===== PAGE 1 ===== The Journal of Libertarian Studies, Vol. V, No. 3 (Summer 1981) The Anti-war Abolitionists: The Peace Movement’s Split over the Civil War by Sheldon Richman Department of History, George Mason University Since the victors of warfare write the histories, one must look long and hard to find recognition of the radical critics of any given war. No matter how substantial or respectable anti-war sentiment may be as a conflict approaches, once the pro-war spirit gets rolling, like a snowball down a mountain, it sweeps aside everything in its path. The War between the States is no exception. In most accounts, the necessity of the War, as in most other wars, is taken for granted. Those who argued against it in ad- vance are ignored (or forgotten) on the grounds that, since the war occurred, they must have been mistaken.! This is not to say that all the critics are dispensed with. Some serve useful purposes. The Copperheads, with their softness on the slavery issue and conservative longing for the status quo, cast a flattering light on the pro-war Radical Republicans in some observers’ judgment. ? The Copperheads, however, were not the only opponents of the War and its militarization of American society. Other groups and individuals coupled a disgust for state warfare with abolitionist passion. In general, while wishing to see the horror of chattel slavery ended at once, they recog- nized that state warfare, total or limited, would bring horrors of its own, They were confident that abolitionist ends could be attained by other than military means. These anti-war abolitionists were not a homogeneous group. Their philosophical roots were diverse, they differed on their proposed solutions, and they disagreed regarding the use of violence. Some were extreme paci- fists,® while others openly favored violent slave uprisings, if necessary, and praised John Brown’s methods of terror. Their political views also con- flicted. Some believed the state was a divine institution to be obeyed up to the limits of one’s conscience. Others thought the state evil, but adopted non-resistance as their creed. Still others qualify as anarchists or near anarchists who believed in the natural right of revolution. What they agreed on was the depravity of slavery and the foolishness of holding a segment of the population in the Union by force (even if secession 327 ===== PAGE 2 ===== 328 THE JOURNAL OF LIBERTARIAN STUDIES Summer itself was wrong). An examination of their views and activities may call into question the tone of much writing on the War —that undercurrent that seems to say, “War was the only way.” Quandary for Pacifists Historians of the War* have noted the quandary it presents at first glance for those sympathetic to the struggle for civil liberty: one must be either pro-war and antislavery, or anti-war and proslavery. The suggestion that one can be anti-war and antislavery is taken as evidence of naivety. Unsurprisingly, the peace crusaders of the era found themselves in the same quandary. During the 1830s, ’40’s and ’50’s there was a proliferation of pacifist, non-resistant activity that was usually combined with abolition- ism. As the slavery issue approached a boil and secession was openly dis- cussed, the abolitionists appeared to unanimously favor separation from the “sinful” South. In 1844, at the urging of the great abolitionist leader William Lloyd Gar- rison and others, the American Anti-Slavery Society passed a resolution calling for dissolution of the United States. Its backers believed that slavery was dependent on Northern force and “therefore that a dissolution of the Union would certainly abolish that system.”® They saw the value of “making the REPEAL of the Union between the North and the South, the grand rallying point until it be accomplished, or slavery ceases to pollute our soil.”¢ Declaring in The Liberator that “you can be free without the shedding of blood,” Garrison defended the right of dissolution “by the very theory of your government.”” In January 1843, the Massachusetts Anti- Slavery Society passed a resolution that contained words that have been associated with Garrison ever since: “The compact which exists between the North and the South is a ‘covenant with death, and an agreement with hell’ — involving both parties in atrocious criminality—and should be immediately annulled.”3 Garrison and his colleague Wendell Phillips were motivated in part by their belief that the Constitution allowed for, or at best was neutral on, slavery. Phillips, writing in The Liberator in 1848, rebutted the more mod- erate abolitionists who sought to amend the Constitution: Disunion is a course, by which a man or a state may immediately discon- nect themselves from the sin of sustaining slavery. The distant hope of Constitutional amendment not only allows, but makes it necessary, that we should remain in the Union, performing its sinful requirements while they continue the law of the land, in order to effect our object.® Phillips fervently believed that Northern support was critical to slavery’s existence and sought to hold Unionists culpable. “It [the proposal for dis- solution] takes a lazy abolitionist by the throat,” he said, “and thunders in his ear, ‘Thou art the slaveholder.’”1? ===== PAGE 3 ===== 1981 THE CIVIL WAR PEACE MOVEMENT 329 Horace Greeley added his voice to the dissolutionists with an editorial shortly after Lincoln’s election: If the cotton states shall decide that they can do better out of the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go in peace. The right to secede may be a revolutionary one, but it exists nonetheless. . . . Whenever a consid- erable section of the Union shall deliberately resolve to go out, we shall resist all coercive measures designed to keep it in. We hope never to live in a republic whereof one section is pinned to the residue by bayonets, !! Such sentiments were more easily held and expressed before the shooting at Fort Sumter in April 1861. Once the war was on, opponents of a compul- sory Union wavered, and peace organizations — which had long argued over the issue of defensive wars —writhed with internal discord. As Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., writes in The Civilian and the Military: In the early months of 1861, the prospect of a civil war was looked upon with dismay by most thoughtful Americans. ... Leaders of the vigorous peace movement of the "forties and ’fifties realized especially well the threat that a war held for American free institutions. At the same time, because the pacifists were usually also staunch abolitionists, they were faced by a conflict of loyalties. After the Sumter incident many of the peace leaders went along with the majority of the American people in their acceptance of the Civil War as a necessary struggle. The abolition- ists, at least, hoped that with the emancipation of the Negro slaves some good would come out of the military experience. !? Phillips, the disunionist of 1848, became the reluctant war supporter of December 1861: The war is better than the past, but there is not an element of good in it. I mean, there is nothing in it which we might not have gotten better, fuller, or more perfectly in other ways. ... Neither will I remind you that, when we go out of this war, we go out with an immense disbanded army, an intense military spirit embodied in two thirds of a million sol- diers, the fruitful, the inevitable source of fresh debts and new wars. 13 Charles Sumner, who had previously delivered passionate anti-war speeches, found events forcing him “to give up early visions, and to see my country filled with armies, while the military spirit prevails everywhere.” Even Garrison, who on at least one occasion had rebuked John Brown’s violence at Harper’s Ferry in 1859, 5 was heard to speak gently of the raging war. “When 1 said I would not sustain the Constitution because it was a ‘covenant with death and an agreement with hell,’ I had no idea I would live to see death and hell secede,” Garrison said.’¢ And further, “Now that the civil war has begun and a whirlwind of violence and excitement is to sweep the country, it is for abolitionists to ‘stand still and see the salvation of God’ rather than to attempt to add anything to the commotion.”!? Garrison clearly suffered while wrestling with the dilemma. He was a passionate devotee of non-resistance. As Merle Curti wrote: ===== PAGE 4 ===== 330 THE JOURNAL OF LIBERTARIAN STUDIES Summer He even argued in its behalf with John Brown in the parlors of Theo- dore Parker on a January evening in 1857. But with the John Brown raid, Garrison surrendered. On the day of the execution of Brown, Garrison, in a speech at Tremont Temple, declared that wherever there was a conflict between the oppressed and the oppressor, his heart must be with the oppressed, and that therefore he could but wish success to all slave insurrections. “Give me,” he said, “as a non-resistant, Bunker Hill and Lexington and Concord, rather than the Cowardice and Servility of a Southern slave-plantation.” In the same breath he tried to persuade himself and his hearers that he had neither stained nor compromised his peace profession. !® A Garrison biographer, Ernest Crosby, has tried to explain Garrison’s position: His defense [of the war]. . .is impregnable. He was living among people who did not accept his standards of right and wrong. If they chose to fight over an issue which he thought should be settled peaceably, he could not but hope that the side of Abolition would triumph. '? Garrison was not the only peace activist who tried to find some good in the War. Horace Greeley traveled the same route. Greeley desired emancipation passionately. ... Might not the continu- ance of the war be justified if it was for the purpose of universal freedom?.. .It was this bridge of reconciliation which enable Greeley, the peace lover, to ballyhoo with the loudest militarist,2° Even such peace lovers as the Transcendentalists Emerson and Whitman found hope in the War. 2! While the pro-war faction of the peace movement was not of the same bloodthirstiness as, say, Zachariah Chandler, the Michigan Radical Repub- lican (who said, “without a little blood-letting this Union will not, in my estimation, be worth a rush”2?), it went to great lengths to defend its curious position. Gerrit Smith, who was president of the American Peace Society, and others active in the APS argued that the fighting was not a war, but rather a rebellion that the federal government had a right to crush. The few remaining defenders of pacifism attempted to answer this and other pro-war arguments. Adin Ballou, a prominent peace activist and extreme pacifist, led the chorus against those they regarded as sell-outs: It is hard for me to understand how professing anti-war Abolitionists of long standing should so forget or ignore their former protestations against the use of violent means for carrying forward their work and freeing the bondsmen, as to be swept into the foaming vortex of blood and death. Concerning Garrison he wrote with incredulity: And —must I write it! —even Brother William Lloyd Garrison. ..who penned the ‘declaration of sentiments’ adopted by the Peace convention al TE ===== PAGE 5 ===== 1981 THE CIVIL WAR PEACE MOVEMENT 331 of 1838, when spring the New England Non-Resistant Society — this man became more than apologist, he became a eulogist of the blood- shedding hero of the Harper’s Ferry tragedy.?s Apparently sensitive to the possible inference that he was soft on slavery, he wrote that he opposes the war spirit “without abating one jot or tittle of my deep seated and ineradicable hostility to the gigantic system of American oppression.”?¢ He never ceased needling his friend Garrison: To ask a government to use the war power for the accomplishment of an object confessedly good, is to ask it to do what Non-Resistance teaches is essentially wrong.... And to petition the government to abolish slavery by the exercise of the war power, is to become morally involved in the bloodshed and death resulting from such an action.?’ While Ballou’s struggle was lonely, he was not completely alone. He found allies in Elihu Burritt, the free-trader and blacksmith who had taught himself thirty languages; Joshua P. Blanchard, the elderly Boston mer- chant; Moncure D. Conway, the Virginia pacifist; and Josiah Warren and Ezra H. Heywood (who wrote an anti-war article in The Liberator in 1863), two individualist anarchists who opposed all state enterprises, especially war. Burritt was so desperate to see slavery ended peaceably he proposed a federal compensation program under which western lands would be sold off to recompense slaveholders. He also proposed a partial separation of the Confederacy as a compromise to end the War. “He welcomed every sugges- tion for compromise that was not an out and out surrender to slavocracy,” wrote Curti in his book on Burritt.2® According to Curti, the learned blacksmith differed from the vast majority of the original friends of peace when he refused to compromise with his conscience and resolutely held out against the argument that this war was merely a domestic insurrection which federal authority must legitimately crush. With a mere handful of other pacifists he insisted that the struggle was a war, to be opposed like any other.?® Burritt was disturbed about the views of the American Peace Society, in which he had been active. He believed that the APS’s “sophistry and posi- tion have shorn the locks of the Society of all the strength of principle” and regretted that “49 in a hundred of all the Quakers in America have drifted from their moorings in this storm of passion or indignation.” In letters to his friend, the Rev. Henry Richard, secretary of the Peace Society of Lon- don, Burritt vented his anxiety and fears. In May 1861, he wrote Richard about Amasa Walker, an abolitionist and pacifist who early on had none- theless leaned toward supporting the war. Burritt thanked Richard for writ- ing Walker about the matter3!: I hope it will tend to arrest his honest mind from the insidious drifting that has carried nearly all our peace friends into the wake of this ===== PAGE 6 ===== 332 THE JOURNAL OF LIBERTARIAN STUDIES Summer war. ... The great trouble with professed friends of peace here, is the habit of working up fictitious premises, then building an argument and a policy upon them. Mr. [Rev. George C.] Beckwith [secretary of APS] in the Advocate, has done a great deal to commit the Peace Society to this quicksand footing. He has assumed from the beginning that this ter- rible conflict, in which each party is arraying 500,000 armed men against the other, is not a war, but quelling a mob on the part of the Federal Government, that the Northern army of half a million is only a sherifs [sic] posse called out to put down an organization of riotous individ- uals. ... I have felt distressed at my inability to put forth a feather’s weight of influence against the war spirit. In the first place, no Northern journal would admit an article against the conflict. Indeed a religious paper in Philadelphia was suppressed because it called it an Unholy War. The position taken by the Advocate of Peace completely nullifies that as an exponent of our fundamental principles, and there is no possi- bility of getting a hearing of a public audience for views adverse to the war, | have gone as far as I could, without exposing myself to arrest, in opposing the war; but I feel powerless and almost alone. 32 A year and a half later, in another letter to Richard, he wrote, “I am regarded here as almost a secessionist; and indeed, I only try to modify that impression by calling myself a separationist.”3? Burritt spent much time in England during the war in great despair. Joshua P. Blanchard, treasurer of APS, rebuked the society throughout the war for its position. A prolific and colorful writer, Blanchard published articles in The Liberator and other papers and frequently wrote letters to editors. In his writing he gracefully rebutted every point raised in defense of the war by Christians and peace advocates. He firmly believed slavery would end after secession, either by mass run-aways or by action of the slaveholders. He accepted secession as an inherent right and the only solu- tion compatible with the principle of government by consent of the gov- erned. Moreover, he advocated mass conscientious objection to the war. 34 In a March 1861 Liberator article, “Peaceable Division,” Blanchard warned that forcible reunion would mean the entire subjugation of one of the parties, maintained by a perpetual occupation of military force, military tyranny over all the states, aban- donment of our claim to be a government of the people. ... The doc- trine that the prerogatives of government are more sacred and inviolable than the rights, liberties, and welfare and even lives of individual men, is now openly maintained by the advocates of an enforced union, in direct opposition to the principle of popular sovereignty. ... The success of this compulsory measure, establishing the character of our national gov- ernment as one maintained by coercion, and not by consent, would be an awful apostacy, a retrogression into the barbarous maxims of Euro- pean domination, cemented in blood; an utter failure of the first mag- nificent experiment of popular government, to the exultation of tyrants, the disgrace of our land, the despair of all the friends of freedom in the world. ===== PAGE 7 ===== 1981 THE CIVIL WAR PEACE MOVEMENT 333 ...But the harmonious union of the people of this nation, on the principle of general consent, can never be maintained where the senti- ments of the two great sections of it are at such irreconcilable variance on the vital question of the right of slavery. ... The only plan, then, for national reputation, for safety, for justice, and even for humanity, is to give each section an independent government, confirmed to its own ideas of right —that is, peaceable separation from each other.3’ Blanchard denounced those members of the clergy who judged the war compatible with Christianity by virtue of its being merely a rebellion: “Rebellion” is defined by Webster, “an open and avowed renunciation of the authority of the government, to which one owes allegiance.” This can only apply to government on the European principle — there can be no such thing as owing allegiance in a government expressly held on the will of the people. 36 And he saved some of his most penetrating prose for the clergy’s claim that the state had divine origins. It is significant that, in the Constitution, the name of God, or any refer- ence to him, is not to be found, so careful were its framers to prevent the suspicion that he had any hand in it; and surely its character, and that of some Of the laws under it, indicate any thing rather than divine instructions?’ Blanchard wrote that the right of secession was protected by the Declaration of Independence’s principle of government by the consent of the governed, and rejected the argument that this refers to rule of the majority. But the rule of a majority of voters, of necessity led by a few influential persons, is but a disguised oligarchy. ... The only way, then, in which this principle of Revolution — the consent of the governed — can be truly accomplished, is, not by increasing the comparative number in majori- ties, but by exempting private individuals, as far as possible, from the power of the government.... The appellations of “rebellion,” and “treason,” so profusely bestowed by Northern prints on this secession, are false, unjust, illiberal,3® He denounced the North’s aggression, arguing that there were no grounds for the self-defense claim,?® and added his voice to those who believed that slavery could not last without Northern support. It seems so clear that slavery in the South could not long exist when deprived of the support of the North, that we are surprised that this evi- dent consequence is so overlooked or disregarded. ... It is plain, then, that this war is not an anti-slavery, but a pro-siavery war. Josiah Warren, founder of the Modern Times experimental commu- nity,4! took his stand as an abolitionist war opponent in his 1863 book True Civilization, An Immediate Necessity. As Curti writes, ===== PAGE 8 ===== 334 THE JOURNAL OF LIBERTARIAN STUDIES Summer This eccentric archindividualist made a strong plea for fundamental reorganization of society based on voluntary cooperation of sovereign individuals, without any violence, force, or compulsion either for perpetuation of a union of states, the protection of property, or the enforcement of the laws.42 Some of Warren’s disciples at Modern Times avoided involvement in the War by leaving the country.43 Warren thought secession would be the death of slavery. As historian James J. Martin wrote, Disinterested in the political issues with which the term “secession” was connected, Warren always used the term loosely; he considered the act of a slave running away from his master as much a matter of “secession” as the desertion of the Union by a state. However, Warren demonstrated a lack of rigor in seeking a solution to the slave question. While supporting the right of individual sovereignty, he believed it might be bad for an uneducated group without preparation. Warren advocated affirming the right of slaves to be free, while protecting slaveholders from “all unnecessary violence. ..from slaves or any other source.” In his view, the War occurred because Northerners believed that all Southerners regarded slavery as “natural.”4’ Warren, as we have seen, was not the only one who believed secession doomed slavery. A few historians have speculated that awareness of the right of revolutionary self-determination (William Appleman Williams’s term) inherent in secession would have surely spread to the slaves them- selves. Relocating the “Canadian border” to the Mason-Dixon line could only have boosted the abolitionist cause. As slaves poured out of the border states to freedom, that gateway to liberty would have dropped southward until slavery was extinct.¢ Moreover, there is evidence that some slaveholders themselves foresaw this scenario. In 1861 no less a figure than Jefferson Davis told his wife, “In any case, I think our slave property will be lost eventually.” Even earlier, some Southerners had used this as an argument against secession. In 1842, Congressman Joseph Rogers Underwood of Kentucky remarked, How could we retain our slaves, when they, in one hour, one day, or a week at the furthest, could pass the boundary? Sooner or later, this pro- cess would extend itself farther and farther south, rendering slave labor so precarious and uncertain that it could not be depended upon.... Slavery in the States would fall with the Union.4# Speculation about the fate of slavery, had the war not been fought, generally ignores the possibility of a black “bourgeois” revolution in the South, *® but this dismissal is too quick. Private help from friends of liberty in the North is a reasonable premise for suggesting the possibility. One anti- war abolitionist who was ready to provide the help was the curmudgeonly ===== PAGE 9 ===== 1981 THE CIVIL WAR PEACE MOVEMENT 335 Lysander Spooner, a Boston businessman and constitutional lawyer, who, disagreeing with Garrison and Phillips, argued that slavery was unconstitutional. s? He believed that, had Northerners held the conviction that slavery vio- lated the Constitution, the South would have found it difficult to persevere in a pro-slavery effort. He savagely denounced those who denied this psy- chological edge to the abolitionists. As he wrote in his 1864 letter to Charles Sumner, the slaveholders would never have dared, in the face of the world to attempt to overthrow a government that gave freedom to all, for the sake of establishing in its place one that should make slaves of those, who, by the existing Constitution, were free. But so long as the North, especially, so long as the professed (though hypocritical) advocates of liberty. . .conceded the Constitutional right of property in slaves, they gave the slaveholders the full benefit of the argument that they were insulted, disturbed, and endangered in the enjoyment of their acknowil- edged Constitutional right; and that it was therefore necessary to their honor, security and happiness that they should have a separate govern- ment. And this argument, conceded to them by the North, has not only given them strength and union among themselves, but has given them friends, both in the North and among foreign nations, and cost the nation hundreds of thousands of lives, and thousands of millions of treasure. ... Upon yourself, and others like you. . .rests the blood of this horrible, unnecessary, and therefore guilty, war. Spooner’s lack of enthusiasm for the War was the result of his lack of enthusiasm for the state. “Only he and a very few others realized it would be compounding crime and error to try to use government to right the wrongs committed by another government.”’? But Spooner was not a pacifist. He knew and admired John Brown, and when Brown was captured after Har- per’s Ferry, Spooner plotted to seize Virginia Governor Henry Wise and hold him until Brown was released. Lack of money aborted the plan.s3 Unlike the non-resistants, Spooner believed violence was justified in defense of one’s natural rights and that this principle applied to the blacks held in slavery. The state of slavery is a state of war, in this case, it is a just war, on the part of the negroes —a war for liberty, and recompense of injuries; and necessity justifies them in carrying it on by the only means their oppres- sors have left them, 34 Spooner actively tried to recruit Northerners and non-slaveholding Southerners to help slaves escape their masters. On an 1858 poster, he urged them to support a slave rebellion with arms, money, instruction in revolu- tionary methods and organization. He believed the slaves, not the slave- holders, should be compensated and that the land they were forced to work would make proper restitution. His poster declared: ===== PAGE 10 ===== 336 THE JOURNAL OF LIBERTARIAN STUDIES Summer We hope it [the extinction of slavery] may be without blood. ... If it be objected that this scheme proposes war, we confess the fact. It does pro- pose war— private war indeed — but nevertheless, war, if that should prove necessary. ... If the American governments, state or national, would abolish slavery, we would leave the work in their hands. But as they do not, and apparently will not, we propose to force them to do it, or to do it ourselves in defiance of them.5s Spooner’s writing on the War itself came only after its conclusion. He shows himself to be one of the early economic interpreters. Five years after Appomattox, Spooner denounced the War as the Northern businessmen’s effort to “monopolize the Southern markets, to maintain their industrial and commercial control over the South. ...”% He was no socialist; his argument against the Northern industrial interests was a reflection of his individualistic anti-mercantilism which put him at odds with the Republican Party. In 1867 he wrote: On the part of the North, the war was carried on, not to liberate the slaves, but by a government that had always perverted and violated the Constitution to keep the slaves in bondage and was still willing to do so, if the slaveholders could be thereby induced to stay in the Union. The principle, on which the war was waged by the North, was simply this: That men may rightfully be compelled to submit to, and support, a gov- ernment that they do not want; and that resistance, on their part, makes them traitors and criminals. ... If it be established, the number of slaves, instead of having been diminished by the war, has been greatly increased; for a man, thus subjected to a government that he does not want, is a slave. And there is no difference, in principle— but only in degree — between political and chattel slavery,s? Spooner provides the final word to those who argue that the War was the only way: If their object had really been to abolish slavery, or maintain liberty or justice generally, they had only to say: All, whether white or black, who want the protection of this government, shall have it; all who do not want it, will be left in peace, so long as they leave us in peace. Had they said this, slavery would have necessarily been abolished at once; the war would have been saved; and a thousand times nobler union than we have ever had would have been the result. 58 Conscientious Objection Active opponents of the War had a tough time, as they always have. Besides being reviled as cowards or traitors or as un-American, they were often forced to participate in the War against their will. Only limited grounds for conscientious-objector status were allowed during conscription, and a commutation fee and alternative service were required. The Congress did not allow federal exemptions for clergymen until 1864.5 Members of reli- gious groups that objected to all war,® including the Society of Friends ===== PAGE 11 ===== 1981 THE CIVIL WAR PEACE MOVEMENT 337 (Quakers) and the Mennonite Church, suffered abuses at the hands of the military authorities. Some were persecuted because they refused not only to serve, but also to provide substitute soldiers or pay the commutation fee. Perhaps the most poignant story on record in this regard is that of Cyrus Pringle, a Quaker youth who meekly submitted when drafted in 1863, but refused to comply with any orders. In his touching diary, the Vermonter wrote, But we confess a higher duty than that to country, and asking no mili- tary protection of our government and grateful for none, deny any obli- gation to support so unlawful a system, as we hold a war to be even when waged in opposition to an evil and oppressive power and osten- sibly in defence of liberty, virtue, and free institutions. During his ordeal, Pringle was imprisoned and later tied to four posts and forced to lie spread-eagle in the sun for two hours. He was finally sent home on the personal order of President Lincoln. 62 While Lincoln showed some sympathy for the Quakers, others in his administration were impatient with such impertinence. During the War, Quaker Ethan Foster and one Charles Perry visited Secretary of State William H. Seward to plead on behalf of New England Friends who had been drafted. Foster recorded his recollections. Seward at one point asked, “Why don’t Quakers fight?” Charles replied, “Because they believe it wrong, and cannot do it with a clear conscience.” He reprimanded us severely because we refused to fight. After a little pause, I said, “Well, if this world were all, perhaps we might take thy advice,” to which he responded, “The way to get along in the next world is to do your duty in this.” I replied, “That is what we are trying to do; and now I want to ask thee a question, and I want thee to answer it; whose prerogative is it to decide what my duty is, thine or mine?” He did not answer the question. ®? Conclusion The anti-war abolitionists had but little ability to affect the course of the nation. They exercised little or no influence on their contemporaries who were caught up in the Save-the-Union Crusade. But as prognosticators, most were on the mark. They unhappily predicted that the nation would never be the same. They shuddered at the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, newspaper censorship and jailing of editors, and the use of troops to break strikes.®* And some realized that permanent changes would occur as a result of the Republican Party’s neo-mercantilist program of high tariffs, aid to railroads and manipulation of the currency by government, not to mention conscription and the first income tax. Finally, they were acutely aware that the fundamental change involved in forcibly preventing withdrawal from the Union represented a rejection of the principles of the revolution against the Old World. By virtue of this, if nothing else, they deserve the attention of historians and laymen alike. ===== PAGE 12 ===== 338 THE JOURNAL OF LIBERTARIAN STUDIES Summer NOTES 1. This reasoning is curious since the critics argued that the War should not be fought, not that it would not be fought. See Joseph R. Stromberg, “The War for Southern Independ- ence: A Radical Libertarian Perspective,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 3, no. 1 (Spring 1979): 31-53. 2. See Frank L. Klement, The Copperheads in the Middle West (Chicago: Peter Smith, 1960); idem, The Limits of Dissent (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1970); and Wood Gray, The Hidden Civil War, (New York: Viking Press, 1942). 3. By “extreme pacifists” I mean those who believe that any use of physical force, even in genuine self-defense, is immoral. 4, Some have called it the War for Southern Independence or the War of Northern Aggres- sion, See Stromberg, “The War for Southern Independence,” and Stephen Halbrook, “Colonized We Stand: Class, Race and Power in Southern History,” (paper delivered at Southeastern Regional Scholars Conference, University of South Carolina, April 29, 1978). 5. Aileen S. Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism (New York: Pantheon, 1969), p. 196. 6. Ibid., p. 198. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., p. 200. 9. Ibid., p. 212. Emphasis in original. 10. Ibid. Emphasis in original. 11. New York Tribune editorial, November 9, 1869, in Edward Chase Kirkland, The Peace- makers of 1864 (New York: AMS Press, 1927), pp. 66-67. 12. Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., The Civilian and the Military: A History of the American Antimili- tarist Tradition (Colorado Springs, Colo.: Ralph Myles, 1972), p. 91. 13. Ibid. 14, Ibid. 15. “We do not and we cannot approve of any indulgence of the war spirit” (quoted in Ernest Crosby, Garrison the Non-Resistant [Chicago: Ozer, 1905], p. 46). 16. Margaret Hope Bacon, / Speak for My Slave Sister: The Life of Abby Kelley Foster (New York: Crowell, 1974), p. 191. 17. Merle Curti, Peace or War: The American Struggle, 1636-1936 (New York: Norton, 1936), p. 58. 18. Curti, “Non-Resistance in New England,” New England Quarterly 2, no. 1 (January 1929):55-56. 19. Crosby, Garrison the Non-Resistant, p. 86. 20. Adin Ballou, The Auto-Biography of Adin Ballou (Lowell, Mass.: Thompson & Hill, 1896), p. 419. 21. Kirkland, The Peacemakers of 1864, pp. 60-67. 22. Ekirch, The Decline of American Liberalism (New York: Atheneum, 1976), pp. 122-23. 23. J. G. Randall and David Herbert Donald, The Civil War and Reconstruction, (Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1969), p. 152. 24, Peter Tolis, Elihu Burritt: Crusader for Brotherhood (Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String, 1968), p. 261. 25. Ballou, Auto-Biography, p. 416. 26. Ibid., p. 418. 27. Ibid., p. 448. 28. Curti, The Learned Blacksmith: The Letters and Journals of Elihu Burritt (New York: Ozer, 1938), pp. 121-22, 29. Ibid. Emphasis in original. 30. Tolis, Elihu Burritt, p. 263. Emphasis in original. 31. Walker later abandoned his pro-war views. See Peter Brock, Radical Pacifists in Ante- bellum America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 245. 32. Letter from Burritt to Rev. Henry Richard in Curti, The Learned Blacksmith, pp. 138-40. ===== PAGE 13 ===== 1981 THE CIVIL WAR PEACE MOVEMENT 339 33. Ibid., p. 146. Emphasis in original. The Advocate of Peace was the publication of the American Peace Society. 34. Brock, Radical Pacifists, p. 261. 35. Joshua P. Blanchard, “Peaceable Division,” The Liberator, March 1, 1861, in the Blan- chard Scrapbook, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore, Pa, 36. Blanchard, “Christianity of War,” The Register, May 23, 1861, in the Blanchard Scrapbook. Emphasis in original. 37. Blanchard, “War of Secession,” 1861, pamphlet in the Blanchard Scrapbook. Emphasis in original. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. See Curti, Peace or War, p. 59; also James J. Martin, Men Against the State (Colorado Springs, Colo.: Ralph Myles, 1970), pp. 1-102. 42. Curti, Peace or War, p. 59. 43. See Eric Foner, “Radical Individualism in America: Revolution to Civil War,” Literature of Liberty 1, no. 3 (July-September 1978): 27. 44. See Martin, Men Against the State, p. 99, n. 59. 45. Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization, 1606-1865 (New York: Viking Press, 1946), 2:960-61. 46. See William Appleman Williams, America Confronts a Revolutionary World, 1776-1976 (New York: Morrow, 1976), pp. 117-18; and Stromberg, “The War for Southern Inde- pendence,” pp. 41-44. Stromberg notes that the Confederate constitution prohibited for- eign slave-trade. 47. Williams, America Confronts a Revolutionary World, p. 118, 48. Ibid., p. 88. 49. See Stromberg, “The War for Southern Independence,” p. 43. 50. See Lysander Spooner, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery (1845), in The Collected Works of Lysander Spooner, vol. 4, ed. Charles Shively (Weston, Mass.: M&S Press, 1971). Spooner is a rarity in that he actually became more radical as he grew older, becoming finally, a pure individualist anarchist. Despite his having invoked the Constitution against slavery, he argued in 1870 that under natural law it binds no one. “But whether the Constitution really be one thing or another, this much is certain — either it has authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist” (Spooner, No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority, vol. 6 {1870}, in Collected Works, 1:59). His friend and fellow anarchist Benjamin Tucker in 1887 dis- cussed Spooner’s interest in the Constitution during the War: “It should be born in mind that the question was one of interpretation only; the authority of the Constitution as such was not under discussion; if it had been, Spooner’s opposition to it would have been far more radical than Garrison’s” (Benjamin Tucker, “Our Nestor Taken From Us,” in Spooner, Vices are not Crimes: A Vindication of Moral Liberty [Cupertino, Cal.: TANSTAAFL, 1977], p. 43). For Garrison’s and Phillip’s response to Spooner on the con- stitutionality of slavery, see Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism. 51. Spooner, “Letter to Charles Sumner,” October 12, 1864, in Collected Works, 4:2-3. 52. Murray N. Rothbard, “Introduction,” in Spooner, Vices are not Crimes, p. xvii. 53. Shively, Spooner biography in Collected Works, 1:38. 54. Spooner, “In Defense of Fugitive Slaves,” Collected Works 4:37. 55. Spooner, “A Plan for the Abolition of Slavery” {poster}, in Collected Works 4, fold-out illustration. See also Carl Watner, “The Radical Libertarian Tradition in Antislavery Thought,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 3, no. 3 (Fall 1979): 299-330. 56. Spooner, No Treason 6, in Collected Works 1:54. 57. Spooner, No Treason 1, in ibid., p. iil. 58. Spooner, No Treason 6, in ibid., p. 57. 59. J. G. Randall, Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1963), p. 263. Also, “Very little attention was paid to those whose conscientious objections to military service were based on non-religious grounds” (Randall and Donald, The Civil War and Reconstruction, p. 319). ===== PAGE 14 ===== 340 61. 62. 65. THE JOURNAL OF LIBERTARIAN STUDIES Summer . See Edward Needles Wright, Conscientious Objectors in the Civil War (Philadelphia: Uni- versity of Pennsylvania Press, 1931), p. 6. Rufus T. Jones, Record of a Quaker Conscience: Cyrus Pringle’s Diary (New York: Pendle Hill, 1918), pp. 25-26. Ibid. See also Randall, Constitutional Problems, p. 262. . Lillian Schlissel, ed., Conscience in America (New York: Dutton, 1968), pp. 100-101. . Foner, “Radical Individualism in America,” p. 27. Ibid. See also Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty (New York: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 278-79.