The Price of Freedom: Political Philosophy from Thoreau's Journals (Annotated) by Henry David Thoreau

Author:Henry David Thoreau [Thoreau, Henry David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Politics
ISBN: 9781434805522
Publisher: Picket Line Press
Published: 2011-05-04T04:00:00+00:00

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Thoreau used sections of this entry for Slavery in Massachusetts. See Sandra Harbert Petrulionis’s Editorial Savoir Faire: Thoreau Transforms His Journal into “Slavery in Massachusetts”.

See also 17 June 1854.

A reference to John Milton’s Paradise Lost

Court Street in Boston was both a major commercial area and the address of many government buildings.

A tintamarre is a raucous clangor.

17 June 1854

Slavery has produced no sweet-scented flower like the water-lily, for its flower must smell like itself. It will be a carrion-flower.1

…

The judges and lawyers, all men of expediency, consider not whether the Fugitive Slave Law2 is right, but whether it is what they call constitutional. They try the merits of the case by a very low and incompetent standard. Pray, is virtue constitutional, or vice? Is equity constitutional, or iniquity? It is as impertinent, in important moral and vital questions like this, to ask whether a law is constitutional or not, as to ask whether it is profitable or not. They persist in being the servants of man, and the worst of men, rather than the servants of God. Sir, the question is not whether you or your grandfather, seventy years ago, entered into an agreement to serve the devil, and that service is not accordingly now due; but whether you will not now, for once and last, serve God — in spite of your own past recreancy or that of your ancestors — and obey that eternal and only just Constitution which he, and not any Jefferson or Adams, has written in your being.3 Is the Constitution a thing to live by? or die by? No, as long as we are alive we forget it, and when we die we have done with it. At most it is only to swear by. While they are hurrying off Christ to the cross, the ruler decides that he cannot constitutionally interfere to save him. The Christians, now and always, are they who obey the higher law, who discover it to be according to their constitution to interfere. They at least cut of the ears of the police; the others pocket the thirty pieces of silver.4 This was meaner than to crucify Christ, for he could better take care of himself.

…

Massachusetts sits waiting his decision, as if the crime were not already committed. The crime consists first of all and chiefly in her permitting an innocent man to be tried for more than his life — for his liberty. They who talk about Mr. Loring’s5 decision, and not about their own and the State’s consenting that he shall be the umpire in such a case, waste time in words and are weak in the head, if not in the heart alone.

(June 9th, continued.) — The amount of it is, if the majority vote the devil to be God, the minority will live and behave accordingly, and obey the successful candidate, trusting that some time or other, by some Speaker’s casting-vote, they may reinstate God again. Some men act as if they believed that

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