Henry David Thoreau Was a Great American Dissident
One afternoon in the summer of 1846, Henry David Thoreau left his hut near Walden Pond and walked into town to pick up a shoe he was having mended. He was stopped by the local tax collector, who nudged him for the umpteenth time about paying his poll tax—the dollar and a half that every man over the age of 20 had to pay annually, or else lose the right to vote. The tax collector, who wanted to clear his books, even offered to cover the bill, which hadn’t been paid for four years. But Thoreau refused, and he was taken to jail. The one night he spent in a second-floor cell overlooking his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts, was not particularly dramatic. But it was clarifying. As an opponent of slavery, he understood that paying the tax would mean legitimizing a government “which is the slave’s government also,” he later wrote. He couldn’t do that, and so he didn’t. Thoreau has served different prophetic purposes at various moments in American history, depending on what we …
