Henry David Thoreau may be most known for his lonely stint at Walden
             Pond also wrote many essays commenting on his times and the world around him. Thoreau consistently used his brand of civil disobedience to protest the wrongs he saw around him. One means he used to protest was his refusal to pay a local poll tax. He had not been paying the tax since
             approximately 1842, in a protest against slavery, and his non-payment
             caught up with him in 1846, when he spent a night in the local jail. He
             was prepared to stay longer, but someone, probably a relative, paid the
             tax, and he was released. However, his brief stay was quite influential in his work, and he wrote "Civil Disobedience" partly as a retort about his
             Thoreau wrote "Civil Disobedience" in 1849, after his short stay in
             jail, and it is pretty clear the essay has had a strong influence on a wide
             variety of politicians and leaders. First, the definition of civil
             disobedience must be explored. One writer called civil disobedience "A
             paradigm case of civil disobedience is an action that is conscientious and
             illegal but also both non-violent and 'public'--which is to say, for one,
             that the civil disobedient accepts some societal punishment for breaking
             the law" (Meyer 69). Thus, civil disobedience is usually a public action
             that is non-violent but gauged to involve the public, so they understand
             just what the reason is for the disobedience in the first place. For
             example, civil disobedience today could be an act such as the
             people who moved into tree houses in old-growth forests, which kept logging
             companies from cutting down some of the oldest trees in the woods. The
             action became quite public, eventually saved the trees, and was a non-
             violent gesture against the lumber companies and their practices. This is
             an example of civil disobedience at its' best.
             Thoreau completely believed in the usefulness of civil disobedience in
             all i...