Compare Emerson, Thoreau, and Douglass's writing - Essay Example

Topic: Compare Emerson, Thoreau, and Douglasss writing Overview of Thoreau’s “resistance to civil Government” and Douglass’s “my bondage and my freedomUsing the basis of the Mexican-American War and the emergence of slavery in his time, Thoreau writes on a sensitive topic and issue of resistance against civil government. From a myopic perspective, one is tempted to think that Thoreau was merely preaching acts of violence and uprising against civil governance so that military rule would prevail.

However, there is an inner thought that Thoreau shares in the fact that the people who are supposedly ruled by government are the government themselves. For this reason, it would just be out of place that a small representation of the larger people would use their influence, authority and power to cause the larger masses of people suffer and take instructions that are contrary to their conscience. In simple terms, Thoreau beliefs that if government will force people to be involved in acts they do not consider as appropriate, it would just be better that the people resist such acts.

On his part, Douglas, using the first three chapters of his autobiography, gives a detailed account of his life as a slave who was lucky to have been freed eventually. As a realist and a person with personal experience, Douglas trumpets the bizarre nature in which slaves were generally treated. What was worse was the fact that hardly was slaves given the chance to be educated. In this regard, writes that "I never met with a slave who could tell me how old he was. Few slave-mothers know anything of the months of the year, nor of the days of the month" (p. 35). In the second chapter of the book, the author brings out his eagerness to know more about why some people entertained slavery and how he could with such an understanding help in the elimination of slavery.

In his subsequent chapter though, he seemed to be unsuccessful with his attempt as he laments of how slavery had succeeded in tearing his entire family apart, making him not even have a feeling of sorry towards his mothers death.Introduction to Ralph Emerson’s “Self-reliance”Emerson perhaps supports the fact that we are more of individual beings than social beings than any other person under the sun. This is because with a personal theme and motto of "Trust thyself", Emerson centered his writing of Self Reliance on the need for each person to be a lord of his own conscious.

As far as the philosopher was concerned, the last thing that any person should do is to be entangled by the thoughts and ideas of other people: such that instead of pursuing their personal agenda, these people go after general norm.Correlation between Emersons work and those of Thoreau and Douglas Having looked into the details of the works of the three authors, this section is dedicated to identifying how and why Emerson’s ideas are relevant or irrelevant, similar or different to the other two authors’ works.

This will be done with specific examples from the three texts. In the first place, there can be seen a major relevance and similarity between the work of Emerson and that of the two other writers. On the part of Thoreau who wrote on civil disobedience, there is a relevance of self-reliance on civil disobedience and a similarity for that matter in the sense that it would only take people who rely on their own conscious and decision making to decide not to continue to be spanned around by the dictates of the government in power.

With the instance of the American-Mexican War, which was used by Thoreau, the realization that a reader gets is that if people really relied on their own motivation and conscious, they would not have followed the instructions of government to be engaged in such way as would have though defied the civil government of the day. There also exist similarities with Douglas who was writing on slavery. This is because slavery is tactical attempt to self people’s self reliance from them. The relevance that Emerson’s work has on Douglas’ work therefore has to do with the understanding that is created on the depth of mental deprivation that is done to people who cannot have self reliance because they are under slavery.

REFERENCE LISTDouglass, Frederick, My Bondage and My Freedom. With and Introduction. By James M`Cune Smith. Available on line from http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=DouMybo.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=1&division=div2Nordquist, Richard. Self-Reliance, by Ralph Waldo Emerson. 2012. Online. May 3, 2012 Thoreau, Henry D. Resistance to Civil Government. 1849. Online. May 3, 2012