Conscience and Consciousness: The Liberal Christian Context of Thoreau's
Political Ethics
James Duban
The New England Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 2. (Jun., 1987), pp. 208-222.
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Conscience and Consciousness : The Liberal Christian Context of Thoreau's Political Ethics JAMES DUBAN
I
N a college essay submitted on 19 May 1837, young Henry
David Thoreau wrote, "the fear of displeasing the world
ought not, in the least, to influence my actions; were it otherwise the principal avenue to reform would be closed."'
Thoreau followed this dictum when in 1846 he was jailed for
refusing to pay a poll tax destined to support American
aggression against Mexico and, to his mind, the extension of
slavery into the American Southwest. Thoreau's reflections on
his jailing--delivered as a lecture in 1848 and first published
under the title of "Resistance to Civil Government" the following year-have elicited a variety of critical responses,
several of which concentrate upon "influence": some detail
the impact of Thoreau's essay upon such writers and thinkers
as Count Leo Tolstoy, Upton Sinclair, Mahatma Gandhi, and
Martin Luther King, Jr.; looking back in time, others see in
Thoreau's conscientious dissent a reaction to Plato's Crito and,
as Thoreau himself makes clear, to Paley's Moral and Political
Philosophy. Figuring more positively in the formulation of
Thoreau's views were, perhaps, the individualistic outlooks of
Sophocles's Antigone, Milton's Areopagitica, Jonathan
Dymond's Essays on the Principles of Morality, and Emerson's
' Essay on "the duty, inconvenience, and dangers of conformity," in Henry D.
Thoreau, Early Essays and Miscellanies, ed. Joseph J . Moldenhauer et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 106.
THOREAU'S POLITICAL ETHICS
209
"Self Reliance" and T politic^."^ Thoreau seems also to have
been indebted to the "non-resistant" antislavery protests of
William Lloyd Garrison and Charles Lane, as well as to Amos
Bronson Alcott's refusal to pay his poll tax to a government
. ~ to be
tolerant of slavery, an act that led to his a r r e ~ t Still
addressed, however, is the Unitarian dimension of Thoreau's
account of his resistance, especially with respect to his dual
emphasis on conscience and consciousness.
The idea-only
partly true-persists
that Thoreau's
Resistance to Civil Government" pushes a mainly transcendental spiritualism to its sociopolitical conclusions.* Transcendentalism is implicated insofar as it espoused self-reliance and
celebrated the moral sentiment, yet transcendentalism was
itself indebted to several key tenets of Unitarian Christianity.
Notwithstanding Emerson's, Parker's, and Ripley's rejection
of Unitarian rationalism and historiography, recent scholarship has detailed the aesthetic and rhetorical similarities
between transcendental prose and the Unitarian sermon form
and has shown that the idea of self-culture-which is central to
' I
Walter Harding, "The Influence of Civil Disobedience" (1963). reproduced as
part of the introduction to Harding's The Variorum Civil Disobedience (New York:
Twayne, 1967), pp. 11-28; George Hendrick, "The Influence of Thoreau's 'Civil
Disobedience' on Gandhi's Satyagraha," New England Quarterly 29 (1956):
462-71; Michael Meyer, Several More Lioes to Lice: Thoreau's Political Reprrtation in America (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. 1977); George Anastaplo,
"On Civil Disobedience: Thoreau and Socrates," Southwest Review 54 (1969):
203-14; Martin K. Doudna, "Echoes of Milton, Donne, and Carlyle in 'Civil
Disobedience,' Thoreau Jourrlal Quarterly 12 (1980): 5-7; (on Antigone) Richard
Drinnon, "Thoreau's Politics of the Upright Man" (1962), in The Recognition of
Henry Daaid Thoreau, ed. Wendell Glick (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1969), pp. 365-66; James Duban, "Thoreau, Garrison, and Dymond:
Unbending Firmness of the &find," American Literature 57 (1985): 309-17; (on
Paley and Emerson) Raymond Adams, "Thoreau's Sources for 'Resistance to Civil
Government,' Studies in Philology 42 (1945): 642-46, 651-53.
\%dams, "Thoreau's Sources," pp. 647-51; Wendell Glick, "Thoreau and Radical
Abolitionism: A Study of the Native Background of Thoreau's Social Philosophy"
(Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1950); John C. Rroderick, "Thoreau. Alcott,
and the Poll Tax," Studies in Philology 5 3 (1956): 612-26; Taylor Stoehr, NaySaying in Concord: Emerson, Alcott, and Thoreau (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books,
1979), pp. 44-66.
" Edward H. Madden, Ciuil Disobedience and Moral Law in Nineteenth-Century
American Philosophy (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968), p. 97;
Christopher Lyle Johnstone, "Thoreau and Civil Disobedience: A Rhetorical Paradox." Quarterly Journal of Speech 60 (1974): 315.
"
"
210
THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY
Emerson's moral vision-stems from a prior Unitarian ethic.
"Transcendentalism," we are advised, "is best seen not as a
repudiation but as an outgrowth of trends in Unitarian
tho~ght"~-an observation that can profitably be applied to
Thoreau's ideas about conscience in "Resistance to Civil
Government."
Granted, notions about the supremacy of conscience predated the utterances of American Unitarians. Beyond Sophocles and Milton, one could cite Roger Williams or-with
reference to the kindred issue of majorities and minorities-the Constitution, Jefferson, The Federalist, Cooper, or
d e Tocqueville. One must also grant that among Thoreau's
contemporaries in the 1840s were eminent thinkers-including at least some Unitarians-who thought themselves conscientious in taking a gradualist approach to slavery or in supporting the Fugitive Slave Law.6 Nonetheless, when the
writings of Unitarian thinkers William Ellery Channing, John
Walker, and Henry Whitney Bellows are studied in relation to
"Resistance to Civil Government," a valuable clue to an
apparent and troubling contradiction in Thoreau's thought
emerges as well. Specifically, the way in which Channing and
Walker equate conscience and consciousness can help us
Lawrence Buell, Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American
Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), p. 19 (see also, pp. 76, 90,
118, 134-35); David Robinson, Apostle of Culture: Emerson as Preacher and
Lecturer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), pp. 7-60. Also see
Robinson's review essay, "Unitarian Historiography and the American Renaissance," ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 23 (1977): 130-37, and
Conrad Wright, "Unitarianism and Transcendentalism," in The Transcendentalists: A Review of Research and Criticism, ed. Joel Myerson (New York: Modern
Language Association of America, 1984), pp. 45-55.
I have in mind Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw (Unitarian), Francis Wayland
(Baptist), Moses Stuart (Calvinist), Orville Dewey (Unitarian), and George Putnam
(Unitarian). See Leonard W. Levy, The Law of the Commonwealth and Chief
Justice Shaw (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), pp. 73-108; (on Francis
Wayland) Madden, Civil Disobedience and Moral Law, p. 32; "Dr. Dewey on
Conscience and Law," New York Christian Inquirer, 13 May 1851, p. 1; Moses
Stuart, Conscience and the Constitution (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1850), pp.
59-65; George Putnam, God and Our Country (Boston: W. Crosby and H. P.
Nichols, 1847). An informative overview of both conservative and liberal responses
to conscience is D. H. Meyer's The Instructed Conscience: The Shaping of the
American National Ethic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972).
THOREAU'S POLITICAL ETHICS
211
understand how Thoreau might have justified, morally and
epistemologically, bridging the extremes of the pacifism he
expressed in "Resistance to Civil Government" and the
defense of murder he advanced in "A Plea for Captain John
Brown" (1859).7Whatever consistency exists between these
two works quite possibly hinges upon a rather conservative
notion-but one nonetheless espoused by Unitarians and
echoed by Thoreau-that
the dictates of conscience correspond to universally prescribed standards of morality. In this
respect, Thoreau may either be less radical than is commonly
assumed or may strategically evoke certain conservative attitudes to enhance the appeal of his own views for a broad
audience.
In "Resistance to Civil Government" Thoreau emphasizes
the moral aspect of individualism and conscientiousness.
Regarding government as a mere "expedient," he insists that
"There will never be a really free and enlightened State, until
the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and
independent power, from which all its own power and
authority are d e r i ~ e d . "Springing
~
from such individualism is
the essay's antimajoritarianism: "government," says Thoreau,
should cherish a "wise minority," and individuals should be
disposed, for the sake of a moral cause, to constitute "a majority of one" (pp. 73, 74). The ability to do so depends upon the
"free exercise . . . of the judgment or of the moral sense" (p.
66). For Thoreau that category of the moral judgment antecedent to behavior is conscience, and this sense of the term
informs his query, "Can there not be a government in which
majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience? . . . Must the citizen ever for a moment . . . resign
The debate about Thoreau's consistency is ongoing. For the most eloquent
statement of the incompatibility of "Resistance to Civil Government" and "A
Plea," see Glick, "Thoreau and Radical Abolitionism," pp. 215-17. For elements of
consistency in Thoreau's thought, see William A . Herr, "Thoreau on Violence,"
Thoreau Society Bulletin 131 (1975): 2-4; James Goodwin, "Thoreau and John
Brown: Transcendental Politics," ESQ 25 (1979): 15668.
"Resistance to Civil Government," in Henry D. Thoreau: Reform Papers, ed.
Wendell Glick (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), pp. 63, 89; henceforth
cited parenthetically in the text.
212
THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY
his conscience to the legislator?" (p. 65).Believing that a sort of
"blood [is] shed when the conscience is wounded" (p. 77),
Thoreau would have people sometimes "serve the state with
their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it" (p. 66)especially when the state demands the perpetration of a
wrong: "if . . . it requires you to be the agent of injustice to
another, then, I say, break the law" (p. 73). Still, in his
statement that "there must be some absolute goodness somewhere" (p. 69) and in his remark that "for eighteen hundred
years . . . the New Testament has been written; yet where is
the legislator who has wisdom . . . enough to avail himself of
the light which it sheds on the science of legislation?" (p. 89),
Thoreau suggests that his apparently radical outlook is actually consistent with long-established religious values; "absolute right," he elsewhere mused, is "synonymous with the law
of
A related approach to conscience circulated among the Unitarian faculty at Thoreau's alma mater, Harvard College.
Indebted in part to the Scottish Common Sense philosophy and
British moral theology of Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, and
Bishop Butler, such professors as Levi Frisbie, Henry Ware,
and James Walker everywhere stressed humanity's conscientious and religious faculties.1° In so doing, they challenged the
Trinitarian denigration of human nature. By acknowledging a
correspondence between moral and religious dimensions,
however, they refused to credit the autonomy of ethics and
conscience in human affairs. As Professor Francis Bowen
remarked, an extreme reliance on ethical intuition would render moot the "necessity for divine interference, either to give
additional sanction to the law itself, or to supply stronger
An entry for 16 March 1842, in Henry D . Thoreau, Journal, Volume 1: 1837-44,
ed. John C. Broderick e t al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp.
378-79.
l o See Daniel Walker Howe, The Unitarian Conscience: Harcard Moral Philosophy, 1805-1861 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 4 7 4 4 , 94;
hleyer, Thoreau's Political Reputation, pp. 37-40; William J. Norton, Jr., Bishop
Butler: Moralist and Divine (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press,
1940), pp. 84-114.
THOREAU'S POLITICAL ETHICS
213
motives for respecting it as a rule of action."" A contributor to
the Unitarian Christian Examiner captured the point more
succinctly: conscience "is an inherent part of man's nature"
but conscience "is, in itself, a strictly religious principle; . . .
man is made, by his conscience, a religious being."12
This tendency simultaneously to exalt and subordinate conscience is evident in the writings of America's most eminent
Unitarian, William Ellery Channing. While acknowledging
conscience" to be the "supreme power within us," Channing
nonetheless confirms that it possesses a "Sovereignty" that
"speaks with a divine authority." Elsewhere invoking "the
divine faculty of conscience," Channing anticipates Thoreau's
rejection of Paley's expediential morality: "conscience . . .
has stronger claims upon [us] than what is recommended as
merely agreeable or advantageou~."'~
Also, Thoreau's subordination of civil authority to the voice of God manifest in private conscience finds precedent in a passage from Channing's
"Spiritual Freedom" :
"
[TIhe individual is not made for the state, so much as the state for the
individual. . . . The human soul is greater, more sacred, than the
state, and must never be sacrificed to it. . . . [Glovernments have
tended greatly to obscure this importance of the individual, . . . to
give him the ideas of an outward interest more important than the
invisible soul, and of an outward authority more sacred than the
voice of God in his own secret conscience.
A further parallel with Thoreau is Channing's articulation of
an "antinomian" respect for conscience: "were an individual
ever called to serve his country by acts debasing to his own
mind, he ought not to waver a moment as to the good which he
should prefer. . . . [Flor no good of others ought he to .
" Francis Bowen, "Fiehte's Exposition of Kant: Philosophy Applied to Theology,"
in his Critical Essays, on a Few Subjects Connected with the History and Present
Condition of Speculatine Philosophy (Boston: H . B. William, 1842), pp. 102-3.
l 2 "The Argument for Natural Religion," Christian Examiner 19 (1835): 151.
l 3 William Ellery Channing, "Address on Self-Culture" (1838), "Evidences of
Christianity," and "The Evil of Sin," in The Works of William E. Channing, D.D.,
4th ed., 6 vols. (Boston: James Munroe and Co., 18451, 2:358, 3:335, 4:155.
214
THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY
violate the inward law."14 But precisely what this inward law
is Channing does not say; instead, he implicitly relies upon a
consensus of his Christian readers. Thus, beneath the
apparent radicalism of Channing's thoughts about conscience
lurks the sort of conservative appeal to consensus ethics that is
at the center of Thoreau's defense of John Brown.
A similar perspective on conscience can be found in the
writings of Henry Whitney Bellows (1814-82), a noted Unitarian minister who sought a middle ground on which to reconcile
conservative and radical Unitarians.15 Echoing Channing and
anticipating Thoreau, Bellows argued in 1842 that "Reason,
including in this term what is called conscience, is God in us"
and that the faculty of conscience comprises "[mlan's dignity"
and "likeness to God."16 Within a year Thoreau would hear
Bellows preach, and Emerson-with whom Thoreau regularly
exchanged ideas-knew Bellows socially. We would do well,
then, to review Bellows's ideas with an eye toward how they
may have been considered by Thoreau. Although Bellows was
more moderate than ~ h o r e a uon the subject i f abolitionism,
his opinions still provide striking precedent for several of
Thoreau's.17
In a sermon delivered in 1843, Bellows takes the stand--one
well known to his orthodox antagonists-that "the individual
mind is the sole interpreter of the Bible. The right of private
Channing, "Spiritual Freedom" (1830), in Works, 4:7&79.
See Conrad Wright, "Henry W. Bellows and the Organization of the National
Conference," in Wright's The Liberal Christians: Essays on American Unitarian
History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), pp. 81-109.
l6 A Discourse Occasioned by the Death of William Ellery Channing, D . D . (New
York: Charles S. Francis and Co., 1842), pp. 16, 15.
l7 See Walter Donald Kring, Henry Whitney Bellows (Boston: Skinner House,
1979), pp. 102-9, for Bellows's conscientious, but still moderate, application of
conscience to the politically complex issue of slavery. Thoreau's attendance at one
of Bellows's sermons is evident from Thoreau's 29 August 1843 letter to his mother:
"On sunday I heard Mr Bellows p r e a c h . . .-but the fine prospect over the bay
and narrows from where I sat preached louder than h e t h o u g h he did far better
than the average, if I remember aright" (The Correspondence of Henry Daoid
Thoreau, ed. Walter Harding and Carl Bode [New York: New York University
Press, 19581, p. 135). For Emerson's acquaintance with Bellows, see The Letters of
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk, 6 vols. (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1939), 3:14, 26, 144, 146; 4:70, 184, 280.
l4
Is
THOREAU'S POLITICAL ETHICS
215
judgment was the radical doctrine of the Reformation."
Drawing a comparison between Lutheran reformers of the
sixteenth century and contemporary Unitarians in revolt from
Calvinism, Bellows praises the "liberty of conscience" long
associated with Protestant thought. Calvinistic predestination,
on the other hand, is for Bellows "an opiate to . . . conscience" which relieves "the private man" of "personal
responsibility." Equating orthodox intolerance of Unitarianism with earlier Catholic efforts "to shackle all independent thinking," Bellows maintains that Unitarians "prefer the
approbation of God and our own consciences to the applause
of men." Nor does Bellows miss the political implications of his
remarks: "What is freedom, but the freedom of the human
soul? . . . It is the emancipation of thought, of conscience,
which lie torpid and dead beneath the grasp of tyrannical institutions." The very language in which he expresses his ideas
seems to foreshadow Thoreau's when we hear the Unitarian
argue that suppressions of conscience can lead to a system
where "MAN [is] buried under the state" and is left with
"smothered intellect [and] . . . slumbering conscience."ls
Even if Thoreau was not familiar with Bellows's views, the
fact remains that Bellows had already ~ o n d e r e dthe higher
law of conscience as an important means of distinguishing the
special virtues of Unitarianism, which values individualism or
"independent thinking." "The right of private judgment,"
says Bellows, "has its basis in the worth of the individual
man." Where for his secular ends Thoreau insists that the
"State . . . [must] recognize the individual as a higher and
independent power, from which all its own power and
authority are derived" (p. 89), Bellows calls for the "individual
man [to be] recognised as more sacred than churches and
establishments"; indeed, claiming that the Church and State
too often "consider themselves more important than the individuals that sustain them," Bellows, like Thoreau, believes
Is Henry Whitney Bellows, Sermon Preached November 26, 1843, at the Ordination of Mr. Dexter Clapp, Over the Unitarian Church at Savannah, Ga. (New
York: Charles S. Francis and Co., 1843), pp. 7, 16, 19, 21, 4, 12.
216
THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY
that "all the triumphs of freedom, whether political, social, or
religious, [are] so many consequences of the resistance of the
human soul . . . against the contempt, or violence of institutions which did not recognize [man's] inherent right to turn
them to his account, instead of being turned to theirs."lg
Implicit in Bellows's remarks is a mandate for personal
responsibility among individuals. Not surprisingly he disdains
dogmas and institutions that "remove responsibility from the
individual to corporations." "Consciences," Bellows elsewhere remarked, "cannot be incorporated; and the common
conscience of any association is a very poor one." Thoreau, too,
states that "a corporation has no conscience," but he also
claims that "a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience" (p. 65). Bellows further anticipates
Thoreau's position that the moral individual has a duty to defy
an immoral law: "the individual man . . . is the being for
whom all other things are made. . . . [N]o precepts or laws
[are] valuable which do not tend to advance his rational and
moral progress." Like Channing, however, Bellows subordinates ethical capacity to the religious fact that "the individual
man" is the "rational and moral offspring of God."20 As for
Thoreau in "Resistance to Civil Government" and, as we shall
see, in "A Plea for Captain John Brown," ethics and conscience are for Bellows objectively prescriptive and compatible with the moral sentiment of humanity at large.
The objective character of the individual conscience had
earlier been elaborately justified by Channing in a philosophical alignment of "conscience," "intellect," "thought," and
conscientiousness" :
' I
Does not conscience include, as part of itself, the noblest action of the
intellect or reason? . . . Without power of thought [as opposed to
mere sentiment], what we call conscientiousness, or a desire to do
right, shoots out into illusion, exaggeration. . . . Thought, intelligence, is the dignity of a man. . . . No matter what other vocation he
may have, his chief vocation is to Think.21
l8 Bellows,
20
Sermon, pp. 11-13.
Bellows, Sermon, p. 12, and Discourse, p. 19.
Channing, "On the Elevation of the Laboring Classes" (1840), in Works, 5: 170.
THOREAU'S POLITICAL ETHICS
217
Even more pertinent to what we shall explore as Thoreau's
regard for conscience as an expanded form of consciousness
is the way Channing draws upon the notion of consciousness
to explain the idea that no "outward authority [is] more
sacred than the voice of God in [a person's] own secret
conscience":
Nothing seems to me so needful as to give to the mind the
consciousness, which governments have done so much to
suppress. . . . To me, the progress of society consists in nothing
more, than in bringing out the individual, in giving him a consciousness of his own being, and in quickening him to strengthen
and elevate his own mind.22
As noted above, Bellows warned that oppressive institutions
could produce a "slumbering conscience," one remedy for
which is the vivified and elevated "consciousness" described
by Channing. That remedy, the union of consciousness and
conscience, was also prescribed by Harvard President James
Walker.
In his lecture on "Conscience," Walker uses the terms conscience and consciousness almost synonymously, thereby
making explicit what is everywhere implicit in the writings of
Channing and Bellows: "[Humanity's] common moral nature
becomes conscience, as the very name imports, only in so far as
it is put forth into consciousness and activity." Like Thoreau,
Walker sees such an expression of conscience-if we may
momentarily adopt the French pronunciation of the word,
denoting as it does a dual emphasis-as a curb upon expediency: "our sense of what is right ought to prevail, in all cases,
over our sense of what is expedient or agreeable." Thoreau,
you will recall, had similarly rejected ideas about "resolv[ing]
all civil obligation into expediency," inasmuch as people "must
do justice, cost what it may" (pp. 68, 69). Intere justice, cost
what it may" (pp. 68, 69). Interestingly, the same phrase
appears in Walker's essay, and is couched in a sentence that
22
Channing, "Spiritual Freedom," pp. 77-78
218
THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY
highlights the connection between thinking and morality:
after defining "moral thoughtfulness" as "a habit of attending
to the moral aspects and bearings of things," Walker sets as a
precondition for "progress in both conscience and conscientiousness" the "determination to do right,
cost what it may; in
other words, to moral thoughtfulness we must add an invincible moral purpose."23
Walker, we know, ultimately proved less than consistent in
his political application of injunctions such as this.24Still, his
understanding of the synchrony of thought, consciousness, and
conscience illuminates the role they play in Thoreau's ethics.
Indeed, Thoreau's homage to individual conscience rests upon
the assumption that "[ilf a man is thought-free . . . ,
imagination-free, . . . unwise rulers or reformers cannot
fatally interrupt him" (p. 86). Little wonder, then, that for him
the awakened consciousness is central to political association:
"
If I were consciously to join any party," he wrote to H. G. 0.
Blake, "it would be that which is the most free to entertain
Even in Walden "outlying and transient circumstances" pale before the permanency of "thinking" and of
" ~ ~ n s ~ i effort,"
o u s which induce an "awakening or coming to
life."2BAs one critic has already observed, in Walden Thoreau
associates "moral reform" with "the effort to throw off
sleep."27 At issue, then, is "the degree of consciousness," a
23 James Walker, "Conscience," in Sermons Preached in the Chapel of Harvard
College (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1861), pp. 137, 143-45. Inasmuch as Walker
probably delivered this sermon between 1853 and 1860, during his presidency at
Harvard, any "influence" of Walker's "Conscience" on Thoreau's "Resistance to
Civil Government" is unlikely; in fact, Thoreau's influence on Walker might be a
more suitable subject of inquiry. More to the point of my use of Walker's "Conscience" is the general currency of ideas that allows us better to recognize similar
emphases in Thoreau's writings.
24 See Howe, Unitarian Conscience, p. 297.
2s Thoreau to Blake, 21 July 1852, The Correspondence, p. 285. Thoreau also
extols the preeminence of thought in two other letters to Blake: 9 August 1850 and
26 September 1859. See Joseph J. Moldenhauer, ed., "Thoreau to Blake: Four
Letters Re-Edited," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 8 (196s): 44, 55.
26 Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1971), p. 134.
27 Glick, "Thoreau and Radical Abolitionism," p. 156 (also see pp. 169,172).In this
vein, see Michael Ackland, "Thoreau's Walden: In Praise of Mental Perception,"
American Transcendental Quarterly 49 (1981): 55-71.
THOREAU'S POLITICAL ETHICS
219
lack of which leads to "unconscious despair," social and intellectual malaise, and a lack of conscientious resistance to the
injustices of civil g o ~ e r n m e n tThis
. ~ ~ dimension of Thoreau's
outlook on moral reform invites speculation about two issues in
particular. The first is where to place Thoreau on the continuum of ideas extending from Unitarianism to transcendentalism; the second, the way in which his moral conscientiousness
establishes some degree of harmony between the seemingly
disparate worlds of "Resistance to Civil Government" and "A
Plea for Captain John Brown."
Although Unitarians and transcendentalists alike stressed
the regenerative powers of the mind and-by extension-humanity's capacity for moral sentiment, the transcendentalists
saw in the Unitarian rejection of a freely and individually functioning intuition an implicit subversion of those intellectual
and moral faculties. Whereas Emerson, Ripley,
and Brownson
.
had earlier championed the intuitionalism of Immanuel Kant
(and of Kant's idealistic disciples) against the passive sensationalism of John Locke and his subsequent Unitarian supporters, Thoreau appears to have seen ethical commitment as the
greatest glory of the active mind. In the act of conscientious
objection featured in "Resistance to Civil Government" and in
his sympathetic response to John Brown, Thoreau expands
upon Emerson's conception of the moral sentiment by suggesting an ethically oriented progression of ideas that originates in
an intuitive grasp of morality and ends in a practical commitment to conscience, the most noble element of cognition. This
marriage of epistemology and morality helps to clarify why
Thoreau calls John Brown a "transcendentalist above all, a
man of ideas and principles," an "intelligent and conscientious
man." By implication, people too unimaginative to appreciate
Brown's moral idealism are said to possess "a dim consciousness" and, the suggestion is, to number among those leading
lives of unconscious despair.29Thus, Thoreau's emphasis on
Thoreau, Walden, pp. 147, 8.
Henry David Thoreau, "A Plea for Captain John Brown" (1859), in Reform
Papers, pp. 115, 119, 118; emphasis added. On Emerson's vision of the moral
sentiment, see John Q. Anderson, "Emerson and 'The Moral Sentiment,' Emer28
29
"
220
THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY
conscience takes transcendental respect for the faculties of the
mind beyond speculative and idealistic musing; his conflation
of intuition and "Moral Law" approaches the ethical justifications of some abolitionist^.^^
Thoreau, nonetheless, remains (either on the basis of personal belief or of narrative strategy) indebted to his Unitarian
predecessors. In "Resistance to Civil Government," he
appears to share the Unitarians' objective and universal standards of conscientious behavior. By invoking the notion of
"absolute goodness" (p. 69), by appealing to the New
Testament as a guide for legislation (p. 89), and by implying
throughout that morality can be determined by consensus,
Thoreau makes use of the Unitarian conception of conscience
as the God-given spark of divinity in man. Oddly consistent
with this conception is the ethical framework of "A Plea for
Captain John Brown," in which Thoreau presents a radically
autonomous individual whose conscientious motives still coincide with established humanitarian and religious values:
"When I think of him . . . proceeding . . . reverently,
humanely to work, . . . without expecting any reward but a
good conscience, . . . it affects me as a sublime spectacle."
That Thoreau links "reverently" and "humanely" and later
compares Brown to a crucified Christ suggests that Thoreau in
some measure evokes the prescriptive ethics of his Unitarian
predecessors while spurning the gradualist approach to the
problem of slavery espoused by some. Were society to have as
much "life9'-that is, consciousness and conscientiousness-as
did John Brown, then "the noblest faculties of the mind"
would recognize "a man of principle, of rare courage and
devoted humanity, ready to sacrifice his life at any moment for
the benefit of his fellow man." Thoreau here suggests that
Brown's motives-he wisely avoids discussion of Brown's
son Society Quarterly 19 (1960): 1.3-15; Alfred J. Kloeckner, "Intellect and Moral
Sentiment in Emerson's Opinions of 'The Meaner Kinds' of Men," American
Literature 30 (1958): 32238.
30 On the mainly intuitive basis of the "Moral Law," see Glick, "Thoreau and
Radical Abolitionism," pp. 68, 224; for Glick's more general observations about the
compatibility of abolitionist and transcendental thought, see pp. 228-29.
THOREAC'S POLITICAL ETHICS
22 1
actions--coincide with the best impulses of Christian ethics.31
Still, the tension between the pacifism of "Resistance to
Civil Government" and the sanction of militancy in "A Plea for
Captain John Brown" might be interpreted by some readers as
Thoreau's liberation from the scriptural ethics of his predecessors and his kinship with the relativistic thinking of
nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers who would confront unflinchingly the ambiguities of ethics: "I do not wish to
kill nor to be killed," says Thoreau, "but I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable."32 It remains unlikely, however, that Thoreau harbored
the sort of extreme ethical relativism that contains within itself
an implicit sanction for anarchy.33Again, Thoreau seems to
imply that were all people as conscientious as John Brown,
then Brown's seeming anarchism would be subsumed within a
collective conscientiousness"-if
I may modify a Jungian
concept-having at its core the conjunction of consciousness
and conscience that Channing, Bellows, and Walker recognized to be the link between humanity and divinity and the
basis for social harmony and human dignity.34Thoreau, after
all, credits Brown with having had "a spark of divinity in
him";35 Thoreau also attributes to those with a vivijied consciousness the ability to understand that Brown's deed is
compatible with eternally prescriptive ethics: "We . . . forgot
human laws, and did homage to an idea. The North, I mean the
"
31 Thoreau, "John Brown," pp. 132, 1 3 6 3 7 , 134, 129. U'ith respect to Thoreau's
evasive treatment of Brown's actions, the essential study is Michael Meyer's
"Thoreau's Rescue of John Brown from History," in Studies in the American
Renaissance, 1980, ed. Joel Myerson (Boston: Twayne, 1980), pp. 301-16.
32 Thoreau, "John Brown," p. 133.
3 3 I here take issue with Raymond Tatalovich's conclusion in "Thoreau on Civil
Disobedience: In Defense of Morality or Anarchy?" Southern Quarterly 11
(January 1973): 107-13. More instructive is Myron Simon's "Thoreau and Anarchism," Michigan Quarterly Reuietc 23 (Summer 1984): 360-84.
34 Truman Nelson, in "Thoreau and John Brown," in Thoreau in Our Season, ed.
John H. Hicks (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1966), observes that
Thoreau thought Brown "the conscience of the world. In his lens-clear view of John
Brown, Thoreau came finally to realize that there is an exalted form of individualism which merges into universality and becomes one with it" (p. 152).
35 Thoreau, "John Brown.'' p. 135.
222
THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY
living North, was suddenly all transcendental. It went behind
the human l a w . . . and recognized eternal justice and
glory."36 Similarly, readers inclined to surmount the apparent
inconsistency of "Resistance to Civil Government" and "A
Plea for Captain John Brown" may perceive beneath the
seemingly polar tendencies of these works an ethic unified by
the liberal Christian equation of conscience and consciousness.
"The Last Days of John Brown" (1860), in Reform Papers, p. 147.
James Duban, Associate Professor of English at the University
MAJORFICof Texas at Austin, is the author of MELVILLE'S
TION : POLITICS,
THEOLOGY,
AND IMAGINATION.
He is presently
writing a book about the place of consensus ideology in the
thought of Henry Whitney Bellows and Herman Meluille.
http://www.jstor.org
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Conscience and Consciousness: The Liberal Christian Context of Thoreau's Political Ethics
James Duban
The New England Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 2. (Jun., 1987), pp. 208-222.
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[Footnotes]
2
The Influence of Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" on Gandhi's Satyagraha
George Hendrick
The New England Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 4. (Dec., 1956), pp. 462-471.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0028-4866%28195612%2929%3A4%3C462%3ATIOT%22D%3E2.0.CO%3B2-X
2
Thoreau, Garrison, and Dymond: Unbending Firmness of the Mind
James Duban
American Literature, Vol. 57, No. 2. (May, 1985), pp. 309-317.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-9831%28198505%2957%3A2%3C309%3ATGADUF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-8
29
Intellect and Moral Sentiment in Emerson's Opinions of "The Meaner Kinds" of Men
Alfred J. Kloeckner
American Literature, Vol. 30, No. 3. (Nov., 1958), pp. 322-338.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-9831%28195811%2930%3A3%3C322%3AIAMSIE%3E2.0.CO%3B2-D
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