Chapter 6 - Garrison—Thoreau—Gandhi: Transcending Borders

Summary

Introduction

Two political borders are remarkably significant for the history of nonviolent resistance:

• 1. The border between Mexico and the USA, which shifted by annexations and wars, resulting in the expansion of the exploitation system of slavery to the newly conquered territories. Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) opposed slavery and war: by public speeches and civil disobedience through tax resistance.

• 2. The border between Natal and Transvaal in South Africa, which Indian nonviolent resisters crossed as an act of civil disobedience during the Epic March in November 1913, organized by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948) and Hermann Kallenbach (1871–1945), the owner of Tolstoy Farm (1910–1913).

Both Thoreau and Gandhi, contributed to the emancipation struggle against slavery and war by example: Thoreau's resistance was individual civil disobedience, and Gandhi's border crossing was a collective act of defiance against degrading and oppressive legislation—after he had introduced the notion Satyagraha in the year 1908, emphasizing not only “firmness in Truth” (satyāgraha), but awareness, heart and spirit: courage, equanimity, fearlessness, humility, persistence, righteousness—soul-force. Or in the words of American abolitionist, friend of the New England Transcendentalists, and poet James Russell Lowell (1819–1891):

They are slaves who fear to speak

For the fallen and the weak;

They are slaves who will not choose

Hatred, scoffing, and abuse,

Rather than in silence shrink

From the truth they needs must think;

They are slaves who dare not be

In the right with two or three. (Lowell 1843, p. 211f.)

—James Russell Lowell: Stanzas. Sung at the Anti-Slavery Picnic in Dedham, on the Anniversary of West-India Emancipation, August 1, 1843

We comprehend the transcending of borders as an overarching motto for all those who strove for the abolition of slavery, aimed at establishing cooperative settlements to find alternatives to private property, and denounced racist discrimination, human rights violations, violence, and war. Thus, we demonstrate that the evolution of nonviolent resistance itself is deeply entrenched within the history of human emancipation and pacifist ethics—from the American abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879), Adin Ballou (1803–1890), and Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) to the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910).