William Lloyd Garrison (ca. 1850) | Josiah Johnson Hawes / Metropolitan Museum of Art / CC0 1.0
In 1959, Martin Luther King Jr., then only 30 years old and fresh off leading the Montgomery bus boycotts, traveled to India to pay homage to one of his heroes, the late Mahatma Gandhi. Over the course of five weeks, King met with Indian heads of state, spoke with some of Gandhi’s closest followers, and discussed the shared problems facing both India and the United States. To King, the trip was an awakening, a spiritual pilgrimage to the birthplace of nonviolent resistance.
King was never shy about his affinity for the ascetic leader of Indian Independence. Gandhi had been a source of inspiration to King dating back to his days as a young seminary student. He later kept a framed portrait of Gandhi hanging on his office wall, called him the “guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change,” and based his nonviolent direct-action campaigns on Gandhi’s concept of satyagraha, the Indian leader’s own philosophy of nonviolence.
Ideas, like people, have ancestries. They are part of histories stretching back generations. The emergence of nonviolence as a political philosophy is no different. While Gandhi and King share an obvious intellectual bloodline through their embrace of nonviolent resistance, these two icons of the twentieth century are themselves part of a much larger genealogy of social protest.
Nonviolent resistance, after all, is a twentieth-century version of what many American abolitionists knew as simply “nonresistance.” A form of pacifism mixed with hints of Christian anarchism, nonresistance rejected all forms of violence. Critically, this included not just physical forms of violence but all systems or institutions whose legitimacy came from a power to threaten or coerce. Such a wide definition included churches, which had the power to excommunicate; it also included governments, as followers of nonresistance held that nations naturally derived legitimacy by monopolizing violence—waging war, arresting citizens, and the like.
The rationale behind nonresistance had everything to do with religion. As nonresisters saw it, Christianity demanded they reject violence in the name of peace and love, as Christ commands. They also believed that institutions such as governments or churches not only corrupted society through the use of force, but that such institutions usurped the ultimate power of Christ in creating the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth. To nonresisters, the laws of that Kingdom, not the laws of human governments or man-made institutions, were the only laws worth following and the only laws that truly mattered. Any others superseded the power of Christ.
Not every abolitionist carried the mantle of nonresistance. The wider movement tended to reject pacifism outright. But the philosophy found a special home among the followers of Boston’s William Lloyd Garrison.
Lean, bald, and bespectacled, Garrison was arguably the most influential white abolitionist in American history. In 1831, he founded The Liberator, which quickly became the most electrifying antislavery paper in the country. The paper’s radical zeal matched Garrison’s own persona: He was strident, ascetic, and denunciatory. No condemnation was too harsh, and he used his newspaper as a bullhorn exposing the evils of slavery as well as the hypocrisy of northern apologists who stood idly by. Even more, Garrison would soon become the leader of a band of the most radical abolitionists of all. Known simply as “Garrisonians,” the band consisted of men and women, who held Garrison’s vision and were as uncompromising as their leader.
Their specific vision included several ideas that set Garrisonians apart from the wider antislavery movement. For one, to be a Garrisonian meant supporting not just abolition but racial equality. This belief was fundamental to their activism and not always shared by other abolitionists. The same went for women’s rights. To be a Garrisonian meant supporting nineteenth-century feminism. Garrisonians carved out space for women to become active in the movement, with some even engaging in the otherwise taboo practice of speaking alone on stage at antislavery rallies. This would later become a major fault line dividing the different wings of the movement, but for the Garrisonians, the rights of women were non-negotiable and part of their worldview.
By the end of the 1830s, Garrison and his band began a shift that saw them embrace the tenets of nonresistance. In 1838, he and a group of followers formed the New England Non-Resistance Society, and he announced within the pages of The Liberator that while the paper would remain dedicated to abolition, it would also take up the cause of nonresistance. This shift proved critical to Garrisonians because it facilitated what became the distinguishing feature of their activism, the group’s strict nonvoting stance. Indeed, Garrisonians were devoutly apolitical. To them, ending slavery was a moral issue that could only be achieved through moral suasion—that is, changing the hearts and minds of fellow Americans—and not the messy game of electoral politics. As such, they never voted or supported antislavery candidates for office.
This was partly a matter of principle. Garrisonians refused to compromise, and electoral politics, they knew, was an exercise in compromise. Yet it was also born of their commitment to nonresistance. As they saw it, casting a ballot served as an endorsement of a government they viewed as inherently tyrannical and violent. Moreover, to vote meant electing representatives who would share a legislative chamber with slaveholders; it would also mean electing representatives required to swear an oath to the US Constitution—a document Garrison himself once described as a “Covenant with Death and an Agreement with Hell” due its many protections of slavery. To be a good pacifist, to be a good abolitionist, and to be a good nonresister, then, required withholding one’s vote and working outside of America’s political system—not within it.
Eventually, the idea of nonresistance went global. Its spread had a lot to do with Tolstoy. The Russian writer—author of such classics as War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1878)—was a philosopher and ascetic as much as a novelist. He practiced pacificism, vegetarianism, and later embraced a religious philosophy consistent with the principles of nonresistance. In Tolstoy’s treatise, The Kingdom of God Is Within You, published in 1894 as a statement of his religious beliefs, he cited Garrison as a source of inspiration for his own commitment to the doctrine of “non-resistance to evil.” Tolstoy opens his treatise, in fact, with a brief history of the New England Non-Resistance Society and included within its pages a copy of the society’s Declaration of Sentiments. His discovery of nonresistance, he would write, felt like a spiritual awakening. In a letter written later in life, he paid his respects to Garrison, suggesting that the abolitionist would “forever remain one of the greatest reformers and promoters of true human progress.”
The Kingdom of God Is Within You is arguably the best distillation of Tolstoy’s views concerning nonresistance, but it is not the only one. More than a decade later, for instance, Tolstoy replied to two letters from an Indian revolutionary asking for the great writer’s thoughts on the burgeoning movement for Indian Independence. Tolstoy’s response, later entitled “A Letter to a Hindu” and published by the Indian newspaper Free Hindustan, urged Indian revolutionaries to abandon violent resistance to British colonial rule and instead take up the noble cause of nonresistance. “Love, and forcible resistance to evil-doers, involve such a mutual contradiction as to destroy utterly the whole sense and meaning of the conception of love,” he wrote.
One of Tolstoy’s readers was a young Indian lawyer named Gandhi. He was living in South Africa at the time and later wrote to Tolstoy himself asking for permission to republish the letter in his own newspaper. Tolstoy agreed, and the exchange sparked a correspondence between the two men. While Gandhi’s own philosophy of nonviolence blended beliefs drawn from religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, he would later cite Tolstoy as one of the greatest influences, writing that Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of Heaven Is Within You “overwhelmed me.” In 1910, not long after beginning his correspondence with the aging novelist, the young lawyer—who was not yet the frail, ascetic Independence leader he would soon become—paid homage to Tolstoy by naming one of his first South African ashrams in the writer’s honor, calling it “Tolstoy Farm.”
As is most often the case, the lineage linking the nonviolent ideals of Gandhi and King didn’t exactly overlap. The ideals had evolved from one generation to the next, one cause to another, and each thinker brought with them their own ideas and beliefs.
King, for one, was as influenced by the Bible and the Black Church as Gandhi was by Hinduism and the Bhagavad Gita. Tolstoy’s nonresistance blended with a potent form of Christian anarchism. And King, a pastor, may have had a hard time stomaching some of Garrison’s denunciations of the church.
These distinctions certainly matter.
Yet so does understanding the broader genealogy, as it reminds us that nonviolence is not just a form of protest but an inheritance, with a shared history.
