After the Concept of Peaceful Disobedience Was Established in America, It Traveled Around the World Before Taking Hold

“Force may subdue, but love gains”: The Quaker practice of conscientious objection evolved through Thoreau, Tolstoy and Gandhi before becoming the hallmark of the Civil Rights movement

Jeff MacGregor | Writer-at-Large, Smithsonian

Summer 2026

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The 1955-56 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, was won by the simple act of refusal, led in part by Martin Luther King Jr., an American pastor convinced that love was the only answer to hate. His commitment to nonviolent protest became the standard for the rest of the century. At the same time, he was drawing on a tradition that predates the establishment of the Republic. 

Long before the states united, American Quakers in Pennsylvania—what founder William Penn (above) called a “Holy Experiment”—had espoused conscientious objection, pacifism and a peaceful refusal to do wrong. As Penn wrote in 1682, “Force may subdue, but love gains: And he that forgives first wins the laurel.” 

In the century after the Revolution, perhaps the most famous American proponent of civil resistance was Henry David Thoreau. After spending a single night in jail in Concord, Massachusetts—­for refusing to pay his poll tax—he produced one of America’s foundational texts, his 1849 essay, “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.” “It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right,” Thoreau wrote. He endorsed such tactics as the march and protest, which later became the walkout, the sit-in, the boycott—the courageous and active willingness to suffer punishment, even violence, in order to shame the state, change the law or raise the public’s consciousness.

But sometimes ideas need to travel the world before they take hold. In the late 19th century, Russian author Leo Tolstoy drew deep inspiration from Thoreau, American Mennonites and Quakers, and in his 1893 book, The Kingdom of God Is Within You, argued persuasively for the virtues of nonviolent disobedience. Quoting from the Sermon on the Mount, Tolstoy took the love and conscience propounded in the Gospels as the path to the highest good. Not long after, in South Africa, a young Mohandas K. Gandhi read Tolstoy and refined his own ideas about peace and moral refusal. King read Gandhi reading Tolstoy reading Thoreau. And one of King’s closest advisers, Bayard Rustin, a quiet giant of the American civil rights movement, was raised a Quaker. So civil rights protest joined American history’s long line of marches for abolition, suffrage, temperance, labor.

Active nonviolence is a protester’s brave appeal to our better angels. Our First Amendment guarantees us the right to organize and to disagree and to refuse—­especially contra our own government. Now, as then, these are the rules of common conscience, of moral conduct and of love.  

Jeff MacGregor | | Read More

Jeff MacGregor is the award-winning Writer-at-Large for Smithsonian. He has written for the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Esquire, and many others, and is the author of the acclaimed book Sunday Money. Photo by Olya Evanitsky.