Law Commons^™

Radical Resisters, David B. Lyons

Faculty Scholarship

In the early 1840s Henry David Thoreau stopped paying the Massachusetts poll tax. When pressed for payment in 1846, he invited arrest and went to jail. He had wanted to protest his state's complicity in the federal government's support of chattel slavery and its policies towards Native Americans. By the time he delivered his lecture on civil disobedience, in 1848, events had produced another cause. Thoreau also condemned this country's expansionist war against Mexico.