Henry David Thoreau's essay "Civil Disobedience" was a result of his arrest after he refused to pay the toll tax of $1. This refusal was his way of protesting against the Mexican war and the practice of slavery which resulted in his arrest. The experience of being in prison led him to write about it in his essay where he stressed upon the importance of asserting one's rights even if it means going against the law, if one views the laws as unjust. With this belief, he protested against the practice of slavery and the war, for he believed that they are discriminatory against a particular race. And in practice of this protest, he refused to pay the toll tax fee that funds the war. This arrest eventually led to the production of this literary work.
You need to write the main idea of each paragraph of the story and if all the mean ideas are about the same topic then you got the main or central idea of the story.
