A Code for the Government of Armies in the Field, / as authorized by the laws and usages of war on land.

by United States. War Department; Francis Lieber

PUBLIC AND PRIVATE PROPERTY OF THE ENEMY. PROTECTION OF PERSONS, AND ESPECIALLY WOMEN; OF RELIGION, THE ARTS AND SCIENCES. PUNISHMENT OF CRIMES AGAINST THE INHABITANTS OF HOSTILE COUNTRIES.

§ 14. A victorious army appropriates all public money, seizes all public movable property until further direction by its government, and sequesters, for its own benefit, or that of its government, all real property belonging to the hostile government or nation.

§ 15. A victorious army, by the martial power inherent in the same, may suspend, change, disacknowledge, or abolish, as far as the martial power extends, the relations which arise from the services due, according to the existing laws of the invaded country, from one citizen, subject, or native of the same to another.

The commander of the army must leave it to the ultimate treaty of peace to settle the permanency of this change.

§ 16. As a general rule, the property belonging to churches, to hospitals, or other establishments of an exclusively charitable or eleemosynary character, to establishments of education, or foundations for the promotion of knowledge, whether public schools, universities, academies of learning or observatories, museums of the fine arts, or of a scientific character—such property shall not be considered by the armies of the United States, public property in the sense of paragraph 14.

In exceptional cases, such as richly endowed churches or convents, their property may be taxed with military contributions.

§ 17. Classical works of art, noble fabrics, libraries, scientific collections, or precious instruments, such as astronomic telescopes, as well as hospitals, must be tenderly secured in the name of common humanity and civilization, against all avoidable injury, even when they are contained in fortified places, whilst besieged or bombarded.

§ 18. If such, works of art, libraries, collections, or instruments belonging to the hostile nation or government, can be removed without injury, the ruler of the conquering state or nation may order them to be seized and removed for the benefit of the said nation. The ultimate ownership is to be settled by the ensuing treaty of peace.

In no case ought they to be sold or given away by the captor or the victorious government during the war, still less ought they ever to be privately appropriated, or wantonly destroyed or injured.

§ 19. The United States acknowledge and protect, in hostile countries occupied by them, religion and morality; unmixed private property—that is to say, property in which neither private and public property, nor the ideas of property and humanity, or person, are mixed;—the persons of the inhabitants, especially those of women; and the sacredness of domestic relations. Offences to the contrary are to be rigorously punished.

This rule does not interfere with the right of the victorious invader to tax the people or their property, to levy forced loans, to billet soldiers, or to appropriate property especially houses, land, boats, or ships, and churches, for temporary and military uses.

§ 20. Private property, unless forfeited by crimes or by offences of the owner against the safety of the army or the dignity of the United States, and after due conviction of the owner by court-martial, can be seized only by way of military necessity, for the support or other benefit of the army or of the United States.

If the owner has not fled, the commanding and seizing officer will give receipts, which may serve the spoliated owner to obtain indemnity from his own government, or which, if the seized property consists in large magazines and stores, or extensive real property—such as the demolition of houses, or the seizure of extensive lands for the erection of fortifications—may be ultimately accounted for or disposed of by the treaty of peace concluding the war.

§ 21. The salaries of civil officers of the hostile government who remain in the invaded territory, and continue the work of their office, and can continue it according to the circumstances arising out of the war—such as judges, administrative or police officers, officers of city or communal governments—are paid from the public revenue of the invaded territory, until the military government has reason wholly or partially to discontinue it. Salaries or incomes connected with purely honorary titles, are always stopped.

§ 22. There exists no law or body of authoritative rules of action between hostile armies, except that branch of the law of nature and nations, which is called the law and usages of war on land.

All municipal law of the ground on which the armies stand, or of the countries to which they belong, is silent and of no effect between armies in the field.

Slavery, complicating and confounding the ideas of property, (that is of a thing,) and of personality, (that is of humanity,) exists according to municipal or local law only. The law of nature and nations, has never acknowledged it. The jurists of all countries agree. The Digest of the Roman Law enacts the early dictum of the pagan jurist, that “so far as the law of nature is concerned, all men are equal”; and fugitives escaping from a country, in which they were slaves, villains, or serfs, into another country, have, for centuries past, been held free, and acknowledged free, by judicial decisions of European countries, even though the municipal law of the country, in which the slave had taken refuge, acknowledged slavery within its own dominions.

§ 23. Therefore, if the United States wage war with a government which admits of slavery, and a fugitive from the opposite belligerent offers himself for protection to the American army, and is free from the suspicion of mischievous intentions, he must be received and protected, be he a fugitive slave or not; and once received and protected by the United States, under the shield of the Law of Nations, he can never be returned into slavery or given up to the enemy.

Returning such a person would amount to enslaving a free person, and neither the United States nor any officer under their authority has the right to enslave any human being. No Christian state has claimed, for centuries past the right of enslaving those who are free.

§ 24. All wanton violence committed against persons in the invaded country, all destruction of property not commanded by the authorized officer, all robbery, all pillage, or sacking, even after taking a place by main force, all rape, wounding, maiming, or killing of such inhabitants, are prohibited under the penalty of death, or such other severe punishment as may seem adequate for the gravity of the offence.

A soldier, private or officer, in the act of committing such violence, and disobeying a superior, ordering to abstain from it, may be lawfully killed on the spot by such superior.

§ 25. There is no prize money on land. All booty belongs to the United States, and not to any individual.

§ 26. Neither officers nor privates are allowed to make use of their position or power in the hostile country for transactions of private gain, not even for commercial transactions otherwise legitimate. Offences to the contrary committed by commissioned officers will be punished with the loss of the gain, with cashiering, and such additional punishment as the nature of the offence may require, not exceeding years imprisonment.

§ 27. Crimes punishable by all penal codes, such as arson, murder, maiming, assaults, highway robbery, theft, burglary, fraud, forgery, and rape, if committed by an American soldier in a hostile country, against its inhabitants, are not only punishable as at home, but in all cases in which death is not inflicted, the severer punishment shall be preferred, because the criminal has, as far as in him lay, prostituted the power conferred on a man of arms, and prostrated the dignity of the United States.