WAR AND PEACENIKS

Noah Worcester

In the spring of 1775, with the redcoats storming Boston, 16-year-old Noah Worcester joined his father’s company of New Hampshire militiamen on their trek south to team up with the patriot army assembling in nearby Cambridge. Weeks later, as the Siege of Boston continued, Worcester served as a fifer at the Battle of Bunker Hill, where he narrowly escaped capture by British forces, and went on to complete 11 months of service in the Revolutionary War. He rejoined the patriot army for a two-month stint as a fife major in the summer of 1777 and took part in the victory at the Battle of Bennington. Its deadly aftermath spurred him to embrace pacifism and, in the process, kindle the American peace movement. Worcester went on to become a liberal clergyman in the Boston area, where he founded the Massachusetts Peace Society; launched and edited the influential quarterly Friend of Peace; and, in 1814, published the book (under the pseudonym Philo Pacificus) A Solemn Review of the Custom of War, still celebrated as a groundbreaking and enduring pacifist manifesto.

Leo Tolstoy

The celebrated novelist Count Lev (Leo) Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born in 1828 on his family’s estate a hundred miles south of Moscow. Following years, Tolstoy’s philosophical treatise published in 1894, had a profound influence on such high-profile proponents of nonviolent resistance as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.