July 4, 2025: Models of Critical Patriotism: Thoreau

[As the author of a book on the contested history of American patriotism, every day of 2025 feels strikingly relevant. So for this year’s July 4^th series, I wanted to share & expand on excerpts from that book that feature models of critical patriotism from across our history, leading up to a weekend request for further conversations!]

On two interconnected texts through which the naturalist and activist embodied critical patriotism.

The book excerpt: “[Ralph Waldo] Emerson’s Concord neighbor, friend, and protégé, the author and naturalist Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), expressed in one of his most prominent actions and works a distinct and more critical form of active patriotism. In late July 1846, when he was about a year into what would be a two-year sojourn in his cabin at Walden Pond, Thoreau happened to meet Concord’s tax collector, Sam Staples. Staples asked Thoreau to pay unpaid poll taxes, and he refused, citing his opposition to both the Mexican American War and the concurrent extension of slavery into new American territories, themselves two direct reflections of the violent and divisive effects of myths of Manifest Destiny and national expansion. Thoreau would spend a night in the Concord jail before a family member paid the tax against his wishes, and he turned that experience into the source for two interconnected texts: his January and February 1848 lecture series “The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to Government,” delivered at the Concord Lyceum; and his 1849 essay “Resistance to Civil Government,” published by his fellow Transcendentalist and reformer Elizabeth Peabody in a May 1849 collection entitled Aesthetic Papers and posthumously re-published under its more well-known name “Civil Disobedience.”

In that essay, Thoreau advances a clear argument about the active patriotic duty of each American if the nation is to move closer toward its ideals. “To speak practically, and as a citizen, …I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it” (Thoreau’s emphasis). He connects that argument to an alternative, still celebratory but more active account of the “Revolution of ’75” and its legacies in his own moment, noting that “I think it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.” And he ends with a critical patriotic vision of an American government and community that lives up to the founding celebrations of liberty and equality, writing, “I please myself with imagining a State at least which can afford to be just to all men.” Thoreau’s active patriotism, expressed in this essay and embodied throughout his tragically short life, weds the Transcendental emphases on the individual and the unfolding present to an argument that it is the expansion of justice and equality to all Americans, rather than the expansion of the nation’s territory, which should be America’s manifest destiny.”

Earlier this year, for a Patriots’ Day installment of my Saturday Evening Post Considering History column, I connected those Thoreau moments and texts to another even more overtly critical patriotic one, and the reason why I’m sharing this particular post on July 4^th: Thoreau’s speech “Slavery in Massachusetts,” delivered at a July 4^th, 1854 anti-slavery rally in Framingham, Massachusetts (and inspired by the Anthony Burns saga from earlier that year) and then turned into a published essay later that year. Thoreau’s culminating, impassioned contrast of the Burns case with Patriots’ Day celebrations at Lexington and Concord—“As if those three millions had fought for the right to be free themselves, but to hold in slavery three million others”—makes for a perfect complement to another critical patriotic speech I’ve written about often in this space, Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the 4^th of July?” (1852). Two authors and activists, and a number of interconnected texts of theirs, that can serve as exemplary models of critical patriotism, on this holiday and every day.  

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Models of patriotism you’d share?