Alfred Roman, The military operations of General Beauregard in the war between the states, 1861 to 1865

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This, Vattel expressly says, is equally applicable to the operations of a civil war, ‘the parties to which are bound to observe the common laws of war.’ Even the Duke of Alva was finally forced to respect these laws of war in his conduct towards the confederates in the Netherlands.

Wharton is no less explicit than Vattel on all these points. He declares that private property or land can only be taken in special cases; that is, when captured on the field or in besieged places and towns, or as military contributions levied upon the inhabitants of hostile territory. (See ‘Law of Nations,’ p. 395.)

The pages of the American publicist furnish the most striking condemnation of the acts of your soldiery on the Combahee, and at Jacksonville, Bluffton, and Darien, in connection with the burning by the British of Havre de Grace, in 1813, the devastations of Lord Cochrane on the coast of the Chesapeake Bay, and in relation to some excess of the troops of the United States in Canada.

The destruction of Havre de Grace was characterized at the time by the Cabinet at Washington as ‘manifestly contrary to usages of civilized warfare.’ That village, we are told, was ravaged and burned, to the ‘astonishment’ of its unarmed inhabitants at seeing that they derived no protection to their property from the laws of war.

Further, the burning of the village of Newark, in Canada and near Fort George, by the troops of the United States, in 1813, though defended as legitimate by the officers who did it, on the score of military necessity, yet the act was earnestly disavowed and repudiated by the Government of the United States of that day. So, too, was the burning of Long Point, concerning which a military investigation was instituted. And for the destruction of St. David, by stragglers, the officer who commanded on that occasion was dismissed the service, without trial, for permitting it. (Wharton on the ‘Law of Nations,’ p. 399.)

The Government of the United States then, under the inspiration of Southern statesmen, declared that it ‘owed to itself, and to the principles it ever held sacred, to disavow any such wanton, cruel, and unjustifiable warfare,’ which it further denounced as ‘revolting to humanity and repugnant to the sentiments and usages of the civilized world.’

I shall now remark that these violations of long and thoroughly established laws of war may be chiefly attributed to the species of persons employed by your predecessor in command in these expeditions, and should have been anticipated, in view of the lessons of history—that is, negroes, for the most part, either fugitive slaves or who had been carried away from their masters' plantations. So apparent are the atrocious consequences which have ever resulted from the employment of a merciless servile race as soldiers, that Napoleon, when invading Russia, refused to receive or employ against the Russian Government and army the Russian serfs, who, we are told, were ready on all sides to flock to his standard, if he would enfranchise them. He was actuated, he declared, by a horror of the inevitable consequences which would result from a servile war. This course one of your authors, Abbott, contrasts to the prejudice of Great Britain, in the war of 1812 with the United States, in the