This dissertation examines the philosophical contributions of transatlantic peace reform discourse to American literature (1790-1865). My title is drawn from a dialogue between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle in which Emerson comments that, although his pacifist anarchist friends in the New England Non- Resistance Society are “fanatics of a dream,” they also contribute the only original American political philosophy. Taking up Emerson's invitation, I consider what it would mean to treat the peace reform movement as philosophical in the sense that it both engaged Enlightenment philosophy and produced its own philosophical ideas. Questions about ontology, determinism, and Idealism are inseparable from peace reformers’ debates. While my research includes peace society archives, journals and tracts, and a broad range of literary texts and genres, my primary emphasis is on novels that constitute distinctive efforts at nonviolent social transformation. I have selected texts that not only refer to peace reform, peace principles, or peace societies, but do so in a philosophically complex and dialogic way, demonstrating a metafictive awareness of how fiction might function as social intervention. My aim is to describe the unique intellectual challenges faced by advocates of peace principles and to broaden scholarly narratives of transatlantic peace reform’s early history and the diverse voices and texts it involved. My dissertation includes American Indian writers like George Copway, formerly enslaved authors such as William Wells Brown, and work by white writers like William Godwin, Charles Brockden Brown, Herman Melville, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. I emphasize philosophical problems and theoretical legacies that remain with us today, drawing on critics of violence and power like Gayatri Spivak, Donna Haraway, and Theodor Adorno, as well as recent scholarship that aims to re-theorize violence and the politics of its hermeneutics. Understanding the diverse transatlantic contexts and theoretical complexity of peace reform can both offer new insights into literary texts and also unsettle national narratives that minimize the significance of nineteenth-century pacifist thought.

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