Ballou, Adin

Adin Ballou (1803-1890), the founder of the utopian community of Hopedale, Massachusetts, was a leading nineteenth-century pacifist, socialist, and abolitionist. Unlike many other reformers of his time Ballou did not abandon his pacifist principles during the Civil War. His version of pacifism, which he called Christian Non-Resistance, was admired by Leo Tolstoy and, through Tolstoy, influenced the great twentieth-century non-violent activists, Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.