Présentation de l'éditeur
Pulitzer Prize Finalist
Bancroft Prize Winner
ABA Silver Gavel Award Winner
A
New York Times Notable Book of the Year
In the closing days of 1862, just three weeks before Emancipation, the administration of Abraham Lincoln commissioned a code setting forth the laws of war for US armies. It announced standards of conduct in wartime—concerning torture, prisoners of war, civilians, spies, and slaves—that shaped the course of the Civil War. By the twentieth century, Lincoln’s code would be incorporated into the Geneva Conventions and form the basis of a new international law of war.
In this deeply original book, John Fabian Witt tells the fascinating history of the laws of war and its eminent cast of characters—Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and Lincoln—as they crafted the articles that would change the course of world history. Witt’s engrossing exploration of the dilemmas at the heart of the laws of war is a prehistory of our own era.
Lincoln’s Code reveals that the heated controversies of twenty-first-century warfare have roots going back to the beginnings of American history. It is a compelling story of ideals under pressure and a landmark contribution to our understanding of the American experience.
Extrait
Lincoln’s Code
Chapter 1
The Rights of Humanity
The authorized maxims and practices of war are the satire of human nature.
—Alexander Hamilton, 1780
IN 1754, a rash young officer in the Virginia militia became for a short while the world’s most notorious violator of the laws and usages of war. The officer, a twenty-two-year-old named George Washington, had come to public attention a year before when he made his way through a barely mapped wilderness to deliver a defiant message to the encroaching French. Now, as rumors flew of further French incursions along the Ohio River, Washington went once again into the woods, this time with 160 members of the Virginia militia and a party of Iroquois warriors. At a boulder-strewn glen between the Allegheny Mountains and the junction of the three rivers that form the Ohio Valley’s eastern end, Washington encircled and attacked an unsuspecting French encampment. Firing the first shots of what would become the Seven Years’ War, Washington and his men killed ten Frenchmen and took twenty-one prisoners in less than fifteen minutes. That much is clear, or as clear as such things can be. What happened next, however, has been obscured by controversy for two and a half centuries.
In his official report of the engagement Washington would later write that the French commander, Joseph Coulon de Jumonville, was killed in the initial shooting. But in French accounts, Jumonville was alive when the French company surrendered. According to the French, the entire attack was an outrage. Jumonville, they said, had not been a combatant but an ambassador delivering a message, much like Washington the year before. The French commander, they said, had not resisted the British attack, but had called for a cease-fire. And the French insisted that the attackers had murdered Jumonville in cold blood—that they had assassinated him after the fighting had stopped. In one version of the French story, the British executed Jumonville with a musket shot to the head. In another version, Washington’s Indian ally, the Iroquois leader Tanacharison, did the deed. In full view of Washington and the British, Tanacharison said, “You are not yet dead, my father,” whereupon he drove his tomahawk into the defenseless Frenchman’s skull. Tanacharison’s warriors fell upon the remaining wounded Frenchmen and killed them, too.
Washington’s complicity in the Jumonville affair might have been left shrouded forever in the fog of war. But on a rainy night two months later, Washington committed an error that would haunt him for years to come. Rightly predicting that the main body of French troops would soon descend on them, Washington and his small band of Virginia militia ha
