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.