Thoreau has no objection to government taxes for highways and schools, which make good neighbors. Thoreau’s classic essay popularly known as “ Civil Disobedience” was first published as “ Resistance to Civil Government” in Aesthetic Papers (1849). Individual resistance to the State has a long historical foreground, reaching back to Sophocles’ play Antigone, through many episodes of religious dissent against authority, to Thoreau’s friend Bronson Alcott’s arrest in 1843 who also refused to pay his poll tax. This act of defiance was a protest against slavery and against the Mexican War, which Thoreau and other abolitionists regarded as a means to expand the slave territory. Thoreau was arrested and imprisoned in Concord for one night in 1846 for nonpayment of his poll tax. The Thoreau Log: A Digital Documentary Life of Henry D.News from The Walden Woods Project Farm.The Transcendentalists: Their Lives & Writings.
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