George Washington strove to be the embodiment of civilized conduct in the War of Independence after being accused of atrocities twenty years before. He is depicted here by John Trumbull as the calm before the storm.
An artist’s rendering of the Capitol building after it was burned by the British in 1814; President James Madison accused the British of violating the “rules of civilized warfare.”
From 1815 to 1828, as the U.S. minister in London, as secretary of state, and then as president, John Quincy Adams insisted that it was unlawful to carry off enemy slaves in wartime.
Serving in the Congress in the 1830s and 1840s, Adams reversed his position and predicted that slavery would end in a terrible war laying waste to the South.
The London press lampooned Andrew Jackson as a bloodthirsty butcher leading a Tennessee militia of desperate savages. President James Monroe is seated at right.
A young Charles Sumner condemned the laws of war as legitimating lawless violence. By 1861, he defended a war against slavery and helped introduce Lincoln to John Quincy Adams’s late-career arguments about the fate of slavery in wartime.
The first week of the war presented President Abraham Lincoln with a crisis in the laws of war at sea; controversy dogged his decision to blockade the South and treat Confederate privateers as pirates.
Secretary of State William Henry Seward (seated with hat on knee) used social occasions with the European diplomatic corps to craft the Lincoln administration’s distinctively pragmatic approach to the laws of war.
The Union blockade of southern ports was notoriously porous, but its basis in the laws of war helped accomplish the crucial goal of holding off European intervention in the war. Alfred Waud’s Civil War sketch for Harper’s Weekly captured the life of the blockade that Lincoln, Seward, and Secretary of War Gideon Welles constructed.
Captain Charles Wilkes seized Confederate diplomats Mason and Slidell from a British vessel in November 1861. This early controversy over neutral and belligerent rights at sea nearly brought Britain (depicted as the angry John Bull in the rear) to war against the Union.
At the outset of the war, Francis Lieber was teaching the laws of war at Columbia College in New York City after living in South Carolina for two decades.
When Lincoln elevated the bookish Henry Halleck to general-in-chief in 1862, he brought an expert on the laws of war into the Union high command.
Fugitive slaves streaming into Union lines forced the issue of slavery onto the Union agenda.
Images of racial violence from the wars in Haiti more than a half century later led to widespread fears that Emancipation would touch off terrible violence.
By the fall of 1862, when Lincoln traveled to the battlefield at Antietam in Maryland, he had announced Emancipation. He is pictured here with Major General George B. McClellan, who bitterly opposed freeing slaves as a dangerous and uncivilized step in warfare.
Southern sympathizer Adalbert Johann Volck’s cartoon depicted leading Union men as infidels justifying Emancipation by the terrible motto inscribed on the altar of Negro Worship: “The End Sanctifies the Means.” Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
With the decision not only to emancipate the slaves behind Confederate lines but to enlist them and other blacks into the Union Army, it seemed that the Civil War had turned the violence of slavery upside down.
By late 1862, when he began work on a code for the laws of war, Francis Lieber had lost one son killed fighting for the Confederacy and seen a second gravely injured while fighting for the Union. The costs of the war are etched on his face in this grave portrait for the Columbia College 1862 class book.
Two hundred thousand black men served in the Union armed forces, including the 29th Connecticut (Colored) Regiment, shown here in Beaufort, South Carolina.
Despite fears that the former slaves would fight with lawless ferocity, most black regiments performed impeccably in the face of grave provocations. A Philadelphia lithographic card from 1863 and an Alfred Waud sketch capture the fascination with the black soldier as the Civil War entered its climatic phase.
William Tecumseh Sherman’s “hard hand of war” put into action the Union’s uncompromising 1863 instructions for the laws of war. He is shown here outside Atlanta in 1864.
Sherman defended his shelling of Atlanta by arguing that short and sharp wars were more humane than the drawn-out tepid conflicts imagined by the jurists of the eighteenth century. The shell-damaged Ponder House in Atlanta bore the effects of Sherman’s barrage.
Ethan Allen Hitchcock, the grandson of Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen, used the Union’s code to insist that captured black Union soldiers be treated as prisoners of war regardless of race.
Images of emaciated Union prisoners made their way to the public in 1864 after the Union’s insistence on equal treatment of black soldiers helped bring an end to prisoner exchanges.
Union camps for southern prisoners swelled with new detainees after the end of prisoner exchanges. Though less notorious than the southern camps, they were nearly as deadly as their Confederate counterparts. Confederate soldiers here await transportation at Belle Plain Landing, Virginia.
At the end of July 1863, just days before he sat for this photograph, Lincoln issued an order drawing expressly on the code and promising to retaliate against southern soldiers for the execution or enslavement of black Union soldiers or their white officers.
Nathan B. Forrest commanded Confederate troops at Fort Pillow, the site of the most notorious (but not the only) massacre of black Union soldiers.
The hooded bodies of three men and one woman convicted and sentenced to death by a military commission for conspiring with John Wilkes Booth to assassinate Lincoln and high-ranking members of his administration.
The terribly overcrowded Confederate camp at Andersonville, Georgia, was the war’s most notorious prisoner of war camp, though not its deadliest. Here Union soldiers draw their rations near the main gate.
Captain Henry Wirz, the commander at Andersonville, was one of nearly 1,000 Confederate soldiers or sympathizers to face law of war charges in front of Union military commissions during or just after the war.
The capture of Jefferson Davis in the spring of 1865 touched off two years of debate over his fate; northern publications like Harper’s Weekly pointedly observed the contrast between the conditions of Davis’s confinement and those of Union soldiers held prisoner during the war.
Francis Lieber’s son G. Norman Lieber presided over the Judge Advocate General’s office from 1884 to 1901. He brought the code his father drafted to Indian wars in the West and to the war in the Philippines.
Three hundred and three Dakota Sioux warriors were sentenced to death by military commission in 1862; Lincoln approved the sentences of thirty-nine, including the man pictured here, whom he decided had participated in indiscriminate warfare against settlers.
A nasty conflict with Modoc Indians in Oregon in 1873 reprised the scalping scenes of the pre–Civil War era.
“Captain Jack,” standing at right, led the Modoc band before being executed for killing a U.S. officer under a flag of truce. Men like Andrew Jackson had executed the Indians they captured without any formality; now captured Indian warriors like Jack were tried by military commission.
President Grover Cleveland proposed to execute Geronimo, but he and his band of Chiricahua Apache—men, women, and children alike—were taken by train to Florida from their native Southwest and spent more than two decades as prisoners of war.
After the Civil War, the Union’s law of war instructions of 1863 began to spread around the world. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 saw the code’s principles applied to the irregular French fighters who resisted Prussian occupation.
A Swiss-born jurist named Johann Caspar Bluntschli translated the American code into German and spread its influence in Europe.
The formidable Alfred Thayer Mahan dominated the U.S. delegation at a conference in The Hague in 1899 that set the terms for the laws of war the world over.
U.S. armed forces in the Philippines engaged in the widespread use of torture tactics such as the water cure, demonstrated here by a team of American soldiers.
