Henry David Thoreau: The First Hippy - Hippes of the 19th Century Part 6

In November 1849, in Concord, Massachusetts, Henry David Thoreau sat down to write to Harrison Gray Otis Blake. He told Blake what his days looked like now. In the mornings he read, wrote, or made pencils for money. In the afternoons he went out walking, sometimes for miles, moving from hill to hill and pond to pond, rarely meeting anyone. Then, he would practice yoga. At rare intervals, he said, even he was a yogin. Henry David Thoreau was a pencil-maker in Concord, trying to fit the Bhagavad Gita into a life of labor, solitary walking, and refusal of ordinary social demands.

He had been moving in that direction for years. In "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", he set the Christian scriptures and the Hindu scriptures beside each other. The New Testament, he wrote, was remarkable for its pure morality; and the best of the Hindu scripture for its pure intellectuality. He singled out the Bhagavad Gita as one of the highest regions of thought available to a reader, and then repeated Warren Hastings’s prediction that Indian philosophy would survive long after British dominion in India had ceased to exist. 

While he walked and thought, at the same time, Thoreau had also been developing a determined inward discipline. A few years earlier, he had left mainstream society and begun to live a simpler life by Walden Pond, on a property owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson. What he was doing there was not hiding. He was trying to reduce the number of things that could command him. In the book he wrote of his time there, he said that had moved to Walden in order to meet “the facts of life” face to face. At Walden he read, wrote, hoed beans, cooked, fished, repaired things, and supported himself partly through pencil work and later through surveying. It was a deliberate narrowing of wants, carried on within walking distance of town, with enough independence to let him decide what he would and would not cooperate with.

One day, he was walking into Concord to have a shoe repaired. Sam Staples, the village constable and jailer, stopped him over an unpaid poll tax. Thoreau had let the tax go for years because he believed Massachusetts was complicit in slavery and in the Mexican War. Staples arrested him and he spent the night in jail. By morning, someone, probably his aunt Maria, had paid the tax without his knowledge, and he was out again. He got his shoe mended and went off to gather huckleberries. 

But that one night in jail and had just set a template that, many decades later, millions of people would follow. It was this: if you find the actions of those in power to be intolerable, you should simply refuse to cooperate. Disobey. Do not pay the tax, do not let the state conscript your body or your earnings. Do not fight back with violence, but do not cooperate. Live your own life, in your own way. He had also shown another part of the disobedience strategy: to keep your needs low, your labor your own, and to have enough distance from the machinery of society that you can say no when it asks something intolerable.

He formalized these thoughts and actions in a lecture he delivered in 1848, which he called “On the Relation of the Individual to the State.” In 1849, Elizabeth Peabody printed it as “Resistance to Civil Government.” In 1866, after Thoreau had died of tuberculosis four years earlier at the age of 44, the lecture received a new title: “Civil Disobedience.” 

Nearly half a century later, in October 1896, the essay surfaced again, this time in Russia. Tolstoy wrote to Eugen Heinrich Schmitt, a Christian anti-state writer in Central Europe, about the incompatibility between Christianity and government service. To make the point, he reached for Thoreau. Fifty years earlier, Tolstoy wrote, a not widely known but very remarkable American writer had already expressed this incompatibility in his admirable essay on "Civil Disobedience,” and had given a practical example of it by refusing to pay taxes to a government that legalized slavery, and he had chosen to go to jail for it. Thoreau, Tolstoy thought, was the first to express this view. A man who had once spent his mornings making pencils and his afternoons wandering around ponds had become, in Tolstoy’s mind, a hero of conscience.

What drew Tolstoy to Thoreau was not only tax refusal. It was the larger shape of his life. Thoreau had tried to make a human being less dependent on institutions: less dependent on salaries, churches, newspapers, social ambition, and the little daily forms of obedience that pass for common sense. Tolstoy, by the 1890s, was trying to do something similar from another direction. He had passed through a religious crisis, turned against both the church and state in Russia, and written The Kingdom of God Is Within You. There too the state appeared as a machine resting on violence and habit, and the answer was not seizure of power, but refusal of participation.

An American writer who seemed, in his own lifetime, a local eccentric and moral crank, had ended up furnishing Tolstoy with one of the clearest earlier examples of conscience set against law. Later, in 1907, Gandhi would find the same essay and use it as a founding document for his strategy to achieve freedom from British Imperlialism. It seemed that Henry David Thoreau, who had found so much inspiration in the Bhagavad Gita, had absorbed its ideas and transmitted them back to India, through Gandhi, and help free its people thousands of years later.

To those around him, Thoreau probably did not appear to be a person of much consequence. He walked a lot, didn't really have a job, and died young. But the ideas he had, and a small lecture delivered in Concord, Massachusetts, eventually would help to change the world.