Civil Disobedience

In July 1846 Transcendentalist author Henry David Thoreau was arrested in Concord, Massachusetts, for refusing to pay his poll tax in protest of the U.S. government’s support of slavery and of the Mexican-American War. As an abolitionist, Thoreau saw the war with Mexico as an attempt by the slave states to extend slavery and enhance their power with the creation of additional slave states out of the soon-to-be-acquired Mexican lands. After his arrest Thoreau spent one...