What is the connection to individuality in "Civil Disobedience"?

In "Civil Disobedience," Thoreau is essentially arguing that when a person's conscience is in conflict with the law, that person is bound to obey their conscience. Laws in Thoreau's America were made with the consent of the governed, that is to say, majority rule. But Thoreau claims that the individual is not bound by the will of the majority when that will is in conflict with a higher law of morality. He urges his readers to "let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine." When the "machine" is moving in the wrong direction, he says that it is at least his obligation not to "lend myself to the wrong which I condemn." In other words, if a law approved by the consent of the majority conflicts with one's individual sense of right, a person ought not to consent to obey that law. In this way, a person becomes a "majority of one," according to Thoreau.
This, of course, is a radically individualistic understanding of what it meant to live in a democracy. Representative majoritarian government was of course preferable to a monarchy or a dictatorship, but how was the individual to respond, Thoreau asked, when the majority was wrong? His choice was to disobey the law (a poll tax, by way of protesting slavery and the Mexican War). He was briefly imprisoned for this act of civil disobedience, but he claimed that in doing so, the state only coerced his body and not his spirit. In one of the purest statements of radical individualism in all of American writing, he asserts: "I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest." "Civil Disobedience" is, among other things, a discussion of the proper boundaries in the relationship between the individual and the state in a majoritarian democratic society.

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