s of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, bus as machines, with their bodies.” Thoreau is suggesting that the individual not his government governs his body and more importantly his mind. Freedom was not something granted by a government and its laws; it was every man’s right. “I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also,” Thoreau says. “This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as people.” Simply put, the law was wrong. And no man of good conscience could allow it to exist any longer. Bernard De Voto writes in The Year of Decision “somewhere between August and December 1846 the Civil War had begun.” (Richardson, 1986). For much of the early 1850’s Thoreau would continue writing and refining his earlier works. Completing his manuscript A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and eventually his most famous book, Walden in which he set forth his ideas on how an individual should best live to be in tune to his own nature as well as to nature itself. He continued to protest slavery and after meeting John Brown in 1857 altered his pacifist view to condone using force when all peaceful means of abolishing slavery had failed. Thoreau’s Walden gained him immediate fame, attention, and praise. Resistance to Civil Government would find more attention in the 20th century inspiring men like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi with its use of passive resistance to unjust laws. Thomas Carlyle called it the one truly original American contribution to civilization (http://www.biography.com/cgi-bin/biomain.cgi). It is also in the 20th century that Thoreau would come to be regarded as one of America's major literary thinkers. As a naturalist Thoreau’s ideas of”interconnectedness” and a need for preservation would sp...
