American Peace Society

The American Peace Society is the oldest nonsectarian U.S. organization dedicated to peace among civil states, domestically and internationally. For more than 150 years, it has promoted the establishment of laws and institutions that would be able to arbitrate and adjudicate disputes among nations and thereby avoid war. The society has worked to establish a Congress of Nations and a World Court, conducted a variety of international peace congresses at the Hague, and lobbied for international treaties and institutions, such as the Pan American Union—all to “promote permanent international peace through justice,” in the words of its charter. With roots in the peace movements of the early 19th century, the American Peace Society promoted a moderate, internationalist philosophy that at times ran counter to more radical pacifist and isolationist views of the larger American peace movement.

William Ladd, a retired sea captain and farmer from Maine, first proposed the establishment of the American Peace Society in 1828. The society was organized in New York City in May of that year through the association of state and local peace societies, the oldest of which was the New York Peace Society, which had been founded in 1815 by New York City merchant and pacifist David Low Dodge. Noah Worcester had organized the Massachusetts Peace Society in the same year. Societies from Maine, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania joined with the New York and Massachusetts organizations to form the American Peace Society.

The American Peace Society was the umbrella organization for its affiliated regional societies but also engaged in its own activities. Originally headquartered in Hartford, Connecticut, the society moved to Boston in 1835, where it was located until 1911, when it moved to Washington, D.C.

The peace movement prior to the Civil War, of which the American Peace Society was a part, gained members after the publication of Bowdoin College professor and clergyman Thomas Coggswell Upham's Manual of Peace in 1836. It argued for the founding of a congress of nations, an idea that Ladd had first proposed in 1832. Ladd and Upham also argued for the establishment of a world court that would arbitrate disputes without nations’ resorting to arms.

[Page 37]The society's leaders during the 19th century also included New Hampshire merchant Samuel Elliott Coues, and, into the 20th century, Quaker and Earlham College English professor Benjamin Franklin Trueblood. Its corresponding secretary for many years was Boston Congregationalist minister George Cone Beckwith, who edited the society's magazine, The Advocate of Peace and Universal Brotherhood, earlier titled The Harbinger of Peace and The Calumet.

Throughout the 19th century, the society had a large, broad membership. It did not condemn defensive wars or individual acts of self-defense, thus both its goals and methods were moderate compared with those of some of its more restive members. Twice during the century, radicals who did reject self-defense broke away from the society to establish more strictly pacifist organizations.

The first of these was the New-England Nonresistance Society, formed in Boston in 1838. It took its name from the biblical injunction, “Resist not evil.” Under the leadership of such reformers as William Lloyd Garrison and Adin Ballou, it urged the abandonment of all use of force, even in self-defense, and the refusal to act in league with any “human government,” including that of the United States, that used force. Where the American Peace Society encouraged working through the political process to establish just institutions, the New-England Non-Resistance Society encouraged people to be “Come Outers,” i.e., to abstract themselves from any participation in politics. Ballou and Garrison published a newspaper, The Nonresistant, to disseminate their views. The New-England Non-Resistance Society lasted until 1845.

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