In her cautionary letter to Garrison, Anne Warren Weston recommended that Garrison dedicate the Liberator solely to the cause of abolitionism. By combining abolition with nonresistance in the same paper, Garrison opened himself to “allegations that we are contending for the abolition of government rather than that of slavery”—a cause that even many abolitionists would not endorse. Moreover, the Liberator could not do justice to the pacifist cause. “The non‐​resistance people feel as though it were a sort of sufferance, only, by which they have a place in the Liberator, and do not therefore feel perfectly at liberty to bring forward their views there. This, at least, would be the case with myself.”

Weston recommended that Garrison begin a separate journal devoted to the cause of nonresistance, though she recognized that Garrison’s heavy workload would probably make him unable to edit the journal himself. “Very many, I think, who do not wish to have the cause introduced into the Liberator, would be anxious to take a paper wholly devoted to it.” Garrison took Weston’s advice; the first issue of the semi‐​monthly Non‐​Resistant (edited by Edmund Quincy) was published the following year. Both the journal and the Non‐​Resistance Society itself were short lived; in 1844, Garrison wrote that the “Society, I regret to say, has had only a nominal existence during the past year….It is without an organ, without funds, without publications.”

Garrison and other nonresistants split from the American Peace Society because they regarded its principles as too lax. Members of the Peace Society ranged from those who opposed all wars to those who condemned only offensive wars. Although virtually all activists in the peace movement condemned the war with Mexico in 1846—the United States, they claimed, was clearly the aggressor in that conflict—they disagreed substantially among themselves on other issues. For example, George Beckwith, an influential member of the Peace Society, argued for a crucial distinction between wars between states and domestic insurrections. Only international wars, according to Beckwith, were authentic wars, so only those conflicts should be condemned by peace advocates. Domestic insurrections were another matter; a government could legitimately suppress those uprisings with violence, since this was an essential part of a government’s duty to maintain peace. Beckwith applied this reasoning to the Civil War in his 1861 article, “The Enforcement of Law a Peace Measure.” Beckwith published his article in the Advocate, a leading peace journal.

For years Beckwith had opposed the anarchistic tendencies of Garrison’s pacifism, which condemned a government’s use of coercion against its own citizens. In his article Beckwith responded that the cure and control of many evils requires governmental force, not nonviolence. Among such evils was secession, which in Beckwith’s opinion was obviously criminal. Nevertheless, Beckwith believed that the seceding states should be permitted to leave the Union without molestation. But, like thousands of Americans, his opinion changed after the bombardment of Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. Beckwith insisted that no peace advocate could possibly tolerate a violent attack against the United States government. The Union was entirely within its rights to retaliate with violence. Indeed, the Union government had a duty to preserve law and order. Beckwith wrote: