Thoreau why are you not in jail

I simply wish to refuse allegiance to the State, to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually. I do not care to trace the course of my dollar, if I could, till it buys a man, or a musket to shoot one with—the dollar is innocent—but I am concerned to trace the effects of my allegiance. In a mention of his night in jail in the book Walden , published in , Thoreau wrote :.

In , Alcott refused to pay the poll tax, as a symbolic protest against slavery. As a sort of symbolic punishment, the local sheriff put Alcott in jail for a couple of hours until someone possibly his wife paid the tax for him. Three years later, Concord Constable Sam Staples stopped Thoreau on the street on either July 23 or July 24, and urged him to pay up.

According to an article in the August issue of the venerable history magazine American Heritage , Staples even offered to loan Thoreau the money.

Thoreau told Staples he was still refusing to pay. Either way, it was simply a symbolic gesture. The poll tax supported city services, not the state or federal government, and it had no real financial connection to slavery or the Mexican-American War.

At any rate, it is true that Thoreau spent one night in jail for his principled act of tax evasion. He was released the next day after someone probably his aunt Maria Thoreau paid the tax for him. Staples disagreed and made him leave. Rural officers of those days—and often nowadays too— tended to consider themselves the law; they had no legal training.

He probably assumed that any violation of the law was to be answered by arrest. As for Thoreau, since he knew Alcott had been arrested for the same offense, he too probably assumed that incarceration was the legal punishment for nonpayment of taxes. Certainly for his own purposes arrest would have been preferable to a public auction of his books. Martyrdom of the protester is one of the essential elements of the theory of civil disobedience.

The reasoning is that if a protester is willing to suffer martyrdom, he is much more likely to win a sympathetic ear from his fellow man for his cause. It has often been wondered why it took Sam Staples three years to get around to arresting Thoreau.

Staples was not only the constable for Concord, but also the tax collector and, as a matter of fact, the jailer, too. The office of tax collector was neither an appointive nor an elective office; it was open to the lowest bidder.

In Staples won the office with a bid of collection charges of one cent on the dollar, a rate he had raised to one and a half cents by In he resigned his office. Then two years, two months, and two days after he had moved to Walden, Thoreau "left the woods for as good a reason as I went there.

Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. Walden, or, Life in the Woods was published on August 9, Unlike his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers , which sold poorly, sales of Walden were strong from the start. With the exception of a three-year period , the book has never been out of print. It has been translated into almost every language and has sold tens of millions of copies. Henry David Thoreau was an original thinker and a gifted writer, who produced an extraordinary body of work — journals, essays, poetry, and books.

He was also a magnificent naturalist. Taking a walk with him, Emerson remembered, was like walking with an encyclopedia. Thoreau recognized every animal track, every wildflower, and every bird call. Concord Museum has Thoreau's bed, desk and chair from his cabin at Walden Pond and an exhibit of pencil making-related artifacts.

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods Library. Walden Pond State Reservation has a replica of Thoreau's cabin and a trail to its original site. He spoke about the situation in Kansas, where a bitter struggle was underway between pro- and anti-slavery settlers. In a matter-of-fact On this day in , a group of three adults and five children made its way from Concord to the town of Harvard. Their destination was an old and dilapidated farmhouse in a beautiful but On this day in the first issue of the Transcendentalist magazine "The Dial" was published in Boston.

The moving force behind this "journal in a new spirit" was Ralph Waldo Emerson, the man who July 23, Share this story. Comments 7. The primary inaccuracy is in the exaggeratuion of of the quality of Thoreau pencils and its false description of Thoreau's pencil-making process innovations.

It alleges that "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. The pencils the Thoreaus made did once win a local prize for quality, but to the best of my knowledge this local award did not take into account all pencils manufactured anywhere, and was a recognition of excellent quality, rather than an acclaimation that these pencils were any better than any other fine art pencils being manufactured.

In the last few years of his life, HDT and his sister had to take over the business after the death of their father and sold this powdered graphite to electrotyping businesses in Boston, but took some care to keep secret the specific nature of their business in order to avoid competition. They no longer bothered with the pencils, because the graphite by itself was more profitable. Inhaling the fine dust, certainly did not help his lung condition.

Someone once noted that the fine dust had infiltrated the Thoreau household the small hand-powered mill was next to the house and the graphite may have been packaged inside the house and that the keys of their piano had been blackened with the dust. After the first night, however, somebody interfered and paid his tax, and so he was released from prison the next day.

Upon Thoreau's release, it seemed some kind of change had come over the town, the State and the country. He realized that the people he lived with were only friends in the good times.

They were not interested in justice or in taking any risks. He soon left the town and was out of view of the State again. Thoreau says that he always pays the highway tax because he wants to be a good neighbor, but, generally, he avoids all taxes. However, his refusal to pay taxes is not based on a desire to boycott one or two government practices in particular or the practices that a certain tax funds. Rather, he is refusing allegiance to the State as a whole.

If the person did it to help him, then he or she was letting his or her private feelings interfere with the public good. Thoreau says that he sometimes wants to respect his neighbors' desires, knowing that they mean well.

However, he reminds himself that there are other people e.