Free Nonviolence by Mark Kurlansky Page 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 influencedAmerica'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 Indiansand independently negotiated peaceful and