Rush was controversial, too, for some of his views on race, for some of his medical practices, and for his opposition to George Washington as Commander-in-Chief. He was buddies with Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams.
Benjamin Rush was a Surgeon General of the Continental Army and observed, first hand, the effects of war. He has been called "the father of American psychiatry" for his work with the mentally ill.
Rush believed that, in addition to the government's Department of War, there should be a Department of Peace. He believed that to promote peace, free schools should teach arithmetic, reading, writing, and religion - especially Christianity because "...it belongs to this religion exclusively, to teach us not only to cultivate peace with men, but to forgive, nay more- to love our very enemies."
From Benjamin Rush's essay "A Plan of a Peace-Office for the United States":
In order more deeply to affect the minds of the citizens of the United States with the blessings of peace, by contrasting them with the evils of war, let the following inscriptions be painted upon the sign, which is placed over the door of the War Office.
1. An office for butchering the human species.
2. A Widow and Orphan making office.
3. A broken bone making office.
4. A Wooden leg making office.
5. An office for creating public and private vices.
6. An office for creating a public debt.
7. An office for creating speculators, stock Jobbers, and Bankrupts.
8. An office for creating famine.
9 An office for creating pestilential diseases.
10. An office for creating poverty, and the destruction of liberty, and national happiness.
In the lobby of this office let there be painted representations of all the common military instruments of death, also human skulls, broken bones, unburied and putrifying dead bodies, hospitals crowded with sick and wounded Soldiers, villages on fire, mothers in besieged towns eating the flesh of their children, ships sinking in the ocean, livers dyed with blood, and extensive plains without a tree or fence, or any other object, but the ruins of deserted farm houses.
Above this group of woeful figures,—let the following words be inserted, in red characters to represent human blood,
"NATIONAL GLORY."
