A Yankee in Canada with Anti Slavery and Reform Papers

A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers is a posthumous collection of essays by Henry David Thoreau, published in 1866, four years after his death from tuberculosis in 1862. The collection brings together several of Thoreau’s most politically engaged shorter pieces alongside his only substantial travel essay about a country other than the United States.

The Yankee in Canada essay records Thoreau’s brief trip to Canada in September and October 1850, during which he visited Montreal, Quebec City, and various smaller locations in Lower Canada. The essay is a short travel piece in the mode that Thoreau had developed in his various American travel writings, with substantial attention to physical landscape, to the human communities he encountered, and to the historical and political significance of the country he was visiting. The treatment of French Canadian Catholic culture is observant if not always sympathetic, and Thoreau was clearly more impressed by the rural Quebec countryside than by the urban settlements he passed through.

The anti-slavery papers gathered with the Canada essay include several of Thoreau’s strongest political pieces. Slavery in Massachusetts of 1854 was delivered as a speech at an abolitionist meeting and is one of the most angry political documents Thoreau produced. A Plea for Captain John Brown of 1859 was written and delivered in defense of John Brown after the Harpers Ferry raid and was one of the most controversial pieces of American political writing of the immediate pre-Civil War years. The Last Days of John Brown was a follow-up piece written after Brown’s execution.

The reform papers include Thoreau’s earlier writing on various American reform questions including the Mexican War, government taxation, and the broader question of individual conscience versus state authority that Civil Disobedience had treated at greater length.

The collection runs about three hundred pages and is essential reading for the political Thoreau. The Walden and Cape Cod travel writing has the more obvious literary appeal, but the political essays show the harder side of Thoreau that the nature writing sometimes obscures. The book pairs with Walden, with Civil Disobedience as a separate work, and with the various other Thoreau collections.