Valerie Ziegler's account of peace activist/abolitionist anarchism of the early nineteenth century, in particular that of William Lloyd Garrison, in The Advocates of Peace in Antebellum America (University of Indiana Press: 1992).

The nonresistants...deprecated human governments for substituting their own rule in place of the laws of God. "God creates men to be ruled by himself, and be subject to his own dominion," the [New England Non-Resistant Society's] document on "National Organizations" [composed by Garrison?] explained. "Men form nations to dethrone the Deity, and subject men to the dominion of man."

The nonresistants' objections to civil government generally took two forms. It was always easy to denounce national laws or customs that fell below the perfection of the gospel. Here all the usual arguments against the penal code, capital punishment, and war came into play. An even more fundamental objection, however, was that government usurped God's role as humanity's ruler. Whereas God had created humankind to be obedient to the divine rule, human governments rushed to establish themselves as alternative authorities. They paid no heed to the divine rule, but established their own fiefdoms in defiance of God.

Nothing angered the nonresistants more than the spectacle of earthly governments attempting to usurp God as lord of creation. Only God was humanity's true governor, and only the laws God laid down were to guide human behavior. At the heart of those laws was the Sermon on the Mount, with its admonition to love one's enemies and to return no one evil for evil. As Garrison explained:

"The more I look into the subject, the deeper is my conviction that the principles of the Non-Resistance are immutably true; that whoever feels unable or unwilling to forgive all manner of injuries and the worst of enemies, has no right to rank himself among the followers of Christ; that the attempt of men to govern themselves by external rules and physical penalties is and ever must be futile; and that from the assumption, that man has a right to exercise oppression over his brother, has proceeded every form of injustice and oppression with which the earth has been afflicted." [from Garrison's letters, vol. 2: 408]

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From the start, nonresistants had rejected participation in government on the grounds that the state necessarily relied upon coercion to maintain its power and enforce its edicts. The constitution of the nonresistance society {composed by Garrison] had prohibited all participation in government for that reason. . . . At the second annual meeting, the society passed a resolution declaring that "all existing human governments are based on the life-taking, war-making power, as essential to their existence; and they are therefore wrong, and no person believing in the inviolability of human life, and the sinfulness of war, can be identified with them as electors, or office-holders, without guilt."