LITR 4232 American Renaissance 2008
Text-Objective Presentation

Thursday, 16 October: Henry David Thoreau 1853-1872, introduction + “Resistance to Civil Government” + Backgrounds to Civil Disobedience

Text-Objective Discussion: Faron Samford

Thoreau – Resistance to Civil Government

Objective 2. To study the movement of "Romanticism," the narrative genre of "romance," and the related styles of the "gothic" and "the sublime." (The American Renaissance is the major period of American Romantic Literature.)

Thoreau uses the transcendentalist ideals for his approach to Resistance to Civil Government, by believing that the law of the land is not the highest law that should be followed, but that actions of a government and its citizens should be guided by a “Higher Law” of right and wrong.

Page 1858: “But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience? … It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.”

Page 1858 : “A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences…they have no doubt that it is damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small moveable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power?”

Page 1859: “I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also.”

Page 1862: “It is not a man’s duty , as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong…but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.”

1862 – “Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?”

1863 – “What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.”

Questions:

1. What elements of Thoreau’s ideas fit with the Transcendentalists?

2. How does he justify the use of passive resistance?

3. What is Thoreau really trying to motivate people to do? Is it to overthrow the government or to refine it?