Free Nonviolence by Mark Kurlansky Page B

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 atrocitieswere 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.