Soldiers of Peace: Civil War Pacifism and the Postwar Radical Peace Movement.

Soldiers of Peace: Civil War Pacifism and the Postwar Radical Peace Movement. By Thomas F. Curran. The North's Civil War Series. (New York: Fordham University Press. 2003. Pp. xviii. 228. $45.00, ISBN 0-8232-2210-1.)

When historians refer to the "peace movement" in the North during the Civil War, they usually have in mind the Peace Democrats, with their racism and Confederate sympathies. Thomas F. Curran reminds us of another northern peace movement, one that shared none of the ideological bases of the Peace Democrats and that had influence well into the twentieth century.

Curran's focus is the Universal Peace Union (UPU), which began in December 1866, but he gives considerable attention to its ideological roots in what he calls "perfectionist pacifism." This was a nonresistance movement that grew out of the radical abolitionism of the 1830s. These perfectionist pacifists saw all forms of coercive force as contrary to the Christian Gospel and looked instead to the time when human governments would give way to "God's government" (p. 10). Such perfectionists eschewed voting, for example, as a compromise of principle--to vote for officials who might give an order to shed blood was to share in the responsibility. This movement in the 1830s and 1840s has received considerable attention from historians such as Peter Brock and Lewis Perry. Historical attention has tended to stop, however, when many nonresistants, most notably William Lloyd Garrison, embraced the Union cause during the Civil War.

The Civil War, however, is Curran's real starting point. Focusing on Alfred H. Love, a Philadelphia merchant of Quaker forebears, he notes that a handful of nonresistants did not give up the cause during the war--they condemned slavery but also the use of force to end it. After the war, convinced that its carnage opened new opportunities for their message, they established the UPU. The group was always tiny and largely confined to the Northeast. It included a few Hicksite Quakers, most notably Lucretia Mott, as well as Shakers, some old communitarians like Adin Ballou, veteran nonresistants like Henry C. Wright, and a handful of liberal Protestant ministers.

Curran does not claim too much for the UPU. Its efforts to amend the Constitution to remove Congress's war-making powers and to abolish West Point and capital punishment had no effect. The group did embrace other reforms that ultimately were realized, such as black voting rights and women's suffrage. Curran sees the lasting impact of the group, however, in keeping alive a radical peace impulse that would influence contemporaries like Leo Tolstoy and later groups like the War Resisters League and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

Curran is right not to claim too much for this marginal group. But his carefully argued work reminds us of the persistence of a pacifist outlook that most historians thought died at Fort Sumter.

Earlham College

THOMAS D. HAMM