David Low Dodge (1774–1852) was a merchant, philanthropist, and, after nearly shooting an innkeeper who had entered his room late at night and finding that his “war spirit appeared to be crucified and slain,” a busy and useful crusader for peace. In 1812 he published War Inconsistent with the Religion of Jesus Christ, and in the summer of 1815 he became the first president of the New York Peace Society—the first peace society in the world. (In 1828 it merged with similar groups in Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire to form the American Peace Society, which organized peace conferences and began publishing the Advocate of Peace.)
Dodge’s autobiography, printed posthumously in 1854, is of a piece with his public work: respectable, judicious, dignified, pious. Early in the book, however, he becomes a different writer as he recalls a pacifist of a different sort: an opponent of the American Revolution who through his opposition became a sort of wild man, keeping to the forests, in danger from most of his neighbors though supported and fed by others. Dodge’s unnamed fugitive anticipates the long history of pacifists subject to oppression: scorned, hunted, jailed.
I WILL here notice an event, as it illustrates the spirit of the times. There was a respectable farmer who resided in Brooklyn, by the name of John Baker, who was called an odd and singular man, because he openly denounced all kinds of carnal warfare as contrary to the gospel; and, of course, refused to take any part in the revolutionary war. By some he was called a Tory, by others a coward, while he constantly declared it a matter of conscience. Yet he was drafted for the army, and his neighbors determined he should serve by compulsion. He declared he would die before he would serve as a warrior, and consequently fled to the woods in the fall of 1779. The clergy and the laity urged his compulsion, and the populace turned out and pursued him, as hounds would a fox, and finally they caught and bound him, like Sampson, “with strong cords,” placed him in a wagon, and sent two trusty patriots to convey him to Providence, to the troops stationed there. In the course of the night, however, he got hold of a knife, cut himself loose, and escaped to the woods. Subsequently he returned and secreted himself in a large, dense cedar swamp, about half a mile from our house. He made himself as comfortable a shelter as the thick boughs of the double spruce and cedar would permit. There he remained, without fire, during the severe winter of 1780, without the knowledge of any one, except his brother and my parents, to whom he made himself known to save himself from perishing. His brother furnished him, in the night, with some articles of food and clothing from his own house; and my father, by an understanding with him, was absent at certain times, while my mother would supply him with food, blankets, and other conveniences. There was a wall from the woods connected with the swamp, to our garden, forming the back fence. One day, as I was on a snow-bank in the rear of the garden, I looked over the fence and saw a man creeping along the side of the wall; as soon as he saw me he started and ran for the woods. I, with equal speed, made for the house, supposing he was a “wild Indian,” of which class of men I had heard many frightful stories, and screamed to my mother that the Indians had come, and fled into the back room and crept under the bed. The term “wild,” was applied to Indians on the frontiers at war with Americans, in distinction from a pretty numerous remnant of several tribes who lived quietly in the State. So frightened was I at a glimpse of poor Baker, that for several nights afterwards I dreamed frightful dreams about “wild Indians.”
The facts relative to Mr. Baker, I received from my parents, but do not recollect how he was released. Probably the compassion of the community was aroused, as there was reason to suppose that he might have perished by the severity of the winter. In after years, when a young man, I have visited Mr. Baker. He had one of the best cultivated farms in the vicinity, and I never heard a lisp against his character, except his opposition to war.