Antiwar Movements

Early Republic

Although Pres. George Washington had warned Americans to be leery of “foreign entanglements,” his advice fell on deaf ears. Both presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson championed opposing sides in the era of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. Adams and the Federalist Party regarded Great Britain as a bulwark against French nihilism. Jefferson and the Republican (later Democratic) Party announced their sympathies for the antimonarchist French. Adams involved the United States in fighting an undeclared naval war with France in 1797 (sometimes called the Quasi-War).

Republicans, led by Pres. James Madison, were outraged over the British Royal Navy's practice of boarding U.S. ships in search of alleged deserters; in response they declared war on Great Britain in 1812. Federalists, concentrated in New England, denounced the action; the Federalist state governments of Massachusetts and Connecticut refused to send their militias to support the U.S. war effort in what became known as the War of 1812. Late in the war, in 1814, Federalist delegates from Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Vermont converged in Hartford, Connecticut, to discuss seceding from the Union and making a separate peace with Britain.

In 1815 an affluent merchant, David Low Dodge founded the New York Peace Society. Twenty-two Protestant clerics, college presidents, and writers followed Dodge's example, founding the Massachusetts Peace Society later that year. By 1828 antiwar groups in New York, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania formed the American Peace Society (APS). The APS's 300 members, among them the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, advocated not only the abolition of war, but also of slavery and Roman Catholic immigration.

Civil War Era

The expansion of slavery in the American South led some within the APS to become more militant on this issue. In [Page 46]1838 abolitionist and peace activist William Lloyd Garrison exhorted New Englanders to engage in disruptive acts of civil disobedience to deprive southern slave owners of federal financial, legal, and military support. Garrison's converts included New England author Henry David Thoreau, whose 1849 essay, “Civil Disobedience,” encouraged citizens not to pay taxes that might be used to finance the Mexican-American War. This essay served as an inspiration to later nonviolent social activists, including the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

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