Revolutionary lessons from Thoreau

Boston Globe

15-04-2025

Concord took no real note of the anniversary until the 1820s, when the war was more recent in town memory than the Vietnam War is to us today. The town marked it first in 1825; again in 1835, during the bicentennial of its founding; and even more grandly in 1837, when Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote his
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Henry David Thoreau was a young man at the time. As his neighbors marched, sang, gave speeches, and lit bonfires on the anniversary to toast their political freedom, it didn't seem to Thoreau that they were free in how they lived. As he saw it, they had entrapped themselves in social expectations and material pursuits that enslaved them, and indeed much of his writing would become a critique of mere political freedom. In order to truly honor 1775, he believed, another, more interior revolution was needed, similar to the experiment in 'self-emancipation' he would undertake at Walden Pond, beginning on Independence Day in 1845.
Thoreau saw political freedom as but a means to moral and spiritual freedom. That deeper kind of liberty meant freedom from rank materialism, from racism, from a purely utilitarian view of nature, and from religious doctrines and institutions that bound the spirit rather than expanded it. 'Men talk of freedom!' Thoreau wrote. 'How many are free to think? Free from fear, from perturbation, from prejudice?'
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One way Thoreau thought his Concord neighbors abrogated the freedom won for them was their devotion to commercial pursuits and acquiring possessions. In 1837, the year the Battle Monument was dedicated, Thoreau decried the 'blind and unmanly love of wealth' in a speech at his Harvard commencement. The world, he declared, 'is more wonderful than it is convenient; more beautiful than it is useful.' And in 'Walden,' he wrote that most people 'even in this comparatively free country … are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.'
Thoreau invoked the rhetoric of our revolt against England to suggest that we enslave ourselves. 'We tax ourselves unjustly,' he
Another way Americans were not free was the endemic racism of his day and the institution of slavery. 'What is it to be free from King George and continue the slaves of King Prejudice?' Thoreau asked in his essay '
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Thoreau called for a 'peaceable revolution' against slavery in his essay '
Thoreau also saw a need for spiritual freedom, for freedom from institutions and creeds that narrowed the soul and sought to define or control the human experience of the sacred. 'The wisest man preaches no doctrines,' he
He noted in 'Walden' that religious freedom remained a rare commodity. Middlesex County had many fine houses and churches of brick or stone, he
Thoreau's writings about religion were among his most revolutionary. He took religious language back from the churches because he refused to let them have the last say about God. He rejected sectarianism, which mushroomed in Massachusetts during his life. 'The gods are of no sect,' he wrote, 'they side with no man.' Refusing to fit God into a theological shoebox, he urged his readers to know God through direct, unmediated experience. And he expressed faith that people could intuitively grasp the spiritual and moral laws of nature on their own.
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Ultimately, Thoreau found moral and spiritual freedom in the natural world, in his experience of wildness as a divine, liberating force, and in his inextinguishable faith in life. 'Faith, indeed, is all the reform that is needed,' he wrote in one of his earliest pieces.
Thoreau never explicitly called for revolution. His jeremiads about freedom were more literary and philosophical. But his writings amount to a revolution in thought, in what we value and how we live our lives. Thoreau hoped his readers would keep the revolution of 1775 alive by turning in a new direction, but he was wise enough to know this would take a long time.
'We are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outsides of freedom, the means and outmost defenses of freedom,' he wrote in 1851. 'It is our children's children who may perchance be really free.'
Thoreau's critique of freedom is as salient today as it was when Concord first celebrated April 19, on the 50th anniversary of the battle, in 1825.