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Peace in the US Republic of Letters, 1840–1900
OXFORD STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY
Gordon Hutner, Series Editor

Transgression and Redemption in American Fiction

Thomas J. Ferraro

The Latino Continuum and the Nineteenth-Century Americas

Carmen Lamas

Time and Antiquity in American Empire

Roma Redux
Mark Storey

Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835–

1874
John Evelev

Literary Neurophysiology
Memory, Race, Sex, and Representation in U.S. Writing, 1860–1914
Randall Knoper

Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Thomas Constantinesco

Telling America’s Story to the World

Literature, Internationalism, Cultural Diplomacy
Harilaos Stecopoulos

Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature

Kelly Ross

Climate and the Picturesque in the American Tropics

Michael Boyden

Schools of Fiction
Literature and the Making of the American Educational System
Morgan Day Frank

Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies

An Aesthetics in All Things
Cody Marrs

American Tyrannies in the Long Age of Napoleon

Elizabeth Duquette

Fictions of Finance at the End of an American Century

Punctuating Capital
Richard Godden

Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature

David Anthony
Peace in the US Republic
of Letters, 1840–1900

SANDRA M. GUSTAFSON
 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom

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© Sandra M. Gustafson 2023

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Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

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 Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Regeneration through Nonviolence

i. The Rise of the Peace Cause
ii. Human Rights in The Deerslayer
iii. 1848 on the Michigan Frontier in The Oak Openings
iv. Copway’s American Indian

2. Abolishing Slavery, Imagining Peace

i. The Peace Cause in the Republic of Letters
ii. The Place of Righteous Violence
iii. Forms of Peace in Dred
iv. William Wells Brown Reconsiders

3. Violence, Direct and Indirect

i. The “Red Republicanism” of Karl Marx
ii. Hawthorne’s Heart of Reform
iii. Indirect Violence in The Blithedale Romance
iv. War Matters

4. Arbitration and Alliance

i. The Alabama Claims Case and the Rise of Arbitration
ii. The Secession Winter of Henry Adams
iii. Forging Alliances in Democracy
 iv. John Hay’s The Bread-winners and the Anglo-American Alliance

5. Race and Republican Peace

i. Anglo-Saxonisms
ii. False Peace in A Fool’s Errand and Bricks Without Straw
iii. Charles Chesnutt’s “Angry-Saxons”
iv. Monumenta

6. Failing at Peace
i. Ely Parker, Seneca Peacemaker
ii. Reckoning with A Century of Dishonor in Ramona
iii. Simon Pokagon Rebukes the Nation

Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index
 List of Illustrations

1. Daniel Webster, 1843 Speech at Bunker Hill Monument.

Source: Heritage Auctions, HA.com.
2. Edward Hicks, The Peaceable Kingdom (1826).Source:
Philadelphia Museum of Art: Bequest of Charles C. Willis,
1956, 1956–59–1.
3. Portrait of William Wells Brown. Richard Woodman’s
etching served as the frontispiece for Brown’s Sketches of
Places and People Abroad (1855).
4. The Freeman’s Defense by Hammatt Billings. This full-
page illustration of a scene from Chapter 17 of Uncle
Tom’s Cabin was commissioned for the first edition of the
novel (Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1852). It
features George Harris and Phineas Fletcher defending
the group from Tom Loker and the slave catchers.
5. Emmanuel Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes
Its Way (1862). The German artist was commissioned to
paint this celebration of westward expansion in the US
Capitol Building, where he completed the work in 1861–
1862. Leutze’s portrayal of an African American youth at
the center of the mural may have been influenced by the
emancipation of slaves in the District of Columbia in
1862.Source: Architect of the Capitol.
6. The beating of Charles Sumner. This lithograph cartoon
by John L. Magee portrays Representative Preston Brooks
caning Senator Charles Sumner in the United States
 Senate chamber on May 22, 1856. Source: Harry T.
Peters “America on Stone” Lithography Collection,
American Museum of National History.
7. Freedman’s Village Arlington.Source: Library of Congress.
8. Union soldiers outside Arlington House, June 28, 1864.
Source: Photograph by Andrew J. Russell. Library of
Congress Prints & Photographs Division.
9. and 10. Illustrations by N.C. Wyeth of John Hay’s “Banty Tim,”
The Pike County Ballads. “Banty Tim” portrays the
political implications of a Black man’s rescue of a white
soldier on a Civil War battlefield.
11. Flyer from a speaking engagement of Albion Winegar
Tourgée. Source: Chautauqua Country Historical Society,
McClurg Museum.
12. 1877 view of the Washington Monument under
construction as seen from the Tower of the
Smithsonian.Source: Library of Congress.
13. “Let us Have Peace” illustrated poem.Source: Library of
Congress.
14. Ely S. Parker.Source: The Western Reserve Historical
Society, Cleveland, Ohio.
15. Helen Hunt Jackson, “Santa Ynez Mission.” Source:
Images from The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine,
Vol. XXVI (1883): p. 7.
16. Helen Hunt Jackson, “The Old Alcalde, San Luis Rey.”
Source: Images from The Century Illustrated Monthly
Magazine, Vol. XXVI (1883): p. 214.
 Preface

Writing a literary history with contemporary relevance is always

tricky, and in recent years making connections between the past and
the present has become downright treacherous. Two challenges in
particular gave me pause as I considered how to relate this book on
the literary history of the peace movement to current events: the
proliferation of historical narratives that shape and drive conflict; and
the way digital technologies are creating new domains where conflict
can unfold. The two concerns are intertwined. Conflicts driven by
competing versions of history are nothing new, but the digital realm
has spurred the proliferation of such narratives and extended their
reach.
It sometimes seems that nothing changes faster than the past.
Historical narratives drive many present-day conflicts, with
competing versions of history being used to stoke grievances and, in
some cases, to build support for war. Contested histories may
involve nationalist impulses or highlight the traumas of the
oppressed; they often refer to past violence in the form of battles,
massacres, or personal assaults. Monuments often serve as a
material basis for contestation.1 Correspondingly, innovations in
communications technologies have driven the accelerating pace of
life in the twenty-first century, as well as propelling the
transformation of journalism. The 24–7 news cycle requires a steady
stream of fresh material at the same time that the rapid increase of
media outlets and platforms has created a highly competitive
marketplace for news. Journalists respond with a heightened tone,
rewarded by social media algorithms that elevate sensational topics
and language. Political polarization was already underway when the
internet went mainstream, and the spread of “click-bait” journalism
helped to further deepen those divisions. Polarization became an end
in itself, notably in the domain of international rivalries, as new
media technologies enabled a vast expansion of old propaganda
techniques, making disinformation campaigns increasingly difficult to
detect. Russian intervention in the Brexit campaign of 2016 and the
presidential campaigns in the United States (2016) and France
(2017) were prominent instances of a much wider phenomenon.
The rising impact of cyber-intervention led the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) in June 2021 to hold its first scientific
meeting on “cognitive warfare,” with an eye to resolving whether to
add the cognitive realm as a sixth fighting domain, in addition to
land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace.2 While cyberspace might seem
to encompass the realm where propaganda campaigns unfold on
social media, the cognitive domain is actually quite different. Conflict
in cyberspace can take the form of breaching security systems and
disrupting basic services like power grids. Cognitive warfare takes
the mind itself as the battlefield. An influential definition from 2017
characterizes “cognitive warfare” as “manipulat[ing] an enemy or its
citizenry’s cognition mechanisms in order to weaken, penetrate,
influence or even subjugate or destroy it” (Claverie and du Cluzel 3).
Such propaganda campaigns involve foreign efforts to undermine
American democracy by making citizens distrust one another and
reducing the capacity of the US government to address urgent
issues. What are the implications of adding cognitive warfare to
NATO’s array of fighting domains?
Reversing the perspective, we might ask: what will warfare be like
if the cognitive domain is not recognized as a defense priority?
August Cole and Hervé Le Guyader, the authors of a narrative posted
on NATO’s Innovation Hub in 2021, took just this approach. Futurist
narratives (Sci-Fi and the sub-genre Cli-Fi, or climate fiction)
envision possible worlds-to-come, and in recent years narrative has
been employed as an intelligence tool as well. Cole and Le Guyader
describe their work as “FICINT”—that is, Fictional (or Fiction)
Intelligence—and explain that their narrative presents “a fictional yet
realistic NATO operational scenario at the end of this decade” to help
assess whether to add “the human mind” as the sixth domain of
warfare. In other words, the authors’ ability to invent a convincingly
realistic scenario of a dystopian future could help persuade NATO
leaders to elevate the “human domain” (Cole and Le Guyader’s
variant of the cognitive domain) as an officially recognized space of
conflict. Emphasizing the role of literary character to their project,
Cole and Le Guyader explain that their narrative is “character driven
so that the reader may better understand the strategic, operational,
political and social implications of this paradigm from the point of
view of those who will be experiencing these transformative
moments.”3
The narrative consists of three parts: a short conversation held
during a break at a conference in September 2028 between a top
NATO commander and a chief scientist at a prestigious French
university; an account of a NATO exercise that goes awry the
following June; and “the speech that never was,” which General H.P.
Weaver, the NATO commander from the first section, had planned to
give a week after the failed exercise. In part one, the scientist Dr.
Jean-Bernard Béthany works to persuade Weaver of the urgent need
to address what Béthany calls the “human domain”—including but
going beyond the cognitive domain to encompass a broad range of
fields, including “political science, history, geography, biology,
cognitive science, business studies, medicine and health, psychology,
demography, economics, environmental studies, information
sciences, international studies, law, linguistics, management, media
studies, philosophy, voting systems, public administration,
international politics, international relations, religious studies,
education, sociology, arts and culture.…” (8). To make his case
Béthany lists five main points: warfare has changed and the threat
picture is larger than ever; trust is a targeted vulnerability, especially
trust in government institutions; the human domain is at the core of
the security threat; individuals and committed minorities have more
power than ever before; and finally, collaboration is essential to
address these novel problems, for all nations “have external forces
and home grown committed minorities busy weakening its economy,
its cohesiveness, constantly testing its resolve by launching attacks
of all sorts.” As the conversation between Béthany and Weaver
unfolds, conference workers plant nano-mics on the cappuccino cups
that they bring to the men, a cloak-and-dagger detail that lingers in
subsequent scenes.
Having introduced the core concepts and presented the argument
for a “human domain” in the opening scene, in the second and
longest section Cole and Le Guyader imagine a conflict scenario in
the arctic setting of Svalbard, Norway, where a NATO exercise is
being witnessed by journalists and observers in high-tech gear.
Suddenly Polish nationalist music blares, disrupting the exercise. A
series of hypothetical explanations for the disruption begins with
resurgent nationalism: “nationalist lyrics, conjuring the backward-
looking darkness that … was growing throughout Europe in the late
2020s” (15). Next, the disruption is traced to China: “Beijing wanted
to discredit the NATO exercise and technological demonstrations to
poison Taiwan’s interest” and dissuade “NATO from further outreach
to nations in the Asia-Pacific” (19). The third and final explanation
attributes the disruption to “a European non-state movement calling
itself Libertas … [whose] goal was to accelerate the breakup of 20th
century alliances and national boundaries in Europe that it believes
are going to repeat the conflicts that ravaged Europe during the
prior century.” Libertas’s goals are summed up as “‘They want to
wage war to … achieve peace….’” (22). With these competing
explanations in play, NATO’s member nations are fighting amongst
themselves about how to respond. Admiral Angela Alvarez, the US
Navy officer and commander of Joint Forces Command, Naples,
states the problem concisely: “We need a narrative everybody can
get aligned around” (21).
The third and final section of the narrative presents “the speech
that never was.” It contains the text of the address that General
Weaver was scheduled to give to the NATO London Summit
advocating for the “human domain,” until the events at Svalbard
made the exigence of adopting the concept all too obvious. Weaver’s
speech opens with words evoking a famous historical precedent:
“President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his First Presidential
Inauguration speech delivered on March 4th, 1933, famously said,
‘… the only thing we have to fear is … fear itself.’” The speech
continues: “This was eight and a half years before the United States
entered World War Two and, yet, this quote is still applicable today
although the kind of fear we should fear the most has, to a large
extent, evolved into something far more ominous” (24). Drawing two
additional phrases from Roosevelt’s speech—“public opinion” and
“the hearts and minds of men”—Weaver notes the present lack of a
cohesive public opinion and the pervasiveness of the threats to
“hearts and minds,” threats that include both rival nations and non-
state actors. “Make no mistake,” he continues, “today’s target is
human behavior, and that includes targeting human cognition
through manipulation of the information sphere, but the threat goes
beyond the mere damage that manipulating information can yield.”
Weaver develops the point, stating that “the human, hence any
community they belong to and work for, is a target for our
adversaries and their diversifying arsenal. This is a frontline” (25–
26). The speech closes with a repetition of Roosevelt’s “fear itself,” a
detail that captures the radically compressed timescale of the
twenty-first century: where Roosevelt anticipated the war on his
horizon by over eight years, Weaver’s speech is already outdated
before the event where he is scheduled to give it even begins.
Roosevelt’s speech represents the necessity and inadequacy of an
orientation to the past in Cole and Le Guyader’s work of Ficint. This
is one example of the pervasive habit of resurrecting a historical
episode to frame a current conflict or crisis. The emergence of
COVID-19 in early 2020 was met with a sense of inevitability borne
of both rising attention to emergent viruses in a globalized world,
and the prevalence of political narratives organized by references to
twentieth-century fascism, Communism, and two world wars.
Reviving nationalist ideologies that at times verged on fascism,
including white supremacism, and the rising ambitions of the
Communist Party of China made the sense of déjà vu that much
more intense. The historical attention trained on the centennial of
the 1919 Spanish flu pandemic provided an immediate reference
point for early reporting on the coronavirus at the beginning of
2020. Echoes of a more recent past resonated in the US pullout from
Afghanistan in August 2021, which journalists compared to the
American withdrawal from Saigon in April 1975, at the end of the
Vietnam War.
More déjà vu moments unfolded in the first half of 2022, when
two seemingly settled historical conflicts flared to renewed life as
Russia invaded Ukraine, and the US Supreme Court overturned the
1973 abortion rights decision in Roe v. Wade. What these very
different issues have in common is that they both involve the revival
of disputes that had appeared to be resolved. The breakup of the
Soviet Union in 1991 seemed to promise the end of the Cold War,
the end of Communism as a viable alternative to liberalism, and the
integration of Russia and its former empire into a global community;
the US high court’s decision emphasizing a woman’s right to control
her body had appeared firmly established, particularly after the 1992
decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey confirmed the Roe decision.
Meanwhile, news reports framed the inflation rate as the highest in
forty years and the prospect of 1970s-style “stagflation” loomed. All
of these issues were used to mobilize political activists and to further
polarize a divided electorate.
 The lesson seems to be that old conflicts never die; they lie
dormant until conflict entrepreneurs dig them up and set them in
motion again. I encountered the phrase “conflict entrepreneurs” in
Amanda Ripley’s timely and accessible book about hyper-
polarization, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get
Out (2021). A recognized phenomenon in legal and peacebuilding
circles, conflict entrepreneurs are people who exploit dissension for
their own ends. Historical comparisons provide ready material for
shaping narratives that drive conflicts; the past can be a distorting
lens as well as a sharpening one, sometimes both at once. The
response to COVID-19 was informed in ways both good and bad by
the historical analogy to the Spanish flu, all quickly absorbed into the
partisan political landscape and the polarizing media industry. The
conflicts surrounding the pandemic went beyond what Ripley
describes as “healthy conflict”—conflict that is inevitable and even
desirable as a way of valuing difference and sharpening our thinking
—and moved into what she calls “high conflict,” which generates
intensely personalized hostility toward people who think differently
or hold competing beliefs and values. Ripley connects the myriad
high conflicts in the United States and around the world to the
polarizing effects of social media and the cascading reactions to
those developments.4
Ripley’s distinction between healthy and high conflict seems worth
holding on to as we step back to one of the most violent and
contested periods of US history: the sixty years from 1840 to 1900,
which include the American Civil War and the rise of the United
States as a continent-spanning global power. These years saw an
American war still unmatched in deaths per capita; the official end of
chattel slavery and efforts to reconstruct Southern society to
mitigate that system’s devastating effects; rapid territorial expansion
that often came at the expense of Native communities; and an
increasingly imperialist understanding of the American role in the
world. They were also the years when an international peace
movement with a strong presence in the United States played an
active and evolving role. Already in the nineteenth-century US peace
movement, tensions were crystallizing between efforts to build
international peace and attempts to achieve a positive peace at
home. These tensions between preventing war and creating a just
and lasting peace persist today. They are tensions that have shaped
the academic field of peace studies that emerged from the peace
movement in the decades following World War II. This book takes a
close look at the tensions between social peace and international
peace in the first century of the American peace movement, with
discussions of key historical figures and episodes, and with close
readings of select novels. Resisting the high conflicts of the present
that make superficial references to the past, my aim is to promote a
deeper understanding of efforts to build a more peaceful world that
can help shape healthier forms of conflict in the future.
 Acknowledgements

This project has received generous financial support from the Kroc
Institute for International Peace Studies, the National Endowment
for the Humanities, and the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal
Arts, College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame. I also
wish to thank George A. Lopez, Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C.,
Professor Emeritus of Peace Studies, who encouraged me and
provided a formative introduction to the field of peace studies.
 Introduction

On April 11, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln delivered the final

speech of his life from a White House window. Two days earlier
Confederate General Robert E. Lee had surrendered to Ulysses S.
Grant, General-in-Chief of the Union Armies, at Appomattox Court
House in Virginia. Amidst the hope and uncertainty of this watershed
moment, the people wanted to hear from their president. In what
became known as the “Speech on Reconstruction,” Lincoln offered
his reflections on the urgent matters at hand to the racially diverse
crowd gathered outside the White House. Less soaring in its rhetoric
than the justly famous Second Inaugural Address that Lincoln had
delivered less than six weeks earlier, the “Speech on Reconstruction”
highlighted the practical challenges then facing the United States. In
his opening remarks Lincoln spoke of his “hope of a righteous and
speedy peace,” and he promised to announce a day of
thanksgiving.1 This celebratory note sounded only briefly. The bulk
of the speech dealt with the immediate requirements for readmitting
Louisiana into the Union with a newly constituted state government.
Lincoln touched on the contentious matter of Black suffrage, noting
that “it is … unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not
given to the colored man” in Louisiana, and stating that “I would
prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on
those who serve our cause as soldiers” (699). These few rather
tentative remarks signaling Lincoln’s plans to enfranchise some of
the freed people are thought to have moved John Wilkes Booth to
assassinate the President. Three days later Booth carried out his
decision, shooting Lincoln in the head at Ford’s Theater on the
evening of April 14. The President died the following morning.
Contemplating the transition to peace that he would not live to
accomplish, Lincoln acknowledged the enormous challenges ahead,
stating flatly that the future “is fraught with great difficulty.” He
explained the obstacles facing the United States with remarkable
economy of expression. First, he observed that “unlike the case of a
war between independent nations, there is no authorized organ for
us to treat with” (697). Lincoln may have been thinking about the
developing system of international law that offered new ways to end
wars between states but did not apply to civil conflicts. This system
had begun taking shape with the Jay Treaty of 1794, officially titled
the “Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation, between His
Britannic Majesty and the United States of America.” Named for
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay who served as a special envoy
for the United States in the negotiations, the Jay Treaty included
provisions for arbitration to resolve hostilities between the United
States and Great Britain. Three joint commissions negotiated the
main issues in the conflict, with a settlement reached in 1802. While
not the first use of arbitration, the Jay Treaty is often considered to
be the origin point for the system of international adjudication that
matured over the succeeding century and a half. In 1872 the Civil
War gave rise to a pivotal moment in the history of arbitration with
the settlement of the Alabama Claims Case, which involved
reparations that Great Britain paid to the United States for enabling
the supply of vessels and goods to the Confederacy. The long-
ripening fruits of these early successes include such institutions and
protocols of international peacebuilding as: the United Nations, the
International Criminal Court, a range of non-governmental
organizations focused on peacebuilding, certain aspects of
international law, and norms articulated in the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights and the Responsibility to Protect principle. This
partial list reflects an extraordinarily robust set of developments
traceable, in some measure, to the Jay Treaty and the Alabama
case. Even today, however, civil wars pose special challenges to a
system designed to regulate conflicts between states rather than
within them.2
There were additional complexities to the situation facing Lincoln.
Not only was there no external, international body to aid the
victorious North as it sought to establish terms with the defeated
South; within the Confederacy itself, there was no clear “authorized
organ” or governing body capable of enforcing the peace.
Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his cabinet had
abandoned their capitol at Richmond before Lee surrendered to
Grant—a surrender that Davis had not authorized. The leader of the
Confederacy hoped to make his way to Europe, or perhaps to Texas
to establish a government in exile, and he remained in hiding until
his capture by Union forces on May 10. It was this situation that
Lincoln referenced when he noted that the disorder in the South was
traceable to the fact that “no one man has authority to give up the
rebellion for any other man.” With no clear lines of institutional
authority, no roadmap to peace, and no helpful precedents, Lincoln
observed that “we simply must begin with, and mould from,
disorganized and discordant elements.” The difficulties were further
compounded by divisions among the victors, insofar as “we, the loyal
people, differ among ourselves as to mode, manner, and means of
reconstruction” (697). Already there were tensions between the
Radical Republicans, who pressed Lincoln to move quickly in support
of the formerly enslaved people and hold the Confederacy to
account, and members of the party’s Moderate wing who urged a
more gradual and conciliatory approach to white Southerners. These
early steps toward peace exposed long-standing divisions that would
only widen in the succeeding months and years.
In the conclusion of his Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln had
called on the nation to “achieve and cherish a just, and lasting
peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”3 But what, in
practice, would this mean? Here, Lincoln employed scriptural and
symbolic language to lay the groundwork for a restored Union.
Stating with unusual directness that the war was being fought over
slavery, the President framed the bloody conflict as divine
providence. God had allowed the slave system to develop, he
observed, and “He now wills to remove” it; the war represented
divine punishment of North and South alike for complicity in the
system. Lincoln touched on the unexpected duration and
destructiveness of the conflict and urged his audience to accept the
affliction, no matter its length or cost in blood and treasure. He
avoided more mundane explanations of the war’s duration and high
death toll. Some of Lincoln’s contemporaries believed that the 1861
declaration of neutrality issued by Queen Victoria had enabled British
firms to provide the vessels and goods to the Confederacy that were
addressed in the Alabama case, and modern historians continue to
speculate that this distinctly human factor may have significantly
protracted the war.
Lincoln steered attention away from this and other human
elements to emphasize heavenly causes, albeit in a conditional
mood. “If God wills” that “the bond-man’s two hundred and
fifty years of unrequited toil” and “blood drawn with the lash” are to
be repaid drop-for-drop with blood “drawn with the sword,” he
urged, then all Americans must accept “the judgments of the Lord”
as “true and righteous altogether.” Calling for “malice toward none”
and “charity for all,” he focused attention on “him who shall have
borne the battle, and … his widow, and his orphan.” This pointedly
broad appeal specifies neither the sectional affiliation nor the race of
those most directly affected. Southerners and Northerners, Blacks
and whites alike were among the soldiers and their families who
would be the primary recipients of the Biblical “charity” that Lincoln
hoped would “bind up the nation’s wounds” (687).
 Contemporaries responded to Lincoln’s religious framing of the
war, his use of Biblical references, and the sermonic tone and timbre
of the speech, qualities that continue to loom large today. Frederick
Douglass reportedly told Lincoln at the inaugural reception that his
address had been a “sacred effort.” Lincoln himself responded to a
complimentary missive from the Republican political operative
Thurlow Weed with a short note explaining that he expected that the
speech would not be “immediately popular” because “men are not
flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose
between the Almighty and them. To deny it,” Lincoln continued, “is
to deny that there is a God governing the world.” By framing the war
as divine punishment, Lincoln shaped a narrative with the potential
to unite white Northerners and Southerners in a shared sense of sin
and guilt, which might help to lessen the punitive impulses of the
victors, while also stressing the entire nation’s debts to the freed
people. Lincoln’s call for “malice toward none” and “charity for all”
was a rhetorical bid to diminish the after-effects of a conflict that
already threatened to linger for decades or even generations.4
The American Civil War has been called the nation’s “second
founding.”5 This language of re-founding, similar to Lincoln’s “sacred
effort” in his Second Inaugural Address, places the war and its
aftermath squarely in a progressive national narrative. In recent
years, however, the second founding has been called into question
as the failures of Reconstruction have increasingly shaped public
discourse. Scholars, journalists, filmmakers, artists, and activists
have highlighted the ways that white supremacy not only survived
the war, but may even have strengthened its hegemony.6 At an early
moment in the “peace,” Southern elites formed the Ku Klux Klan as a
means to reassert their power, while white political leaders imposed
Black Codes that clad key elements of the chattel slave system in a
new legal garb. These efforts were beaten back by Reconstruction
policies and the passage of the 14th and 15th amendments, but they
reasserted themselves in new forms such as Jim Crow segregation,
which the Supreme Court effectively nationalized in its Plessy v.
Ferguson decision of 1896.
Black Americans continued to struggle in the volatile post-war
climate, even as social conflicts multiplied and new problems seized
public attention after the official end of Reconstruction on March 31,
1877. The United States was rapidly expanding in territory and
population, fighting Native communities for land, bringing
immigrants to work in factories, and becoming more urban and
industrialized. Historian Jon Grinspan has characterized the
postbellum era as “the age of acrimony,” calling attention to the way
that contentious politics became increasingly pronounced after the
war, until eventually political conflict came to be seen as more of an
obstacle to democratic governance than a means to achieve it. The
late nineteenth century can be characterized in the terms that
Amanda Ripley uses to describe political culture in the United States
today, where “healthy conflict” too often gives way to self-
perpetuating “high conflicts” related to intense polarization. Ripley
draws on insights from the field of negotiation—a field intimately
connected with peacebuilding—to offer a path out of our present
state of high conflict.7
Instead of turning to history to revitalize conflicts, looking to the
past can offer paths to a better future. Taking the Civil War as a
fulcrum, this book explores how the peace movement in the United
States evolved over the nineteenth century. Often episodic in its
influence during the sixty-year period that is the focus of this book,
the peace movement proved exceptionally consequential over the
long term. The first peace societies were established independently
of one another in New York and London in 1815 and 1816, catalyzed
by the devastation of the Napoleonic wars and frustration over the
War of 1812. This initial phase of the movement peaked at the
international peace congresses that were held in England and
Europe in 1843 and annually between 1848 and 1853. Though
centered in Europe, the peace cause had a significant presence in
the United States, which provided important leadership. Elihu Burritt,
a Connecticut native, was among its most influential figures. An
energetic auto-didact nicknamed the “Learned Blacksmith,” Burritt
launched the series of six congresses that began in 1848, among his
other contributions to the cause.8 The United States was well
represented at these events, with delegates including James W.C.
Pennington and William Wells Brown, two formerly enslaved men of
letters, and the Ojibwa writer and public intellectual Kah-Ge-Ga-Gah-
Bowh (George Copway). For a time, these Black and indigenous
activists found affinities between the peace movement and the work
they did to end slavery and bring attention to the violence of settler
colonialism.
From the 1815 founding of the first societies to the mid-century
congresses, the cause of peace attracted wide attention. Leading
intellectuals and public figures, including William Ellery Channing,
Theodore Parker, William Lloyd Garrison, and Charles Sumner,
advocated for peace. Literary figures did as well. Speaking to the
American Peace Society in 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson asserted that
“the peace principle … can never be defended, it can never be
executed, by cowards. Everything great must be done in the spirit of
greatness. The manhood that has been in war must be transferred
to the cause of peace, before war can lose its charm, and peace be
venerable to men.”9 Emerson’s prediction about the impact of a
valiant commitment to peace began to take a more concrete form in
July 1846, when Henry David Thoreau spent a night in Concord jail
after refusing to pay his poll tax to protest the Mexican–American
War and the expansion of slavery. The essay that grew out of
Thoreau’s experience remains a landmark statement of nonviolent
resistance. Published in 1849, “Resistance to Civil Government” (also
known as “Civil Disobedience”) later influenced the nonviolent
protest movements of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King,
Jr.10
 A particularly challenging moment for the peace cause unfolded
after the Compromise of 1850 opened a rift between peace
advocates and the anti-slavery cause. The Compromise measures
included the Fugitive Slave Act, which implicated Northerners in the
slave system and helped push a legislated end to slavery out of
reach. A rising tide of violent resistance over the ensuing decade
culminated in John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry, tipping the
fragile balance that existed within the United States toward the war
that became all but inevitable following Lincoln’s election in
November 1860. William Lloyd Garrison, who espoused both
immediate abolition and nonviolence, responded to John Brown’s
execution by describing Brown’s violent actions as a stage on the
path to non-resistance. “I thank God when men who believe in the
right and duty of wielding carnal weapons are so far advanced that
they will take those weapons out of the scale of despotism, and
throw them into the scale of freedom,” Garrison wrote in The
Liberator. “It is an indication of progress, and a positive moral
growth; it is one way to get up to the sublime platform of non-
resistance; and it is God’s method of dealing retribution upon the
head of the tyrant.”11 This passage shows Garrison’s non-resistance
to be bound up with his perfectionism, that is, his belief that humans
could become free from sin and thus morally perfect.12 His words
capture a salient aspect of peace advocacy: unlike absolute pacifists,
who oppose war in any circumstances, pragmatic or conditional
pacifists believe that war, or violence more generally, is justified in
certain circumstances. Both schools contributed to the early peace
movement.
Thrown into disarray by the Civil War, the US peace movement
regrouped with arbitration as its central emphasis, achieving notable
results. The success of the Alabama Claims Case spawned a series of
efforts that culminated in the Hague Peace Conference of 1899,
where leading international powers agreed to a Permanent Court of
Arbitration—an important step toward the founding of the United
Nations in 1945. The focus on arbitration in the postbellum peace
movement did not mean that domestic concerns within the United
States were entirely neglected—for example, the Universal Peace
Union, the leading peace organization after the war, supported the
cause of indigenous rights, as I discuss in Chapter 6—but they were
overshadowed by the response to rising militarism and imperialism
on the international stage. As had been the case before the Civil
War, writers and intellectuals continued to be attracted to later peace
efforts. Prominent authors contributed to the anti-militarism and
anti-imperialism that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century
(Mark Twain is a notable example); the pacifist reaction against
World Wars I and II (including Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Anne
Porter, and Robert Lowell); the anti-war movement of the 1960s and
1970s (Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, and James Baldwin, among
others); and the anti-nuclear movement of the 1970s and 1980s
(Leslie Marmon Silko and Joan Didion, to name two).
A transformation occurred after World War II, when the peace
field emerged as a research discipline with a growing footprint in
institutions and universities. Over the ensuing decades peace
scholars have developed more complex and data-driven explanations
of the types and sources of violence; and they have contributed
approaches to conflict that enable shifts in perception and response
at both the individual and the societal level.13 Though widely
separated in time, much of the groundwork for these twentieth- and
twenty-first-century developments was laid in the period covered by
this book. By returning to the early years of the peace movement, I
hope to show how the twin impulses of social justice and
peacebuilding that continue to animate the peace field were
intertwined from the beginning, sometimes complementing one
another but at other times pulling in different directions. Some
theoretical advances in the study of peace over the past six decades
—including the concepts of negative and positive peace, and of
direct and indirect violence—have precursors in the novels and other
writings that I discuss in the chapters that follow.
Let me offer some brief definitions to set the stage for what
comes later. Negative peace refers to a state of social quiet without
regard to conditions of justice, while positive peace describes a state
of peace with justice (sometimes referred to as “justpeace”). Direct
violence describes immediate harm inflicted with weapons or by
reducing the capacity to fulfill basic human needs; indirect (or
structural) violence involves harm done through neglect or social
disadvantage. Developed as analytic concepts by leading peace
researcher Johan Galtung beginning in the 1960s, the contours of
these concepts are visible much earlier.14 I use them to show how
literary writers explored the meaning of peace in ways that
anticipated the modern conceptual vocabulary by many decades.
Other peace scholars whose work has been important for this study
include the social historian Merle Curti, whose foundational histories
of the US peace cause remain valuable; John Paul Lederach, who
emphasizes the place of creativity for achieving peace in The Moral
Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace (2005); and David
Cortright, whose one-volume Peace: A History of Movements and
Ideas (2008) is remarkable in its breadth and insight. While
Christianity played a significant role in the early US peace
movement, and so appears frequently in this study, Cortright
emphasizes parallel ideas in the major world religions.15

Despite the reach and longevity of the movement for peace, little
attention has been devoted to the peace cause in American
literature.16 The slim body of scholarship in this area contrasts
sharply with the large number of studies devoted to the connections
between American literature and the abolitionist movement. This
important and wide-ranging body of work includes studies of slave
narratives, treatments of the literature of protest, accounts of the
relationship between sentimental fiction and the anti-slavery cause,
and readings in law and literature, among other approaches.
Another large body of scholarship treats the theme of war in
American literature, often with the implication that the United States
is a uniquely violent society. What I have discovered in the course of
researching this book is that while war is a frequent topic in
American literature, there has also been a powerful literary interest
in peace—sometimes in surprising places. James Fenimore Cooper is
not typically discussed as a writer with a strong interest in the peace
cause, and yet as we shall see in Chapter 1, he had personal
connections to the movement and thought deeply about the issues it
addressed. Some of the sources of the literary interest in peace
overlapped with abolitionism, as was the case for Harriet Beecher
Stowe. And, in the case of Nathaniel Hawthorne, attention to peace
advocacy arose out of a mixture of skepticism regarding the
perfectionist impulses of a figure like Garrison, a desire to explore
the varied nature and appropriate limits of violence, and fear over
what war might bring to the nation. The Civil War is the central axis
for the book, with the three chapters organized around readings of
novels by Cooper, Stowe, and Hawthorne spanning the period from
1840 to 1865. The second group of chapters explores fiction
engaged with problems arising in the aftermath of that war,
including novels by Henry Adams and John Hay on political
corruption and class conflict; novels on the failures of Reconstruction
by Albion Tourgée and Charles Chesnutt; and the distinct treatments
of indigenous experience in Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona and
Simon Pokagon’s Queen of the Woods. As I describe below, all of
these writers focused on issues related to the cause of peace,
expanding its thematic reach and anticipating insights that peace
scholars would later develop in a more analytic or data-oriented way.
My first chapter, “Regeneration through Nonviolence,” opens with
a discussion of an enduring tension between the competing
republican values of peace and the right to resist oppression that
emerged in the early years of peace advocacy. This tension
crystallized in an 1825 debate over the Bunker Hill Monument. Peace
activist William Ladd condemned the monument for glorifying war;
Congressman Daniel Webster celebrated the monument as a symbol
of republican liberty; and Ojibwa author Kah-Ge-Ga-Gah-Bowh
(George Copway) viewed it with ambivalence, citing the impact of
the US founding on indigenous Americans. My attention then turns
to the history of peace thought and considers the life and writings of
William Penn, who contributed foundational works that shaped the
cause. This discussion of Penn is followed by consideration of two
other influential Quaker authors and artists: John Woolman, who
wrote about peace in connection with slavery, poverty, and other
social issues; and Edward Hicks, painter of The Peaceable Kingdom
paintings and author of a revealing Memoir (1851).
I turn next in this opening chapter to Cooper, whose parents were
raised in the Society of Friends and retained varying degrees of
affiliation with it. William Cooper, the novelist’s father, refused to
fight in the Revolution, but the younger Cooper became an ardent
nationalist willing to take up arms to defend the United States. This
tension between James Fenimore Cooper’s upbringing and his adult
values gave him a distinctive perspective on the country’s history.
Critics have often read the Leather-Stocking Tales as a glorification
of violence against Native Americans, but Cooper’s contemporaries
often saw his novels quite differently. Here I discuss the criticism
offered in the North American Review by Governor Lewis Cass of the
Michigan Territory, who considered Cooper’s Indian characters to be
wildly idealized. A reading of The Deerslayer (1841) follows,
highlighting Cooper’s exploration of the ethics of frontier warfare and
what he terms “human rights.” I situate these themes in relation to
the work of William Jay, Cooper’s friend from childhood and a leader
of peace and abolitionist organizations. Jay’s pamphlet War and
Peace: The Evils of the First, and a Plan for Preserving the Last
(1842) proved to be an enduring contribution to the literature of
peace. The final section of this chapter offers a reading of The Oak-
Openings; or, The Bee Hunter (1848). Cooper’s last frontier novel is
set in southern Michigan and features the character “Scalping Peter,”
whose campaign of violent resistance was modeled on Tecumseh
and his brother Tenskwatawa, and whose embrace of Christianity
resembles the life of Kah-Ge-Ga-Gah-Bowh (George Copway). The
novel responds to the European revolutions and counter-revolutions
of 1848, in an effort to imagine the future of republican nation-
states. Cooper envisions the resolution of US border wars through
the triumph of a Christian republic that embraces Native converts
and pursues peaceful interactions with friendly non-Christian
Indians. This section ends with a discussion of the brief but
significant literary friendship between Copway and Cooper.
My second chapter considers the connections between the
abolition movement and the peace cause. The chapter opens with
an account of the 1849 Paris Peace Congress, which was presided
over by the leading French author Victor Hugo. Hugo’s inaugural
address, discussed here, became one of the most-quoted works in
the history of the peace movement. This section also considers the
contributions to the Congress of two African American delegates, the
Reverend James Pennington and the author William Wells Brown,
who linked the cause of peace with opposition to slavery. I then
focus on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s two best-selling anti-slavery novels
to tease out some of the contradictions involved in the concept of
peace. My discussion of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1850) highlights the
minor character Phineas Fletcher. A former frontiersman and hunter
who has embraced his wife’s Quakerism, Fletcher embodies the
tension between an ethos of non-violence and a commitment to
oppose slavery and serve the enslaved. Through Fletcher, Stowe
examines an increasingly salient issue in the abolitionist movement:
the scope and legitimacy of righteous violence. Stowe’s second best-
selling anti-slavery novel Dred takes its name from a character who
is descended from Denmark Vesey. This novel portrays the limits of
social quiet as a goal and begins to imagine a just peace for post-
slavery America. Here I consider Stowe’s treatment of Dred, examine
her presentation of negative peace in the South, and describe her
efforts to imagine a positive peace after slavery. Returning to William
Wells Brown, I close Chapter 2 by considering his treatment of peace
in a range of writings, including his account of the Paris Peace
Congress, his novel Clotel (1853), and his biographical encyclopedia
on The Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius, His Achievements
(1863). In the latter work he considers Black resistors and their
reflections on both peaceful and violent means of achieving freedom.
Chapter 3 opens with a discussion of Karl Marx’s “Red
Republicanism” as an ideological rival to the peace cause. After
considering Marx’s reflections on British support for the Confederacy,
which were triggered by a public letter from Harriet Beecher Stowe,
I turn briefly to The Communist Manifesto (1848) and its connection
to the political violence in Paris that year, leading organizers to
relocate the peace congress to Brussels. The main discussion in this
section focuses on the versions of republicanism presented in The
Eighteenth Brumaire (1852). I argue that Marx’s analysis was an
effort to clear the ground of peace-oriented republican ideals and
uphold the place of violence in creating what he viewed as an
authentic, “red” republic. I close this section by comparing Marx’s
approach to republican thought with the views of two American
writers: William Ellery Channing’s case for republican self-regulation
in his influential essay “Self-Culture” (1838) and Orestes Brownson’s
celebration of class conflict in “The Laboring Classes” (1840).
Turning to the theme of reform in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fiction
broadly, I consider his language of “the heart” in “Earth’s Holocaust”
(1844), as well as his use of romance to resolve class conflict in
House of the Seven Gables (1851). This is followed by a discussion
of indirect violence in The Blithedale Romance (1852). Here I make
an unconventional argument about Miles Coverdale, proposing that
he implicates himself in the death of Zenobia. Failing to prevent his
friend’s suicide, Coverdale deserves scrutiny for the indirect violence
that he commits against her. For peace scholars, indirect violence is
a term of art that links peace to various forms of injustice, including
obstacles to women’s equality. Women’s rights were a signature
issue for Margaret Fuller, a model for Hawthorne when he created
Zenobia, giving this connection sustained relevance. In the final
section of this chapter, my reading of “Chiefly About War Matters, by
a Peaceable Man” (1862) highlights the contradictions in
Hawthorne’s treatment of peace and war. The problem of “the heart”
is central to his discussion of US politics: people have one heart but
the United States demands at least two political allegiances, to the
state and to the nation. The war clogs the national “heart” with
soldiers and weapons. Policed by the federal government’s censors,
the “peaceable man” struggles to express his reservations about the
war while remaining within the bounds of acceptable opinion. This
section concludes with a short discussion of the Lieber Code of War,
the first modern code regulating the conduct of warfare, which was
issued by Lincoln in 1863. Authored by philosopher Francis Lieber,
the code set limits on legitimate violence even as it assumed the
justice of the Union cause. The tension between the Code’s
humanitarian goals and the cause of justice is an abiding issue in the
international laws of war that descend from it.
Chapter 4 addresses arbitration as a leading aim of the peace
cause after the Civil War, relating it to the theme of alliance-building
in Henry Adams’s Democracy: An American Novel (1880) and John
Hay’s The Bread-winners: A Social Study (1884). The first section of
this chapter focuses on the Alabama Claims Case, which as noted
earlier moved arbitration closer to the center of modern international
law. Senator Charles Sumner, a Radical Republican and sometime
advocate for peace, argued for a robust approach to reparations
from Britain that he believed should include compensation for
indirect as well as direct damages. Sumner had longstanding ties to
the Adams family, who from the very beginning were involved in the
effort to win compensation from Britain. Henry Adams arrived in
England with his father Charles Francis Adams, Sr., the newly
appointed Minister to the Court of St. James, just as Queen Victoria
announced a policy of neutrality in the war. It was this policy that led
to the production of the Alabama and the sale of other provisions to
the Confederacy by British firms. In The Education of Henry Adams,
the author claimed to have initiated the effort to resolve the case
through arbitration; ultimately, his father was a member of the five-
person panel that settled the case in favor of the United States in
1872. My reading of Adams’s novel Democracy focuses on two
alliances: the corrupt Senator Silas Ratcliffe’s attempts to forge a
marital alliance with Madeleine Lee, whom he sees as an asset in his
bid for the presidency; and the “alliance offensive and defensive”
between her sister Sibyl and their Southern relative John Carrington,
who want to prevent both the marriage and its potential
consequences for the United States should Ratcliffe succeed in
winning both Madeleine’s hand and the presidency. The novel’s
Washington setting features Northern financial and political elites
along with European diplomats, establishing the international
context that increasingly shaped the exercise of national power.
Adams’s friend John Hay started his career as Lincoln’s secretary,
then pursued diplomacy and literature. In 1884 Hay published his
only novel: The Bread-winners: A Social Study. Hay’s novel shares
Democracy’s emphasis on political corruption; it also explores labor
violence. My reading highlights the alliance of Anglo-American elites
that Hay offers as a way to restore peace and alleviate the social
turmoil of the era. The section connects this theme in Hay’s novel to
his focus on the US relationship with the United Kingdom in his
diplomatic work, which culminated in the 1890s when he became
ambassador to Great Britain and then Secretary of State. Hay’s
reputation as an Anglophile bears on the US embrace of imperial
power during his tenure at the head of the State Department.
 The relationship between race and republican peace is the subject
of Chapter 5, which opens with a discussion of Anglo-Saxon identity
in the work of Albion Tourgée—the Republican civil rights activist,
lawyer, and author—and the Black novelist and man of letters
Charles Chesnutt. Tourgée and Chesnutt forged a literary and
personal connection in the 1890s. Here I consider the significance of
their different interpretations of “the Anglo-Saxon” in Chesnutt’s
early essay “What is a White Man?” (1889) and Tourgée’s late essay
“The Twentieth-Century Peacemakers” (1899). While Chesnutt
interpreted “Anglo-Saxon” to mean “white,” Tourgée argued that the
term referred to a set of core values and political practices that
people “white or black” might embrace. This essay extends
Tourgée’s longstanding commitment to the New England town
meeting as a political ideal, linking it to international relations and
US expansionism. In an intriguing series of events, Tourgée was
serving as US Consul in Bordeaux when his essay was published,
shortly after John Hay became Secretary of State. Turning from
these late developments to Tourgée’s early career, I consider his
major Reconstruction novels with a focus on two things: his
exposure of Southern “peace” as a white supremacist “reign of
terror”; and his attention to both the conditions of public speech and
the potential for introducing the town meeting in the South—
something he had tried to achieve in post-war North Carolina. In
Bricks without Straw, the most successful example of the town
meeting ideal emerges all-too-briefly in the Black township of Red-
Wing, until the town is attacked by the Ku Klux Klan. The novel ends
with the white Southern aristocrat Hesden LeMoyne making the case
for the town meeting system to a Northern Congressman in
Washington, D.C. The final section of this chapter builds on the
phrase “Angry-Saxons” used by Jerry, the Black porter in The Marrow
of Tradition (1901), who overhears the white supremacist cabal led
by Major Carteret planning to overthrow the racially integrated
regime in a North Carolina city. Based on the 1899 coup d’état in
Wilmington, Chesnutt’s historical novel examines scenes of private
speech that overturn a democratically elected government. He
further links private white supremacist speech to rising US
imperialism, touching on events in the Philippines.
My sixth and final chapter considers the failure of Ulysses S. Grant
to achieve his goal of establishing peace after the Civil War. Grant
ran for president on the Republican ticket in 1868 using the slogan
“Let us have peace,” citing relations with the former Confederacy
and with Native nations as central concerns. Once elected, Grant
appointed his army staff assistant Ely S. Parker, who was also a
Grand Sachem of the Seneca Nation, to be the Commissioner of
Indian Affairs. Drawing on Parker’s own writings and the biography
by his grand-nephew Arthur C. Parker, this section describes the
idealistic vision that Parker brought to this position and the reasons
for his failure to realize his goals. In a striking passage from an 1881
letter Ely Parker wrote: “I am nearly akin in fate to Topsy, who never
had a birthday, never was born, and only ‘growed up.’… My birthday,
which occurred sometime ‘in the course of human events,’ was never
recorded in any book of man.” This juxtaposition of references to
Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Declaration of Independence suggests
Parker’s identification with the American nation—and with the
condition of the slave.
The following section considers the work of Helen Hunt Jackson,
who was already a successful author when she turned to the cause
of “the Indian” in A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United
States Government’s Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes
(1881). The work attracted national attention and led to Jackson’s
appointment by the federal government to review the California
missions. In addition to her official report, she used the opportunity
to write periodical essays idealizing Father Junipero Serra and the
mission system. She continued to write about the California missions
in her novel Ramona (1884), which she aspired to make the Uncle
Tom’s Cabin of the Indians’ cause. I trace the connections between
these writings, highlighting Jackson’s vision of Mexican and
indigenous Catholicism as the source of a more capacious and
communal vision than the individualist ethos of Protestant Anglo-
Saxon America. Ramona made an impact. Albion Tourgée celebrated
Jackson’s novel in an important review, and José Martí issued a
Spanish-language translation.
In 1893 Simon Pokagon published a birchbark pamphlet titled The
Red Man’s Rebuke dedicated “to the memory of William Penn…[and]
the late lamented Helen Hunt Jackson,” which he offered for sale at
the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Afterward the
Potawatomi author began publishing essays and poems in the
periodical press; at the time of his death in 1899, he had a novel
Ogimawkwe Mitigwaki (Queen of the Woods) in production—
arguably the second novel by an indigenous American, after
Cherokee author John Rollin Ridge’s California bandit tale Joaquin
Murrieta (1854). Pokagon was the son of Leopold Pokagon, a
convert to Roman Catholicism, who was involved in the Battle of Fort
Dearborn and subsequently participated in a land transfer that
included the site of Chicago. Simon was raised Catholic in the area
around the Michigan/Indiana border, though he later converted to
Protestantism. Set in Michigan, Queen of the Woods begins as a
bicultural novel devoted to the preservation of the Algonquin
language and the Anishinaabe cultures of the Three Fires
Confederacy. It ends with a plea to the American nation—and
especially the national political parties—to embrace the temperance
cause for the good of all races. Pokagon’s notion of the “common
good” has republican elements; his critique of the liquor industry
links that business to a pervasive indirect violence responsible for
destroying individuals and communities. “Peace” for Pokagon
involved recognizing the weaponlike qualities of alcohol, which could
be used in lieu of overt war to destroy Native communities. Alcohol
addiction was a form of indirect violence that Pokagon argued must
be stopped through government action.
 As I hope my overview suggests, this book is a work of literary
history, first and foremost. I have aimed to sketch some of the major
historical events, groups, and individuals that shaped the early peace
movement and to consider their significance for a range of mainly
US-based authors. I have also drawn on modern peace theory,
especially the concepts of negative and positive (also called social or
just) peace and of direct and indirect violence, to explore a variety of
peace-related themes. My goal has been to bring this history and
these concepts into the study of nineteenth-century US literature,
without injecting an undigestible mass of unfamiliar history and
terminology. In looking to the past, we do well to elevate positive
developments even as we criticize negative ones. This approach is
not the same as engaging in “Whig history,” which assumes steady
improvement. Rather, it is to present a history that recognizes the
all-too-fragile nature of even the most successful efforts to create “a
more perfect union.”17
 1
Regeneration through
Nonviolence

i. The Rise of the Peace Cause

The peace cause has deep though tangled roots in the American
past. Its indigenous sources include the Great League of Peace that
created the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy dating to the
fifteenth century. Embodied in the Deganawidah Epic, the
Haudenosaunee ideal of peace emphasizes “domestic harmony”
achievable “within a group cemented by consanguinity and a
common sense of moral order.”1 The first step of the
Haudenosaunee peacemaking protocol is the condolence ceremony,
which provided an elastic negotiating framework with Native
communities beyond the Confederacy, as well as with colonial
governments.2 Among the British North American colonies, the
Society of Friends played a central role in making peace thought a
vital and dynamic presence. Anglo-American Quaker leader William
Penn gave the Society of Friends a leading place in his colony and,
as will be addressed later in this chapter, Penn himself became an
iconic figure of peaceful relations between the colonists and their
indigenous neighbors. The struggle to balance pacifist commitments
with security and self-determination led to frequent contentions over
defense funding within the colony, as Native communities resisted
the encroachment of white settlements and European rivalries were
acted out on the American stage. The difficulties associated with
maintaining a commitment to nonviolence only intensified as the
colonies moved toward independence from Great Britain. Inspired by
republican thinkers who favored political solutions but did not
eschew violence, patriot leaders struggled to accommodate the
pacifists in their midst. The American Revolution elevated violent
struggle as a means to achieve republican independence. Soon,
however, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars—ostensibly
in the service of republican values—helped to temper public
enthusiasm for revolutionary violence.
A prominent dispute over a monument captures many of the
contradictions running through the early peace movement. The
scene is Breed’s Hill, near Boston; the date is June 17, 1825. On the
site where one of the first battles of the American Revolution had
taken place fifty years earlier, Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster
delivers an address at the laying of a cornerstone for the Bunker Hill
Monument. Already a nationally recognized figure, Webster has built
his reputation in part on his ability to frame a compelling story about
the American past, relate it to the present, and project its
significance for the future. On this occasion, he celebrates the legacy
of the American Revolution as an “electric spark of liberty” that
ignited republican movements in Europe and Latin America, while
urging his Boston audience to sustain and build on the achievements
of the founding generation. The heroic days of the Revolution are
gone, he insists, and he calls for a different kind of heroism. “Let our
age be the age of improvement,” Webster urges his audience. “In a
day of peace, let us advance the arts of peace and the works of
peace. Let us develop the resources of our land, call forth its
powers, build up its institutions, promote all its great interests, and
see whether we also, in our day and generation, may not perform
something worthy to be remembered. Let us cultivate a true spirit of
union and harmony.”3
A local conflict with broad relevance loomed behind Webster’s
soothing words. The decision to monumentalize the Battle of Bunker
Hill had sparked a controversy over the legacy of the American
Revolution and its implications for peace activism. The monument’s
opponents argued that war—even a war for freedom—should never
be the cause of celebration.4 Already the contradictions between
freedom and peace figured in the complex legacy of the American
Revolution. That unresolved tension would continue to fuel social
conflicts, particularly over slavery and Indian Removal, as the nation
wrestled with the revolution’s unfinished business. As late as 1851
the dispute between peace advocates and celebrants of the Battle of
Bunker Hill continued to resonate for some activists, including the
Ojibwa minister and peace advocate Kah-Ge-Ga-Gah-Bowh, who
sometimes went by the English name George Copway. Describing his
departure from the port of Boston to attend the Third General Peace
Congress at Frankfurt-am-Main, Kah-Ge-Ga-Gah-Bowh added an
anticolonial message to his critique of the monument, which had
been dedicated at a ceremony in 1843, where Webster spoke again
(see Figure 1).
Figure 1 Daniel Webster, 1843 Speech at Bunker Hill Monument.
Source: Heritage Auctions, HA.com.
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