NonviolenceUSA: it can happen here

Spear began himself to write critically of capital punishment in 1830. He and his brother John urged passage of resolutions against capital punishment at the Universalist General Conventions in 1835 and 1836. In 1839 they both were founding members of the New England Non-Resistance Society, an organization led by William Lloyd Garrison and Adin Ballou…

The American Peace Society, based in Boston, Massachusetts, was formed in May 1828 as a result of a merger suggested by William Ladd between the peace societies of Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. The records of the American Peace Society, housed at the Swarthmore College Peace Collection, consist of meeting minutes, branch material, correspondence, reports,…

The Christian Disciple, a monthly journal, had been established by the Revs. William Ellery Channing, Charles Lowell, Samuel Cooper Thacher, and Joseph Tuckerman. In May, 1813, Worcester became its editor. The letter inviting him to Boston to take up this position cited the union of his “talent in writing, skill in reasoning, with Christian gentleness…

It was in 1805 that a startling personal experience prompted the train of thought which soon and forever made David L. Dodge the advocate of the thoroughgoing peace principles with which his name is chiefly identified, and led him to condemn all violence, even in self-defense, in dealings between men, as between nations. Accustomed to…

The Shakers are one of the few success stories resulting from the proliferation of communitarian and millenarian groups in eighteenth and nineteeenth century Europe and America. They splintered from a Quaker community in Manchester, England (Gidley and Bowles 1990). James Wardley, its preacher, had absorbed the teachings of the millenial French Prophets and his community…

The apostle enters upon his subject thus–Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers; for there is no power but of God: the powers that be, are ordained of God. Here he urges the duty of obedience from this topic of argument, that civil rulers, as they are supposed to fulfil the pleasure of…

In a few months after I came here, my master bought several Scotchmen servants, from on board a vessel, and brought them to Mount Holly to sell, one of whom was taken sick and died. In the latter part of his sickness, being delirious, he used to curse and swear most sorrowfully; and the next…

He was in Pennsylvania only three and a half years. But from 1681, when he received the King’s charter at the age of thirty-seven to 1718, when he died, Pennsylvania was one of his chief preoccupations. The growth and well-being of his colony was based on a tradition of religious toleration and freedom under law,…

We came one night to an Indian town, and lay at the house of the king, who was a very pretty man. Both he and his wife received us very lovingly, and his attendants (such as they were) were very respectful to us. They gave us mats to lie on; but provision was very short…

The founder of the Confederacy of the Five Nations is generally acknowledged to be Dekanawida, born near the Bay of Quinte, in southeastern Ontario, Canada. During his travels, he associated himself with a Mohawk tribal lord in what is now New York, and named him Hahyonhwatha (Hiawatha) (He who has misplaced something, but knows where…