Beautiful Souls: The Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times Highlight

Not Thoreau, who a year and a half later appeared at the Concord Lyceum to deliver a lecture explaining why, had it been up to him, he might have settled in for a longer stay. “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison,” he proclaimed. Refusing to pay taxes in a country that tolerated slavery and had recently launched an unjust war on Mexico was not a crime but a moral obligation, Thoreau insisted: “When a sixth of the population which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army … I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.”