"And, if there was any responsibility in refusing to obey, he was willing to accept it"
About this Quote
There is a courtroom calm to this line, but the drama is moral, not procedural. Bigelow frames disobedience as a choice made with open eyes, then tightens the screws: if refusing to obey carries responsibility, he will take it. The conditional "if" is doing heavy work. It concedes the legalistic premise that authority may be owed obedience, while quietly challenging whether that authority is legitimate, competent, or just. It is a sentence built to deny opponents their favorite accusation: that dissenters are reckless, unserious, or hiding behind chaos.
Coming from a 19th-century lawyer steeped in institutions, the phrasing reads less like rebellion and more like disciplined resistance. "Responsibility" is the key substitution. He does not say he will accept punishment, which would imply guilt; he accepts responsibility, which implies agency and ethical accounting. It’s a way of flipping the hierarchy. The obedient subject becomes the moral actor; the commanding power becomes something that must justify itself.
The subtext is a threat delivered politely: you can prosecute me, but you can’t reduce me to a delinquent. In an era when "order" was often the alibi for coercion (from party machines to wartime measures to the deeper national crises of the century), Bigelow’s sentence offers a template for respectable defiance. It grants the state its language of duty, then reassigns duty to the individual conscience. That’s why it works: it makes refusal sound not like an escape from consequences, but like the only adult way to face them.
Coming from a 19th-century lawyer steeped in institutions, the phrasing reads less like rebellion and more like disciplined resistance. "Responsibility" is the key substitution. He does not say he will accept punishment, which would imply guilt; he accepts responsibility, which implies agency and ethical accounting. It’s a way of flipping the hierarchy. The obedient subject becomes the moral actor; the commanding power becomes something that must justify itself.
The subtext is a threat delivered politely: you can prosecute me, but you can’t reduce me to a delinquent. In an era when "order" was often the alibi for coercion (from party machines to wartime measures to the deeper national crises of the century), Bigelow’s sentence offers a template for respectable defiance. It grants the state its language of duty, then reassigns duty to the individual conscience. That’s why it works: it makes refusal sound not like an escape from consequences, but like the only adult way to face them.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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