Soldiers of Peace: Civil War Pacifism and the Postwar Radical Peace Movement (review)

Edmund Morgan's The Puritan Dilemma (Boston, 1958) posed the question that all people of principle must face, "the question of what responsibility a righteous man owes to society." The answers, Morgan observed of seventeenth-century New England, were diverse. On the one hand were the come-outers (called "Pilgrims" back then), who would not compromise with "the world" and who remained pure—and ineffectual. On the other hand were the "Puritans," who adopted a more realistic pose of "being in the world without being of the world." They would transform Anglo-American culture into a messianic "City Upon a Hill."

Curran's comprehensive Soldiers of Peace is a nineteenth- and twentieth-century reprise of Morgan's Puritan Dilemma. This time, the protagonists are not Calvinist Pilgrims and Puritans but "perfectionist" and "restorationist" northern pacifists who emerged during the Civil War, and received notoriety for their implacable opposition to it and to the draft that sustained it. As North and South moved ever-closer to total war, the perfectionist pacifists divided from the vast majority of their countrymen by asserting that war was a sin and not a "sacred crusade."

Curran traces the roots of perfectionist pacifism to a radical "restorationist" tradition that drew a sharp distinction between the ends of Christianity as they interpreted it and the ends of American civil government. This tradition included some representation from such peace denominations as the Quakers and Mennonites, as well as the Shakers, but it was not itself a denomination. Nor were its members automatically draft-exempt as "conscientious objectors." Many perfectionists shared their ideas through William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator, but when Garrison came out in favor of a war for abolition (together with the nation's largest peace organization, the American Peace Society), they broke ranks. Instead of looking forward to a millennial age, perfectionist pacifists looked backward for their model, arguing that the millennium had already appeared and that an individual committed to God's laws of love and non-violence automatically became a citizen of God's millennial kingdom.

In consummate detail, Curran traces how, after the Civil War, the perfectionist pacifists evolved into a formal reform organization, the Universal Peace Union (UPU), with the indomitable Alfred Love as their president for the next forty-seven years. Although focused on issues surrounding war, the UPU soon expanded to include other social ills involving labor and the inequality of women that stood between their present and a perfected future where all would live in peace.

Without Love's energetic, even inspired, leadership and his fearless resistance to both war and conscription, the movement would have never grown. Indeed, to a significant degree, this history of "soldiers of peace" is a biography of Love and his single-minded campaign to stand for non-violence, no matter what the consequences. That his peace movement never really drew significant numbers during the war is less a reflection of passive leadership than the consequence of a civil war that was so total and all-encompassing that virtually no Americans wanted to derail the bloodbath.

The book is divided almost exactly into two parts—radical pacifists in the Civil War and radical pacifists in the postwar period until their demise early in the twentieth century. After the war, Love was able to increase the ranks of the UPU from the hundreds to the low thousands, not a large number but a definite influence. With the support and participation of other peace and women's activists, including Lucretia Mott, Julia Ward Howe, Joshua Blanchard, and Francis Willard, the movement found a voice under Love's leadership.

The UPU's greatest post-Civil War issue was Native American rights and the reform of violent solutions. But by agreeing with the government that Indians had to become Christian if they were to be civilized, they fell into the same condescending trap as the more militant army officers who preferred to...