A Plea for Captain John Brown

Henry David Thoreau was an American essayist, poet, and natural philosopher. His work is considered foundational to the American literary and philosophical movement known as transcendentalism, which promoted an idealist sense of nature and the prevalence of spirit and intuition in crafting personal morality. He sought a transcendent state through direct action, as opposed to what he saw as the idle sentiments of many of his contemporaries.

As a young man, Thoreau attended Harvard before returning to Concord, Massachusetts, where he remained most of his life. He worked as an intermittent school teacher, tutor, and land surveyor. Under the tutelage of his benefactor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau spent two years living in the woods near Walden Pond, where he wrote Walden (1854), the most prominent work of his life. Walden encapsulated Thoreau’s commitment to transcendent moral virtues, hard work, naturalism, and self-reliance.

Thoreau became increasingly agitated by the political situation regarding slavery in the United States. In the final years of his life, abolition became the primary cause to which he dedicated himself. Following the arrest of John Brown in 1859, Thoreau was frustrated by abolitionists in the mainstream press who dismissed Brown as a man of low moral character.