude than preserve the nation. “This people must cease to hold slaves,” he says, “though it cost them their existence as a people.”
129 unjustly wrested a plank: Thoreau answers Cicero’s question “If a fool should, snatch a plank from a wreck, shall a wise man wrest it from him if he is able?” De officiis III.xxiii.
129 he that would save his life: Luke 9:24; Matthew 10:39.
129 “A drab of state”: Cyril Tourneur (1575?-1626), The Revenger’s Tragedy IV.iv.72-73. The first line should read: “A drab of State, a cloath, a silver slut.”
129 a hundred thousand merchants: The Cotton Whigs of Massachusetts, especially those whose income depended on New England cotton mills, preferred to absent themselves from the politics of slavery.
129 leaven the whole lump: paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 5:6.
129 prices-current: regularly published lists of the prices at which merchandise has recently been sold.
130 All voting: Thoreau is here in accord with the no-government nonresisters, who refused to vote. “If we cannot occupy a seat in the legislature, or on the bench, neither can we elect others to act as our substitutes in any such capacity,” wrote William Lloyd Garrison. Thoreau never voted.
130 a convention … at Baltimore: th
e 1848 Democratic Party convention, in which delegates remained silent on the question of slavery. Lewis Cass was nominated as the presidential candidate, later to be defeated by the Whig Zachary Taylor.
130 Odd Fellow: a member of a secret benevolent society whose U.S. branch was founded in 1819. The object of the order was declared to be “to visit the sick, relieve the distressed, bury the dead, and educate the orphan, to improve and elevate the character of man.”
131 almshouses: houses for the common residence of the publicly supported paupers of a town. The almshouse in Concord was on the Walden Road between Walden Pond and the center of town.
131 virile garb: the toga virilis, or adult clothing, that a Roman boy was permitted to wear upon reaching age fourteen.
131 substitute: someone paid to serve in the military in the place of a conscript.
131 petitioning the State to dissolve the Union: the followers of William Lloyd Garrison, for example. The motto of Garrison’s journal, The Liberator, was “No union with slaveholders.”
132 Copernicus: Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), Polish astronomer who argued that the planets revolve around the sun. His work on the solar system was banned by the Catholic Church, but as he died soon after it was published, he was not excommunicated.
132 Luther: Martin Luther (1483-1546), German theologian and leader of the Protestant Reformation. He was excommunicated in 1521 by Pope Leo X as a result of his attacks on the wealth and corruption of the papacy and his contention that salvation depended on faith alone, not on works.
132 nine shillings: It is not clear why Thoreau uses this sum. In his own case, the tax he refused to pay was 1.50. A shilling is the twentieth part of a British pound and was worth about 23 cents in Thoreau’s time, meaning his tax was equivalent to six shillings.