The Friends of Peace: The Origins of Debate on Pacifism in Early 19th Century New England
By Philip Crossman
Noah Worcester and Sylvanus Haynes had a good deal in common. They were both self-educated ministers of the early 19th Century who eventually received honorary degrees from what are now Ivy League colleges. Both of them found ways to incorporate their spiritual interests with their political passions. And both liked to write, argue, and try to persuade. But there the similarities begin to recede into the background.
Noah was born in 1758. Sylvanus was born a decade later. In 1776 as the Revolutionary War was breaking out, Sylvanus would have been eight years old. Noah was a lanky teenager, already taller than most men who signed up to fight the British army and navy in and around Boston harbor. He was present at the battle of Bunker Hill and came close to being captured. Two years later, he found himself in the thick of the fighting outside Bennington, defending the American cause from Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne’s invasion down Lake Champlain. The carnage at Bennington was all that Noah needed to nudge him down the road towards a full blown passivist theology.
By 1791, as Sylvanus was just entering the ministry as a Baptist Pastor, Noah Worcester was receiving an honorary degree from Dartmouth (Sylvanus would receive his from Middlebury in 1817). By 1801, Sylvanus was leading revivals from the Baptist Church in Middletown, Vermont. Noah had converted to the Unitarian faith, no longer believing in the Trinity. Worcester would soon become one of the leaders of the move away from Congregational orthodoxy that led to the theological split between Harvard and Andover seminary in the first decade of the 19th Century. Sylvanus too would level his rhetorical ire at the Congregationalists but for him, the matter had to do with tax support for select churches and infant baptism. He would die a Trinitarian Baptist in 1828.
By 1807, Sylvanus was seen as the theological mouthpiece of the Jeffersonian Republicans in Vermont and was even recommended to James Madison as a political force to be reckoned with. Noah Worcester’s talents, on the other hand, were being put to good use by the Federalists who, by 1814, were vociferously opposed to the Madison Administration’s war against Great Britain. In December of 1814, at the height of the war, Noah Worcester published a pamphlet entitled A Solemn Review of the Custom of War. It was a frontal assault on the whole idea of war as a mechanism for resolving human conflicts. The work was widely read in America and Europe (just recovering from the Napoleonic Wars) and was translated into many languages. The following year, Worcester began editing a periodical known as The Friend of Peace in which he continued to further the argument.
Sylvanus Haynes was serving as a crucial counterfoil to the Federalists in Vermont during that same period. In 1814, he preached and published a sermon to the military department of Middletown that articulated in spiritual and political logic the justice of Madison’s war and the righteousness of the soldiers work in it. And thus it was that two ministers, two autodidacts with high-caliber rhetorical gifts, standing as representatives of two political parties, two denominations, and two opposing sets of convictions about the place that military preparedness plays in the real and spiritual worlds that they barely shared, would have found themselves on the battlefield of public opinion, both appealing to experience and to their readings of their shared sacred texts.
By 1824, Noah Worcester had been hard at making his pacifist case for almost a decade. Some friend of Sylvanus’, perhaps political or perhaps spiritual, nominated him to be the person to write the “authorized” rebuttal to everything the “Friend of Peace” stood for, and Sylvanus accepted the challenge, publishing his thirty-six-page treatise, A Brief Reply to the Friend of Peace in Auburn, NY.
In his introduction, Sylvanus lays out his motives:
“Much is said, and much is written against defensive war, and against capital punishment in all cases: but scarcely anything has been published on the other side, at least, I have seen nothing of the kind from any other hand, for a number of years. And it has long appeared to me to be the duty of some men to take up the subject, and do it justice. Whether I have succeeded in this attempt, the public will judge. The matter is so interesting, that I could devoutly wish the task had fallen into abler hands, and hands more at leisure than mine.
I can truly say that, if I know my own heart, a sense of duty to God, and my country, has been my leading motive in undertaking this work . . .”
Haynes tries to be friendly. But his opposition roils below the surface, and the further one reads into the tract, the more one begins to sense the emergence of old unhealed political scars from the cauldron of contention that the War of 1812 was in New England. Haynes takes exception to the way that Worcester refers to Haynes’ party’s leaders as “tyrants, murderers, and butchers.” “Such abusive language neither charms the ear, nor attracts the heart,” he says. “On reading such blazing things, we are induced to fear that the ‘war spirit’ has unhappily caught the sons of peace.”
To Sylvanus, pacifism is theologically unsupported, experientially indefensible, politically corrosive, logically inconsistent, and pragmatically unworkable. To Sylvanus, the work of Noah Worcester and the Massachusetts Peace Society is not a minor misdemeanor of shoddy logic. It is bordering on outright treachery. “If a man designed to stir up sedition and rebellion, and to break down, and revolutionize the government,” he writes, “what measure could he take more directly adapted to his purpose, than thus to slander the rulers? Thus, did wicked Absalom, and for a time he succeeded; but his race was short: vengeance overtook him.”
[For those not familiar with the story of Absalom, he was one of David’s rebellious sons who led an insurrection against his father’s government and providentially wound up being hung in a tree by his own long hair and executed by one of David’s generals. In short, Sylvanus is not kidding around here.]
It might be interesting to make our way through the thirty-six pages of Hayne’s argument but the flow of it leads inexorably to the conclusion that people like Noah Worcester have allowed their idealism to cloud their rationality. Haynes will often cite Worcester’s work, note Worcester’s objections to Haynes’ “just war theories” and then answer them. Sylvanus’ response to the objection below harkens back to the arguments of Machiavelli who also marketed himself as a “realist.” Clearly, these two men do not share the same estimate of human potential in a “fallen world” [Worcester would no doubt argue that we live in a fallen world because we won’t get up.]
“Objection. – But if all men would be peaceable and honest, then there would be no need of war, or of coercion in any form.
Answer. – As well may we say if there should be no cold weather, there would be no winter. The fact is too plain to be denied, and too public to be concealed that men are depraved, and that thousands of them have been, and still are disposed rather to steal, rob, murder, &c. than to live honestly. And it is totally useless, and perfectly chimerical to make any calculations upon general virtue in mankind, in the present state of things, without legal restraint, and coercion. There can be nothing more futile than to imagine that if governments would forbear to punish, the people would cease to transgress. Therefore the solemn truth must remain, that we must deal with mankind as they are and not as they should be.”
Here is another example of Sylvanus Haynes’ rhetorical style:
“Objection. – but the scriptures foretell a general peace through the world, and it will come to pass. It is to be brought about by means and it must begin sometime, and why not now? To renounce war wholly, would be to introduce this glorious period.
Answer. – As God has predicted it, so he will accomplish it in his own time, by diffusing a morally good and peaceful disposition through the great body of mankind; and he alone can do it. But that morally benign and quiet spirit is not now generally imparted, is too notorious to be questioned. And until that spirit is shed abroad, the blessed result will not appear. We admit the duty of doing what we can to tame, and soften the ferocious, and warlike spirit of the world, and to pave the way for the glorious reign of the Prince of Peace; but as the situation of the world is now, for us to reject the means of defense, and to say we will not use them in any case, appears to be presumption, approaching to madness. With the same propriety might we in February say the Lord has ordained that seed time shall come when the pastures will sustain our flocks and herds – when our heavy garments will be laid aside – when but little fuel will suffice – when teams will be employed in plowing the ground, and when, instead of the warm room, the cooling shade will be sought, &c. Therefore, to hasten on this blessed time, we must cease foddering our flocks and herds, and turn them out to pasture – keep but small fires – lay aside our thick wool and garments – take up our teams, and instead of drawing fuel for fires, to provoke the storms, and cold weather, we must go to plowing and sewing, and then rest in the shade, and have faith, and then spring will come: for it must come sometime and why not bring it on now? A man who should say and labor thus, would be justly charged with insanity. But the poor man would not be further from sound reasoning, then he who declares against defensive war in all cases, as the way to amend the wicked, dishonest and murderous dispositions of the disturbers and destroyers of mankind. Such a course would indeed be to impose the fruitless task of laboring at the effect in order to remove the cause.”
For Sylvanus, the crucial “mistake” in thinking that Noah Worcester and the Peace Society crowd that follows him makes, is to think that the rules of the spiritual kingdom Jesus established in the church are to be applied to the worldly kingdom of unconverted men. For Sylvanus, there are clear boundaries between these two worlds and thus clear rule-sets that apply to them. The rules for the “born again” cannot be the same rules for the “lost and still depraved” and it is always a mistake to apply one set of rules in the other realm.
In the community of faith, he insists,
“No civil, or military officer as such, is to be employed in his official duties. The rule that should govern, is the law of love. If the members offend, the brethren are to labor with them. All the satisfaction that is required, is, that they repent, confess their faults, and reform their lives. If they have injured anyone, they must make them good. If this be done, their standing is restored. If they cannot be reclaimed, they are to be excluded, as improper members to be retained; and then we have nothing more to inflict upon them.”
Haynes’ conclusion drives home the importance of maintaining the distinction between the world of saints and the world of sinners:
“From these things it is evident that these two kingdoms are so different in their materials, manner of building, laws and government, as described in the word of God, but there is no arguing from one to the other. In one case, justice with stern aspect points his sword, and with awful frowns demands satisfaction of the offender; in the other, smiling mercy waves the olive branch, in an accent sweet as the melody of heaven, invites the sinner to repentance, and then to pardon and peace through the blood of the cross. Some having mistaken the point, and having blended these two kingdoms, have drawn the sword in the house of God, and have shed the blood of the saints and martyrs of Jesus Christ. Others equally erroneous, would extend to the hardened and flagrant transgressor in Caesar’s realm, the mild scepter of Emanuel‘s kingdom. But the better way seems to be to render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God, the things that are Gods.”
I suspect that Noah Worcester tended to see the world as full of “saint-sinners” and drew his arguments from that foundation.
It appears that Noah Worcester, if he ever read Sylvanus Haynes’ critique of his life’s mission, remained unconvinced. He continued to publish his regular installments of Friend of Peace for another four years. Soon, the Massachusetts Peace Society merged into a national organization (The American Peace Society) which lived on in outreach and influence until it was drowned in the calamity that was World War I a hundred years after Worcester began his crusade (that was the wrong word, wasn’t it?)
It is fair to say that Noah Worcester’s arguments live on today and Sylvanus Haynes’ argument live on today. Meanwhile, human beings have not stopped going to war and regretting it even as they celebrate it.
Thanks to Dennis Davidson of the Unitarian Universalist History and Heritage Society for some of the background material on Noah Worcester.
Unitarian Universalist History and Heritage Society. (2001, July 7). Noah Worcester. Retrieved June 27, 2022, from https://uudb.org/articles/noahworcester.html
Question for Comment: Do you find yourself more on "team Sylvanus" or "team Noah" when it comes to this issue of War? Why?
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