David Dodge - War Inconsistent with the Religion of Jesus Christ

To David Low Dodge of New York belongs the high honor of having written the first pamphlets published in America directed expressly against the war system of nations, and of having founded the first peace society ever organized in America or in the world. His first pamphlet, The Mediator’s Kingdom not of this World , was published in 1809. His second and more important pamphlet, War Inconsistent with the Religion of Jesus Christ , was prepared for the press in 1812. This was two years before the publication of Noah Worcester’s Solemn Review of the Custom of War , which was issued in Boston on Christmas Day, 1814. Early in 1812 Mr. Dodge and his friends in New York deliberated on the expediency of forming a peace society; but on account of the excitement attending the war with Great Britain this was postponed until 1815. In August of that year the New York Peace Society, the first in the world, was organized, with Mr. Dodge as its president. This was four months before the organization of the Massachusetts Peace Society (December 26, 1815) under the leadership of Noah Worcester, and nearly a year before the English Peace Society, the first in Europe, was formed (June 14, 1816) in London.

The preëminent historical interest attaching to Mr. Dodge’s pioneering work in the peace cause in this country would alone justify and indeed seem to command the republication of his pamphlets at this time, when the great ideas for which he so courageously and prophetically stood are at last winning the general recognition of humane and thoughtful men. But it is not merely historical interest which warrants a revival of attention to these almost forgotten papers. Their intrinsic power and worth are such as make their reading, especially that of the second essay, War Inconsistent with the Religion of Jesus Christ , which stands first in the present volume, edifying and inspiring to-day. Marked by few literary graces and cast in a theological mold which the critical thought of the present has in large measure outgrown, there is a force of thought, a moral earnestness, a persevering logic, a common sense, a hatred of inhumanity, a passion for justice, a penetration and a virtue in them, which commends them to the abiding and reverent regard of all who work for the peace and order of the world. Among such workers to-day are men of various political philosophies, and perhaps only a small minority are nonresistants of the extreme type of David L. Dodge; but to that minority, we cannot fail to remark, belongs the greatest and most influential of all the peace prophets of this time, Leo Tolstoi. None can read these old essays without being impressed by the fact that their arguments are essentially the same as those of the great Russian. There is little indeed of the Tolstoian thunder and lightning, the pathos, wrath, and rhetoric, the poetry and prophecy, in these old-fashioned pages; but the doctrine is the same as that of Bethink Yourselves! and Patriotism versus Christianity . In his central thought and purpose, in his religious trust and reliance upon the Christian principle, the New York merchant was a Tolstoi a hundred years before his time.

David Low Dodge was born June 14, 1774, in that part of Pomfret, Connecticut, now called Brooklyn. This was the home of Israel Putnam; and David Dodge’s father, a farmer and carpenter, was Putnam’s neighbor and friend, – may well have been near him when in April, 1775, upon hearing of the battle of Lexington, he left his plow in the furrow and started to join the forces gathering at Cambridge. David Dodge’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather each bore the name of David Dodge. The great-grandfather was a Congregational minister, who was understood to have come from Wales, – a learned and wealthy man, who was for a while settled in the vicinity of Cape Ann in Massachusetts. The grandfather, who also received a liberal education, probably in England, came into the possession of his father’s estate, for that day a large one, and we are not informed whether he followed any profession or regular business. He was a man fully six feet tall, of great muscular power, and a lover of good horses, on which he spent much time and money. He married Ann Low, from a wealthy Massachusetts family, and settled in Beverly, where their sons David and Samuel were born, and where the family fortunes became much embarrassed. About 1757 the family removed to Pomfret, Connecticut, and the boys, whose education at the hands of their mother had been but slight, were apprenticed, David to a carpenter and Samuel to a shoemaker. Their father, obtaining at this time a commission in the army invading Canada, met his death in a bateau which attempted to descend the falls of the Oswego and was dashed to pieces on the rocks with the loss of every soul on board.

David Low Dodge’s mother, when a girl, was Mary Stuart, and when she married his father, in 1768, was a widow bearing the name of Earl. The young husband hired a small farm, the wife by her industry and economy had furniture sufficient to begin housekeeping, and the little home was founded in which David Low Dodge’s only sister Mary was born in 1770. Three years later the father hired a more expensive place in the same town, where the boy was born in 1774. “During that year,” he writes in his autobiography, “my father became serious, and commenced family prayer. He was educated in the old semi-Arminian views of his mother and the halfway covenant. My mother was a rigid Calvinist of the Whitefield school. Neither of them ever made a public profession of religion, but they were careful to observe external ordinances, catechize their children, and give religious instruction. They were honest, industrious, temperate, kind-hearted people, universally respected and esteemed by all who were acquainted with them.”

Such was the atmosphere in which the boy grew up. “The American Revolution at this period was convulsing the whole country, drafting and enlisting soldiers. Wagons were needed for the army, and by the advice of the Putnams, the old general and his son Israel, who was about two years younger than my father, he was induced to engage in the manufacture of continental wagons. He hired a convenient place for carpenters and blacksmiths, took several journeymen into the family, and embarked all his earnings in the business.” The boy’s half-brothers, William and Jesse Earl, entered the army at the tender ages of fourteen and sixteen, endured battles, sickness, and every privation, and both died towards the close of the war, the event almost wrecking the nervous system of the mother, a woman of acute sensibility. Thus early were the horrors of war brought personally home to the boy. He remembered hearing the distant cannonading when New London was burned by the British, and the exclamation of the man beside him, “Blood is flowing to-day.” “News came the next morning that the forts were stormed, the garrisons put to the sword, New London burnt, and the British were marching upon Norwich, and would proceed up into the country. My mother wrung her hands, and asked my father if we had not better pack up some things to secrete them.”

The boy’s education was slight and fragmentary. The summer he was six years old he attended the school of a venerable Irish maiden lady about sixty years of age, learning Watts’ Divine Songs , texts of Scripture, and the Shorter Catechism . From the age of seven to fourteen – the family now living on a farm in the neighboring town of Hampton – he attended the district school for two terms each winter, having no access to any other books than the primer, spelling book, arithmetic, and Bible. “I used often, when not at work in the shop evenings, to retire to the old kitchen fireplace, put my lamp into the oven, and, sitting with my back against it, take my arithmetic, slate, and pencil, and try to cipher a little. I often think how I should have been delighted to have had one fifth part of the advantages enjoyed by most of my descendants.” Confined to the house for seven weeks a little later as the result of accidents, he turned hungrily to such books as he could secure – Dilworth’s