[603] laws of nations and of war, when property of the subjects of one belligerent power captured by the forces of the other belligerent, is recaptured by the armies of the former owner, then the property is to be restored to its prior possessor as if it had never been captured; and, therefore, under this principle, your authorities propose to restore to their masters the slaves which heretofore belonged to them which you may capture from us. But this postliminary right, under which you claim to act, as understood and defined by all writers on national law, is applicable simply to immovable property, and that, too, only after the complete resubjugation of that portion of the country in which the property is situated, upon whichthis right fastens itself. By the laws and customs of war, this right has never been applied to movable property. True it is, I believe, that the Romans attempted to apply it to the case of slaves; but for two thousand years no other nation has attempted to set up this right as ground for treating slaves differently from other property. But the Romans ever refused to enslave men captured from opposing belligerents in a civil war, such as ours unhappily is. Consistently, then, with any principle of the law of nations, treating slaves as property merely, it would seem to be impossible for the Government
Libby prison.
This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
A. M. Thayer and Co. 1892.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.