Thoreau, Civil Disobedience,
and the Underground Railroad
Footnotes to Parts I - II - III - IV
Here is the National Park Service's definition of the Underground Railroad:
"Traditionally the term refers to a multitude of routes to freedom traken by fugitive slaves. ...The Underground Railroad is the name given to the many ways that blacks took to escape slavery in the southern United States before the Civil War." ("Underground Railroad," Washington DC: National Park Service, 1998, pages 7 and 90.) Back to Part I.
1. Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists, Oxford Univ Press 1969, p. 40.
2. James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North, Holmes & Meier 1979, p. 1.
3. Richard Lebeaux, Young Man Thoreau, Univ of Massachusetts Press 1977, ch. 1.
4. Walter Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau, Dover Publications 1992, p. 142.
5. James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty, Oxford Univ Press 1997, p. 251.
6. "Civil Disobedience" (any edition), paragraph 4.
7. David Walker, "Appeal... to the Colored Citizens of the World...," in Benjamin Brawley, ed., Early Black American Writers, Dover Publications 1992, pp. 129-30.
8. On the strength of popular
sentiment, President James A. Polk asked Congress for a declaration
of war against Mexico on May 13, 1846. This was the year of America's
"Manifest Destiny" - a slogan coined by a Democratic
newspaperman (whom Thoreau knew) to express a widespread expansionist
patriotism.
Opponents
of the war included virtually all free African Americans, who
"saw the annexation of slaveholding Texas in 1845 and the
outbreak of war with Mexico a year later as evidence of the expansion
of slaveholders' power." (Horton, In Hope of Liberty,
p. 247.) In Boston, blacks denounced a war "designed to strengthen
or perpetuate slavery," and Frederick Douglass declared that
Massachusetts had become "the tool of Texas."
As the acquisition of Mexico's huge stretches of land seemed to
prepare the way for expansion of slavery throughout the southwest
and west, sentiment among free blacks began to shift from Garrison's
nonviolence toward support for violent self-defense and
for using political as well as moral pressure to win the
struggle. Symbolizing this growing division, Frederick Douglass
split from Garrison in 1847, left Massachusetts, and established
a separate antislavery paper, The North Star. In Concord,
the war's critics included Ralph Waldo Emerson ("Mexico will
poison us") as well as Henry Thoreau.
9. "Civil Disobedience," paragraph 8.
10. "Civil Disobedience," paragraph 22.
11. Joan Trumbull, "Concord and the Negro," Vassar College, 1944, p. 22, note by Mrs. Olive Brooks Banks (1919).
12. Gary Collison, Shadrach Minkins: From Fugitive Slave to Citizen, Harvard Univ Press 1997, p. 150.
13. Read Thoreau's account of helping Henry Williams.
14. Thoreau, Journal, vol. II, p. 174 (April 1851).
15. Albert J. Von Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson's Boston, Harvard Univ Press 1998, p. 2.
16. Henry Meyer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery, St. Martin's Press 1998, p. 444.
17. Thoreau, "Slavery in Massachusetts" (any edition), paragraph 32.
18. For more information about John Brown (1800-1859) and his raid on Harpers Ferry (1859), visit the Harpers Ferry National Historic Park site on the Web.
19. Thoreau, "A Plea for Captain John Brown" (any edition), paragraph 57.
20. Quoted in Walter Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau: A Biography, Dover 1982, p. 419.