A YANKEE IN CANADA, With Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers

Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866. First edition and printing, in the first binding, per Borst. 8vo, publisher's original dark plum cloth, lettered and decorated in gilt on spine, the covers with blind-stamped wreaths in the center bordered in blind, brown coated endpapers. 286 pp. Internally a very nice copy, the text is quite clean and fresh with no foxing, the original cloth still attractive without fading but with some expert consolidation at the corner tips and neatly rebacked preserving a majority of the original decorated cloth from the spine. FIRST EDITION OF THIS IMPORTANT WORK IN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY AS IT Includes the first general appearance of "Civil Disobedience”.
This title contains a five chapter work “A Yankee in Canada” based on several brief trips Thoreau made from 1849 to 1853. It was during these years that his primary residence was at Walden. The second half of the book is a series of 11 essays called the “Anti-Slavery and Reform Essays”. They include a plea for John Brown, an essay on Wendell Phillips address to the Lyceum Society in Concord, and most importantly the first public printing of his essay “Civil Disobedience”, originally given as a sermon in 1849. “Civil Disobedience” was written after Thoreau spent a day in prison for refusal to pay a poll tax supporting the Mexican War. Thoreau considered the war to be an unethical land grabbing scheme to increase the size and number of the southern slave-holding states. His article stresses the influence of passive resistance as a form of political protest. This essay has had a profound influence on the American psyche from the Civil War to the Vietnam era and beyond. It was revered by both Gandhi and Martin Luther King who credited it with giving them their first introduction to the philosophy of non-violent social action.