Henry David Thoreau's Influences In The Antebellum Period

America was influenced in the antebellum period by many aspects, and authors with their writings were no exception. Henry David Thoreau a famous American writer sparked the ideas of reform and standing up for ones belief through his writings such as Walden, Civil Disobedience, and speeches such as Slavery in Massachusetts. Thoreau started life through education, but still did not conform to who society thought he should be, but rather rose with his idol Ralph Waldo Emerson into transcendentalism and pushed the limits of government. Thoreau was an influential gentleman who stood for what he believed in time and time again and pushed Americans to do the same through his writings and actions.

Henry David Thoreau, a Harvard graduate, did not exceed in his professions he studied. Thoreau studied the art of teaching and when he returned to teach in his home town of Concord he quit within the first two weeks because he would not conform to the

Thoreau wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” The words transformed people’s lives to think more of the why in life and live with a purpose not just do what they are told, which was a driving idea within the Transcendentalist movements. Transcendentalist were hard to define, but perhaps one of the fathers of transcendentalism Ralph Waldo Emerson defines it most gracefully in a speech he gave, “The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine, He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power: he believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy”. As Emerson’s key student and self-proclaimed Transcendentalist Thoreau fulfilled these requirements to help further this movement of higher