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Francis Lieber's Attitudes on Race, Slavery, and Abolition

HARTMUT KEIL


      ON JANUARY 9, 1836, only a few months after having moved from Philadelphia to Columbia, South Carolina, in order to assume the chair for History and Political Economy at South Carolina College, Francis Lieber and his wife bought their first two slaves. Seeing Betsy and her daughter seated on a bench in front of the courthouse and being attracted by Betsy's "good looks" and Elsa's "healthy, cheerful, and bright appearance," Lieber asked the slave dealer for their price and then went away. The same day Betsy, in the company of another slave girl, came by Lieber's home and asked him if he did not want to buy her, praising her domestic skills and pointing out to him that she did not want to be separated from her daughter. Having consulted with both his colleague David McCord and the physician Dr. Gibbes, who attested to the slave women's good health, having procured the necessary amount of money—Lieber paid $1,150 for them—with McCord's help, and after elaborate negotiations with Elsa's new owner, who agreed to sell the girl to Lieber so that mother and daughter could work in the same household, Lieber finally completed the purchase. Lieber and his wife Mathilda, however, seem to have had a bad conscience afterwards; for Mathilda, "though absolutely convinced that we did right under the given circumstances,...had a severe headache Friday night; she was very much moved by the matter," while Lieber felt compelled to write down the "reasons why we bought them" in his diary:
  1. Where slavery exists, it is far better to own slaves than to hire them. They feel attached to the master, because they are entirely dependent upon him, and the master not only feels more interest in them but can also do something for them, habituate them to good manners etc., whereas he has no influence over hired slaves.
  2. It is no injustice to have slaves where slavery exists and emancipation does not happen. We know that we want to be good to them, and they shall be treated as kindly as anywhere. Alas, to whom, and whereto, might the mother have been sold!
  3. We want to make them into good servants, and encourage them to cleanliness.
  4. There is a constant turnover with hired slaves, and they themselves by far prefer to be with their master than elsewhere. A good slave hates to be sold or hired out.
  5. We believe it will be cheaper for us.
  6. Math[ilda] wants to thoroughly educate the slave wom[e]n.1
Lieber ended this rationalization by pointing out that he had stated his views on slavery in his book, Letters to a Gentleman, published the previous year, and he emphatically reasserted that the institution "is and remains a great evil and misery in our time. Absolute power when granted will often be abused. The horrible shows in so many details!"2		 1
      This incident raises a host of questions. How can we account for the shocking fact that Lieber—a German liberal intellectual who had served time in jail for his political convictions when repression set in under the impact of the Holy Alliance in the 1820s and who had barely escaped from Prussia, had become an American citizen and integrated into the mainstream of American society, and was highly respected as initiator and editor of the Encyclopaedia Americana and renowned as political scientist and philosopher—became a slaveholder himself during his long tenure, from 1835 to 1856, in Columbia? Why, as an opponent of slavery, did he move to South Carolina, the leading slave state, which steadfastly defended the southern tradition of slavery and states rights, and to an intellectual and political environment where he was seen as an outsider and confronted with misgivings and mistrust? How did Lieber cope with this situation during his long sojourn of more than twenty years? Did he compromise his views, as his former friend Charles Sumner claimed? Why did Lieber write a series of letters to John C. Calhoun in which he condemned the institution of slavery—and then not actually mail them to this eminent statesman? Was he finally relieved of a personal and moral burden when he vacated his position and moved north again in the mid-1850s, where he became an outspoken critic of the slavocracy, mended the soured relationship with Charles Sumner, and became an adviser to Republican politicians as well as public speaker for emancipation and the Union? 2
      This essay will address these issues in the broader context of the relationship between German liberal immigrants and African Americans in the antebellum period. However, Francis Lieber provides a different perspective, for he lived both in the North and the South, in contrast to the overwhelming majority of German immigrants as well as intellectuals who had strong convictions about the institution of slavery but never experienced it themselves. 3
      It is helpful to outline the historical and intellectual context of the perception of slavery in the period of German mass immigration in the post-Napoleonic period before discussing Francis Lieber's views of race and slavery. These can be documented and analyzed on three distinct levels. First, there was his personal and practical encounter with slavery in South Carolina and his emotional efforts to come to terms with his environment. Second, as an intellectual and scholar, he set out to study the institution of slavery in all respects from ancient times to its contemporary appearance in order to prove the institution's inconsistencies, contradictions, and inhumanity. Finally, both his experiential and intellectual struggles over slavery also contributed in essential ways to Lieber's self-understanding as an American citizen. He ultimately could not bear the contradictions after living in the South for twenty-one years. His solution, that is, his escape to the North, which he obviously experienced as personal and moral liberation, was an effort to live true to his liberal Enlightenment convictions and to finally have an impact on the American political scene as both scholar and activist. 4
   

GERMAN IMMIGRANTS' PERCEPTION OF SLAVERY DURING THE PERIOD OF MASS IMMIGRATION IN THE POST-NAPOLEONIC PERIOD

 
      Mass immigration from Germany to the United States, beginning in the 1820s and accelerating in the 1840s and 1850s, seldom led to a confrontation of the immigrants with the issues of slavery and abolition. German farmers and artisans had given up their homeland for economic success and social acceptance in the new country. Therefore, most of them settled in the midwestern territories and states where land and opportunities were abundant. It was because of this self-interest—not because of humanitarian considerations—that they chose to avoid the slave South and its "peculiar institution." Even in the 1850s, when the conflict between North and South escalated beyond reconciliation, German immigrants for the most part were indifferent and held aloof from the intensifying debate. Ideological affinities coupled with self-interest, however, also were responsible for keeping Germans separate from African Americans. Thus, they subscribed to the Free Soilers' demand for free homesteads and later to the new Republican Party's slogan of "free soil, free labor, free men," rejecting competition with slave labor and agreeing with that party's goal to contain the "slavocracy" by preventing it from extending into new territories. The mass of German immigrants therefore heeded the advice of travel and emigrant guides—some three hundred of which were published between 1842 and 1852—to avoid the South. Even if they did choose to settle in slave states like Missouri or Texas, most of them continued in their traditional ways of farming, trading, or artisan work.3 5
      Geographic settlement patterns largely help explain the fact that personal contact with people of color was rare; when it occurred it was usually limited to urban centers. But other reasons account for the lack of personal relationships as well. Since German immigrants had higher skill levels—and therefore had other options in the labor market—they generally did not meet with black workers on the shop floor and, even more importantly, they did not look for the same jobs as black people, in contrast to the Irish, most of whom were unskilled laborers and often competed with African Americans in the labor market. This relative lack of labor competition (and, one might add, the lack of concrete relationships) made for more friendly mutual perceptions between German immigrants and people of color.4 Although this distinction holds true in distinct local and regional labor markets, it must be qualified in the broader context of mass immigration.5 For the number of free blacks both in northern and southern cities who held skilled jobs declined significantly to the degree that immigrants settled in the cities and came to predominate artisan trades. Trade unions in cities like Cincinnati opposed black membership and pressured employers not to hire black workers, while immigrant artisans and skilled workers in southern cities demanded the enforcement of codes to prevent competition from slave labor and free blacks. In port cities like New Orleans and in the Midwest, where a substantial percentage of German immigrants—like the Irish—also worked in unskilled occupations, it was slaves and free blacks who were displaced by both ethnic groups.6 6
      The opinions that German liberals expressed in letters, newspaper articles, essays, reports, and speeches—both at home and after emigrating to the United States—were of course shaped by European and American political environments, by historical changes, specific events, and personal background. Lacking direct experience, German journalists and writers nourished, on the one hand, idealistic, even utopian notions of the character of American independence and of the republican experiment.7 In the 1830s the radical democrats of the Young Germany movement helped popularize republican ideals in rousing poems and songs; a basically uncritical enthusiasm for America's "great democracy" often prevailed in these circles.8 On the other hand, as information on the American political system and American social institutions became more widespread in Europe—partly as a result of an increasing body of travel accounts—this positive view was counterbalanced by more realistic perceptions of the imperfections of American society. European intellectuals naturally were aware of the institution of slavery and often condemned it in unequivocal terms. Heinrich Heine, poignant critic of German social and political conditions, also directed his scorn at the "peculiar institution" and the treatment that people of color suffered. He ridiculed German immigrants with his ironic advice: "You good German farmers! Go to America! Everyone there is equal ... with, of course, the exception of several million slaves.... The brutality used in dealing with the latter is more than just shocking." Heine then substantiated this statement by recounting a heinous example of racial prejudice.9 7
      Alexander von Humboldt, who was deeply committed to liberal and humanitarian ideals, was no less critical of the institution of slavery. During his travels to South America he had visited the island of Cuba, where he observed the practical consequences of slavery, as well as the United States, when he traveled to Washington, D.C., in 1804 to meet President Thomas Jefferson and other important politicians.10 When Humboldt published his book on Cuba in 1826, he included a scathing condemnation of slavery, attacking the brutality of the institution and exposing its true character.11 He was clearly a humanist and a believer in natural rights. Thus, he wrote in 1845:
In maintaining the unity of the human race we also reject the disagreeable assumption of superior and inferior peoples. Some peoples are more pliable, more highly educated and ennobled by intellectual culture, but there are no races which are more noble than others. All are equally entitled to freedom; to freedom which in the state of nature belongs to the individual and which in civilization belongs as a right to the entire citizenry through political institutions.12
 Humboldt applied these principles to American society, repeatedly voicing his concern for the worsening debate over slavery in the 1850s and, as his final legacy, expressing his conviction that "our colored fellowmen ... are entitled to the enjoyment of the same freedom as ourselves."13		 8
      Humboldt's perspective was increasingly reflected in articles written by correspondents in the United States and published in German newspapers. The renowned Allgemeine Zeitung of Augsburg, one of the leading liberal German newspapers, may serve as an example. By the 1830s it had become so well established that it reached an important part of the middle class and of German intellectuals and had a tremendous impact among elites. Heinrich Heine, some of whose work was published in the paper, acknowledged that "it so truly deserves its worldwide renown as authoritative source that one could well call it the common newspaper of Europe."14 9
      At midcentury the Allgemeine Zeitung became increasingly critical of slavery, reflecting the debate among German American intellectuals in the United States. When Ottilie Assing, a young woman who had recently arrived from Hamburg, became its main correspondent after 1855, the paper's readership was even offered a black abolitionist perspective, since Assing was introduced to leaders of the movement, including Frederick Douglass, with whom she became close friends.15 It was from Douglass that she gained firsthand knowledge of the abolitionist movement and its activities.16 The dominant leitmotif of her reporting—one which took on an increasing sense of urgency—was that slavery and freedom were irreconcilable.17 10
      Thus, a transatlantic intellectual network evolved between the German states and North America in the first half of the nineteenth century. As a consequence, a sophisticated level of selected information was readily available to liberal intellectuals who decided to comment on, or emigrate to, the United States. 11
   

FRANCIS LIEBER'S PERSONAL AND PRACTICAL ENCOUNTER WITH RACE AND SLAVERY

 
      From the very beginning of his arrival in the United States, Francis Lieber was part of this network. In fact, his plan for becoming accepted into American society initially followed the usual pattern of German émigré intellectuals like Charles Follen. Since German erudition and scholarship were mainly received in the New England academies, foremost among them Harvard University, it was here that Lieber tried to establish himself as an intellectual and scholar. Although having access to educated circles, he faced obstacles finding an academic position. Undaunted by these difficulties, Lieber taught gymnastics and swimming lessons before engaging in an ambitious project. He wanted to translate the successful Brockhaus Conversations-Lexikon, a twelve-volume encyclopedia that had been selling well in Germany since its first publication in 1812 and had been translated in other languages, for an American audience. Soon realizing that the needs of an American readership were quite different from those of its German counterpart, he wrote many new articles himself and also succeeded in engaging as authors some of the most renowned American professionals and scholars of his time, publishing the complete thirteen-volume encyclopedia within a few years. Thus, through personal will, ambition, and perseverance he created what would remain a standard source of general information for many years. 12
      There was something else that Lieber shared with his émigré compatriots: their particular sense of what distinguished American society from their home country and from Europe in general. Heike Paul's analysis of German immigrants' and travelers' accounts concludes that these foreign observers saw the presence of people of color as the defining characteristic of American society.18 Lieber's interest in the status and living conditions of black people was also aroused as soon as he set foot on American shores, as he asserted in 1835, when he wrote that "the mental as well as physical difference between the white and black races, have formed a subject to which I have directed my attention ever since I came to this country."19 This interest is well documented both for the time that he lived in Massachusetts and later, when he moved to Philadelphia. But what separated his experience from those of his compatriots was his long sojourn of more than twenty years in the heart of the South, in South Carolina. During this time especially, he immersed himself in the issues of race and slavery to an extent that bordered on obsession. How can we explain this restless and persistent inquiry into the nature of the "peculiar institution" and its debasing effects on the victims as well as on southern and American society in general? This essay concludes that it grew out of Lieber's recognition of the irreconcilable contradictions between his convictions and his accommodation to southern society and life while he and his family lived in Columbia. 13
      Lieber turned out to be at the same time both a curious observer of the condition of blacks, which he recorded as an interested scholar, and a slaveholder. These two sides make him appear as two distinct personae, although again and again there occurred moments of personal despair and awareness that these two could not be held separate, but that he himself was existentially involved in southern society. For the sake of analysis, this essay will first discuss Lieber's role as observer and then that of participant before looking at the intersection of the two. 14
      Upon his arrival in Columbia, Lieber began to look at his social environment with open eyes and, as was typical of all his endeavors, with the ethnological curiosity of a scholar eager to dissect and understand what was going on around him. He applied his usual method, already tried when he had wanted to learn more about the black prison population in the New York State penitentiary, Sing Sing, of raising a host of questions that he wanted to explore and then finding the answers.20 Often Lieber maintained the role of neutral chronicler of events and opinions that he had collected by talking to colleagues and neighbors and reading newspapers and official reports. But time and again he also gave his own opinions and conclusions (or those given him by fellow whites), generally accounting for the slaves' behavior by referring to the "moral effects of slavery." The institution, in his judgment, nourished "pride" and "arrogance," and it "pervert[ed] judgement."21 It had degrading effects on the slaves' character and mentality. Thus, he observed a greater intelligence among "family negroes" than "plantation negroes." Negroes had a different sense of time; they never asked questions but answered whites regardless of whether they understood or not; they were drowsy and always ready to go to sleep; their slave status did not encourage cleanliness (in contrast to what Lieber had observed at Sing Sing, where the cells of black prisoners were much cleaner than those of white inmates). And he claimed that "slaves are incredible liars, not because they are mischievous, but because they were never taught to be responsible for their actions and to look at them from a moral standpoint." Thus, for slaves there was "neither future nor past but only the present. They cannot care for themselves, for their old age, for their children etc.; they don't think for themselves, they never learn how to form an opinion."22 15
      Lieber also observed aspects of the slaves' daily lives and culture, including their health and nutrition.23 He recorded their wages (if hired out), their work habits and attitudes toward work—"The servants are very slow"—the nature of task work, and the competition between slave and free "coloured mechanics" and "white mechanics."24 He also suspected that slaves did not reveal their real abilities to their masters, surmising that "they know and think probably more than people believe they do."25 Slave songs attracted his attention, and because of his deep interest in languages he recorded the "niggerisms," the slaves' peculiar linguistic and grammatical usages, and he wondered how slaves had acquired their names.26 Summing up his observations after a year or two, Lieber concluded disgustedly: "The more one sees of slavery here the more it appears how wrong and absurd the institution is."27 16
      In contrast to what the above remarks seem to imply, however, Lieber was not just a neutral observer who remained an outsider. Rather, he became actively involved in this "wrong and absurd" institution—witness the introductory account of his purchase of the slave woman Betsy and her daughter Elsa.28 On the one hand, he must have had a guilty conscience; otherwise, he might not have felt compelled to justify this first purchase. One can also argue that hiring or owning slaves was the only way to employ domestic servants in a slave society. Given Lieber's elevated status as a professor at Columbia College, he must also have been subject to social pressure that he assume an appropriate lifestyle by having house servants. At the same time, the fulfilment of this expectation would be read by his social equals and Columbia society at-large as a sign that the newcomer was willing to accept southern mores. 17
      Lieber, however, did more than just assent to a token conformism. He continued to look out for slaves, and indeed bought several more during succeeding years, accepting and applying typical slave owners' standards in the process. Thus, for "the business" of purchasing a slave he went to Richmond to no avail, but intended "to look about in Washington."29 Several weeks later he wrote his wife, again from a businessman's perspective: "I have seen a boy here, who from mere appearance pleases me exceedingly, about 14 or 15 years old, lively etc. But the man a small tavern keeper asks $700; of course I would not give more than $500, provided he pleases me upon farther inquiry. For less it is not well possible to get a boy."30 Lieber's next letter reveals that he, like a slave trader, was familiar with the usual criteria for judging a slave's value. When offered a male slave for purchase, he investigated his bare back and found fresh scars and, on another occasion, checked his teeth.31 He continued to look for an opportunity on his way back home, stopping over in Fayetteville, North Carolina, but was not successful there either. When he wrote his wife about his intention, he used the word "servant"instead of "slave," an indication that he had quickly adopted this southern euphemism.32 18
      All the while Lieber was painfully aware of the contradictions he lived. Again and again there were occasions, especially when he witnessed the ill treatment of slaves, that caused him, often with a grain of self-pity, both to complain of his fate to be professionally tied to the South and to want to break free of his ambivalent situation. Still under the impact of a scene he had witnessed in Washington, D.C., he wrote his wife:
I write with a heart full of grief and shame and horror. This morning I went to see the President. Not far from his house I saw a group of well-dressed negros [sic], loudly calling while one of them screamed and groaned and beat himself. I hurried toward them asking what was the matter, supposing at the time the man had been seized with the cholera. Only think said a woman, he just came home and found his house empty—wife, children—all gone. They have carried them to Georgetown. Her master sold them all, and he did not know a word of it. My God, my God! And this is suffered [sic]? And slavery yet defended! Oh God, what a black thing is man! My heart bleeds too much.33
 Often Lieber would conclude that he must leave the South, that he could not let his family live under such conditions. For example, when he learned of his slave Betsy's and his son Norman's sickness and of a slave's disobedience, he wrote "I loathe the S[outh], I loathe it from the inmost of my heart. And I aver, solemnly ... I'll break that chain, I cannot endure it, I sacrifice body and soul of all who are dearest to me."34 At the same time he showed concern for the family's house slaves, asking his wife how they were while he traveled in the North.35 Lieber's reaction to the slave girl Elsa's death, however, is revealing. Concerning Elsa's mother, he "truly sympathize[d] with poor Betsy. How lonely that poor woman is left!" Regarding Elsa he said, "why she is better off. If there is immortality she must have gone to a better state—this I hope; this I cling to." But his grief did not prevent him from also calculating the economic cost: "The pecuniary loss we sustain is also great; considering Betsy's poor health and that no one would wish her alone, we lose, all in all, fully one thousand dollars—the hard labor of a year." Although because of this experience he did not want to buy another girl, he thought it necessary to hire one soon.36		 19
      In his relation to the family's house slaves, Lieber seems to have heeded the principles written down when he purchased Betsy and her daughter Elsa. He was particularly proud—"oh it touched me very much"—when he learned that his son Norman taught reading and writing to their slave Mary, and that the oldest son, Oscar, would soon be asked by their slave boy Henry to do the same for him.37 20
      We are left wondering how Lieber was able to stand this situation in South Carolina for such a long time, given the fact that he recognized clearly the ambivalences in his life. Frequent and regular traveling to, and sojourning in, the North, putting in words these many contradictions, and asking friends to find an adequate job for him in the North, may have helped him hold out for such a long time. And of course there was the position at Columbia College that carried prestige and status. 21
   

LIEBER'S ANALYSIS OF SLAVERY AND RACE

 
      Lieber was not satisfied, however, with merely observing and recording slavery as he encountered the institution in South Carolina. As a scholar with broad interests extending into many fields of knowledge, he also set out to explore the meaning of slavery in all its aspects: historical, philosophical, political, economic, social, and cultural. For this purpose he collected books, pamphlets, and articles from home and abroad that contributed to a thorough analysis of the institution of slavery. In order to get a fairly complete bibliography on slavery, he wrote to several scholars, asking
whether you will favour me with a list of all the books and pamphlets with which you are acquainted, whether for or against it, whether of substantial worth or merely written in the spirit of party pleading, whether of a historical, religious, philosophical or political character; whether relating to domestic slavery or the African slave trade. Important and reported speeches, especially in Congress a Parliament or at conventions of some decisive character are included. If you will add the titles of works on Medieval servitude and ancient slavery and slave trade, as well as the most important passages or works written on the subject in the middle ages you will confer an additional favour.38
 First, he thoroughly researched the writings from antiquity, citing Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero; looked into the legal status of slaves in Egypt, Ethiopia, Athens, Rome, and Constantinople; and cited opinions from the Bible and the Koran. He wondered if "a good history of slavery (not of the slave trade) during ancient times is available."39 Lieber's rejection of Aristotle's definition of "a slave as an animate tool—a tool, an inanimate slave" became central to his critique of slavery. Instead, he identified the slave as "a person—a human being, for he is when in a sound state and adult, a speaking being, and wherever two human beings stand opposite to each other, there are rights and mutual obligations. It is founded in nature, that nature which precedes all right and is the source whence all rights flow."40		 22
      When it came to contemporary practices, Lieber compared the laws and court rulings in other countries such as Brazil, Great Britain, Ceylon, Denmark, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden and in various colonies like Jamaica, Haiti, and Bermuda. He also discussed different measures by which slavery had been abolished abroad. Great attention was also accorded the individual states (for example, Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, and Pennsylvania) and their laws concerning slavery and the slave trade. Lieber astutely registered the declarations of several Christian denominations on slavery, and he emphasized the more lenient attitude toward slavery by the Roman Catholic Church, pointing specifically to the Portuguese in Brazil. His conclusion from such comparisons was unequivocal: "In theory and as to perpetuation our slavery is the harshest system which has ever existed in ancient times or modern."41 When he sat down in 1849 to write a series of five letters to John C. Calhoun under the pseudonym "Tranquillus"—letters that he never sent—he attacked the South for its utter disregard of the practices of "civilised" nations:
Slavery is eminently a state of degradation. All your codes pronounce it as such. It is a state of degradation which disowns the two first elements of all progress and civilisation, for the introduction of which the early nations of Europe and Asia have celebrated their half mythological personages as God-like benefactors—of property and marriage as legal institutions, which slavery annihilates as much as the vilest communism. And how can a state of utter degradation be a good of itself to the degraded or the degrador [sic]? It is a contradiction in terms.42
 He argued instead that all African Americans should rightfully have the status of American citizens.43		 23
      Southerners must have been aware of Francis Lieber's critical views on slavery, since he had already stated them quite openly in his article, "Slavery," in the Encyclopaedia Americana. Not only had he employed natural rights arguments; he had also cited specific abuses, including examples from the southern slave states, conceding only "we believe it is generally admitted that the slave is no where better treated than in the slave-holding states of the Union."44 24
      Already in this early article there appears a sentence that connects the issue of different skin color to the specific degradation imposed by the institution of slavery. Lieber pointed out that the "atrocity [of slavery] ... could never have reached the height that it did, if the color of the slave had not given rise to the idea of his being by nature a degraded being."45 The social and cultural meaning of skin color, the emergence of racism and notions of white supremacy, preoccupied him almost as much as his study of slavery. He asked himself, "What degrades more in the U.S.—colour or slavery?"46 In a long article, "Education in Liberia, and on the Vaunted White Race and the Capacity of the Ethiopian Race in a Letter to the Late Simon Greenleaf," published in the Boston Journal on June 6, 1851, Lieber offered a Humboldtian perspective on racial difference, claiming that the level of education and civilization was a matter of circumstance and opportunity, unrelated to innate capacities.47 Applying a long historical perspective, he scoffed at the idea of the superiority of the white race:
There is a great deal of useless breath spent in the whole discussion.... Superiority of the white race! Since when? Comparatively speaking, the white man's superiority showed itself very late. What was he doing when civilization had made great progress in India—in literature, architecture, government and the useful arts?...what was the white man of Europe doing? Let human sacrifices and barbarous rites of worship answer.... We forget that this proud race has lived for the greater part of its existence in ignominious barbarity.48
 Turning his attention to the United States, and specifically to the slave states, Lieber likewise argued that race was the fundamental reason for enslavement and discrimination. He invented the term "negroism," using it to characterize the source for the degradation of African Americans: "The simple fact is that all and everything concentrates in negroism...the question is not slavery, but negroism. The free negro stands in every consideration here in the South almost on a level with the slave. His freedom does not elevate him, but his negroism—though it consist only in a shade of yellow—degrades him."49 In line with the general interest at the time in "scientific" anthropological investigations of the difference of race, Lieber also asked for
a thorough and extensive, calm, scientific, and unbiassed [sic] investigation of the anatomical and physiological part of the negro race, especially as with us, and compared with the same race as it appears in Africa, formation of the head, formation of the skeleton, deviation in any other respect from the white race, functions, puberty, whether any system is prevalent, weight of the brain, skin, perspiration, prone to what diseases, what passions, moral development, ask schoolmasters whether they are more forward at an early age, children diseases easier or not, what are the diseases on plantations in Virginia, Georgia, Louisiana etc., etc., etc.50
 He himself never engaged in such research, however, confining his scholarly activities to one empirical investigation of the prison population at Sing Sing before he went to South Carolina, and to the extensive reading to which I have referred, trying to stem the tide of "the universal indifference in the U.S. toward the negroes."51		 25
   

FRANCIS LIEBER, AMERICAN CITIZEN

 
      Yet clearly there were limitations to Lieber's humanitarian and natural rights position. In many more ways than he seemed to realize, he had been impacted by his social environment, and not only as a southerner who accepted the institution of slavery for pragmatic reasons. Having been naturalized already in the 1830s after the required five-year waiting period, he was always proud of his status of American citizen, sometimes blaming his fellow Americans, and especially his fellow southerners, for still considering him a foreigner, even though as a professor and scholar he had done so much to educate young students: "I am an American—a better one than many a native. I know I say it boldly but with full conviction, no native American has done more to Americanize American youth than I have."52 His American-ness also meant, however, that Lieber shared prejudices of his time. When Lieber condemned slavery in his book, The Stranger in America, published in 1835, he used words that reveal in a nutshell his limited attitude. There he wrote, "In the abstract, I hold slavery to be,—philosophically, an absurdity, (man cannot become property,)—morally a bane both to the slave and his owner;—historically, a direct violation of the spirit of the times we live in, and, with regard to public economy, a great malady, to any society at all advanced in industry."53 26
      Lieber could sympathize with the plight of the slaves, as is evident in countless observations, some of which were cited above. But he also did not want to compromise what he saw as the high state of civilization that some nations and their white populations had attained. Miscegenation, instances of which he recorded in and around Columbia, was to be prevented because it threatened to dilute hard-won cultural and social accomplishments. When it came to the most personal question, "Would you marry a negro?" Lieber gave an emphatic "No" for an answer.54 And he agreed with many of his liberal contemporaries who worked for the end of slavery that social relations between blacks and whites should be strictly limited. Lieber could not foresee a future United States where emancipated African Americans would continue to live on American soil; at least in the 1830s he favored emigration and territorial separation. 27
      And yet, given his principled "abstract" natural and constitutional rights convictions, Lieber finally, and very belatedly, made a choice to leave the South. This move entailed several important reorientations, including Lieber's now public opposition to slavery, which he brought to the service of the Republican Party and its administrations. Perhaps Lieber's most important legacy was his contribution to the development of international law when he was commissioned to lay down a code for the conduct of armies during war—in this case during the American Civil War.55 Probably because of both his knowledge and experience of slavery, he specifically included rules for the protection of people of color, explaining that "slavery, complicating and confounding the ideas of property, (that is of as 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," and thus a fugitive slave, "once received and protected under the shield of the Law of Nations,...can never be returned into slavery or given up to the enemy." Finally, he articulated a fundamental principle of international law: "The Law of Nations knows of no distinction of color, and if an enemy of the United States should enslave and sell any captured persons of their army, it would be a case for the severest retaliation, if not redressed upon complaint. The United States cannot retaliate by enslavement; therefore death must be the retaliation for this crime against the Law of Nations."56 28


NOTES

1.  Slavery—Notebook, January 10, 1836; the account of the purchase is on pp. 1–4, Lieber's justification on p. 4, Mathilda's physical reaction on p. 5, in Lieber Papers (hereafter LP), LI 28, Huntington Library, San Marino, California, trans. H.K. The original German version reads "Gründe warum wir sie kauften":

  1. Wo Sklaverei existiert, ist es weit besser eigene Sklaven als gemiethete zu haben. Sie fühlen zum Herrn Anhänglichkeit, weil sie ganz von einem abhängen, u der Herr fühlt nicht nur mehr Interesse für sie, sondern kann auch etwas für sie thun, sie zu guten Sitten gewöhnen etc.; während man über gemiethete Sklaven keinen Einfluβ hat.
  2. Es ist kein Unrecht da Sklaven zu haben wo Sklaverei existiert, u wo keine Emanzipation stattfindet. Wir wissen wir wollen sie gütig behandlen [sic], u sie sollen es bei uns so gut haben, wie sie es irgendwo haben könnten. An wen, u wohin wäre die Mutter nicht vielleicht auch verkauft!
  3. Wir wollen gute Diener aus ihnen machen; sie zur Reinlichkeit anhalten
  4. Gemiethete Sklaven wechseln fortwährend, u sie selbst mögen weit lieber bei ihrem Herrn als bei andern sein. Ein guter Sklave haβt verkauft oder vermiethet zu werden.
  5. Wir glauben es wird uns wohlfeiler zu stehen kommen.
  6. Math. will die Sklavin tüchtig erziehen.

2.  Ibid., 5.

3.  There is conclusive evidence that some Germans also became slaveholders, however few in numbers. Terry Jordan offers a socioeconomic explanation for the low percentages that he found in eastern Texas, arguing that German farmers were recent arrivals and therefore had not yet acquired the necessary capital to purchase slaves. Walter Kamphoefner found twenty-eight slaveholders out of one thousand heads of family in the two Missouri counties that he studied, several of whom later joined the Republican Party. While it is evident that Germans did indeed participate in slaveholding, one still needs to account for the relatively low percentages. Thus, Clement Eaton gives significantly lower percentages of slaveholders in western Virginia counties with a high German American population rate as against neighboring counties with a population of other ethnic background. Cf. Terry G. Jordan, German Seed in Texas Soil: Immigrant Farmers in Nineteenth-Century Texas (Austin, TX, 1966); Walter Kamphoefner, The Westfalians: From Germany to Missouri (Princeton, NJ, 1987); and Clement Eaton, The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South (New York, 1964), 239.

4.  Thus, African American leaders voiced their resentment and outrage against the open hatred and violence often emanating from white workers—usually Irish immigrants—that sometimes erupted into mob action and murders, including lynchings, of black Americans. In contrast to their unanimous condemnation of the Irish, African Americans held a more differentiated view of German immigrants. James McCune Smith, in his lecture on German immigration in Rochester at the end of 1853, gave a favorable description of the character of German immigrants, describing them as hardworking, intelligent, competent, and as having higher skill levels than the average American. Frederick Douglass's views were even more positive. Not only did he praise the "many noble and high-minded men, most of whom, swept over by the tide of the revolution of 1848, have become our active allies against oppression and prejudice"; he even maintained that "a German has only to be a German to be utterly opposed to slavery. In feeling, as well as in conviction and principle, they are anti-slavery." Douglass's positive opinion was shaped by his personal experience, i.e., his close contact with the radical German immigrant community in New York City and Hoboken, New Jersey. See James McCune Smith, "The German Invasion," Anglo-African Magazine 1 (February—March 1859): 49–51, 86. On Douglass, cf. Tamara Felden, "Frauen Reisen: Zur literarischen Repräsentation weiblicher Geschlechterrollenerfahrung im 19. Jahrhundert" (PhD diss., University of Alabama 1991); T. H. Pickett, "The Friendship of Frederick Douglass with the German, Ottilie Assing," Georgia Historical Quarterly 73, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 87–105; T. H. Pickett, "Perspectives on a National Crisis: A German Correspondent Reports on America, 1853–1865," Tamkang Journal of American Studies 4, no. 3 (Spring 1988): 6–15; William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York, 1991), 183–86; and H. Keil, "German Immigrants and African Americans in Mid-Nineteenth Century America," in Enemy Images in American History, ed. Ragnhild Fiebig-von Hase and Ursula Lehmkuhl (Providence, RI, 1998), 137–57. For a general evaluation of African American leaders' view of European immigration, see Jay Rubin, "Black Nativism: The European Immigrant in Negro Thought, 1830–1860," Phylon: The Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture 39, no. 3 (Fall 1978): 193–202.

5.  Thus, job competition between German immigrants and African Americans was low in Buffalo. Cf. James Oliver Horton and Hartmut Keil, "African Americans and Germans in Mid-nineteenth Century Buffalo," in Free People of Color, by James Oliver Horton (Washington, DC: 1993), 173.

6.  Randall Miller, "The Enemy Within: Some Effects of Foreign Immigrants on Antebellum Southern Cities," Southern Studies 24, no. 1 (Spring 1985): 34, 36, 40; Randall Miller, "Introduction," in States of Progress: Germans and Blacks in America over 300 Years, ed. Randall Miller (Philadelphia, 1989), 10–11; Ira Berlin and Herbert G. Gutman, "Natives and Immigrants, Free Men and Slaves: Urban Workingmen in the Antebellum American South," American Historical Review 88, no. 5 (December 1983): 1175–1200; Nancy Bertaux, "Structural Economic Change and Occupational Decline among Black Workers in Nineteenth-Century Cincinnati," in Race and the City: Work, Community, and Protest in Cincinnati, 1820–1970, ed. Henry Louis Taylor, Jr. (Urbana, IL, 1993), 126–55. See also the observation by James Oliver Horton and Stacy Flaherty:

There was strong opposition to blacks employing any skills they did possess. White employers who were willing to hire blacks in skilled jobs often faced extreme censure from those white workers who saw themselves in direct competition with African American labor. Trade associations, dominated by German and, to a lesser extent, Irish immigrants, not only forbade black membership but also pressured white businesses not to take on black workers in any but 'appropriate'—that is, low-level and unskilled—employment. ("Black Leadership in Antebellum Cincinnati," in Race and the City, 87)

7.  For a general introduction to the literature, cf. Robert R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, vol. 1, The Challenge (Princeton, NJ, 1959); Otto Vossler, Die amerikanischen Revolutionsideale in ihrem Verhältnis zu den europäischen untersucht an Thomas Jefferson (Berlin, 1929); Hildegard Meyer, Nordamerika im Urteil des deutschen Schrifttums bis zur Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Eine Untersuchung über Kürnbergers "Amerika-Müden." Mit einer Bibliographie (Hamburg, Germany, 1929); and Paul C. Weber, America in Imaginative German Literature in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1929). Also, see Rolf Engelsing, "Deutschland und die Vereinigten Staaten im 19. Jahrhundert. Eine Periodisierung," Die Welt als Geschichte 18 (1958): 139; Günter Moltmann, Atlantische Blockpolitik im 19. Jahrhundert. Die Vereinigten Staaten und der deutsche Liberalismus während der Revolution von 1848–49 (Düsseldorf, Germany, 1973), 39; and Eckhart G. Franz, Das Amerikabild der deutschen Revolution von 1848/49. Zum Problem der Übertragung gewachsener Verfassungsformen (Heidelberg, Germany, 1958), 105ff.

8.  The term was used by historian Friedrich von Raumer; it is quoted in Meyer, Nordamerika, 44.

9. 

I believe it was in New York where a Protestant preacher was so outraged about the way the black people were being mistreated that he married his own daughter to a free Negro to spite the horrible prejudice. As soon as this true Christian deed became publicly known, the people stormed the preacher's house, and only by fleeing was he able to escape death; but his house was demolished, and the preacher's daughter, the hapless victim, was taken by the mob and forced to suffer the fury. She was ... stripped stark naked, painted with tar, rolled around in the feathers of a mattress which had been torn open for the occasion, and, thus tarred and feathered, was dragged through the town and ridiculed. (Heinrich Heine, "Ludwig Börne. Eine Denkschrift," quoted in Harmut Keil and John B. Jentz, eds., German Workers in Chicago: A Documentary History of Working-Class Culture from 1850 to World War I [Urbana, IL, and Chicago, 1988], 349)

10.  Helmut de Terra, "Studies of the Documentation of Alexander von Humboldt," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 102, no. 2 (April 1958): 136–41, 561ff., and 102, no. 6 (December 1958): 560–89; Helmut de Terra, "Alexander von Humboldt's Correspondence with Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 103, no. 6 (December 1959): 783–806; Helmut de Terra, Humboldt: The Life and Times of Alexander von Humboldt, 1769–1859 (New York, 1955); Richard Henry Stoddard, The Life Travels and Books of Alexander von Humboldt (New York, 1854). I am especially indebted to Philip S. Foner, ed., Alexander von Humboldt on Slavery in the United States (Berlin [1981]).

11.  The Essai politique sur l'île de Cuba was published in Paris in 1826; the Spanish edition, Ensayo Político sobre la Isla de Cuba, followed a year later. See also Foner, Alexander von Humboldt, 19.

12.  Alexander von Humboldt, Kosmos, vol. 1 (Stuttgart and Tübingen, Germany, 1845), 385, trans. H.K.

13.  Foner, Alexander von Humboldt, 23ff. In an interview for the Evening Post (March 24, 1855), the then eighty-five-year-old Humboldt expressed his admiration for the American political system, but added: "In one respect, however, you are much worse off than when I was there.... For 30 years you have not made any progress about slavery. You have gone backward, very far backward in every respect. I especially refer to the law of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act.... In Europe you will also find bad things. But I tell you you will not find anything half as bad as your system of slavery, and I know what slavery is like in your country." The preceding quote is taken from the German-language paper Louisiana Staats-Zeitung, May 17, 1855, trans. H.K. Upon his death Alexander von Humboldt was honored by the National Anti-Slavery Standard for his consistent antislavery views. The weekly devoted two issues to Humboldt, in which his compiled opinions on slavery were reprinted. These were the issues of June 8, 1858 and July 2, 1859. Excerpts are reprinted in Foner, Alexander von Humboldt, 56–58.

14.  Heinrich Heine, Werke und Briefe, vol. 4, ed. Hans Kaufmann (Berlin, 1961), 368, quoted in "Introduction," Reports from America in German Newspapers, 1828 to 1865, ed. and trans. Maria Wagner (Stuttgart, Germany, 1985), x.

15.  The number of reports in the biweekly journal Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser is a good indicator of Assing's increasing prominence as a correspondent. This journal, like the Allgemeine Zeitung, came out of the publishing house of Cotta, and Assing's articles were also printed in the biweekly. In 1854 only six of sixteen reports on the United States in the Morgenblatt were written by Assing; in 1857 and 1858, twenty-four of twenty-eight articles were Assing's, and in 1859 and 1860 all but one were written by her. Before 1855 the correspondents for the Allgemeine Zeitung had included Francis Lieber, Francis Grund, and Friedrich Münch. Cf. Wagner, Reports from America.

16.  Thus, she wrote a report on John Brown's Harpers Ferry raid that was full of insider information which she could only have received through Douglass and his associates. Cf. Tamara Felden, "Frauen Reisen," 235ff. See also the biographical material on Ottilie Assing in Maria Diedrich's book on the relationship between Ottilie Assing and Fredrick Douglass, Love across Color Lines: Ottilie Assing and Frederick Douglass (New York, 1999).

17.  Cf. Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser, June 4, July 3, and September 10, 1861.

18.  Heike Paul, Kulturkontakt und Racial Presences: Afro-Amerikaner und die deutsche Amerika-Literatur 1815–1914 (Heidelberg, Germany, 2005).

19.  Francis Lieber, The Stranger in America: or, Letters to a Gentleman in Germany, Comprising Sketches of the Manners, Society, and National Peculiarities of the United States (Philadelphia, 1835), 291.

20.  Typical are some questions Lieber wrote down in his Slavery Scrapbook (LP, LI 29) between 1837 and 1845, to some of which he added short answers:

Can a negro sell himself? Why is it disreputable all over the South to be a slave dealer—so much so that it is mentioned of a person as something fearful.... Why does the Constitution never mention the word.... Why are you the only community in the world that speaks eternally of the peculiar institution.... Why must you always draw from most distant and most heterogeneous nations, never from advanced, civilized.... You are for free trade, yet slavery the very negation of it.... Free men of Colour in S.C. - In what does his position differ from that of the slave, besides his right to the produce of his own labour?—Can he make a will? Yes—Does the law acknowledge his marriage or is there no difference between legitimate and illegitimate free children of colour?—The law does acknowledged [sic] his marriage, and a difference between his legitimate and illegitimate children. Can he testify upon oath for or against coloured free or slave people? No.—Can he testify in cases touching white people? No.—Does the law distinguish between actions performed by white against white and those done by white against free people of colour? Civil, penal. No.—Can the free coloured man sue the white man debt? He can.—Can coloured & white contract between themselves? Yes.—Can they own slaves? Yes.—Are they under peculiar notice (police?)?"
Even more extensive is his list of questions, extending over nine pages, when he became interested in the condition of slaves in Puerto Rico.

21.  Slavery—Notes, LP, LI 29.

22.  Slavery—Notebook, ibid., LI 28, trans. H.K.

23.  Lieber recorded the talk he had with President Preston of Columbia College concerning the students' singing of an African American song:

Columbia, S.C. Oct. 31. 1848—Last night Pres. Preston at my house. Students singing a negro song. I asked what it was. He told me that they were just now singing a Tennessee negro song; branched out and said that the negroes had a song of wide wailing accompanied by the clangor of chains when carried by slave dealers in long gangs from home; that (many years ago) it was such a song and this rattling of chains by a gang passing the window of Randolph, that induced the latter to sit down and write a resolution to abolish slave trade in the District of Columbia. (Slavery Scrapbook, ibid., LI 29)

24. 

Task work means in the slave states the work of the slaves by task, that is, a task is given to each for the day. This done, he may go home. The overseer or rather the driver places sticks in the ground, which mark out the plot of land which forms the task for the day. Families of negros [sic] help each other; if the husband has finished his task, he assists the wife, or daughter, son etc. It is common for them to have finished the task by one or two o'clock or three, when they return to attend to their own affairs—their garden, household, etc. All work cannot be done by task, as is natural, but whereever [sic] it can be done, it has been found that task work is the easiest for the negro and most productive for the planter. (Americanisms, Anglicisms, etc., LP, LI 36)
One of the difficulties arising out of our slavery is that the coloured mechanics, free and slave, underwork the white mechanics. Somehow or other the coloured mechanics—especially the free ones—live better, dress more dandyishly, keep horses etc. and work sheeper [sic] although at the same time perhaps often not as well as the white. The reason is, I believe, that, they live in less respectable quarters, pay nothing for the education of their children, and—their wives earn frequently more money, in a decent or indecent way—as laundresses, mantuamakers or as prostitutes. At any rate the fact is &c. There is much discontent here among the white mechanics. (Slavery Scrapbook, ibid., LI 29, written after 1849)

25.  Slavery Scrapbook, ibid., LI 29, 39. On this page he also recorded slaves' wages: "Carpenters here, and bricklayers, receive from their master 25 cts. to find themselves, but when sick they go home. Two dresses i.e. shirt, jacket, pantal./shoes (about 4 pair). Hats irregular—The master earns by them if mechanics 30$ a month—Cook from 7 to 10$, generally 8 a month.—House maid $ 7.- for which they are clothed and medicined [sic] by the master."

26.  Americanisms, Anglicisms, etc., ibid, LI 36. Lieber called the term "sun-down" a "niggerism." For Lieber's detailed observations on black language, cf. Stuart Davis, "'Is This Negroish or Irish?' African American English, the Antebellum Writings of Francis Lieber, and the Origins Theory," American Speech 78, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 285–306; and Stuart Davis, "Observations Concerning African-American English in the Writings of Francis Lieber," in Francis Lieber and the Culture of the Mind, ed. Charles R. Mack and Henry H. Lesesne (Columbia, SC, 2005), 86–100; "The negroes always assign their names themselves, like Venus, Phoebe, Diana, after aunts, cousins, etc. Initially they were probably given to the imported Africans." Slavery—Notebook, LP, LI 28, 6, trans. H.K.

27.  Ibid. The italicized words are in German, translation by H.K.

28.  Michael O'Brien has written extensively, critically, and conclusively on Lieber's compromising and ambivalent involvement. See his "'A Sort of Cosmopolitan Dog': Francis Lieber in the South," Southern Review 25, no. 2 (Spring 1989): 308–22, adapted and published in Michael O'Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860, vol. 1 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004), 73–87. See also Frank Freidel, Francis Lieber, Nineteenth-Century Liberal (1947; repr. Gloucester, MA, 1968), esp. 223–58; and Frank Freidel, "Francis Lieber, Charles Sumner, and Slavery," Journal of Southern History 9 (February 1943): 75–93.

29.  Francis Lieber, letter to his wife Mathilda, Richmond, VA, July 25, 1837, LP, LI 4717.

30.  Francis Lieber, letter to his wife Mathilda, Washington, DC, September 8, 1837, ibid, LI 4734.

31.  Francis Lieber, letter to his wife Mathilda, Washington, DC, September 12, 1837, ibid., LI, 4735; O'Brien, Sort of Cosmopolitan Dog, 310.

32.  Francis Lieber, letter to his wife Mathilda, Fayetteville, NC, September 25, 1837, LP, LI 4741.

33.  Francis Lieber to his wife Mathilda, Washington, DC, August 2, 1850, ibid., LI 4876.

34.  Francis Lieber to his wife Mathilda, Boston, August 14, 1838, ibid., LI 4754.

35.  E.g., Francis Lieber to his wife Mathilda, Schenectady, NY, July 30 and 31, 1841, ibid., LI 4765.

36.  Francis Lieber to his wife Mathilda, New York, September 1 and 4, 1841, ibid., LI 4769.

37.  Lieber related the matter to his wife Mathilda:

Mary had been sowing [sic] in the piazza and put the sheet and her work on a chair. I went, put it on the ground, to seat myself, and found in the sheet a spelling book. At dinner I asked her whether she could spell. Yes, Sir. And how did you learn it? Master Norman taught me the ABC and spelling. When? When I was sowing in the nursery, he would come and teach me, when I begged him. Is this not to You [Matilda] as deeply touching as to You [sic]. It is a most lively picture in my mind. I wish I could draw it.... The dear boy [Norman] I found, has taught Mary to spell. Oh it touched me very much. (Francis Lieber to his wife Mathilda, Columbia, SC, March 3, 1844, ibid., LI 4793)
He also wrote that "[Henry] has settled it in his mind that Master Norman is going to teach him reading, while Betsy says: 'I shall get Master Oscar to do it', making free and certain" (Francis Lieber to his wife Mathilda, Columbia, SC, June 11, 1845, ibid., LI 4836).

38.  Slavery—Notes, LP, LI 29. See also German Poetry, ibid., LI 34.

39.  Inquirenda, ibid., LI 85, trans. H.K.

40.  [Columbia, South Carolina, 1849?], ibid., LI 461. Lieber's argument here was definitive:

Aristotle does not define a slave, but a domestic animal. An ox, an ass, a mule—these are animate tools, and a tool is an inanimate ox, ass or mule, but the slave is a man, and has always been acknowledged so in ancient and modern times. An ox is absolute property. I can knock him on the head, for whatever purpose I choose, but if I were (2.) to kill a slave, however urgent the desire of a teacher of anatomy should be to have a subject for demonstration, I should commit murder and be punished as murderer by the laws of every state in the Union—and most justly so.

41.  Slavery—Notebook, LP, LI 28. There are many more such judgments over the course of the years, e.g., an early verdict written in 1834: "In the abstract, I hold slavery to be,—philosophically, an absurdity, (man cannot become property,)—morally a bane both to the slave and his owner;—historically, a direct violation of the spirit of the times we live in, and, with regard to public economy, a great malady, to any society at all advanced in industry." Lieber, Stranger in America, 289.

42.  Five Letters to the Hon. John C. Calhoun On the Present Slavery Question, By Tranquillus, Letter First, LP, LI 1044.

43.  American Citizenship, ibid., LI 281.

44.  Cf. "Slavery," Encyclopaedia Americana, vol. 11 (Philadelphia, 1832), 432.

45.  Ibid., 433.

46.  Slavery Scrapbook, LP, LI 29, 68.

47.  For Humboldt's position on race, cf. Hartmut Keil, "Alexander von Humboldt, The German Immigrant Community, and Antebellum Politics," Przeglåd Polonijny, Polska Akademia Nauk 31, no. 4 (Cracow, Poland, 2005): 7–21.

48.  Education in Liberia, LP, LI 23. This folder contains a copy of the article, as printed in the Boston Globe, which Lieber edited thoroughly, correcting it and adding remarks at the margins.

49.  Slavery Scrapbook, ibid, LI 29, ca. 1850.

50.  Notebook—Verschiedenes, ibid., LI 31, 41. See also Education in Liberia, ibid., LI, 23.

51.  Notebook—Verschiedenes, ibid., LI 31, 64.

52.  Francis Lieber, letter to Mills, February 1, 1855, Copies of Letters 1845–1855, ibid., LI 26.

53.  Lieber, Stranger in America, 289 (italics added).

54.  Slavery—Notes, LP, LI 29.

55.  Cf. "Part Three. Thoughts on Armed Conflict," in Francis Lieber and the Culture of the Mind, ed. Mack and Lesesne.

56.  Paragraphs 29, 30, and 44, Code for the Government of Armies in the Field, LP, LI 182. See also Code of Law of War on Land 1862, LP, LI 183, and Lieber's memorandum to General Halleck on how to treat people of color and runaway slaves during the war, Lieber to Halleck, August 10, 1862, ibid., LI 1759.

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