Nonviolence (9 page)

Gentili went even further in his Oxford lectures, stating that being the aggressor was also justified in the defense of property and holdings. He specifically justified the Spanish conquests in the New World, neatly piecing together references to the Romans spreading liberty with references to Augustine's just war to preserve the values of society and Urban's demonization of the infidel. Not surprising for a new age of imperialism, the original imperialists, the Romans, were being cited more and more. The Indians, like the Gauls,
deserved
to be conquered.

The cause of the Spaniards is just when they make war upon the Indians, who practiced abominable lewdness, even with beasts, and who ate human flesh, slaying men for that purpose. For such sins are contrary to human nature….

Gentili employed a similar logic to justify slavery, underscoring the justness of enslaving the “wicked.” This was an ancient argument. Aristotle wrote about those who deserved to be enslaved. But here it was applied to wicked races, races that deserved to be conquered and deserved to be enslaved. The slavery of the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries was necessarily racist because it
argued that Africans should be enslaved because of their inherent moral inferiority. Thomas Jefferson, who professed to be opposed to slavery as a “political and moral evil” even while owning slaves, believed that while all men were created equal, black men were less equal. In his
Notes on Virginia,
he amply discusses the inherent inferiority of African people. Since the inherent inferiority of other people could be invoked to justify both warfare and slavery, it was not a coincidence that the promoters of warfare and of slavery were often the same people, and that abolitionism and nonviolence, often, though not always, went hand in hand. In 1783, when the U.S. Constitution was being written, the Quakers were the loudest voice for abolishing slavery.

In the seventeenth century the English justification for war and colonialism was further enriched by another Oxford scholar and member of Parliament, John Selden, with his conclusion that “extending empire was a good enough reason” to go to war, because man had a natural right to acquisitiveness. This thinking was further developed by another seventeenth-century Oxford thinker, Thomas Hobbes. Though Hobbes believed in monarchy as the most efficient form of government, he strongly influenced the American Founding Fathers with his belief that the origin of power was the people, who only submitted to a sovereign because they required protection. Yet Hobbes, like Selden, believed that war and violence were part of the natural order. In his central thesis on government,
Leviathan,
he wrote that man had a selfish nature and that continual warfare was his natural state. A century later, the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that beyond being the individual's natural state, warfare was the natural condition of the nation-state. Hobbes also believed, like Selden, in man's acquisitive nature, and that until contracts to the contrary were established, he had the right to take what he wanted. Hobbes had worked for Lord Cavendish, one of the leaders of the Virginia Company, which invested in North American colonies, and had been awarded a share in that organization's American holdings.

John Locke, another Oxford intellectual who greatly influenced
America's Founding Fathers, was a firm believer in the middle class and its right to property and was a strong enthusiast for British colonialism. He was directly involved in the establishment of Carolina, where an island, now called Edisto, was for a time named after him. He also invested in the Bahamas and the Royal Africa Company. Locke believed that God gave man land to use and enjoy and that since Europeans with their advanced agriculture used it better than “savages,” they had the right to take it by force. According to Locke, Europeans had the right to punish others for not living by what he deemed “natural laws.” He also believed they had the right to take slaves, over whom they were free to exercise the power of life and death.

These were the radical thinkers of the day who were shaping revolutionary thought in America. But there were other, very different, kinds of radicals in America, such as William Penn. Pennsylvania— and eventually neighboring colonies—drew people who denied the state its Hobbesian rights to war, colonial expansion, and slavery. In Penn's “holy experiment,” the Quakers controlled the Assembly and made the rules favorable to the nonviolent sects. These sects, which had shunned political participation in Europe, now voted and actively worked to keep the Quakers in power. Many, such as the Mennonites, for the first time were living under a type of government in which they could fully participate. The colony assigned land on the western frontier to the warlike settlers— people not from peace sects—whose implicit role was to confront the Indians; but the frontiersmen resented the pacifists, who were given more secure eastern lands that often also happened to have richer soil. A tension developed in Pennsylvania between eastern establishment and western frontiersmen that was a microcosm for what would be seen in the country as a whole after independence.

The Quakers ran their colony of Pennsylvania as though it were an independent state, adopting a foreign policy completely out of line with the British Empire. Not only did Pennsylvania refuse to conscript militias to fight the French, they would not fight Indians
and independently negotiated peaceful and friendly relations with them.

Had Quakers controlled all of the colonial legislatures and not just that of Pennsylvania, the history of North America—and perhaps, by example, all of the Americas, Africa, and much of Asia— might have been different. The Quakers did not believe that non-Christian people were unnatural and needed to be conquered. In North America they not only tried to teach Quakerism to the Indians by example, they also directly preached it to them. They had little success. The Indians were not just dealing with Quakers, they were caught between two ruthless European empires, both of which coveted their land. As long as the British and the French were active in the New World, nonviolence made little sense to these people.

Samuel Bownas, a British Quaker who soon after he landed in Maryland began debating important colonial figures on Quaker issues, very quickly found himself in colonial prison. In his autobiography he described a conversation with four Indians while he was an inmate in a Long Island prison in 1702. He explained that while most white men believed that killing their enemies was acceptable behavior, Quakers believed that it was wrong, that Quakers “rather endeavor to overcome our enemies with courteous and friendly offices and kindness, and to assuage their wrath by mildness and persuasion.” The Indians agreed that “this was good. But who can do it?” The leader of the group argued, “When my enemies seek my life, how can I do other than use my endeavor to destroy them in my own defense?” The four agreed that if everyone adopted this point of view, “there would be no more need of war, nor killing one the other to enlarge their kingdom, nor one nation want to overcome another,” but they did not think many people would take up this belief. Bownas gave the standard Quaker response: “All things have their beginnings.” The Indians agreed that if Bownas had his way, “things will go well” in the world.

The frontiersmen of the western border of Pennsylvania did not follow the dictates of the Quakers. An increasing number of atrocities
were committed throughout the colony by frontiersmen against the Indians, notably a massacre in Lancaster in 1763. In 1764 some 1,500 western settlers marched to Philadelphia to protest the refusal of the Quaker-controlled Assembly to pay bounties for Indian scalps. There was growing disenchantment with the Quaker Assembly, and it was only because the pacifist sects voted in a block that they were able to stay in power long after they had lost the support of the majority of Pennsylvanians. Finally, in 1756, they were voted out of power, and the new assembly dropped their nonvio-lent stance. Mennonites and other nonviolent sects retreated to their traditional posture of nonparticipation in government and were seldom heard from again until the fight over slavery heated up in the mid-nineteenth century. Quaker control of the colony lasted only seventy-four years. The central problem was that the pacifist state was part of a larger colonial system that vehemently rejected nonviolence.

In the vast history of European colonialism, there are few incidents of nonviolent resistance by indigenous people, leaving unanswered the question of whether this would have worked. What is answerable is that nothing they did try worked. The indigenous people of five continents were facing an intractable enemy from a sixth continent that was convinced that they had the right to steal the land on other continents and destroy the inhabitants as peoples and cultures, and, in fact, that this was the proper thing to do. The Europeans had not only the public and the clergy, but the intelligentsia, the thinkers and philosophers, backing up their program of genocide.

What were these indigenous peoples to do? Most decided to resist militarily, and it can now be seen that this was a disaster. But right from the start it was clear that pacifism was also a route to annihilation. Bartolomé de las Casas, who was born in Spain in 1474, and was possibly the first Catholic priest ordained in the Americas, wanted to establish towns in the Americas where Indians and Spaniards could live together in peace. “For this is nothing else
than making the coming and passion of Christ useless … as long as innumerable human beings are slaughtered in a war waged on the pretext of preaching the gospel and spreading religion.” But he could find little Spanish support for such a project.

In 1542 de las Casas claimed to have seen the indigenous population of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola reduced from three million to two hundred survivors. The reason, he said, that this extermination was possible was that “of all the infinite universe of humanity, these people are the most guileless, the most devoid of wickedness and duplicity, the most obedient and faithful to their native masters and to the Spanish Christians whom they serve…. Yet into this sheepfold, into the land of meek outcasts there came some Spaniards who immediately behaved like ravening wild beasts….” As Gandhi would observe centuries later, it would take more than meekness to survive European empire builders.

In North America, the Cherokee took a different approach. The largest pre-European nation in what was to become the United States, the Cherokee had a rich culture and a developed agricultural economy by the time Europeans arrived. After seeing that a military response was disastrous, in 1820 they adopted an American-style democracy, with an elected leader, a House, and a Senate. Seven years later they declared themselves to be again a nation, with a capital in Georgia. They developed written characters for their language and wrote laws and published a newspaper. For a few years they seemed able to coexist with their sister democracy, the United States. This might have continued were it not for the discovery of gold on their land.

In 1830 the U.S. Congress debated the “Indian Removal Act.” Tennessee congressman Davy Crockett staked and lost his political future on opposing the bill, and when it passed, he left Washington for Texas, saying, “I would sooner be honestly damned than hypocritically immortalized.” The Cherokee went to court and won in the Supreme Court when Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that the Cherokee nation was sovereign and the removal act was illegal. Such an act would have to be negotiated between the Cherokee and the U.S. government.

This would have been a great triumph for nonviolence and the rule of law, except that President Andrew Jackson, the great advocate of Indian removal, was able to find a small Cherokee faction of fewer than 500 people in a nation of 17,000 who were agreeable to removal. A treaty was signed with them and was ratified in the U.S. Senate, passing by only one vote over the vociferous objection of such leading figures as Daniel Webster and Henry Clay. When seven thousand army troops were ordered to force-march the Cherokee, all 17,000, to what is now Oklahoma, the commanding officer, John Wool, resigned in protest and was replaced by General Winfield Scott, whose march, known in history as “the Trail of Tears,”
nunna daul Tsuny
in the Cherokee language, was so brutal that 4,000 Cherokees died. The Cherokee had lost their faith in nonviolence and put to death the leaders of the small contingent that had signed the removal treaty.

But in a remote corner of the far-flung British Empire, there was a people who took on the British with classic nonviolent activism. The far South Pacific seems to have been one of the last places settled by humans. The few islands beyond Australia are not near anyone else nor on the way to anywhere. The first people to go there were Polynesians. In 950, a Polynesian navigator named Kupe discovered the islands, which are today New Zealand. Following his discovery there was a sizable migration of Polynesians to these un-inhabited islands.

Polynesians are usually portrayed in movies as a gentle, peaceful people. But this was often not the case, and certainly not the case with the ones who settled New Zealand and called themselves the Maori, which means “Children of Heaven.” The Children of Heaven were armed with flat stone clubs that they wielded with deadly force from a thong attached to the handle. Competing Maori groups fought each other for control of the limited land. Defeated enemies were often enslaved and on rare occasions were eaten.

The Maori resisted the British militarily and from 1845 to 1872 Europeans fought to destroy them and take over their land. A
memorial to the soldiers of that war in the Auckland War Museum, a museum dedicated to the glorification of war, says, “Through war they won the peace we know.” If they took out the word
peace
and replaced it with the word
land,
they would have had the truth. Toward the end of the war the government was paying bounties for heads, £5 for a regular head and £10 for a chief 's. To collect the bounty the killers would carry the sack of heads to the commanding officer's tent where they would dump it out, the heads rolling across the floor. White soldiers and pro-government Maori competed for heads; in one famous incident a Maori shot an insurgent and a white soldier ran up to the wounded man, still alive, and decapitated him to rob the Maori of the £5.