The Puritans of the 1630s added a new element of religious and social intolerance to America, expanding on the blueprint created by the Pilgrims. Known for their strict, repressive society, the Puritans barred all forms of deviation within their community, as described in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Set in the mid-1600s, The Scarlet Letter epitomizes the religious intolerance of Puritan society. By the mid-1800s, however, the religious fervor that had been so prevalent two centuries ago was gone, replaced by the ideals of Transcendentalism. Henry David Thoreau helped to propel this movement, expressing his own deviance through writing. “Civil Disobedience” argues against the legitimacy of government and laws, and is Thoreau’

Deviance of thought and behavior were inevitable products of the Transcendentalist movement in the 19th Century. This was exemplified by Henry David Thoreau and his writings, particularly his work as a social philosopher in the 1840s and 1850s. Thoreau was a genuine social deviant, disenchanted by the growing industrial machine of commerce and its constructions. He believed that the typical American was not the individualist, but rather the conformist. He completely rejected this developing consumerist society, instead spending much of his lifetime outdoors in nature.

“Thoreau was a frontiersman, an explorer of the primeval wilderness as well as of the higher latitudes to be found within oneself” (Parker and Krupat 1790).

In “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau lashes out against the existence of government. “That government is best which governs not at all,” he says (Thoreau, qtd. in Parker and Krupat 1792). He explains that government is merely a military tool controlled by a few individuals, an imposing edifice that hinders trade and commerce with gratuitous obstacles. He denounces the laws which governments impose, questioning their legitima

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