Why was thoreau jailed

On January 17, , Freeman signed over his property to the town. A strange detail is that John Cuming had left money to the town of Concord to pay any debts that Brister Freeman might accumulate. But Freeman still had to sign over his land. The town did not ask Brister Freeman to vacate the property he lived on. It is believed that the town made Freeman sign over his property so that he could not participate in town meeting, which was granted to all property owners.

How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. A few months before he moved to his utopian experiment Fruitlands , Alcott was arrested for not paying the poll tax.

He was arrested, but he did not spend time behind bars. Sources: Cain, William E. The Essays of Henry David Thoreau. Edited by Richard Dillman. In July , the sheriff arrested and jailed Thoreau for his tax delinquency. A person of conscience had to act. In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation, which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty, are slaves, and a whole country [Mexico] is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.

Thoreau argued that the government must end its unjust actions to earn the right to collect taxes from its citizens. As long as the government commits unjust actions, he continued, conscientious individuals must choose whether to pay their taxes or to refuse to pay them and defy the government.

By not paying his taxes, Thoreau explained, he was refusing his allegiance to the government. Unlike some later advocates of civil disobedience like Martin Luther King, Thoreau did not rule out using violence against an unjust government.

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