Henry David Thoreau - The Price Of Freedom: Political Philosophy From Thoreaus Journals

This collection of excerpts from the journals of Henry David Thoreau concerning law, government, man in society, war, economics, duty, and conscience is divided into several parts:

These are based on the journals transcribed by Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen in their The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau (1906), the online journal transcripts at The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau website and on the lost volume transcribed by Perry Miller in Consciousness in Concord (1958).

Footnotes are mine unless otherwise noted. I mostly stuck by the transcriptions used in the sources mentioned above, occasionally omitting brackets when they were used to insert some obvious missing article or end-quote, or when the intended addition seemed unnecessary. I sometimes used ellipses to omit material without distinguishing these from ellipses used by the editors of the transcribed journals or by Thoreau himself.

You can also find these excerpts at my website, The Picket Line ( http://sniggle.net/Experiment ), along with hyperlinks leading to additional source material and supplemental material that fleshes out the footnotes.

David Gross

Some time ago, I read Sandra Harbert Petrulioniss study of how Thoreau had used his journal when composing the speech that would become his essay Slavery in Massachusetts.1 Petrulionis wrote:

A comparison of the text of Slavery in Massachusetts with the Journal from which it derives reveals that Thoreau curtailed the Journals stridency, revising or cutting more than twenty passages that with few exceptions can be categorized as blasphemous, revolutionary, or, at best, politically incautious. In the Journal, among other infractions, Thoreau equates the suffering of slaves with Christs, and he unequivocally advocates violence in the fight to end slavery.

After reading this I became curious about what other blasphemous, revolutionary, [and] politically incautious passages might be lurking in the journals: ones that Thoreau considered too dangerous for publication his private thoughts, which, as he noted in Slavery in Massachusetts, tended towards murder to the State.

In his journal, Thoreau noted that the best of a persons thoughts were not those that were filtered for public approval:

We forget to strive and aspire, to do better ever than is expected of us. I cannot stay to be congratulated. I would leave the world behind me. We must withdraw from our flatterers, even from our friends. They drag us down. It is rare that we use our thinking faculty as resolutely as an Irishman his spade. To please our friends and relatives we turn out our silver ore in cartloads, while we neglect to work our mines of gold known only to ourselves far up in the Sierras, where we pulled up a bush in our mountain walk, and saw the glittering treasure. Let us return thither. Let it be the price of freedom to make that known.2

I hoped to rediscover some of this gold that Thoreau mined but didnt or couldnt publish.

Could I do justice to his writing by assembling it in bits and pieces? On the one hand, his journals often read as though they were meant to be fodder for such a collection of excerpts a paragraph break for him might as well be the opening of a new volume. On the other hand, sometimes a closer look at the paragraphs surrounding one of his seemingly out-of-the-blue political aphorisms reveals, if not an explicit metaphor, a train of thought that runs better with engine and caboose still attached.

Thoreau himself wondered about this:

I do not know but thoughts written down thus in a journal might be printed in the same form with greater advantage than if the related ones were brought together into separate essays. They are now allied to life, and are seen by the reader not to be far-fetched. It is more simple, less artful. I feel that in the other case I should have no proper frame for my sketches. Mere facts and names and dates communicate more than we suspect. Whether the flower looks better in the nosegay than in the meadow where it grew and we had to wet our feet to get it! Is the scholastic air any advantage?3

For example, take Thoreaus entry of 4 September 18514 in which he notes that as people have domesticated animals there seems to be a dimension on which we and our drudge-beasts have met somewhere half-way. There are so many other places in that days lengthy entry in which men and beasts take each others places: squirrels gamboling like human performers, men walking in the roads horse-track with two more in the wheel-ruts, the dog in whose eye Thoreau see[s] the eye of his master.

The previous day,5 he wrote sympathetically about a work-horse who was carting dirt for his owner and tried to imagine the race of horses before they were subdued by man. There is a continuity between this and his more explicit thoughts the following day that is more poignant when both passages are read, but I wanted to try to maintain a tight focus for the sake of brevity and so I have left out much material that on a close reading might prove to be very much to the point.

It is wise to write on many subjects, to try many themes, that so you may find the right and inspiring one. Be greedy of occasions to express your thought. Improve the opportunity to draw analogies. There are innumerable avenues to a perception of the truth.... It is not in vain that the mind turns aside this way or that: follow its leading; apply it whither it inclines to go. Probe the universe in a myriad points.... He is a wise man and experienced who has taken many views; to whom stones and plants and animals and a myriad objects have each suggested something, contributed something.6

So be it. In the course of taking selections from several thousand pages of Thoreaus journal searching for those moments when hed look away from his turtles and trees and telegraph harps, gaze with contempt on civilization, and make an observation or two about how people treat each other (or how they ought to) I inevitably had to draw the line somewhere: including some sections that only tangentially touch on political philosophy, and leaving out others that deal with mostly personal, as opposed to interpersonal, virtue.

Thoreau would have preferred not to concern himself with political issues at all. He didnt like politics, or government, or society, and was frequently disappointed even by his friends. But the last decades of legal slavery in America were an impossible time for an American to be honestly aloof and neutral.

Civil Disobedience was partially an attempt by Thoreau to withdraw from politics at the same time he was engaging in it. He had a utopian daydream of a State that he could be allowed to ignore:

I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose, if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men.

He knows the current State wont allow this, but he still hopes he can just go along with it to the extent that it demands:

I do not wish to quarrel with any man or nation. I do not wish to split hairs, to make fine distinctions, or set myself up as better than my neighbors. I seek rather, I may say, even an excuse for conforming to the laws of the land. I am but too ready to conform to them. Indeed, I have reason to suspect myself on this head; and each year, as the tax-gatherer comes round, I find myself disposed to review the acts and position of the general and state governments, and the spirit of the people to discover a pretext for conformity.