Elihu Burritt

• Elihu Burritt
• Born: December 8, 1810
• Died: March 6, 1879

Pacifist and moralist, was born in New Britain, Connecticut, to Elihu Burritt, who eked out a living by farming and making shoes, and Elizabeth (Hinsdale) Burritt, an intensely religious woman. The family had ten children, five daughters and five sons, of whom Burritt was the third youngest child.

Desperately poor, Burritt attended the district school and, for one term, a boarding school; beyond that he was prodigiously self-educated. When his father died in 1827, he apprenticed himself to a blacksmith. In his spare time, and while he stood at the bellows, he studied languages, eventually mastering more than thirty, including Sanskrit, Syriac, and Hebrew. Beginning a tour as a lyceum lecturer in 1837, he earned great acclaim for his erudition, as well as the nickname “the Learned Blacksmith.” A great believer in “self-culture,” he turned down a scholarship to Harvard that the governor of Massachusetts offered to arrange for him.

In 1844, in Worcester, Massachusetts, Burritt founded a weekly newspaper called the Christian Citizen to publish his views on temperance, antislavery politics, and, above all, world peace based on Christian morality and respect for the interdependence of all life. As he explained in 1845, “War is a sin-breeding sin of sins. ... We despair of any permanent world-wide, transforming reform, until Christianity is divorced from its unnatural, ungodly wedlock with ... the fiendish spirit of War.” Burritt proposed creating a Congress of Nations to make international laws and a world supreme court to adjudicate disputes. Unlike most peace crusaders, he was of working-class background and took his message to working people, who stood to suffer most from war and who, he said, should “form one vast Trades Union, and make a universal and simultaneous strike against the whole war system.”

In 1844 Burritt wrote, “The true reformer is calm and mild, mighty against sin, hurling burning truths at every wrong, but still preserving amid it all a loving heart.” This definition described Burritt well. The principles of Christianity that he espoused led him to believe not only that he was chosen but also that he had the power to redeem humanity.

Burritt quickly became the leader of the international peace movement. In addition to editing the Christian Citizen (until it folded in 1851) and the Advocate of Peace and Universal Brotherhood, he worked with English Quakers to organize the Friendly Address program, an informal exchange of views between nations to promote mutual understanding. In 1846 he traveled to England, where he founded the League of Universal Brotherhood. The league, emphasizing the importance of personal conversion, introduced a pledge renouncing all activities related to war that was signed by more than 50,000 people in Great Britain and the United States. Its Olive Leaf Mission program placed advertisements for pacifism in European newspapers. Burritt organized international peace congresses in major cities across Europe, argued in favor of free trade, enlisted the aid of prominent writers, and campaigned for penny postage rates for transoceanic mail, which, he felt, would be “an inestimable instrumentality in the diffusion of knowledge and the Christian religion.”

The Crimean War of 1853 shattered the international peace movement. Burritt returned to the United States to push his proposal for ocean penny postage. Finally, in 1856, he turned his attention to America’s crisis over slavery. He first suggested promoting European emigration to the South in order to demonstrate that free workers could grow cotton. When that idea made little headway, Burritt suggested that the federal government compensate slaveholders who freed their slaves. In 1858 he started a new paper, North and South, to argue the case for compensated emancipation. Few subscribed to Burritt’s journal or his cause.

When the Civil War broke out, Burritt thought that the seceding states should be allowed to depart in peace. He did not agree with most other peace advocates, who argued that the Civil War was not a war but a domestic insurrection, one that the federal government might legitimately crush. He was appalled by the bloodshed and “saddened to silence” by the defection of so many of his fellow pacifists. Disgusted and dejected, he retired to his farm in New Britain.

In 1863 Burritt went back to England, where he served as the American consular agent at Birmingham. Until 1870, when he returned to the United States for good, he spent most of his time writing about British agriculture and industry. In 1875 he suffered a stroke, and he spent his last four years living alone on his farm and teaching languages. He was sixty-eight at the time of his death.

Elihu Burritt’s manuscript journals, in twenty-eight volumes, are collected in the library of Central Connecticut State College in New Britain, Connecticut; the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, maintains a complete set of the Christian Citizen. Burritt was the author of some sixteen publications, including Sparks from the Anvil (1846) and Ten Minute Talks on All Sorts of Topics (1874). The latter work contains a brief autobiography. C. Northend, Elihu Burritt: a Memorial Volume containing a Sketch of His Life and Labors (1879), includes selections from Burritt’s publications and journals. M. E. Curti, ed., The Learned Blacksmith: The Letters and Journals of Elihu Burritt (1937; reprinted 1971) is a fascinating portrait, but should be supplemented by P. Tolis, Elihu Burritt: Crusader For Brotherhood (1968). R. G. Walters, American Reformers 1815-1860 (1978), discusses Burritt and places him in a larger historical context. See also The Dictionary of American Biography (1929).