Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience espouses the need to prioritize one’s conscience over the dictates of laws. It criticizes American social institutions and policies, most prominently slavery and the Mexican-American War.

Based on Thoreau’s opinion about the Mexican-American War and slavery in the United States, why did he most likely refuse to pay the poll taxes, as described in “Civil Disobedience”? He desired to learn more about the government. He wanted to expose fraud in the government. He disagreed with the government’s actions.

Thoreau had hoped to use his jail time and refusal to pay the tax to raise awareness about the issue of the Mexican-American war and Staples described him as “mad as the devil” when he learned someone had paid his tax for him and he was free to go.

Answer. Thoreau’s first thought of being imprisoned in “civil disobedience” was that he considered the prison to be a foolish institution. The civil disobedience raised sense of freedom among the people to fight and protest.

The poll tax was levied on all men over the age of twenty. Thoreau was finally jailed overnight for this refusal in 1841 but was bailed out by his relatives who paid his back taxes for him. From July 4, 1845, to September 6, 1847, Thoreau lived alone at Walden Pond, Massachusetts, on a plot of land owned by Emerson.

He was freer in jail because he had taken actions in line with his conscience. By refusing to pay taxes to a government that supported slavery, Thoreau felt that he was imprisoned as a freer man than the people who supported the slave state by paying taxes and remaining outside of jail.

There were demonstrations, hartals, boycott of foreign goods, and later refusal to pay taxes. Lakhs of people participated in the movement, including a large number of women.

It carried forward the unfinished work of the Non-Cooperation Movement. (i) Strengthen the National Movement further. (ii) Create political consciousness and a deep sense of patriotism in the minds of the people. (iii) Bring women out of their homes and make them equal partners in the freedom struggle.

1 Answer. When people non violently resist or demonstrate against any law made by the government, which they consider morally or politically wrong, it is referred to as civil disobedience. Engaging in a sit-in, in which African Americans stay at a segregated business.

The principle of civil disobedience has achieved some standing in international law through the war crime trials at Nürnberg after World War II, which affirmed the principle that an individual may, under certain circumstances, be held accountable for failure to break the laws of his country.

The most important element of civil disobedience is the use of nonviolence to protest against an unjust law. For such acts to be considered civil, they cannot include violent struggle.

On March 12, 1930, Indian independence leader Mohandas Gandhi begins a defiant march to the sea in protest of the British monopoly on salt, his boldest act of civil disobedience yet against British rule in India.

1. Deliberately breaking unjust laws like the salt tax law. 2. Boycott of foreign made cloth and liquor shops.

Martin Luther King Jr., James Bevel, Rosa Parks, and other activists in the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, used civil disobedience techniques. Among the most notable civil disobedience events in the U.S. occurred when Parks refused to move on the bus when a white man tried to take her seat.