CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTION

Conscientious objectors are those who, for political and religious reasons, oppose war. Their opposition may take several forms: refusing to serve in the military, to register for the draft, to pay war taxes, or to contribute labor and resources to any war effort.

Prior to the American Revolution, most conscientious objectors belonged to "peace" churches. Quakers, Brethren, Mennonites, Rogerenes, and Schwekenfelders—all of whom opposed war as a matter of Christian principle—were among the first European colonists of North America, and conflict between white settlers and Native Americans provided the first test in the New World of their beliefs. Members of peace churches who refused to fight or help build fortifications were persecuted by Puritans who considered war against Native Americans the "Lord's Revenge."

By the mid-1600s some colonies had exempted Quakers and other members of peace churches from military service. Other colonies, however, were less tolerant, fining or imprisoning citizens who refused to serve in militias or maintain forts. During the French and Indian War, for example, colonial governments forced them to pay for substitutes or face property confiscation.

During the American Revolution, anti-British forces expected conscientious objectors to help provision troops and raided the property of those who refused. Moreover, as the army's need for soldiers increased, some pacifists were forced into service.

During the War of 1812 American political leaders considered national conscription to supplement state militias, but Daniel Webster successfully argued before Congress that such a measure would be unconstitutional. Thus, conscription remained a matter for individual states to decide. Peace church members continued to resist military service and to refuse payment of fines or war-related taxes. As a consequence many, such as pacifists in Baltimore, had their property confiscated by local authorities.

By the 1830s peace had become a political as well as a religious issue. Such organizations as the American Peace Society and the New England Non-Resistance Society linked Christian ethics, abolition of slavery, and pacifism. In 1846, both groups led an organized campaign against the Mexican War. In his essay on civil disobedience, Henry David Thoreau, a representative of political pacifism, presented his rationale for refusing to pay war taxes, and his subsequent imprisonment became a classic example of nonviolent resistance as a means of social change.

During the Civil War, Congress enacted the first federal conscription legislation, requiring all male citizens between the ages of twenty and forty-five to serve in the military if called. The act provided no exemptions for conscientious objectors, but excused from service anyone who paid three hundred dollars. Draft riots erupted among poorer citizens, who could not afford the fee, in protest against the class bias implicit in the legislation. In July 1863 white workers in New York protested the draft by destroying the central recruiting station, factories, transportation lines, and the homes of wealthy citizens. The rioters, viewing African-Americans as the cause of the war, also attacked and killed black citizens. Similar protests erupted in the cities of Boston, Newark, Toledo, and Troy, New York. Quakers, too, objected to commutation fees and, in 1864, pressured Congress into passing the first national legislation allowing members of peace churches to perform alternative service. The law also exempted those whose beliefs forbade any form of service or commutation payment. Confederate conscription legislation initially exempted peace church members who provided substitutes or paid a fine, but these exemptions were eliminated as the need for conscripts increased. In the South, as well as the North, overzealous officers, enlistees, and civilians subjected some objectors to forced service and physical abuse.

During World War I only members of recognized peace churches were granted noncombatant alternatives to military service. Those who belonged to religious sects without a traditional antiwar stance, who opposed war for political reasons, or who refused any form of compulsory service were forcibly inducted, court-martialed, and sentenced to terms in military camps and prisons. Of the 500 objectors who were court-martialed, 17 received death sentences and 142, life terms. Although none of the death sentences were carried out and other terms were reduced, physical abuse in military camps was common. Guards subjected objectors to compulsory exercise, cold showers, solitary confinement, inadequate rations, and cruel punishment. One young man who refused to wear a uniform contracted pneumonia and died. His body, dressed in a uniform, was sent home to his parents.

The majority of World War I objectors were Quakers, Mennonites, Molokans, Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Brethren, and members of other peace churches. There were also smaller numbers of political objectors, including socialists, anarchists, members of the International Workers of the World, and nonaligned radicals. Social worker Jane Addams, anarchist leader Emma Goldman, and Socialist party founder Eugene Debs were outspoken supporters of conscientious objectors and of the First Amendment rights of all Americans to voice opposition to war. The government and most citizens, however, viewed all objectors as subversive radicals and silenced the antiwar position along with other dissenting voices by suspending constitutional rights to freedom of the press, speech, and assembly. Goldman, along with several thousand suspected alien "subversives," was deported without formal trial under the Alien Act of 1918. Debs, charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917 for giving an antiwar speech, was sentenced to ten years in prison. The Espionage Act, strengthened by the Sedition Act of 1918, virtually destroyed the American Left through government-sanctioned censorship of its press and prosecution of its leadership.

During the Second World War, the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 exempted from military service those who "by reason of religious training and belief" opposed war and mandated alternative service in work of "national importance." Objectors who accepted alternative service worked in civilian public service camps on conservation projects, staffed mental hospitals, or volunteered to be human guinea pigs in government-sponsored experiments on diet, endurance, and the transmission and control of malaria, hookworm, typhus, and infectious hepatitis. Objectors received no pay or benefits and had to rely upon families and churches for support.

Those who refused to register for the draft, opposed compulsory service, or failed the test for religious conviction were sentenced to prison. Most imprisoned objectors were Jehovah's Witnesses, but roughly a thousand were radical pacifists affiliated with the War Resisters League, the Catholic Worker movement, or the Socialist party.

Approximately four hundred African-Americans also refused to serve in the military in World War II. Some belonged to the Nation of Islam, which viewed the war as a "white man's conflict." Others refused to serve in a Jim Crow army or to fight for a country that denied basic democratic freedoms to its black citizens.

During the Vietnam War, Selective Service denied exemption to conscientious objectors whose views were "essentially political, sociological, or philosophical." But that war, unlike World War II, was widely viewed as unjust, and the number of political objectors far outnumbered those who held deep religious convictions. Moreover, objectors had a great deal of public support. By the mid-1960s, the peace movement had become a politically powerful and broad-based coalition of radical pacifists, civil rights advocates, nonpacifist anti-imperialists, liberals, and members of the traditional peace churches. This coalition not only helped objectors file for exemption but encouraged those who were denied objector status to resist induction. By the end of the war, 50,000 conscientious objectors had fled the country or assumed false identities in the United States. An estimated 250,000 never registered, and another 110,000 burned their draft cards. High levels of noncompliance with the draft, mass opposition to the war, and declining military morale ultimately forced the government to end its involvement in Vietnam.

Following the Vietnam War, many Quakers, members of other religious groups, and radical pacifist organizations such as the War Resisters League, advocated nonpayment of taxes allocated for military use and the creation of an alternative Peace Tax Fund. In the 1980s, with the reinstatement of draft registration, these organizations supported a new generation of conscientious objectors who refused to register. Tax resistance and nonregistration—both federal offenses—became the central forms of American conscientious objection.

Robert Cooney and Helen Michalowski, eds., Power of the People: Active Nonviolence in the United States (1987); Lawrence S. Wittner, Rebels against the War: The American Peace Movement, 1933-1983 (1984).

Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo

See also Addams, Jane; Conscription; Day, Dorothy; Debs, Eugene V.; Draft Riots; Goldman, Emma; Quakers; Thoreau, Henry David.