Nonviolence (12 page)

VII

The professed object of war generally is to preserve liberty and produce a lasting peace; but war never did and never will preserve liberty and produce a lasting peace, for it is a divine decree that all nations who take the sword shall perish with the sword. War is no more adapted to preserve liberty and produce a lasting peace than midnight darkness is to produce noonday light.

—DAVID LOW DODGE,

War Inconsistent with the Religion of Jesus Christ, 1815

E
ven to those who reject the concept that there are just and unjust wars, it is clear that some wars have better arguments than others. The War of 1812 was not an easy one to sell. The Federalists, the more conservative of the two political parties in the United States, all opposed it. While it was supposed to be a war with the British, more than half of the enemy were Canadians, local militias raised in the loyal northern colonies. It was the first American war to spur a large antiwar movement, though like most effective antiwar movements this one drew as many objectors on economic grounds as it did on moral ones.

Those who objected on moral grounds were not all Quakers or from other peace sects. The man who is considered the first American peace activist was an affluent New York merchant and devout Presbyterian, David Low Dodge, who at the end of the war, in 1815, formed the New York Peace Society, the first nonsectarian peace organization in America history.

Born in Connecticut in 1774, he grew up during the violence and upheaval of the Revolution and later became a businessman in Hartford. Starting in dry goods, he became manager of Connecticut's first cotton mill in Norwich, and seemed to make money at everything he did. In 1802 he moved to New York, where he began his peace activities. In 1827, at the age of fifty-three, the self-made entrepreneur retired from business to devote his time to activism, until his death in 1852.

He mustered with a militia and, according to his autobiography, traveled with a pistol, prepared to defend himself during a rash of highway holdups. He claimed that he first questioned the consistency of considering himself a Christian and carrying a weapon when one night he nearly shot an innkeeper by mistake. He contemplated how he would have felt and how “God would have viewed the transaction” had he taken a human life. He spent several
years studying the Christian position on the issue and eventually began to think the unthinkable: Was the American Revolution immoral?

In 1809 Dodge published a pamphlet that stated that even defensive war was not justifiable and that states that engaged in warfare were not Christian, were pagan and perhaps satanic. He cited the Gospels and the lives of early Christians to support his argument. The pamphlet sold out its thousand-copy press run in two weeks. It attracted both critics and admirers, and out of it came a circle of like-minded people who became the New York Peace Society, which was formed at the time of the outbreak of the War of 1812. But Dodge and his peace group, respecting the moment of silence in order to avoid the accusation of disloyalty, postponed official formation and publication of his tract against the war,
War Inconsistent with the Religion of Jesus Christ,
until 1815, when the war was over.

In the long history of such tracts against war Dodge's is one of the most thorough, cogent, and all encompassing. Like most of the American pacifists of the first half of the nineteenth century, he denounced war preparation, including maintaining an armed force, as inevitably leading to war. Dodge was influenced by the Revolutionary War experiences of his two half brothers who went off to fight at the ages of fourteen and sixteen, both of whom told of terrible battles, suffered sickness and privation, and died near the end of the war. He himself had childhood memories of the horrors of the Revolutionary War:

Who can describe the distress of a happy village suddenly encompassed by two contending armies—perhaps so early and suddenly that its inhabitants are aroused from their peaceful slumbers by the confused noise of the warriors more ferocious than the beasts that prowl the forest? Were it not for the tumult of the battle, shrieks of distress from innocent women and children might be heard from almost every abode.

He observed how war exploited the poor:

Very few, comparatively, who are instigators of war actually take the field of battle, and are seldom seen in the front of the fire. It is usually those who are rioting on the labors of the poor that fan up the flame of war. The great mass of soldiers are generally from the poor of a country. They must gird on the harness and for a few cents per day endure all the hardships of a camp and be led forward like sheep to the slaughter.

Dodge understood that most people were not used to the idea of questioning war and he saw this shake-up in the orderly nineteenth-century mind as his mission, pedaling his Society's pamphlets with the same salesmanship with which he had once pedaled dry goods. Being an adroit businessman, he presented economic arguments as well. “War is unwise,” he wrote, “because it destroys property.” Wars, he pointed out, are expensive and financed by taxes that affect first the merchant but are passed on to the consumer. “In times of war prices of the necessaries of life are generally very much increased, but the prices of labor of the poor do not usually rise.”

It may be the poor who suffer most in war, as Dodge argued, but the New York Peace Society was a gathering of the propertied class, Dodge's circle—merchants, Wall Street brokers, philanthropists, and clergy. Early in its life, some Americans could see that the young United States, founded in war, as many states are, had a tendency toward perpetual warfare. By 1815 two generations had fought and it seemed possible that every generation of Americans would have its war.

Warfare produces peace activists, and they are likely to be found among the veterans of any war. Noah Worcester, a Unitarian minister who had fought as a volunteer in the American Revolution, became one of the first American veteran antiwar activists. Worcester could not find a publisher for his work,
A Solemn Review of the Custom of War,
probably because the country was at war at the time. Finally, as peace was being negotiated at the end of 1814, he self-published the pamphlet, which would become a classic of antiwar
literature. The following year, he formed the Massachusetts Peace Society. War, Worcester contended, was “the grossest delusion that ever afflicted a guilty world.”

With the war over, activists were free to launch a full-scale critique of warfare. In the early 1820s a Pennsylvania Peace Society was led not by a Quaker, but by Henry Holcombe, another veteran of the American Revolution. In 1828 an umbrella group was formed to unite all the peace societies, called the American Peace Society. Peace societies became an important intellectual force in nineteenth-century America, attracting speakers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, who believed that humankind went to war because it was backward and undeveloped and that it would eventually abandon such practices.

As time distanced America from its founding experience, more and more Americans dared to speak out against the official version of the Revolutionary War. In 1839, Charles K. Whipple, a second-generation American born in 1808, wrote an antiwar tract titled
Evils of the Revolutionary War.
Some Americans were seeing fundamental problems with the new nation and suspecting the root of the troubles lay in how the nation was founded.

Two great moral arguments of the day merged, both concepts particularly centered in New England: nonviolence and the abolition of slavery. The leading voice of nonviolent abolitionism was William Lloyd Garrison.

Garrison, unlike earlier peace leaders, had emerged from poverty through self-education. By background he had little in common with anyone in Dodge's New York Peace Society or most of the other societies. Garrison's route out of poverty from the Massachusetts coastal town of Newburyport was journalism. The young man had already earned such a reputation for his articulation of the abolitionist cause that in 1829, Benjamin Lundy, the editor of a Maryland abolitionist newspaper, the
Genius of Universal Emancipation,
walked from Baltimore to Bennington, Vermont, to find Garrison and persuade him to become coeditor. Garrison's work in
Baltimore would earn him seven weeks in prison on a libel charge. In 1831 he began his own newspaper,
The Liberator,
which he continued publishing for the next thirty-five years. The paper never sold more than three thousand copies, but it was quoted and discussed everywhere. Its positions, Garrison's positions, were always clear and uncompromising and stated in bold language. He called for the immediate, unconditional liberation of all two and a half million slaves and called for the boycott of elections until slavery was abolished.

He rejected all violence, but he stirred people to action. Even if a curmudgeon by vocation, he was an enthusiast by nature. He loved taking long walks, and when he happened upon a place that he thought particularly beautiful, he would say, “Someone ought to build a hotel here!”

Perhaps because of his working-class background Garrison was something different from the pacifists before him. Though he had a deep knowledge of the Bible, he was a secular force, largely shunning established religions. He was not a pacifist. He was a nonvio-lent activist and used the force of his words and his charisma to call for people to act—to end slavery, to stop war, to let women vote, even to ban alcohol. But the abolition of slavery is the cause for which he is most remembered. He used to tuck his daughter into bed every night, reminding her that “the poor little slave child” did not have a warm comfortable bed such as hers.

Garrison, who once publicly burned a copy of the Constitution, called for the Northern states to secede from the Union because of the U.S. practice of slavery. He called the U.S. Constitution “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.” According to Garrison, the Constitution bound the North to the South in an “unholy alliance,” and as long as Northerners remained part of the Union they could be drafted “at a moment's notice” to go south and put down a slave rebellion. The slave system in the South, Garrison stated, was guaranteed by “Northern bayonets.” He was one of the first, and one of the few in history, to denounce the “Founding Fathers,” who he said were led by their principles “to spill human
blood like water, in order to be free.” Garrison denounced the idea that good could come from the evil of killing. He was, in his day, one of the most admired and hated people in America.

In 1831, a small band of slaves in Virginia led by a fellow slave named Nat Turner attacked slave owners, killing at least fifty-five of them. This set off such hysteria—slave owners lived in terror that their huge black populations would rise up against them—that the state of Virginia actually proposed abolishing slavery, and the resolution nearly passed. Instead, the state chose a policy of repression. In the hysteria, almost two hundred black people who had nothing to do with the uprising were killed.

Even though it had nearly led to the abolition of slavery in the state, the violent uprising was completely unacceptable to many abolitionists, and especially to Garrison, who nevertheless was continually accused of having organized it. Threats were constantly made against his life and finally, in 1835, while attempting to deliver an antislavery speech in Boston, he was attacked by an angry proslavery mob. They chased him through the streets until he hid behind a pile of planks in the storage loft of a carpentry shop. About a dozen men found him there and were about to throw him from the second-story window when someone suggested his death be more prolonged. A rope was tied around him and he was lowered out the window down to a mob of several thousand, who dragged him by the rope through the streets while debating whether to hang him or first dye him with indelible black ink and tar and feather him. He was rescued at the last minute by the police. The affluent Wendell Phillips, watching from the windows of his law office, observed how this thin bespectacled young man with an already receding hairline never lost his composure throughout the entire ordeal. Garrison was prepared to be martyred for his beliefs. Phillips would become one of Garrison's closest collaborators.

Despite the frequent allegation that Garrison lacked organizing skills, strong and growing nonviolence and abolition movements developed around him in New England and throughout the country. By 1840, 200,000 Americans, including some Southerners, belonged to abolitionist societies. When Harriet Beecher Stowe's
novel about a slave girl's escape,
Uncle Tom's Cabin,
was published in 1852, the 5,000-copy first edition sold out in forty-eight hours, and 300,000 copies were sold the first year alone.

Many of the most dedicated abolitionists identified Garrison as their inspiration, among them the daughter of a Medford, Massachusetts, baker, Lydia Maria Child. One of the first American women novelists, in 1824, at the age of twenty-two, she wrote the first historical novel published in the United States,
Hobomok: A Tale of Early Times.
Published two years before James Fenimore Cooper's better remembered
The Last of the Mohicans,
Child's book was unusual in its sympathetic portrayal of American Indians, as well as controversial in its exploration of interracial marriage. Though she published the book anonymously, her identity was soon discovered and the book made her famous.