Comte de Paris, History of the Civil War in America. Vol. 1.
Henry Coppee , LL.D., Ed.

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[426] tons, called The Savannah, formerly a pilot-boat, armed with an eighteen pounder, went out of the port of Charleston under the Confederate flag; on the 3d of June, after securing a few prizes, the privateer, deceived by appearances, approached the brig-of-war Perry, and discovering her mistake too late was obliged to strike her colors after having vainly attempted to effect her escape. Her crew of twenty men were landed at New York to be tried for the crime of piracy.

This trial, which was to last for a considerable time, gave rise to questions of the gravest importance regarding public law. The Federal government, never having recognized the insurgents of the South as belligerents, could not, strictly speaking, consider them in any other light than that of malefactors. Every Confederate soldier who killed a Federal was in its estimation simply a murderer; every privateer which captured a merchant-vessel carrying the Federal flag was nothing but a robber and a pirate. But it was indispensable that there should be complete assimilation between the acts committed on the sea and on the land. As the government of the United States had declined in 1856 to participate in the declarations of the congress of Paris, it could not have questioned the right of its adversaries to cruise against its commerce, if it had recognized them in the capacity of belligerents; and having denied that character, it could not prosecute the sailors of the Savannah as pirates except by instituting similar criminal proceedings against every prisoner taken on land. It was sufficient to enunciate such a proposition to show its absurdity; the magnitude of the rebellion, the fear of inevitable reprisals, humanity, policy—in fine, good sense—forbade the Federal government from pursuing such a course; nor was the idea even contemplated. From the moment that Confederate soldiers captured on land were considered as prisoners of war, the same immunity from all personal prosecution had to be extended to the crews of Southern privateers. The government at Washington, bound by Mr. Lincoln's proclamations and pressed by public opinion, did not at first understand this. But the battle of Bull Run soon gave Mr. Davis the means of enabling his opponents to form a more correct estimate of the situation, by delivering a large number of Federal officers into his hands. He had Colonel