Nonviolence (11 page)

By 1770 the British recognized the Townsend Acts to be another political and financial disaster and repealed them. But the tax on tea remained. This led to the most famous act of nonviolence in the American colonial period.

The American revolutionaries, in their prewar days, were particularly effective in their use of an important nonviolent tool, the boycott. Women began weaving cloth by hand rather than buy fabric from British mills. Homespun became the fashion. Spinning bees became patriotic gatherings. One result of the tea boycott was that Americans very quickly became coffee drinkers. But there were many debates in Boston on how to take the tea boycott even further. On December 16, 1773, sixty revolutionaries, dressed as Mohawk Indians, boarded three ships in Boston Harbor and dumped 342 chests of tea valued at £10,000 into the sea. This was a perfectly managed act of nonviolent protest. There were no incidents of looting or vandalism. According to legend, one padlock was broken and the revolutionaries replaced it.

Though far less famous today than the Boston Tea Party, the crowning achievement of American colonial civil disobedience,
the one that John Adams considered the turning point of the American Revolution, came in 1774, before any shots were fired. The colonies were becoming ungovernable and unprofitable. The British were responding with repression, including the so-called Coercive Acts, which cost them more money and tied up more troops. From the point of view of the rebels, the British response was ideal, as it was mobilizing public opinion against England. One of the new repressive measures enacted by the British Parliament, intended as a response to the Boston Tea Party, was the Massachusetts Government Act passed in the spring of 1774. It removed the right of Massachusetts' elected representatives to have a say in the appointment of judges. It also stripped them of their power to remove corrupt judges. When the new British-appointed Court of Common Pleas for the county of Worcester tried to sit in September, thousands turned out to block them. Of the estimated six thousand, about one thousand were armed. They stopped the court from coming to session and formed a “convention” that effectively took over, closing courts and freeing prisoners.

The weapons, which were not used, were unnecessary, since no armed force opposed them. Everywhere else in Massachusetts where the British tried to open a Court of Common Pleas, they were also stopped by huge crowds, which often had no weapons at all. The crowds were large enough to keep the courts closed, force the judges to resign, and keep the army helplessly at a distance.

The revolution had overthrown the government in Massachusetts without a shot being fired. Why, then, did the rebels turn to warfare? Sentiment was already strongly anti-British. John Adams wrote to Jefferson late in his life, “The revolution was in the minds of the people, and in the union of the colonies, both of which were accomplished before the hostilities commenced.” So why was the war necessary? Jonathan Schell in
The Unconquerable World
astutely noted that participants in other revolutions had reached similar conclusions. The Romantic writer François René de Chateaubriand, who lived through the French Revolution, said almost the exact same thing: “The French Revolution was accomplished before it occurred.” And Leon Trotsky, one of the authors of the Russian
Revolution, wrote, “The declaration of October 23 had meant the overthrow of the power before the government itself was overthrown.”

So if revolutions are accomplished in the minds of the people, why must they be followed by force of arms? Why do almost all political theorists—not only Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau, but later ones such as Marx and Lenin—insist that a revolution must be an armed movement? If the outbreak of war is inevitable, as seventeenth-century thinkers believed, history teaches the lesson that its inevitability does not rest, as they believed, on natural law, but on individuals incapable of conceiving of another path. Is the source of violence not human nature, as Hobbes contended, but a lack of imagination?

In the case of the American Revolution, could independence have been accomplished without warfare? The British gave up on America even though the Americans had scored very few military victories in the war, because they wanted to get on with other business, including their European wars, and could not afford to tie up military and money in these colonies any longer. But the path of disruption and protest had already been tying up British troops, costing Britain money, making the colonies unprofitable—the very reasons that Britain later gave up the war and negotiated peace. Colonies were supposed to earn, not cost. It seems quite possible that British withdrawal could have been achieved by continuing protest and economic sabotage.

The great lesson from the history of revolutions is that a shooting war is not necessary to overthrow the established power but is often deemed necessary to consolidate the revolution itself. By 1775 the revolutionaries may have, as Adams asserted, defeated the British, but they had not united the colonies. By the start of the shooting war, they had not even achieved the moment of enforced silence, because many, even supporters of independence, hoped that it was not too late to stop the war. There was in America, and especially in Philadelphia, which happened to be the seat of the Continental Congress, a vocal antiwar movement. French-born Anthony
Benezet, raised in a French Protestant family but a Quaker convert, stood on street corners passing out pamphlets against going to war and against slavery, both of which evils he insisted stemmed from the same impulse—a lust for wealth and power. He urged people to look within themselves for the causes of war and urged Patriots, as the revolutionaries liked to call themselves, to remember the meaning of Christianity and pray for reconciliation with the British.

In the winter of 1776 in Philadelphia, the majority of the Continental Congress was not prepared to call for independence. Some were still loyalists, and then there were the Quakers. The Quakers were deeply distrustful of people such as Adams, people who called themselves Patriots. They regarded these Patriots as extremely violent. By 1776 the Quakers had been confronting violent patriotism for some time. The nonpatriots noted that there was considerable criticism of British actions in the British Parliament and even expressions of sympathy for the American point of view. Was this not fertile ground for negotiations? The Patriots, including Quaker-born Tom Paine, were frustrated and angered by the Quaker position. John Adams had little patience for this point of view, believing negotiations would yield nothing and the only guarantee of American “liberty” was independence by force of arms. Franklin, a more experienced opponent of the Quakers, was even more impatient, regarding the entire debate a waste of time.

Leading the opposition to the restless Patriots was the Pennsylvania delegation, with its skilled parliamentarian John Dickenson. He was much respected as an early critic of British policy. An affluent London-trained lawyer with a Quaker mother, he lived in great luxury in Philadelphia, having married into an affluent Quaker family. He adopted both their wealth and some of their pacifism, though he held the rank of colonel in a Philadelphia battalion. Although anti-British and pro-independence, his repeated message to the Congress was that their goals could be achieved peacefully. Despite Lexington and Concord, the British retreat to Boston during which 200 British soldiers were killed, and their losing even more men in Boston at the battle erroneously labeled Bunker Hill, which actually took place on Breed's Hill, the British were reasonable
men from similar traditions and surely negotiations would be possible, Dickenson insisted. Adams, however, argued for “powder and artillery.” According to biographer David McCullough, Adams's irate assessment was that Dickenson must have been henpecked by his Quaker wife and mother.

It probably was too late. British troops had been killed and King George seemed determined to respond with his military might. Once this was clear, the Patriots got their moment of silence, an end to the debate about going to war. To oppose fighting was now equated with being a British loyalist. A loyalist in East Haddam, Connecticut, according to a loyalist report, was attacked by a mob for his politics. He was stripped of all his clothes, and pitch, so hot it burned his skin, was poured on him. He was then taken to a pigsty and had pig excrement rubbed on his body, thrown on his face, and forced down his throat. In Morristown, New Jersey, 105 men were sentenced to death for suspicion of being loyalists. Of them, 101 saved themselves by pledging loyalty to the revolutionary cause. The other four were hanged. Delaware sentenced a man accused of being a loyalist to be hanged and while still breathing cut down and drawn and quartered. Connecticut established the death penalty for loyalists, and in New York any statement deemed favorable to the loyalist cause was punishable by death. Even where it was not a capital crime, those who would not fight for the revolution were sometimes lynched, a practice named for Colonel Charles Lynch of Virginia, who would hang people by their limbs from a walnut tree in his yard until they screamed “Liberty forever!”

Families were bitterly divided. Benjamin Franklin turned against his own son, William, because he was a loyalist, and he did nothing to help him when William was thrown in an infamous underground dungeon in 1776.

After the outbreak of armed hostilities, the Pennsylvania Assembly fell largely into the hands of the revolutionaries, who required all white males of at least the age of eighteen to take an oath of “Renunciation and Allegiance.” Such oaths were forbidden by most pacifist religions, but those who refused the oath could be greatly harassed. If they traveled, upon arriving in a new town they
could be thrown in jail until they swore the oath. Those who did not take it were denied basic civil rights and sometimes imprisoned. Homes were confiscated from pacifists. More than most religious sects, the Quakers tried to enforce their beliefs, penalizing—even ejecting—members who in any way contributed to the war effort.

But not all pacifists were religious. Some secular Americans simply refused the draft and were imprisoned until they agreed to take up the cause.

The United States of America was founded by a war, and so it needed to be a “good war.” The creation of this founding myth, the rewriting of history, began immediately after the war, while everyone with short-term memory knew otherwise. Collective amnesia was a small further sacrifice for nation building.

Most schoolchildren today are given the impression that the American Revolution was a relatively benign war. The worst thing that happened outside of the Continental Army being cold in the winter was the hanging of Nathan Hale, before which he got to make a speech asserting his willingness to be hanged.

In truth, the American Revolution was a brutal civil conflict filled with not only combat casualties but bitter feuds and abuses between civilians and between military and civilians. A higher percentage of the American population died in the Revolution than in any other war in U.S. history except the undeniably brutal Civil War. The Revolution, like most civil wars, was a war against civilians, a war in which women and children and the homes in which they lived were often deliberately and viciously targeted. Civilians would run in terror at the approach of either army. Homes were sacked and women were raped.

Saints were created and called “the Founding Fathers” but the Founding Fathers knew that such idolatry—Thomas Jefferson called it “sanctimonious reverence”—would harm the republic. They were far from the most progressive thinkers of the day. Slavery was their most celebrated flaw but they also set the stage for the genocide of some ten million American Indians, nor did they even entirely reject colonialism. They believed it was wrong to tax
colonists who did not have representation in the legislature, but it was the tax, not the lack of representation, that was the grievance. Ironically, they repeatedly used words like
enslavement
and
slavery
to criticize taxation while at the same time accepting actual slavery. They were men of property, concerned with the issues of the affluent, including taxes. They wrote a Constitution that was far less progressive and enlightened than the laws adopted by the Pennsylvania colony half a century earlier. But they knew that they and their work were flawed. Jefferson, too, believed in the perfectability of humans, or at least that they would steadily grow wiser, and wrote that the Constitution should be rewritten in every generation to avoid having society “remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”

We are indoctrinated by the image of “Patriots” who fought to free Americans, but some were brutal, some were bloodthirsty, and some agreed to fight only because of a lack of alternatives, which is one of the principal ways armies are raised. Most soldiers did not volunteer to fight for liberty. Immediately following the outbreak of war the rebelling colonies each issued their own draft laws, which included fines and sometimes imprisonment for conscientious objectors. But there also were many volunteers including, to John Adams's surprise, entire companies of Quakers.

Like all wars, the American Revolution filled its participants with horror. But its survivors were not allowed to commit such an unpatriotic act as discussing their experiences, and veterans were little cared for. Widows of enlisted men were not given pensions until 1832.

Typical of the postrevolutionary spirit was Charles Thomson, an Irish-born enthusiast of the American cause who was said to know as much about the war as any man alive. A friend of Benjamin Franklin and other key players, he served as secretary to the Continental Congress from 1774 until 1789. All during the Revolution he took detailed notes with the intention of writing a definitive history of the war. But after the war was over he decided not to write the book because too many good Americans would have their reputations sullied by accounts of their misconduct during the war. Before
he died, at the age of ninety-five in 1824, he had all his notes burned.

Throughout the centuries pacifists have insisted that one of history's great lessons is that violence does not resolve disagreement. It always leads to more violence. Among those who reject nonviolence this contention is rigorously disputed. What cannot be disputed is that in the 1770s the American colonists chose violence over nonviolence, war over negotiation. A generation later, in 1812, the British and Americans went to war once more.