The American Peace Society is a pacifist group founded upon the initiative of William Ladd, in New York City, May 8, 1828. It was formed by the merging of many state and local societies, from New York, Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, of which the oldest, the New York Peace Society, dated from 1815. Ladd was an advocate of a "Congress and High Court of Nations." The society organized peace conferences and regularly published a periodical entitled Advocate of Peace. The Society was only opposed to wars between nation states; it did not oppose the American Civil War, regarding the Union's war as a "police action" against the "criminals" of the Confederacy.[1][2] Its most famous leader was Benjamin Franklin Trueblood (1847–1916), a Quaker who in his book The Federation of the World (1899) called for the establishment of an international state to bring about lasting peace in the world. In 1834 the headquarters of the society were removed to Hartford, in 1834 to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1911 to Washington, D.C.[3] The group is now based in Washington. Its official journal is World Affairs.
The American Peace Society house, its headquarters from 1911 to 1948 near the White House, is a U.S. National Historic Landmark. The American Peace Society was opposed to Zionism on the grounds of internationalism.[4]
- ^ Peter Brock, Pacifism in the United States: from the colonial era to the First World War. Princeton University Press, 1968 (p. 691).
- ^ Valarie H. Ziegler,The advocates of peace in antebellum America Mercer University Press, 2001 ISBN 0865547262 (p.158).
- ^ New International Encyclopedia
- ^ "Zionism is a Backward Step". Advocate of Peace. Vol. LXIX, no. 2. Boston: The American Peace Society. February 1907. p. 32. Retrieved 2024-01-03.