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Who paid Henry David Thoreau’s poll tax and secured his release from jail?
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Henry David Thoreau
American essayist, poet, and Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau.
The individual who paid Henry David Thoreau’s poll tax and secured his release from jail remains unidentified. It is often suggested that the person may have been his aunt, Maria Thoreau, but this has not been definitively confirmed.12
Thoreau had spent a single night in jail in July 1846 after refusing to pay the tax as an act of civil disobedience against the U.S. government's support of slavery and the Mexican-American War.132