In July of 1846, Henry David Thoreau was on his way to Concord to run an errand when he was arrested by sheriff Sam Staples for failure to pay a poll tax.  Thoreau had stopped paying the tax four years earlier, believing that it supported the Mexican American War and the expansion of slavery into the southwest territories.  That turned out not to be true; the tax was strictly local and nothing to do with the federal government or that of the state of Massachusetts.  News of the arrest spread quickly, and an unidentified woman promptly visited the jail to pay the tax.   Staples, however, decided to keep Thoreau overnight. To his surprise, when he went to Thoreau’s cell to release him, he didn’t want to go. And was “mad as the devil” when he learned that someone had paid the tax and he was free to go.  The experience led to a series of lectures in at the Concord Lyceum entitled “The Rights and Duties of the Individual in relation to Government”. The essay was first published in 1849 as Resistance to Civil Government. The central idea is that individuals should not permit government to overrule their consciences, and that there is a duty to refuse to acquiesce when governments seek to make them agents of injustice. The essay was reprinted four years after his death in 1866 under the title Civil Disobedience. The use of the word “civil” in the title can be misleading.  Thoreau used the word in the sense of “relating to citizens and their relations with others and with the state”.  Civil can also mean “socially acceptable; polite”, a reading which leads to the impression that the argument is for nonviolent resistance.  That was not his intent.