Northern policy-makers soon theorized their practice. Here Francis Lieber has pride of place. Lieber, a German immigrant who had fought in the wars against Napoleon, was – out of some combination of liberalism, romanticism, and nationalism - extremely sentimental about the state (which Nietzsche, by contrast, called the coldest of cold monsters). Thus Lieber could write in 1838 that "the state stands incalculably above the individual, is worthy of every sacrifice, of life, and goods, of wife and children, for it is the society of societies, the sacred union by which the creator leads man to civilization, the bond, the pacifier, the humanizer, of men, the protector of all undertakings...."Out of this pseudo-Hegelian waffle comes the notion that freedom can be realized only within the modern abstract state; in the US, this meant the allegedly indestructible union. Along with this perilous modification of liberalism came, in practice, a legal-positivist approach to the laws of war, embodied in General Orders No. 100, which Lieber wrote for Lincoln’s War Department.
Section 15 of these Orders reads: "Military necessity admits of all direct destruction of life or limb of armed enemies, and other persons whose destruction is incidentally unavoidable in the armed contests of war....." Naturally, the decision as to which persons it was "whose destruction is incidentally unavoidable" was best left to commanders in the field, or their superiors.
A cynic might well say that this "code" allowed for the after-the-fact justification of anything a commander might claim had been "necessary" to achieve military objectives. One such cynic was James Seddon, Confederate Secretary of War, who commented: "[I]n this code of military necessity... the acts of atrocity and violence which have been committed by the officers of the United States and have shocked the moral sense of civilized nations are to find an apology and defense." Further, "a military commander under this code may pursue a line of conduct in accordance with principles of justice, faith, and honor, or he may justify conduct correspondent with the warfare of the barbarous hordes who overran the Roman Empire...."
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Given the assumption of a right to win, the property and even the lives of enemy civilians began to weigh much less than they had in the older rules of war. Faced with such matters, Lincoln apologists typically resort to what historian Jeffrey Rogers Hummel calls the Hitler-Stalin-Mao test. Clearly, Sherman’s March falls far short of that.
For one such historian, the fact that Northern soldiers did not directly shoot civilians is a sufficient proof of the humanity of the war. This is all well and good, but one would like an explanation for the roughly 50,000 missing Southern civilians of all colors and creeds. They seem to have perished from causes attendant on the war, once it became a war against property and economic resources.
In July 1862, Lincoln rather typically told Southern unionists, who were complaining of Northern seizures of property that "broken eggs cannot be mended" – a statement which puts him directly in the line of Jacobin-Bolshevik political ruthlessness. As a result of all this, Lincoln has become "famed for his compassion," in historian James M. McPherson’s words. It would appear that Lincoln’s myth has long since outrun the facts.
Is it any wonder that so many Lincoln worshipers end up espousing Stalinism?
Are you to be numbered among the nutcases who swear that Lincoln suspended the Constitution and the United States has secretly been governed under the "Lieber Codes" since 1863?