William Ladd.
The Maine “Apostle of Peace” Who Imagined the United Nations
Pacifist farmer William Ladd of Minot, Maine, was a very influential 19th century writer, lecturer and activist whose ideas still shape the world today. The American Peace Society, which he founded in 1828, was the first nationally based, secular pacifist organization in the United States.Its mission was to “promote permanent international peace through justice; and to advance in every proper way the general use of conciliation, arbitration, judicial methods, and other peaceful means of avoiding and adjusting differences among nations, to the end that right shall rule might in a law-governed world.” Ladd’s writings laid the foundation for the creation of the United Nations a century after his death.
Born in Exeter, N.H., in 1778, Ladd had a happy and comfortable childhood. His father, Eliphalet Ladd, was a fairly wealthy merchant. William was accepted to Harvard University, but he never considered himself much of a scholar. He had a particular distaste for classical authors who glorified violence with their heroic tales of war.
“All that remained of my labors, by the midnight lamp, over the pages of Homer and Xenophon,” he wrote of his studies, “was the admiration of feats of arms and military glory, and that at last, thank God, has vanished too, having been dissipated by the light of the blessed gospel which plainly showed me that it was only a delusion of Satan.”
Rather than use his education to pursue a “respectable” profession, Ladd took a job as a sailor on his father’s merchant ship after he graduated from Harvard in 1797. As he liked to say, “The knowledge which I gained in college the salt water washed out of my memory.” He sailed all over Europe and the British Isles, and in just 18 months he’d risen through the ranks to become captain. At just 20 years old, Ladd commanded one of the largest ships that had ever sailed out of Portsmouth, according to his biographer, John Hemmenway.
At 21, Ladd married 19-year-old Londoner Sophia Ann Augusta Stidolph. After three years at sea, the land called him home. He initially tried to make a living as a merchant in Georgia, but soon gave that up to try his hand at cotton farming in Florida.
Ladd’s conscience would not allow him to enslave workers, so he hired some European immigrants, mostly from Holland, to plant and tend the cotton. According to Hemmenway, some of them turned out to be “idlers” and others fell ill, so Ladd’s “noble scheme” to employ free men failed. He decided to use slave labor to bring in the harvest, telling himself he had to commit a temporary sin until he could secure more unbonded labor to ethically harvest his crop. The farming venture ended in failure anyway after a hurricane destroyed his plantation.
“He had a great deal of pity for the African race,” a woman who knew Ladd told Hemmenway. “He once had slaves in Florida; and often alluded to the sin of slavery. Whenever he spoke of this matter, it was with deep emotion; the tears would run freely down his cheeks. He regretted that he ever held a fellow-being in slavery.”
Hemmenway wrote an account (which he almost certainly inflated) of an incident during Ladd’s days in Florida. A neighbor told Ladd his son had recently “died like a man” in a duel, to which Ladd blurted out, “He died like a fool.” The neighbor, incensed, thrusted a loaded gun in Ladd’s face, but “Ladd met him with so much kindness, gentleness, and good sense, that the malicious man left in a peaceful manner, without attempting any personal abuse.”
Following the death of his father in 1806, Ladd returned to Portsmouth to claim his inheritance and continue the family merchant business. But when the British blockade shut down maritime commerce during the War of 1812, Ladd decided to become a farmer again.
In 1814, Ladd moved to a 200-acre farm his father had owned in Minot. He expanded it to 600 acres and raised hundreds of sheep, horses, oxen and cows. He also had an enormous orchard of apple, plum and cherry trees, which he planted along the road for any passerby to reach out and grab a snack. Meanwhile, he found religion and became deeply involved in the local Congregational church across the street from his farm on Center Minot Hill Road.
In 1819, Ladd had an epiphany while visiting Bowdoin College President Jesse Appleton on his death bed. In his tubercular state, the enfeebled Congregationalist minister told Ladd about the peace movement that had taken root in New York and London just a few years earlier. Founded after the carnage of the Battle of Waterloo and decades of bloody European wars, the Society for the Promotion of Permanent and Universal Peace, known as the London Peace Society, was a Protestant-led organization of mostly Quakers who sought the gradual disarmament of all nations. Two years later, the Peace Society of Maine was founded in Portland.
In 1823, Ladd spread his pacifist beliefs in a series of columns published in Portland’s Christian Mirror under the name Philanthropos. These were later collected and pseudonymously published in his book, 32 Essays on Peace and War. Drawing upon scripture, Ladd wrote that it was his duty to “God and to my fellow-creatures to do something to hasten the glorious era, when men shall learn war no more.”He didn’t pull punches as he railed against war-mongering demagogues who caused the brutal deaths of untold millions with their greed, blind ambition and bloodthirsty desire for vengeance.
“Let parents do as much to educate their children in the principles of peace, as has been done to inflame their minds with a love of war,” Ladd wrote. “Let the turpitude and brutality of those who seek for glory in blood and tears and groans, be so exposed that the Alexanders, the Caesars, the Frederics, and the Napoleons shall cease to be objects of emulation.”
Ladd even went so far as to denounce the erection of the Bunker Hill Monument in Boston, calling it “anti-Christian” and unpatriotic:
“Can there be found in New England a misanthrope whose bosom does not glow with patriotic ardor at the prospect of an event associated with the glory and liberty of his country, and with gratitude to her brave defenders? Alas, I am that misanthrope. I view the intended monument in a light altogether different from its founders. I fear, — no, I hope that, as we regard the pyramids of Egypt as stupendous monuments of the degradation of the generations which raised them, so future generations will look upon the column as a monument of the barbarism and anti-Christian spirit of our age. I know I stand almost alone in my opposition to the monument. I know that patriotism, gratitude, and, above all, glory will be arrayed against me, and I shall be branded as a penurious wretch, a fanatic, and a misanthrope. Nevertheless, I refuse to follow the multitude. I hereby enter my solemn protest against it. Because such things encourage military glory, and thereby endanger the peace of the world. Because it is as vainglorious for a nation to erect a monument of her own victories as it is for an individual to trumpet his own fame; and is so far from adding to a nation’s honor, that it is but a monument of its pride and self-conceit.”
Ladd’s writings and lectures inspired others to take up the cause of pacifism, and soon peace societies bloomed from rural Maine towns like Otisfield, Oxford and Minot all the way to North Carolina. His address to the Massachusetts Peace Society was published and circulated as a pamphlet across the U.S. and England.
On May 8, 1828, Ladd united pacifists from 50 local societies to form the American Peace Society at a two-day convention in New York City. From his farm in Minot, Ladd wrote and edited the Society’s monthly magazine, The Harbinger of Peace (later The Calumet and Advocate of Peace). He managed to compose 24 pages of the publication each month while planting and harvesting beans, potatoes and corn on his farm. After the harvest, he set out on his lecture tours through the winter months.
During the Aroostook War of 1838-39, when tensions flared in the Saint John Valley over a boundary dispute with New Brunswick, Ladd dreamed up the idea of an international body that could equitably settle the dispute. In 1840 he published An Essay on a Congress of Nations for the Adjustment of International Disputes Without Resort to Arms, which outlined its structure. The Congress of Nations would pass international laws, and a High Court of Nations, whose bench would have one or more judges from every country, would settle disputes between members. Ladd’s essay helped guide the creation of President Woodrow Wilson’s ill-fated League of Nations in 1920, and, later, the United Nations, in 1945.
Ladd died in 1841, but the American Peace Society continued to flourish. When the Civil War broke out, the APS clarified that it was against wars between nation-states, but considered this conflict a “police action” against Confederate “criminals.” The APS was active in the early 20th century, holding conferences and lectures. In 1907, it took a strong stand against the growing Zionist movement, which sought to establish a national Jewish home in Palestine.
“If the Jews were set up in Palestine or elsewhere as an independent nation, the hostility and friction between them and other races would probably be accentuated thereby and made more difficult to eradicate,” the Society wrote. “The day of race separation has gone by; that of race intermingling and friendly association is upon us, and the sweep of this new tide in human affairs ought not to be in the least arrested.”
The Peace Society held this position until it faded out in the 1970s. The Advocate of Peace has since changed its name to World Affairs, The Journal of International Issues and continues to be published.
In 1928, on the 100th anniversary of the Society’s founding and the 150th anniversary of Ladd’s birth, the town of Minot and APS members gathered at the Center Minot Congregational Church. With the help of several strong men and eight horses, they moved a massive boulder from a neighboring farm to the top of Center Minot Hill Road and placed it in front of the church, where it still stands today. A plaque on the stone, dedicated in honor of William Ladd, reads: “Blessed are the peace makers for they shall be called the children of God.”
Andy O’Brien is a writer and communications director for the Maine AFL-CIO. You can reach him at andy@maineworkingclasshistory.com.
