*Henry David Thoreau Versus the United States*
By THOMAS H. NAYLOR
/There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the
State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent
power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and
treats him accordingly./
Henry David Thoreau, "On Civil Disobedience"
Henry David Thoreau, the iconoclastic, nineteenth century New England
writer, has long been associated with simple living, solitude,
independent thinking, environmental integrity, civil disobedience,
nonviolence, and passive resistance. But few seem to have noticed that
he was also a card-carrying secessionist.
Best known for its influence on Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr.,
the South African anti-apartheid movement, and the Eastern European
anti-communist movement in the 80s, Thoreau's famous 1849 essay "Civil
Disobedience" reads like a secessionist's manifesto.
His two-year stay at Walden Pond near Cambridge, Massachusetts between
1845 and 1847, on which his 1854 book Walden was based, was little short
of a personal secession from his village, his state, and his country.
About personal secession Thoreau once said, "Some are petitioning the
State to dissolve the Union. Why do they not dissolve it
themselves---the union between themselves and the State?"
In 1854, when the population of the United States was around 20 million,
Thoreau thought the country was already too large. "The nation itself
is an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and
tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense." He
called for a "rigid economy" and "Spartan simplicity of life."
"Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!" he said.
Thoreau's principal grievances with the federal government were over its
de facto support of slavery and its participation in the
Mexican-American War, both of which he considered to be immoral.
/When a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to
be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country (Mexico) is
unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army (the U.S. Army),
and subjected to military law, I think it is not too soon for honest
men to rebel and revolutionize./
During the first half of the nineteenth century before the Civil War,
New England was a political hotbed for secessionists, most of whom were
abolitionists. Massachusetts Senator Timothy Pickering, a former
high-ranking general in the Revolutionary War, was one of the most
important leaders of the New England secession movement.
New England Federalists, who believed that the policies of the Jefferson
and Madison administrations were proportionately more harmful to New
England than to other parts of the country, thrice led independence
movements aimed respectively at the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, the
national embargo of 1807, and the War of 1812. In 1814 New England
secessionists expressed their opposition to the War of 1812 and the
military draft of the Hartford Convention.
Thoreau, who was vehemently opposed to slavery, called for abolitionists
to "effectively withdraw their support, both in person and property,
from the government of Massachusetts." He told them that, "if they had
God on their side, even though they did not constitute a majority, that
was enough."
In response to the question, "How does it become a man to behave toward
this American government today?" Thoreau presciently responded, "He
cannot without disgrace be associated with it." Clearly a man ahead of
his time!
As for civil disobedience, of which secession is a special case, Thoreau
said, "If an injustice requires you to be the agent of injustice to
another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a
counter-friction to stop the government machine." Thoreau actually
spent a night in jail for not paying his poll-tax.
No doubt many anarchists have taken note of the following two statements
by Thoreau in "Civil Disobedience. "That government is best which
governs not at all," and "I simply wish to refuse allegiance to the
State, to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually."
If Thoreau were alive today, it seems unlikely that he would have an
e-mail address. He was not convinced that we all had to be connected.
/We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine
to Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to
communicate...We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring
the Old World some weeks nearer to the New, but perchance the first
news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear
will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough./
Perhaps the reason given by Thoreau as to why he escaped to Walden Pond
says it all:
/I//went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to
front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn
what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I
had not lived.
//I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live
so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life./
Thoreau's philosophy of secession was based on the premise that an
individual's moral principles have the first claim on his or her
actions, and that any government which requires violation of these
principles has no legitimate authority whatsoever.
One can only imagine what Thoreau would think of the United States today
-- a nation which has lost its moral authority and is unsustainable,
ungovernable, and unfixable. What would he think of a government owned,
operated, and controlled by corporate America and Wall Street? How
would he feel about the illegal wars with Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya?
What about our unconditional support for the bellicose state of Israel?
Would he condone the torture of military combatant prisoners? And,
alas, the war on terror?
Henry David Thoreau was arguably the most thoughtful, nonviolent
secessionist of the nineteenth century. Unlike well known southern
secessionists such as John C. Calhoun, Jefferson Davis, and Robert E.
Lee, Thoreau's message was not tainted by the scourge of slavery.
Modern day New England liberals who summarily reject secession as a kind
of racist conspiracy, should re-visit Thoreau. They just might be
surprised at what they find.
Thomas H. Naylor is Founder of the Second Vermont Republic and Professor
Emeritus of Economics at Duke University. His books include: Downsizing
the U.S.A., Affluenza, The Search for Meaning and The Abandoned
Generation: Rethinking Higher Education
http://counterpunch.org/naylor04192011.html
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