I was fairly inside of it. I never had seen its institutions before. This is one of its peculiar institutions; for it is a shire town. I began to comprehend what its inhabitants were about. In the morning, our breakfasts were put through the hole in the door, in small oblong-square tin pans, made to fit, and holding a pint of chocolate, with brown bread, and an iron spoon.
When they called for the vessels again, I was green enough to return what bread I had left; but my comrade seized it, and said that I should lay that up for lunch or dinner. Soon after he was let out to work at haying in a neighboring field, whither he went every day, and would not be back till noon; so he bade me good-day, saying that he doubted if he should see me again.
On this day in , Henry David Thoreau left his cabin at Walden Pond for a brief walk into town and ended up in the Concord jail for refusing to pay his poll tax. A fervent abolitionist, Thoreau explained, "I cannot for an instant recognize. He never knew who. Although Thoreau objected, the constable insisted on releasing him. This experience led him to write a powerful lecture on the "relation of the individual to the State.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Other than a rowboat and his books, he owned almost nothing. He boarded mostly with his family, and on several occasions, with the Emersons. Henry David Thoreau was on an errand in town when he encountered Sam Staples, the Concord constable, tax collector, and jailer. Staples took the opportunity to ask Thoreau to pay his back taxes. The independent-minded, highly principled naturalist refused, and Staples politely escorted him to jail.
When he found himself incarcerated, he took full advantage of the new experience. Fascinated, he "pumped" his cellmate for "the history of the various occupants of that room [and] found that even here there was a history and a gossip which never circulated beyond the walls of the jail.
It was not the brevity of his stay that angered him but the interference with his act of conscience and the fuss it caused. For the past six years, he had refused to pay the poll tax imposed on all males 20 to 70 years old to protest the institution of slavery. To his great annoyance during his short stay in jail, someone paid it for him. Thoreau's mother and sisters were active in the Women's Anti-Slavery Society of Concord, founded in , and he had long been involved in the anti-slavery movement, but he preferred to protest through individual action.
His family sheltered a number of fugitive slaves, and he would escort them to the next safe house or to an out-of-the-way train station. He delivered powerful lectures against slavery. And he withheld his taxes. As he later wrote in "Civil Disobedience," he believed "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; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and.
Henry David Thoreau always had "other concerns to engage him. Exceptionally practical and resourceful, Thoreau improved pencil lead by baking the graphite mixture into cylinders and invented a machine that drilled a hole in the wood so the lead cylinder could simply be slipped in.
Thoreau, who was living in his cabin at Walden pond at the time of the arrest, was not the first Concord resident to be arrested for failing to pay this tax. The incident later inspired Thoreau to write his essay Civil Disobedience in which Thoreau argues for nonviolent, passive disobedience to protest unjust government actions.
Exactly like Thoreau, Freeman did not pay his poll tax for six years. His debt accumulated to 7 pounds, 19 shillings. Freeman, who did odd jobs to provide for his family, decided to surrender his half of the property. On January 17, , Freeman signed over his property to the town. A strange detail is that John Cuming had left money to the town of Concord to pay any debts that Brister Freeman might accumulate.
But Freeman still had to sign over his land. The town did not ask Brister Freeman to vacate the property he lived on. Henry David Thoreau was a supremely efficient tax protester. Measured in terms of social impact per unit of personal sacrifice, he managed something remarkable years ago, when he was jailed — briefly, but significantly — for refusing to pay his taxes in Concord, Massachusetts.
On July 23, , Thoreau was walking from his rustic cabin on Walden Pond to run an errand in the nearby town of Concord. By the time he encountered Staples on that midsummer afternoon, Thoreau was no neophyte when it came to tax protesting. He had stopped paying taxes several years earlier, moved to action by the anti-slavery tax protest of his friend and neighbor Amos Bronson Alcott father of author Louisa May Alcott.
Alcott had been arrested in for his own failure to pay poll taxes. Like Alcott, Thoreau believed that taxes — any taxes, paid to any level of government — were morally compromised by the institution of slavery. The fine distinctions of fiscal federalism were immaterial to both men: Local and state levies like the poll tax were important, if indirect, pillars of the national slave state. But after the United States USM declared war on Mexico in , Thoreau denounced the move as yet another effort to protect and extend slavery.
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