American Peace Society

Portrait of Arthur Deerin Call of the American Peace Society, 1913

James Libby Tryon (1864-1958) of the American Peace Society in 1916. He was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The American Peace Society is a pacifist group founded upon the initiative of William Ladd, in New York City, May 8, 1828. It was formed by the merging of many state and local societies, from New York, Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, of which the oldest, the New York Peace Society, dated from 1815. Ladd was an advocate of a "Congress and High Court of Nations." The society organized peace conferences and regularly published a periodical entitled Advocate of Peace. The Society was only opposed to wars between nation states; it did not oppose the American Civil War, regarding the Union's war as a "police action" against the "criminals" of the Confederacy.^{[1] [2]} Its most famous leader was Benjamin Franklin Trueblood (1847–1916), a Quaker who in his book The Federation of the World (1899) called for the establishment of an international state to bring about lasting peace in the world. In 1834 the headquarters of the society were removed to Hartford, in 1834 to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1911 to Washington, D.C.^[3] The group is now based in Washington. Its official journal is World Affairs.

The American Peace Society house, its headquarters from 1911 to 1948 near the White House, is a U.S. National Historic Landmark. The American Peace Society was opposed to Zionism.^[4]

History

In Boston the society worked from offices on Cornhill (ca.1840s-1850s);^[5][6] Chauncey Street (ca.1864);^[7] Winter Street (ca.1868-1869);^[8] and Somerset Street (ca.1870s-1890s).^[9] Annual meetings took place in various venues around town, including Park Street Church (1851).^[10] Officers included George C. Beckwith, William Jay, Howard Malcom, John Field, William C. Brown.^[11][12]

See also

• List of anti-war organizations
• List of peace activists
• Massachusetts Peace Society (1815–1828), one of the predecessors to the American Peace Society
• White House Peace Vigil

Footnotes

1. Peter Brock, Pacifism in the United States: from the colonial era to the First World War. Princeton University Press, 1968 (p. 691).
2. Valarie H. Ziegler,The advocates of peace in antebellum America Mercer University Press, 2001 ISBN 0865547262 (p.158).
3. New International Encyclopedia
4. "Zionism is a Backward Step". Advocate of Peace. Vol. LXIX, No. 1. January, 1907. Page 32
5. Boston Directory. 1848, 1861
6. Boston almanac. 1852
7. Boston Directory. 1864
8. Boston Directory. 1868, 1869
9. Boston almanac. 1894
10. Rufus Wheelwright Clark. An address delivered before the American Peace Society at its annual meeting, May 26, 1851. Google books
11. Massachusetts State Record and Year Book. 1850
12. Boston Directory. 1869

• Oxford Dictionary of the U.S. Military. Oxford University Press, 2001
• Dictionary of American History by James Truslow Adams, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1940

Further reading

Issued by the society

• Advocate of Peace. Published in Hartford: v.1-2 (1834–1836). Published in Boston: v.3-4 (1839–1842); v.11 (1854). New series v.7-9 (1876–1878). Published in Washington, DC: v.84 (1922). Also called Advocate of Peace Through Justice
• Thomas Hancock. The principles of peace: exemplified in the conduct of the Society of Friends in Ireland, during the rebellion of the year 1798, with some preliminary and concluding observations. 1843
• Walter Channing. Thoughts on peace and war: An address delivered before the American Peace Society at its annual meeting, May 27, 1844.
• The Book of Peace. Boston: George Beckwith, 1845.
• William Jay. An address delivered before the American Peace Society at its annual meeting, May 26, 1845.
• Charles Sumner. The war system of the commonwealth of nations: an address before the American Peace Society, at its anniversary in Boston, May 28, 1849. 1854. Google books
• Rufus W. Clark. An address delivered before the American Peace Society at its annual meeting, May 26, 1851.
• Angel of Peace. v.5-8 (1876–1878). Children's magazine.

About the society

• The Calumet. v.2 (1834–1835)
• James Libby Tryon. The Rise of the Peace Movement. Yale Law Journal, Vol. 20, No. 5 (Mar., 1911), pp. 358–371
• The American Peace Society: A Centennial History by Edson L. Whitney (1928)
• John Benedict Buescher (2005). "American Peace Society". In Karsten, Peter. Encyclopedia of War and American Society. 1 (1st ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. pp. 36–38. ISBN 0-7619-3097-3.

External links

• American Peace Society Website
• The records of the American Peace Society, housed at the Swarthmore College Peace Collection
• Library of Congress. Photo of Philip Marshall Brown of the American Peace Society, Washington, D.C., May 1, 1939. Harris & Ewing, photographer
• Literature from the antebellum American peace movement