The Boston Way: Radicals Against Slavery and the Civil War

How do good people find the courage to resist and end the greatest evil in their country? An untold story of the Civil War Era: pacifists in Boston who led the fight to end slavery without violence and war.

Has there ever been good violence or a good war? The American Civil War is likely considered to be so since there seemed to be no alternative. Or was there? Before the war, Bostonian abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison correctly predicted that fighting would not bring about real freedom and justice. If emancipation came about through violence, he believed, it would take at least a century for Black people to get their rights. As we now know, it has taken even longer than that.

Here is the story of Garrison and other abolitionists, Black and white, male and female, who advocated a peaceful end to slavery and the start of human rights for Black people. The Boston Clique, as they were called, were victorious in persuading their fellow Bostonians to end Jim Crow laws on Massachusetts' railroads. Persuasion was, these pacificists believed, the only means to lasting change.

In these pages, we find Frederick Douglass and lesser-known Black abolitionists, William Nell and Charles Remond. We meet leading feminists of the nineteenth century Lydia Maria Child, Margaret Fuller, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Additional key figures include Adin Balou, William Ladd, and Noah Worcester whose voices for nonviolence impacted Leo Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Dr. Martin Luther King.

Still, if it meant a faster end to the horrors of slavery, wasn't violence the answer? In time, pacificist abolitionists such as Douglass and John Brown came to believe the entire system in the South needed to be overthrown and that could only happen through the shedding of blood. Time may now provide a different perspective.

While history has little memory of abolitionists, and even less for pacifists, nothing can be learned from that which is not remembered. What if the Civil War had never have been fought? Might we now live in a world of far greater justice and peace? What does this mean today as we still pursue "righteous" violence? This is the story of a road not taken.

Author: Mark Kurlansky
Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher
Published: 10/07/2025
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.97lbs
Size: 8.35h x 5.59w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9781567927658


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 07/01/2025 pg. 63

About the Author

Mark Kurlansky was born in Hartford in 1948. He graduated from Butler University with a degree in theater in 1970, refused to serve in the Vietnam war, and has opposed every war since. His book, Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He has written a number of bestselling books, including Cod and Salt and 1968: The Year that Rocked the World, as well as a number of books for young readers, six books of fiction, and a translation of a French classic by Emile Zola. This is his fortieth book.