#  Thoreau, Abolition, and Resistance: Lessons for Our Present 

 





November 18, 2025

 

 

A Talk by Lewis Hyde. Sponsored by the Constellation Project.

It has happened before, the occupation of an American city by federal forces, and national guard troops commandeered without local consent. It happened first in 1854 when President Franklin Pierce sent troops into Boston to defend the right of an enslaver to remand his enslaved person to servitude. It’s an event worth revisiting in the present moment for the striking parallels between the rendition of enslaved people and the rendition of immigrants.

Then as now, we find federal power deployed against a vulnerable population. Then as now, we find a near-total lack of procedural protections for the targeted parties. Then as now, attempts by the states to protect the undefended—with “personal liberty laws” in the days of slavery, with “sanctuary policies” now—are met not with reasoned compromise but with unreasonable force.

The history of nineteenth-century resistance to slavery offers provocative ground for reflecting on current conflicts. What tactics might today’s sanctuary jurisdictions borrow from our abolitionist ancestors? To what degree can the states reclaim the sovereignty promised them by the Tenth Amendment? In our current fragmented national polity, what are the best sites for resistance to authoritarianism, and what are the best methods?

LEWIS HYDE is an essayist and cultural critic. His 1983 book, *The Gift*, defends the non-commercial portion of artistic practice. *Trickster Makes This World* (1998) argues for the disruptive intelligence that all cultures need if they are to remain lively and open to change. A MacArthur Fellow and former director of undergraduate creative writing at Harvard, Hyde taught for many years at Kenyon College. Now retired, he lives in Cambridge with his wife, the writer Patricia Vigderman. This September, Milkweed Editions published Hyde’s fully annotated edition of *The Essays of Henry David Thoreau*. One of these essays, “Slavery in Massachusetts,” will be the point of departure for Hyde’s presentation.



 

 

 



 

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