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Peace in the US Republic of Letters, 1840–1900
SANDRA M. GUSTAFSON
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom
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Contents
ListofIllustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Regeneration through Nonviolence
i. The Rise of the Peace Cause
ii. Human Rights in TheDeerslayer
iii. 1848 on the Michigan Frontier in TheOakOpenings
iv. Copway’s American Indian
2. Abolishing Slavery, Imagining Peace
i. The Peace Cause in the Republic of Letters
ii. The Place of Righteous Violence
iii. Forms of Peace in Dred
iv. William Wells Brown Reconsiders
3. Violence, Direct and Indirect
i. The “Red Republicanism” of Karl Marx
ii. Hawthorne’s Heart of Reform
iii. Indirect Violence in TheBlithedaleRomance
iv. War Matters
4. Arbitration and Alliance
i. The AlabamaClaims Case and the Rise of Arbitration
ii. The Secession Winter of Henry Adams
iii. Forging Alliances in Democracy
iv. John Hay’s TheBread-winnersand the Anglo-American Alliance
5. Race and Republican Peace
i. Anglo-Saxonisms
ii. False Peace in AFool’sErrandand BricksWithoutStraw
iii. Charles Chesnutt’s “Angry-Saxons”
iv. Monumenta
6. Failing at Peace
i. Ely Parker, Seneca Peacemaker
ii. Reckoning with ACenturyofDishonorin Ramona
iii. Simon Pokagon Rebukes the Nation
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
List of Illustrations
1. Daniel Webster, 1843 Speech at Bunker Hill Monument. Source: Heritage Auctions, HA.com.
2. Edward Hicks, ThePeaceableKingdom(1826).Source: Philadelphia Museum of Art: Bequest of Charles C. Willis, 1956, 1956–59–1.
3. Portrait of William Wells Brown. Richard Woodman’s etching served as the frontispiece for Brown’s Sketchesof PlacesandPeopleAbroad(1855).
4. The Freeman’s Defense by Hammatt Billings. This fullpage illustration of a scene from Chapter 17 of Uncle Tom’sCabinwas commissioned for the first edition of the novel (Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1852). It features George Harris and Phineas Fletcher defending the group from Tom Loker and the slave catchers.
5. Emmanuel Leutze, WestwardtheCourseofEmpireTakes ItsWay(1862). The German artist was commissioned to paint this celebration of westward expansion in the US Capitol Building, where he completed the work in 1861–1862. Leutze’s portrayal of an African American youth at the center of the mural may have been influenced by the emancipation of slaves in the District of Columbia in 1862.Source: Architect of the Capitol.
6. The beating of Charles Sumner. This lithograph cartoon by John L. Magee portrays Representative Preston Brooks caning Senator Charles Sumner in the United States
Senate chamber on May 22, 1856. Source: Harry T. Peters “America on Stone” Lithography Collection, American Museum of National History.
7. Freedman’s Village Arlington.Source: Library of Congress.
8. Union soldiers outside Arlington House, June 28, 1864. Source: Photograph by Andrew J. Russell. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division.
9. and 10. Illustrations by N.C. Wyeth of John Hay’s “Banty Tim,” ThePikeCountyBallads. “Banty Tim” portrays the political implications of a Black man’s rescue of a white soldier on a Civil War battlefield.
11. Flyer from a speaking engagement of Albion Winegar Tourgée. Source: Chautauqua Country Historical Society, McClurg Museum.
12. 1877 view of the Washington Monument under construction as seen from the Tower of the Smithsonian.Source: Library of Congress.
13. “Let us Have Peace” illustrated poem.Source: Library of Congress.
14. Ely S. Parker.Source: The Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio.
15. Helen Hunt Jackson, “Santa Ynez Mission.” Source: Images from TheCenturyIllustratedMonthlyMagazine, Vol. XXVI (1883): p. 7.
16. Helen Hunt Jackson, “The Old Alcalde, San Luis Rey.” Source: Images from TheCenturyIllustratedMonthly Magazine, Vol. XXVI (1883): p. 214.
Preface
Writing a literary history with contemporary relevance is always tricky, and in recent years making connections between the past and the present has become downright treacherous. Two challenges in particular gave me pause as I considered how to relate this book on the literary history of the peace movement to current events: the proliferation of historical narratives that shape and drive conflict; and the way digital technologies are creating new domains where conflict can unfold. The two concerns are intertwined. Conflicts driven by competing versions of history are nothing new, but the digital realm has spurred the proliferation of such narratives and extended their reach.
It sometimes seems that nothing changes faster than the past. Historical narratives drive many present-day conflicts, with competing versions of history being used to stoke grievances and, in some cases, to build support for war. Contested histories may involve nationalist impulses or highlight the traumas of the oppressed; they often refer to past violence in the form of battles, massacres, or personal assaults. Monuments often serve as a material basis for contestation.1 Correspondingly, innovations in communications technologies have driven the accelerating pace of life in the twenty-first century, as well as propelling the transformation of journalism. The 24–7 news cycle requires a steady stream of fresh material at the same time that the rapid increase of media outlets and platforms has created a highly competitive marketplace for news. Journalists respond with a heightened tone, rewarded by social media algorithms that elevate sensational topics
and language. Political polarization was already underway when the internet went mainstream, and the spread of “click-bait” journalism helped to further deepen those divisions. Polarization became an end in itself, notably in the domain of international rivalries, as new media technologies enabled a vast expansion of old propaganda techniques, making disinformation campaigns increasingly difficult to detect. Russian intervention in the Brexit campaign of 2016 and the presidential campaigns in the United States (2016) and France (2017) were prominent instances of a much wider phenomenon. The rising impact of cyber-intervention led the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in June 2021 to hold its first scientific meeting on “cognitive warfare,” with an eye to resolving whether to add the cognitive realm as a sixth fighting domain, in addition to land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace.2 While cyberspace might seem to encompass the realm where propaganda campaigns unfold on social media, the cognitive domain is actually quite different. Conflict in cyberspace can take the form of breaching security systems and disrupting basic services like power grids. Cognitive warfare takes the mind itself as the battlefield. An influential definition from 2017 characterizes “cognitive warfare” as “manipulat[ing] an enemy or its citizenry’s cognition mechanisms in order to weaken, penetrate, influence or even subjugate or destroy it” (Claverie and du Cluzel 3). Such propaganda campaigns involve foreign efforts to undermine American democracy by making citizens distrust one another and reducing the capacity of the US government to address urgent issues. What are the implications of adding cognitive warfare to NATO’s array of fighting domains?
Reversing the perspective, we might ask: what will warfare be like if the cognitive domain is not recognized as a defense priority? August Cole and Hervé Le Guyader, the authors of a narrative posted on NATO’s Innovation Hub in 2021, took just this approach. Futurist narratives (Sci-Fi and the sub-genre Cli-Fi, or climate fiction) envision possible worlds-to-come, and in recent years narrative has
been employed as an intelligence tool as well. Cole and Le Guyader describe their work as “FICINT”—that is, Fictional (or Fiction) Intelligence—and explain that their narrative presents “a fictional yet realistic NATO operational scenario at the end of this decade” to help assess whether to add “the human mind” as the sixth domain of warfare. In other words, the authors’ ability to invent a convincingly realistic scenario of a dystopian future could help persuade NATO leaders to elevate the “human domain” (Cole and Le Guyader’s variant of the cognitive domain) as an officially recognized space of conflict. Emphasizing the role of literary character to their project, Cole and Le Guyader explain that their narrative is “character driven so that the reader may better understand the strategic, operational, political and social implications of this paradigm from the point of view of those who will be experiencing these transformative moments.”3
The narrative consists of three parts: a short conversation held during a break at a conference in September 2028 between a top NATO commander and a chief scientist at a prestigious French university; an account of a NATO exercise that goes awry the following June; and “the speech that never was,” which General H.P. Weaver, the NATO commander from the first section, had planned to give a week after the failed exercise. In part one, the scientist Dr. Jean-Bernard Béthany works to persuade Weaver of the urgent need to address what Béthany calls the “human domain”—including but going beyond the cognitive domain to encompass a broad range of fields, including “political science, history, geography, biology, cognitive science, business studies, medicine and health, psychology, demography, economics, environmental studies, information sciences, international studies, law, linguistics, management, media studies, philosophy, voting systems, public administration, international politics, international relations, religious studies, education, sociology, arts and culture.…” (8). To make his case Béthany lists five main points: warfare has changed and the threat
picture is larger than ever; trust is a targeted vulnerability, especially trust in government institutions; the human domain is at the core of the security threat; individuals and committed minorities have more power than ever before; and finally, collaboration is essential to address these novel problems, for all nations “have external forces and home grown committed minorities busy weakening its economy, its cohesiveness, constantly testing its resolve by launching attacks of all sorts.” As the conversation between Béthany and Weaver unfolds, conference workers plant nano-mics on the cappuccino cups that they bring to the men, a cloak-and-dagger detail that lingers in subsequent scenes.
Having introduced the core concepts and presented the argument for a “human domain” in the opening scene, in the second and longest section Cole and Le Guyader imagine a conflict scenario in the arctic setting of Svalbard, Norway, where a NATO exercise is being witnessed by journalists and observers in high-tech gear. Suddenly Polish nationalist music blares, disrupting the exercise. A series of hypothetical explanations for the disruption begins with resurgent nationalism: “nationalist lyrics, conjuring the backwardlooking darkness that … was growing throughout Europe in the late 2020s” (15). Next, the disruption is traced to China: “Beijing wanted to discredit the NATO exercise and technological demonstrations to poison Taiwan’s interest” and dissuade “NATO from further outreach to nations in the Asia-Pacific” (19). The third and final explanation attributes the disruption to “a European non-state movement calling itself Libertas … [whose] goal was to accelerate the breakup of 20th century alliances and national boundaries in Europe that it believes are going to repeat the conflicts that ravaged Europe during the prior century.” Libertas’s goals are summed up as “‘They want to wage war to … achieve peace….’” (22). With these competing explanations in play, NATO’s member nations are fighting amongst themselves about how to respond. Admiral Angela Alvarez, the US Navy officer and commander of Joint Forces Command, Naples,
states the problem concisely: “We need a narrative everybody can get aligned around” (21).
The third and final section of the narrative presents “the speech that never was.” It contains the text of the address that General Weaver was scheduled to give to the NATO London Summit advocating for the “human domain,” until the events at Svalbard made the exigence of adopting the concept all too obvious. Weaver’s speech opens with words evoking a famous historical precedent: “President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his First Presidential Inauguration speech delivered on March 4th, 1933, famously said, ‘… the only thing we have to fear is … fear itself.’” The speech continues: “This was eight and a half years before the United States entered World War Two and, yet, this quote is still applicable today although the kind of fear we should fear the most has, to a large extent, evolved into something far more ominous” (24). Drawing two additional phrases from Roosevelt’s speech—“public opinion” and “the hearts and minds of men”—Weaver notes the present lack of a cohesive public opinion and the pervasiveness of the threats to “hearts and minds,” threats that include both rival nations and nonstate actors. “Make no mistake,” he continues, “today’s target is human behavior, and that includes targeting human cognition through manipulation of the information sphere, but the threat goes beyond the mere damage that manipulating information can yield.” Weaver develops the point, stating that “the human, hence any community they belong to and work for, is a target for our adversaries and their diversifying arsenal. This is a frontline” (25–26). The speech closes with a repetition of Roosevelt’s “fear itself,” a detail that captures the radically compressed timescale of the twenty-first century: where Roosevelt anticipated the war on his horizon by over eight years, Weaver’s speech is already outdated before the event where he is scheduled to give it even begins.
Roosevelt’s speech represents the necessity and inadequacy of an orientation to the past in Cole and Le Guyader’s work of Ficint. This
is one example of the pervasive habit of resurrecting a historical episode to frame a current conflict or crisis. The emergence of COVID-19 in early 2020 was met with a sense of inevitability borne of both rising attention to emergent viruses in a globalized world, and the prevalence of political narratives organized by references to twentieth-century fascism, Communism, and two world wars. Reviving nationalist ideologies that at times verged on fascism, including white supremacism, and the rising ambitions of the Communist Party of China made the sense of déjà vu that much more intense. The historical attention trained on the centennial of the 1919 Spanish flu pandemic provided an immediate reference point for early reporting on the coronavirus at the beginning of 2020. Echoes of a more recent past resonated in the US pullout from Afghanistan in August 2021, which journalists compared to the American withdrawal from Saigon in April 1975, at the end of the Vietnam War.
More déjà vu moments unfolded in the first half of 2022, when two seemingly settled historical conflicts flared to renewed life as Russia invaded Ukraine, and the US Supreme Court overturned the 1973 abortion rights decision in Roe v. Wade. What these very different issues have in common is that they both involve the revival of disputes that had appeared to be resolved. The breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 seemed to promise the end of the Cold War, the end of Communism as a viable alternative to liberalism, and the integration of Russia and its former empire into a global community; the US high court’s decision emphasizing a woman’s right to control her body had appeared firmly established, particularly after the 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey confirmed the Roe decision. Meanwhile, news reports framed the inflation rate as the highest in forty years and the prospect of 1970s-style “stagflation” loomed. All of these issues were used to mobilize political activists and to further polarize a divided electorate.
The lesson seems to be that old conflicts never die; they lie dormant until conflict entrepreneurs dig them up and set them in motion again. I encountered the phrase “conflict entrepreneurs” in Amanda Ripley’s timely and accessible book about hyperpolarization, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out (2021). A recognized phenomenon in legal and peacebuilding circles, conflict entrepreneurs are people who exploit dissension for their own ends. Historical comparisons provide ready material for shaping narratives that drive conflicts; the past can be a distorting lens as well as a sharpening one, sometimes both at once. The response to COVID-19 was informed in ways both good and bad by the historical analogy to the Spanish flu, all quickly absorbed into the partisan political landscape and the polarizing media industry. The conflicts surrounding the pandemic went beyond what Ripley describes as “healthy conflict”—conflict that is inevitable and even desirable as a way of valuing difference and sharpening our thinking —and moved into what she calls “high conflict,” which generates intensely personalized hostility toward people who think differently or hold competing beliefs and values. Ripley connects the myriad high conflicts in the United States and around the world to the polarizing effects of social media and the cascading reactions to those developments.4
Ripley’s distinction between healthy and high conflict seems worth holding on to as we step back to one of the most violent and contested periods of US history: the sixty years from 1840 to 1900, which include the American Civil War and the rise of the United States as a continent-spanning global power. These years saw an American war still unmatched in deaths per capita; the official end of chattel slavery and efforts to reconstruct Southern society to mitigate that system’s devastating effects; rapid territorial expansion that often came at the expense of Native communities; and an increasingly imperialist understanding of the American role in the world. They were also the years when an international peace
movement with a strong presence in the United States played an active and evolving role. Already in the nineteenth-century US peace movement, tensions were crystallizing between efforts to build international peace and attempts to achieve a positive peace at home. These tensions between preventing war and creating a just and lasting peace persist today. They are tensions that have shaped the academic field of peace studies that emerged from the peace movement in the decades following World War II. This book takes a close look at the tensions between social peace and international peace in the first century of the American peace movement, with discussions of key historical figures and episodes, and with close readings of select novels. Resisting the high conflicts of the present that make superficial references to the past, my aim is to promote a deeper understanding of efforts to build a more peaceful world that can help shape healthier forms of conflict in the future.
Acknowledgements
This project has received generous financial support from the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame. I also wish to thank George A. Lopez, Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., Professor Emeritus of Peace Studies, who encouraged me and provided a formative introduction to the field of peace studies.
Introduction
On April 11, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln delivered the final speech of his life from a White House window. Two days earlier Confederate General Robert E. Lee had surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, General-in-Chief of the Union Armies, at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. Amidst the hope and uncertainty of this watershed moment, the people wanted to hear from their president. In what became known as the “Speech on Reconstruction,” Lincoln offered his reflections on the urgent matters at hand to the racially diverse crowd gathered outside the White House. Less soaring in its rhetoric than the justly famous Second Inaugural Address that Lincoln had delivered less than six weeks earlier, the “Speech on Reconstruction” highlighted the practical challenges then facing the United States. In his opening remarks Lincoln spoke of his “hope of a righteous and speedy peace,” and he promised to announce a day of thanksgiving.1 This celebratory note sounded only briefly. The bulk of the speech dealt with the immediate requirements for readmitting Louisiana into the Union with a newly constituted state government. Lincoln touched on the contentious matter of Black suffrage, noting that “it is … unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man” in Louisiana, and stating that “I would prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers” (699). These few rather tentative remarks signaling Lincoln’s plans to enfranchise some of the freed people are thought to have moved John Wilkes Booth to
assassinate the President. Three days later Booth carried out his decision, shooting Lincoln in the head at Ford’s Theater on the evening of April 14. The President died the following morning.
Contemplating the transition to peace that he would not live to accomplish, Lincoln acknowledged the enormous challenges ahead, stating flatly that the future “is fraught with great difficulty.” He explained the obstacles facing the United States with remarkable economy of expression. First, he observed that “unlike the case of a war between independent nations, there is no authorized organ for us to treat with” (697). Lincoln may have been thinking about the developing system of international law that offered new ways to end wars between states but did not apply to civil conflicts. This system had begun taking shape with the Jay Treaty of 1794, officially titled the “Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation, between His Britannic Majesty and the United States of America.” Named for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay who served as a special envoy for the United States in the negotiations, the Jay Treaty included provisions for arbitration to resolve hostilities between the United States and Great Britain. Three joint commissions negotiated the main issues in the conflict, with a settlement reached in 1802. While not the first use of arbitration, the Jay Treaty is often considered to be the origin point for the system of international adjudication that matured over the succeeding century and a half. In 1872 the Civil War gave rise to a pivotal moment in the history of arbitration with the settlement of the Alabama Claims Case, which involved reparations that Great Britain paid to the United States for enabling the supply of vessels and goods to the Confederacy. The longripening fruits of these early successes include such institutions and protocols of international peacebuilding as: the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, a range of non-governmental organizations focused on peacebuilding, certain aspects of international law, and norms articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Responsibility to Protect principle. This
partial list reflects an extraordinarily robust set of developments traceable, in some measure, to the Jay Treaty and the Alabama case. Even today, however, civil wars pose special challenges to a system designed to regulate conflicts between states rather than within them.2
There were additional complexities to the situation facing Lincoln. Not only was there no external, international body to aid the victorious North as it sought to establish terms with the defeated South; within the Confederacy itself, there was no clear “authorized organ” or governing body capable of enforcing the peace. Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his cabinet had abandoned their capitol at Richmond before Lee surrendered to Grant a surrender that Davis had not authorized. The leader of the Confederacy hoped to make his way to Europe, or perhaps to Texas to establish a government in exile, and he remained in hiding until his capture by Union forces on May 10. It was this situation that Lincoln referenced when he noted that the disorder in the South was traceable to the fact that “no one man has authority to give up the rebellion for any other man.” With no clear lines of institutional authority, no roadmap to peace, and no helpful precedents, Lincoln observed that “we simply must begin with, and mould from, disorganized and discordant elements.” The difficulties were further compounded by divisions among the victors, insofar as “we, the loyal people, differ among ourselves as to mode, manner, and means of reconstruction” (697). Already there were tensions between the Radical Republicans, who pressed Lincoln to move quickly in support of the formerly enslaved people and hold the Confederacy to account, and members of the party’s Moderate wing who urged a more gradual and conciliatory approach to white Southerners. These early steps toward peace exposed long-standing divisions that would only widen in the succeeding months and years.
In the conclusion of his Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln had called on the nation to “achieve and cherish a just, and lasting
peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”3 But what, in practice, would this mean? Here, Lincoln employed scriptural and symbolic language to lay the groundwork for a restored Union. Stating with unusual directness that the war was being fought over slavery, the President framed the bloody conflict as divine providence. God had allowed the slave system to develop, he observed, and “He now wills to remove” it; the war represented divine punishment of North and South alike for complicity in the system. Lincoln touched on the unexpected duration and destructiveness of the conflict and urged his audience to accept the affliction, no matter its length or cost in blood and treasure. He avoided more mundane explanations of the war’s duration and high death toll. Some of Lincoln’s contemporaries believed that the 1861 declaration of neutrality issued by Queen Victoria had enabled British firms to provide the vessels and goods to the Confederacy that were addressed in the Alabama case, and modern historians continue to speculate that this distinctly human factor may have significantly protracted the war.
Lincoln steered attention away from this and other human elements to emphasize heavenly causes, albeit in a conditional mood. “If God wills” that “the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil” and “blood drawn with the lash” are to be repaid drop-for-drop with blood “drawn with the sword,” he urged, then all Americans must accept “the judgments of the Lord” as “true and righteous altogether.” Calling for “malice toward none” and “charity for all,” he focused attention on “him who shall have borne the battle, and … his widow, and his orphan.” This pointedly broad appeal specifies neither the sectional affiliation nor the race of those most directly affected. Southerners and Northerners, Blacks and whites alike were among the soldiers and their families who would be the primary recipients of the Biblical “charity” that Lincoln hoped would “bind up the nation’s wounds” (687).
Contemporaries responded to Lincoln’s religious framing of the war, his use of Biblical references, and the sermonic tone and timbre of the speech, qualities that continue to loom large today. Frederick Douglass reportedly told Lincoln at the inaugural reception that his address had been a “sacred effort.” Lincoln himself responded to a complimentary missive from the Republican political operative Thurlow Weed with a short note explaining that he expected that the speech would not be “immediately popular” because “men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it,” Lincoln continued, “is to deny that there is a God governing the world.” By framing the war as divine punishment, Lincoln shaped a narrative with the potential to unite white Northerners and Southerners in a shared sense of sin and guilt, which might help to lessen the punitive impulses of the victors, while also stressing the entire nation’s debts to the freed people. Lincoln’s call for “malice toward none” and “charity for all” was a rhetorical bid to diminish the after-effects of a conflict that already threatened to linger for decades or even generations.4
The American Civil War has been called the nation’s “second founding.”5 This language of re-founding, similar to Lincoln’s “sacred effort” in his Second Inaugural Address, places the war and its aftermath squarely in a progressive national narrative. In recent years, however, the second founding has been called into question as the failures of Reconstruction have increasingly shaped public discourse. Scholars, journalists, filmmakers, artists, and activists have highlighted the ways that white supremacy not only survived the war, but may even have strengthened its hegemony.6 At an early moment in the “peace,” Southern elites formed the Ku Klux Klan as a means to reassert their power, while white political leaders imposed Black Codes that clad key elements of the chattel slave system in a new legal garb. These efforts were beaten back by Reconstruction policies and the passage of the 14th and 15th amendments, but they reasserted themselves in new forms such as Jim Crow segregation,
which the Supreme Court effectively nationalized in its Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896.
Black Americans continued to struggle in the volatile post-war climate, even as social conflicts multiplied and new problems seized public attention after the official end of Reconstruction on March 31, 1877. The United States was rapidly expanding in territory and population, fighting Native communities for land, bringing immigrants to work in factories, and becoming more urban and industrialized. Historian Jon Grinspan has characterized the postbellum era as “the age of acrimony,” calling attention to the way that contentious politics became increasingly pronounced after the war, until eventually political conflict came to be seen as more of an obstacle to democratic governance than a means to achieve it. The late nineteenth century can be characterized in the terms that Amanda Ripley uses to describe political culture in the United States today, where “healthy conflict” too often gives way to selfperpetuating “high conflicts” related to intense polarization. Ripley draws on insights from the field of negotiation—a field intimately connected with peacebuilding—to offer a path out of our present state of high conflict.7
Instead of turning to history to revitalize conflicts, looking to the past can offer paths to a better future. Taking the Civil War as a fulcrum, this book explores how the peace movement in the United States evolved over the nineteenth century. Often episodic in its influence during the sixty-year period that is the focus of this book, the peace movement proved exceptionally consequential over the long term. The first peace societies were established independently of one another in New York and London in 1815 and 1816, catalyzed by the devastation of the Napoleonic wars and frustration over the War of 1812. This initial phase of the movement peaked at the international peace congresses that were held in England and Europe in 1843 and annually between 1848 and 1853. Though centered in Europe, the peace cause had a significant presence in
the United States, which provided important leadership. Elihu Burritt, a Connecticut native, was among its most influential figures. An energetic auto-didact nicknamed the “Learned Blacksmith,” Burritt launched the series of six congresses that began in 1848, among his other contributions to the cause.8 The United States was well represented at these events, with delegates including James W.C. Pennington and William Wells Brown, two formerly enslaved men of letters, and the Ojibwa writer and public intellectual Kah-Ge-Ga-GahBowh (George Copway). For a time, these Black and indigenous activists found affinities between the peace movement and the work they did to end slavery and bring attention to the violence of settler colonialism.
From the 1815 founding of the first societies to the mid-century congresses, the cause of peace attracted wide attention. Leading intellectuals and public figures, including William Ellery Channing, Theodore Parker, William Lloyd Garrison, and Charles Sumner, advocated for peace. Literary figures did as well. Speaking to the American Peace Society in 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson asserted that “the peace principle … can never be defended, it can never be executed, by cowards. Everything great must be done in the spirit of greatness. The manhood that has been in war must be transferred to the cause of peace, before war can lose its charm, and peace be venerable to men.”9 Emerson’s prediction about the impact of a valiant commitment to peace began to take a more concrete form in July 1846, when Henry David Thoreau spent a night in Concord jail after refusing to pay his poll tax to protest the Mexican–American War and the expansion of slavery. The essay that grew out of Thoreau’s experience remains a landmark statement of nonviolent resistance. Published in 1849, “Resistance to Civil Government” (also known as “Civil Disobedience”) later influenced the nonviolent protest movements of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.10
A particularly challenging moment for the peace cause unfolded after the Compromise of 1850 opened a rift between peace advocates and the anti-slavery cause. The Compromise measures included the Fugitive Slave Act, which implicated Northerners in the slave system and helped push a legislated end to slavery out of reach. A rising tide of violent resistance over the ensuing decade culminated in John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry, tipping the fragile balance that existed within the United States toward the war that became all but inevitable following Lincoln’s election in November 1860. William Lloyd Garrison, who espoused both immediate abolition and nonviolence, responded to John Brown’s execution by describing Brown’s violent actions as a stage on the path to non-resistance. “I thank God when men who believe in the right and duty of wielding carnal weapons are so far advanced that they will take those weapons out of the scale of despotism, and throw them into the scale of freedom,” Garrison wrote in The Liberator. “It is an indication of progress, and a positive moral growth; it is one way to get up to the sublime platform of nonresistance; and it is God’s method of dealing retribution upon the head of the tyrant.”11 This passage shows Garrison’s non-resistance to be bound up with his perfectionism, that is, his belief that humans could become free from sin and thus morally perfect.12 His words capture a salient aspect of peace advocacy: unlike absolute pacifists, who oppose war in any circumstances, pragmatic or conditional pacifists believe that war, or violence more generally, is justified in certain circumstances. Both schools contributed to the early peace movement.
Thrown into disarray by the Civil War, the US peace movement regrouped with arbitration as its central emphasis, achieving notable results. The success of the AlabamaClaims Case spawned a series of efforts that culminated in the Hague Peace Conference of 1899, where leading international powers agreed to a Permanent Court of Arbitration—an important step toward the founding of the United
Nations in 1945. The focus on arbitration in the postbellum peace movement did not mean that domestic concerns within the United States were entirely neglected—for example, the Universal Peace Union, the leading peace organization after the war, supported the cause of indigenous rights, as I discuss in Chapter 6—but they were overshadowed by the response to rising militarism and imperialism on the international stage. As had been the case before the Civil War, writers and intellectuals continued to be attracted to later peace efforts. Prominent authors contributed to the anti-militarism and anti-imperialism that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century (Mark Twain is a notable example); the pacifist reaction against World Wars I and II (including Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, and Robert Lowell); the anti-war movement of the 1960s and 1970s (Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, and James Baldwin, among others); and the anti-nuclear movement of the 1970s and 1980s (Leslie Marmon Silko and Joan Didion, to name two).
A transformation occurred after World War II, when the peace field emerged as a research discipline with a growing footprint in institutions and universities. Over the ensuing decades peace scholars have developed more complex and data-driven explanations of the types and sources of violence; and they have contributed approaches to conflict that enable shifts in perception and response at both the individual and the societal level.13 Though widely separated in time, much of the groundwork for these twentieth- and twenty-first-century developments was laid in the period covered by this book. By returning to the early years of the peace movement, I hope to show how the twin impulses of social justice and peacebuilding that continue to animate the peace field were intertwined from the beginning, sometimes complementing one another but at other times pulling in different directions. Some theoretical advances in the study of peace over the past six decades —including the concepts of negative and positive peace, and of
