Peace (30 page)

Tying our discussion of reformed Christian peace practices with colonial trends, the Quaker William Penn inherited Irish estates from his father, to whom the newly restored King Charles II owed a large debt. In exchange
for its cancellation, Penn asked for and received one of the largest tracts of land ever owned by a private person, now the US state of Pennsylvania, inaugurating one of the grandest experiments in the history of peace. Fleeing persecution in England and finding it again in the colonies, Quakers and other peace church members now had a place to carry out what has since been referred to as the “Holy Experiment,” or the only known state officially founded on pacifist principles, set out by Penn. Natives were to be treated as equals, for as Penn proclaimed to them:

I and my friends have a hearty desire to live in peace and friendship with you, and to serve you to the utmost of our power. It is not our custom to use hostile weapons against our fellow creatures, for which reason we have come unarmed . . . We are met on the broad pathway of good faith and goodwill, so that no advantage is to be taken on either side, but all is to be openness, brotherhood, and love.
⁶

The Code of Handsome Lake, named after the Seneca tribe's leader (
c
. 1733–1815), combined Quaker pacifism with traditional tribal emphases on kinship and land in a legal and spiritual code focusing on interpersonal behaviour, still practiced today as the Longhouse Religion. Penn made two two-year trips to the colonies, during which he founded Philadelphia, the “city of brotherly love.” At first the Experiment was quite successful: Pennsylvania was among the first colonies to outlaw slavery, abolish capital punishments and use arbitration to resolve disputes. However, the Experiment sputtered within a few generations as settlers with monetary and military rather than missionary motives took over Pennsylvania's administration, as England now had to contend with another power both on the European continent and in the colonies.

From the start, France pursued the same dual paths-of-leastresistance colonial policies as England, leading colonists of both countries to some of the same places, notably North America, making friction between them inevitable and forcing natives to take sides. Early French explorers arrived in Canada in the 1530s with scant supplies and could not have survived winters without native help, which they received in exchange for trinkets and muskets. Thus, in stark contrast to colonies where slave systems already prevailed, of necessity French colonies in North America began on a cooperative footing with natives, who acted as translators and guides in exchange for trading privileges. Marriages between French fur-traders and native North Americans were more common than with English or Dutch. Children of such unions, called
métis
, had counterparts in Spanish and Portuguese South America called
mestizos
; where Africans were brought, as in the Indies, they were called
creoles
. They often spoke native and newcomer languages which later turned into distinctive blends and so could act as intermediaries
between colonial cultures when they were not subjected to the ever-elaborated structural violence based on skin color and class, or precisely because they were. In other cases, they were the result of unions of ruling natives and powerful newcomers, and so could act as intermediaries between the cultures of each continent, when they were not rejected outright by both.

Deaf to language and blind to color and class was disease, an early form of biological warfare when intentionally inflicted and the single most deadly weapon in both European (in North and South America) and native (in Africa and Asia) arsenals. No peace yet devised could deal with diseases that wiped out populations, except living bodies of mixed or immunized blood whose survival is a testament to the power of passive resistance, if it can be so called. In times of active resistance like during King Philip's War (1675–76) between New Englanders and natives, alliances between natives were broken and new ones created with colonial rivals like the French as with former native rivals. This pattern was repeated on ever-larger scales in a series of inter-colonial wars tied to international wars in Europe, as shown in the table on the following page. The debt and devastation caused by the French and Indian War, the Seven Years War and the Treaty of Paris prompted England to levy heavy taxes and tariffs on the North American colonies without seeking their consent, setting gears in motion that would revolutionize war, peace and peacemaking the world over by creating the United States.

Often recognized by colonists but rarely used by them other than for survival and gain, native North Americans had their own longstanding peace and peacemaking traditions. Three prominent examples are the calumet, the League of Peace and Power and Condolence Councils. The calumet or peace pipe may have originated with the Pawnee of Nebraska, but by the time Europeans arrived it was in use across the continent, through which they were introduced to tobacco. In 1672, French Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette and explorer Louis Joliet were given and carried a calumet as they mapped the Mississippi river basin, with which they formed “peaceful relations with all the tribes along the way.”
⁷
In Pawnee culture, peace pipes were centerpieces of elaborate ceremonies through which inter-tribal trading and political relationships were made and maintained. Hosts were called “children” by their visitor “fathers,” and brought with them a wide range of food and goods for exchange. Negotiations were initiated and closed by smoking the calumet in common “as a sign of peaceful intention and thus a safe-conduct pass through alien territory,” extended to Europeans deemed worthy.
⁸
Many tribes recognized peace chiefs and war chiefs, and non-violent codes of intra-tribal conduct were widespread, such as the Cherokee Harmony Ethic by which tribesmen were required to walk away from
a conflict and
resolve it through generosity rather than bellicosity. But the League of Peace and Power was one of the first and few inter-tribal bodies Europeans encountered whose sole aim was to promote
cooperative peace
among its otherwise autonomous communities.

The League was and is a matrilineal alliance of Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas and Seneca of north-eastern North America, enduring “to this day as one of the oldest forms of participatory democracy on earth.”
⁹
According to oral history, it was founded by Deganawidah (
c
. 1100–50), The Great Peacemaker. A stutterer, he enlisted the orator Hiawatha to his cause of bringing peace to the region's warring tribes by spreading a Great Law of Peace, both spiritual and legal. His first axiom was to balance stable minds and healthy bodies so that harmony within and between individuals and groups could flourish. Second was that humane thought, speech and action were the basis of equity and justice, so individual acts of violence were prohibited. Lastly was an extended series of ceremonial and civil procedures for inter-tribal relations, which as an oral tradition could take days to recite in full and by using
wampum
or rope-writings, accessed article-by-article. Each tribe had its own council. Male leaders were selected by women holding hereditary titles to the offices. The Grand Council of these tribal councils convened as necessary to debate, resolve and pronounce on pressing or ongoing issues and popular proposals, which could then be ratified or amended. Rites and rituals sometimes referred to as “Forest Diplomacy” served to widen bases of Great Council deliberations.
¹⁰
Among them were Covenant Chains, in which weapons were linked in symbolic circles of friendship, and Condolence Council rites, in which the dead were mourned, new chiefs named and inter-tribal ties and histories celebrated by storytelling, song and dance. Although for the most part lost to Europeans, many of these native North American peace traditions survived their colonialism and imperialism.

The World in Peaces: Imperial Peace and Peacemaking

Transitions from colonialism, by which relations among colonizers and colonized were made, to imperialism, by which they were maintained, took place at different times, in different places and in different ways. In all cases, however, these transitions transformed colonial into imperial peace and peacemaking in both overall trends and ones specific to the inter-cultural conditions in which they occurred. The earliest European imperial governments were aimed directly at curbing colonial violence by adapting Old World practices to New World conditions. As conquistador
and viceroy brutalities became evident, the Spanish Council of Castile created supervisory bodies to allay them, up and running even before las Casas' protests for peace. The Chamber of Indies Commerce regulated emigration and trade, the Council of the Indies in Spain and
Audiencas
in the colonies analogously functioned as courts, advisory boards and policy-makers. “In checking the ill-treatment of natives by the colonists, in keeping watch upon the activities of colonial,” peace- and profit-oriented services of these bodies soon spread throughout the Spanish Empire, from the Americas to the Philippines.
¹¹
However, as early as the mid-1500s, conquistadors rebelled against the viceroy at the capital of what is now Bolivia, once named Our Lady Peace in reference to a Catholic title for Jesus' mother, often depicted with an olive branch and dove in her hands, sometime after which its name was shortened to La Paz (“The Peace”), to signify the restoration of peace after this early intra-colonial war.

Epitomizing imperial peace traditions are the works of a theologian and jurist, Francisco de Vitoria (1492–1564), who witnessed the shift to them from colonial traditions and expounded a realist approach to the problems of empires similar to a contemporary's approach to those of city-states, Machiavelli. In
The Law of War on Indians
(1532), he states that

a prince ought to subordinate both peace and war to the common weal of his State and not spend public revenues in quest of his own glory or gain, much less expose his subjects to danger on that account. Herein, indeed, is the difference between a lawful king and a tyrant, that the latter directs his government towards his individual profit and advantage, but a king to the public welfare.
¹²

Vitoria considers natives as part of the public whose welfare imperial sovereigns ought to serve, as did Spanish imperial government at first. As he points out, the New World is new only to the Old, so forceful possession of inhabited lands is armed robbery, though uninhabited lands are fair game. Natives, he goes on, “undoubtedly had true dominion in both public and private matters,” unlawfully taken from them by colonists, which imperial governments could not only restore but also make amends for. While just war principles apply to New-Old World relations, he also articulated renewed principles for peaceful global relations, later taken for granted or which may still bear implementation: universal use and protection of ambassadors; compulsory participation in peace talks before war and mandatory acceptance of just peace terms afterward; interventions on behalf of those suffering or oppressed; respect for the lives and properties of neutral parties; rights of safe passage; restraint in warfare and sanctuary for civilians; the right to citizenship by standards of
jus solis
, birth within a country; and the right to become a naturalized
citizen of any another country. Vitoria thus paradoxically provided both the basis for imperial governments to entrench and extend their control over their colonies and the grounds upon which non-violent anti-imperial movements were launched.

In contrast to the Spanish, Portuguese colonialism favoured trading posts over permanent settlements, a preference which in Brazil led to historically unique occurrences in cross-cultural collaboration and imperial government. Landing there accidentally in 1500, at first Portuguese traders found little of value on the coast other than bark that could be made into dye. But within two generations, Brazil was made the world's leading sugar producer by entrepreneurial families with royal charters under governor-generals fitting Vitoria's definition of tyrants to a tee. Facing labor shortages, they began importing African slaves, eventually totalling three million. Revolts brutally supplanted, Africans fled inland to a region called Palmares after its vegetation where their captors had no control, which then lent its name to the
quilombo
or “slave republic” formed in 1603. Soon twenty thousand refugees strong with an area a third of Portugal's size, Palmares became the first self-sufficient, postcolonial state in South America by practicing diversified agriculture of African origin rather than European single-crops. Loose associations of small communities trading among themselves, Palmarians welcomed those persecuted by Portuguese, including natives, mestizos, Jews, Muslims and Christians considered heretics. To keep peace, chiefs acted like Vitoria's kings, enforcing strict penal codes and granting all equality in law and opportunity. In 1678, Palmarians agreed to peace terms with hostile Portuguese. When attacks continued, they armed and retreated in defence, an early form of guerrilla peace tactics. Defeated in 1684, twice-over refugees formed a new
quilombo
and actively resisted until 1797. Ten years later, Napoleon invaded Portugal and its regent fled to Brazil, where he re-established his court and declared the colony equal with Portugal. He remained until 1821, when a pressing political crisis prompted his return, leaving his son behind as representative. After an attempt to abrogate the imperial state's new status, the son in defiance of his father declared the country independent. Backed by Brazil's elite, in 1822 he became Emperor of the first colony in the hemisphere to gain independence without a violent revolution on the US model. A minor one did occur when the monarchy became a republic seventy-five years later, but even this shows to what extent Brazilians, native and newcomers, had danced to their own drums.