The Early Nineteenth-Century American Peace Movement: From Consensus to Division

Abstract

Not everyone in 1815 greeted the formation of the first peace societies in America with joy. John Adams, for one, thought the idea was nonsense. Replying petulantly to an offer from the Massachusetts Peace Society to join its ranks, he insisted that what America needed was not less martial spirit, but more. In light of that fact, he continued, do, sir, most humbly supplicate the theologians, the philosophers, and the politicians to let me die in peace. I seek only repose.1 Ironically enough, peace and repose were one topic on which the peace societies were unable to agree. From the beginning, they debated how radical a stance toward war and violence they ought to take. David Low Dodge, founder of the first society, adamantly declared all wars and violent acts of any nature—including self-defense and capital punishment—to be inimical to the gospel. Noah Worcester and William Ellery Channing, who helped to organize the Massachusetts Peace Society a few months after Dodge began his group in New York, condemned all wars of aggression, but refused to decry defensive wars and acts of personal self-defense. The two groups managed to achieve a working truce when they joined together in the American Peace Society in 1828. That fragile balance was upset in 1838, however, when a group of radicals led by William Lloyd Garrison and Adin Ballou left to form the New England Nonresistance Society.2 It is a misconception, however, to imagine that the peace movement