Thoreau, Garrison, and Dymond: Unbending Firmness of the Mind

Abstract

S CHOLARS of Thoreau's Resistance to Government 0( 849; originally a lecture [I 848] and later published as Civil Disobedience [i 866]) have looked backward and forward in the history of ideas to identify the essay's intellectual predecessors and to establish its subsequent influence. As existing studies show, Resistance to Government helped either to shape or to refine the outlooks of such well-known thinkers as Count Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, Upton Sinclair, and Martin Luther King, Jr.' As for intellectual progenitors, Thoreau had the example of Amos Bronson Alcott, who in I 843 had been arrested for refusing to pay a poll tax destined to support a government tolerant of slavery. And here, as scholarship illustrates, Alcott echoes the tenets of the Non-Resistance Society, which also figure in the background of Thoreau's essay. Founded in 1838, the Society differed from the Abolitionists by adopting an uncompromisingly Christian ethic of peaceful, though energetic, moral suasion as a vehicle for effecting social and political change. As Garrison and his colleagues wrote in their I 838 Declaration of Sentiments, while we shall adhere to the doctrine of non-resistance and passive submission to enemies, we purpose, in a moral and spiritual sense, to speak and act boldly in the cause of GOD. Inasmuch as Thoreau was familiar with the principles of the Non-Resistance Society, we may assume that it was the primary source, or at least the main ideological support group, for his stance on non-violent