National Law Quotes
Lieber was assigned by President Lincoln to study the then international laws of war and prepare a manual for the guidance of union troops in the Civil War. Lincoln then issued the document as a general order. This statement was critical in inhibiting the South from making good on their threat to enslave any Black Union Soldier Captured and to execute any Union Black soldier who was a runaway slave from the South. Lincoln threatened to retaliate and also to hold senior Confederate officers accountable for following these rules. General Sherman and other Union Senior Officers executed a few Confederate soldiers who violated rules of the order and the “illegal” practices stopped, and with few exceptions the senior officers of both sides followed Lieber’s rules. These rules, with few modifications, governed U. S. military policies and rules through the Second World War.
Indeed, he was wrong in the sense that the Southern whites did NOT even obey the letter of the law. The Klu Klux Klan and the rest of Southern Jim Crow terrorism broke the laws of the states and local communities as well as Federal law but they did so with impunity. Andrews recognized the problem but never suspected that it would be as bad as it got with public torture and lynching commonplace and approved by most white Southerners.
