Imagining Peace: Margot Minardi on American Pacifism

The year’s first American Studies Colloquium, held on September 10, featured the history department’s very own Margot Minardi presenting her lecture, “No Place for Peace: The Struggle to Abolish War in Nineteenth Century America.” The lecture was adapted from the first two chapters of the book of the same name that Minardi is currently working on, which will examine nineteenth-century American pacifist movements centered around the concept of “peace reform.”

Minardi began the talk by addressing the traditional prominence of war in discussions of history, from the pop history documentaries beloved by grandfathers nationwide to academic publications alike. Wars are used to define entire historical eras, in addition to being areas of study in their own right, leading the idea of war to be taken for granted as a constant. She acknowledged the prominent belief that war “always has and will always be with us,” before launching into her study of a group of people who strove to challenge those purported truths. 

The peace reform movement at the heart of Minardi’s lecture began to form around 1815, a critical year that marked both the end of the Napoleonic Wars that had engulfed Europe for the previous twelve years and the War of 1812 in the United States. For the reformers, this moment was supposed to usher in a new era of peace after these devastating conflicts. Critically, peace reformers viewed their cause as a “peacetime peace movement.” Rather than advocating for the end to any specific war, they aimed to prevent all wars and proceed from a basis of existing peace.

As an example of these beliefs, Minardi drew upon the Unitarian minister and pacifist advocate Noah Worcester’s provocatively-titled pamphlet, A Solemn Review of the Custom of War Showing That War is the Effect of Popular Delusion and Proposing a Remedy. In particular, Minardi invited the audience to pick up on Worcester’s characterization of war as a “custom,” which challenged the popular justification of war as an inevitable, natural process. With this word choice, Minardi argued that Worcester and similar reformers delegitimized war as part of the “tyranny of custom” that Enlightenment thinkers had fought against in their criticism of oppressive man-made institutions like slavery and monarchy. Minardi connected the peace reformers’ claims to larger developments of radical republicanism and Enlightenment reforms. 

While the peace reformers expressed democratic beliefs in line with those of the original Founding Fathers, they sparked outrage for their retrospective opposition to the Revolutionary War. By their pacifist principles, the peace reform movement viewed the Revolutionary War, like all other wars, as unnecessary. Yet by rejecting all war, they were seen by critics to be rejecting the nation’s patriotic foundational history. 

Minardi explored more dimensions of the peace reform movement by discussing their use of petitions to local legislatures. In particular, there was a wave of petitions across New England and the Midwest in the mid-nineteenth century calling for a “congress of nations.” This congress of nations was intended to function as a sort of proto-United Nations or League of Nations, with representatives from all of the nations of the world who would meet to decide on international issues through nonviolent diplomatic means. 

Minardi highlighted how these petitions showed popular involvement in the movement, citing the common occupations of many petitioners in one document, including everything from shoemakers to grocers. Furthermore, many women were active in peace reform, like the “Ladies of Lowell” who circulated one petition, at which point Minardi shouted out American gender history specialist Jackie Dirks. Although the petitioners’ efforts to form a congress of nations would not be realized on a global scale until after World War I, Minardi argued that, with these petitions, the peace reformers advocated for a “political community beyond the borders of the nation” at a time when American nationalism was growing. 

Concluding the talk, Minardi brought up Donald Trump’s recent bid to rename the Department of Defense to the Department of War, removing the euphemism that had been established post-World War II to reestablish the prominence of America’s martial aims under the current administration. Even without this example, the major questions of the feasibility of international peace brought up by Minardi’s lecture remain perennially relevant in a world at war.

While this marked the end of the planned lecture, Minardi covered more ground while answering questions from the audience. She touched upon the relationship between the peace reform movement and the impending American Civil War. Minardi explained that most peace reformers abandoned their pacifism during the Civil War to support the Union, although they would not have seen it that way. In fact, many peace reformers claimed that the Civil War was not actually a war, as it concerned an internal rebellion over the South’s secession, rather than an external war against another sovereign nation. Minardi added that these claims were tied to the large overlap between radical abolitionism and peace reform as two interconnected movements during this period, motivating peace reformers to justify their support of the Union’s cause, which was in line with their abolitionist beliefs.

Another audience member questioned the connection between peace reformers’ opposition to external wars and their positions on the violent takeover of the American West during the nineteenth century. Minardi clarified that, while many reformers opposed the violent colonization of indigenous people, they did not object to imperialism on principle, rather, they believed that the American empire should be governed peacefully. 

Alongside the conclusion of Minardi’s lecture, this discussion called into question the ways in which concepts like “peace” and “war” are defined, by whom they are weaponized, and to what ends. Over two hundred years after the peace reformers tried to herald a new era without war, Gaza remains ravaged by ongoing war, to give only one example of the conflicts being waged over the perpetual issues of imperialism and capitalism across the globe. Yet amid these seemingly endless horrors, the example of the peace reform movement offers a sign that it is possible not only to imagine peace, but to come even minutely closer to bringing it about through concerted local actions.