THE CIVIL WAR: THE TRUE STORY BOOK 1

Violating the Lieber Code: The March From the Sea

Violating the Lieber Code: The March From the Sea

By Kirkpatrick Sale on Apr 8, 2014

On April 24, 1863—-just three months after the cruel and retaliatory Emancipation Proclamation–Lincoln issued an order drafted by Columbia University law professor Francis Lieber that codified the generally accepted universal standards of warfare, particularly as it related to the lives and property of civilians. Among the actions it deemed to be criminal and prohibited were the "wanton devastation of a district," "infliction of suffering" on civilians, "murder of private citizens," "unnecessary or revengeful destruction of life," and "all wanton violence...all robbery, all pillage or sacking...all rape, wounding, maiming, or killing."

It is true that it also provided, in its articles 14 and 15, a slippery provision called "military necessity," under which "destruction...of armed enemies" and of "other persons whose destruction is incidentally unavoidable" was completely permissible, and allowed "the appropriation of whatever an enemy's country affords" by the conquering army. But it is clear that the overall intent of the Code was to rein in atrocities by the Union Army, particularly toward civilians.

The Union Army in the preceding years of the war had generally observed such principles as the Lieber Code set out, although there had been many instances of victorious troops that, as one general said of the Union troops in Baton Rouge, "regard pillaging not only right in itself but a soldierly accomplishment" and there were a few instances of renegade generals who led their troops into wholesale devastation of civilian targets.

But when the new element to the war became the cause of eliminating slavery, a certain moral fervor was cast upon the troops, or a good many of them at least, that eventually added a kind of John-Brown-like zealotry to the Union cause. It was not that there was any particular passion to see black people freed but rather to abolish slavery itself, an easily condemnable institution that was the economic and political pillar of the hated Southerners. That is why, within just a few months of the Emancipation Proclamation, a number of commanders in the field, despite the recently released Lieber Code, felt sanctioned to unleash the equivalent of what in the 20th century came to be called "total war"—a war upon civilians and their property in the South, with attendant looting, murder, arson, and rape, and neither women, children, the old and infirm, or oftentimes even blacks, were spared.

And with the sanction of General Henry Hallek, General-in-Chief of the Union Army, who let it be known on March 31, 1863—-a slim month after the Lieber Code was issued to the troops– that Union generals should now enlarge the conflict in ways that General Halleck could say that spring changed "the character of the war" and allowed, "no peace but that which is forced by the sword."

To which Grant wrote responded:

Rebellion has assumed that shape now that it can only terminate
by the complete subjugation of the South....It is our duty to weaken the enemy, by destroying their means of subsistence, withdrawing their means of cultivating their fields, and in every other way possible.
It was the following year—150 years ago—that the Union Army was able to start this "complete subjugation," largely through the work of General William Sherman, who totally shredded the Lieber Code and trod it under the feet of his three powerful armies. He went through Mississippi, then Tennessee, then into Georgia, where he destroyed Atlanta in September and then moved south to Savannah, where he contemplated his march northward through South Carolina.
As Sherman wrote to Hallek once he settled in Savannah, "The truth is the whole army is burning with an insatiable desire to wreck vengeance upon South Carolina. I almost tremble at her fate, but feel that she deserves all that seems in store for her."

So the subsequent campaign was, unbelievably, even fiercer than the Georgia one, for after all South Carolina had been the first to secede and first to fire a shot (though in answer to a Union invasion of Charleston Harbor); a reporter for a Northern newspaper wrote: "As for wholesale burning, pillage, devastation, committed in South Carolina, magnify all I have said of Georgia fifty-fold, and then throw in an occasional murder."