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“Detainees,” by Joseph R. Stromberg
The Bush II Administration has experienced, or created, some confusion in the matter of prisoners taken in the ongoing “war.” This is not entirely without antecedents, some of them tracing back to our very own War of the Roses (floruit 1861-1865). I refer of course to the War of Secession. All my life I have heard the question, posed by outsiders, “Why do they keep fighting that old war?” It is a good question, especially in the form, “Why do Yankees keep fighting that old war?” I can say this with little rancor and with no wish, right now, to open up debate on the merits of the case and whether the better side won, and so on. The All-Changed Post-9/11 climate has raised this question in new ways and whittled it down to a point sharper than the average Neo-Con’s wit. Within days of Nine Eleven, sundry pundits, historians, and neo-cons without portfolio were appealing to the “best” in American traditions, with the “best” understood as a truckload of post- or supra-constitutional abuses undertaken in major wars by strong presidents. Much was heard of Abraham Lincoln conjuring up numerous ways of dealing with dissent and opposition, while brooding over his duty to re-found the union. These ways are now gilded, or at least brazen, “precedents.” There were allusions to the 15,000 or so “Copperheads” imprisoned without warrant, charges, or any hint of legal ground, in the north. Suspension of the Bill of Rights was mooted. Less was said about prisoners of war, until numbers of captured Taliban began turning up in Cuba in those moronic orange jumpsuits. There were those who brought up the Geneva Convention, but the administration waved that aside while simultaneously juggling several theories about the status of the... no one knows... “detainees,” perhaps.
This helps explain Semmes’s indignation over the other side’s pragmatic outlook, as displayed upon the sinking of the Alabama by the USS Kearsarge off Cherbourg on the English Channel on June 19, 1864. It wasn’t just that he lost his ship; there were principles at stake. I shall not discuss the battle; Semmes does that ably and with great style. It is enough to say that, with his ship damaged beyond hope of escape or recovery, Semmes struck his colors. He writes: “The Alabama was sunk in open daylight – the enemy’s ship being only 400 yards distant – and ten of my men were permitted to drown. Indeed, but for the friendly interposition of the Deerhound, there is no doubt that a great many more would have perished” (Raphael Semmes, Memoirs of Service Afloat During the War Between the States (reprint, 1987), p. 759). This was in direct violation of the existing rules of naval warfare. John A. Winslow, Captain of the Kearsarge, excused himself by reporting that he had feared a Confederate “ruse.” Writing to advise Charles Francis Adams, US Minister to London, on what he should say to Lord John Russell, US Secretary of State William H. Seward said, “it was the right of the Kearsarge that the pirates should drown,” unless they somehow saved themselves, or were saved by the Kearsarge as a matter of policy, but in any case “without the aid of the Deerhound” (p. 762, Semmes’s italics). Semmes says, rather dryly, “the American war developed ‘grand moral ideas,’ and Mr. Seward’s, about the drowning of prisoners, was one of them” (p. 776). That Semmes and his crew were prisoners was the natural assumption of the pragmatic union-savers. Charles Francis Adams, a real son of a President, wrote Secretary Seward on June 21 in some excitement, complaining about the “conduct of the Deerhound” and asking whether he could demand “the surrender of the prisoners” (p. 765). A private vessel had rescued drowning men, taken them ashore in a neutral country, and the US representatives wanted “their prisoners”! There was really nothing to be said. Shortly, Adams got his instructions and made his demands. Lord John Russell’s reply performed, in effect, an indelicate surgery on Adams. As if politely correcting an especially dull schoolboy, Russell restated the prevailing rules of naval engagement and concluded that the captain of an English yacht “was not under any obligation to deliver to the captain of the Kearsarge the officers and men whom he had rescued from the waves” (p. 766). Russell rubbed in salt by saying that there was no treaty between the US and Britain applicable to the case. Semmes held that as the Kearsarge never had his crew in hand, the latter were never prisoners. The union-saves maintained that if they had accorded belligerent status to the Confederacy in any respect, this flowed solely from their great kindness or their considered policy. At sea, the Northern government took the line that Confederate raiders were mere “pirates.” Semmes comments: “It did not occur to the wily Secretary, that, if we were ‘pirates,’ it was as competent for Great Britain to deal with us as the United States; and that, on this very ground, his claim for extradition might be denied...” (p. 778). Seward intimated that John Lancaster, owner of the Deerhound, had been turned from his duty to hand over the “prisoners” by money tendered him by Semmes. The latter comments that it “was quite natural” for Seward to “suppose that money and stealings had had something to do with Mr. Lancaster’s generous conduct. The whole American war, on the Yankee side, has been conducted on this principle of giving and receiving a ‘consideration’ and on ‘stealings’” (p. 779). It mattered a great deal to Semmes whether or not he and his men were prisoners, even in theory. For in the Northern government’s mind, they would not have been real prisoners of war, but pirates liable to be hanged. The US government has had difficulty, at times, with the existing rules of war. The Spaniards were a real enemy in 1898, but the Filipinos in the so-called Philippine Insurrection (the sequel) were bandits to be killed out of hand. In World War I, the US treated Germans as real soldiers but compensated for this by treating the German government as illegitimate. At best, there has been a certain reluctance on the part of the United States to accord its enemies any legitimacy. That reluctance reflects a kind of moral imperialism whose first great victory was over the Southern states. But it makes it hard for policy-makers to decide just what the status of defeated, captured enemies is. Just imagine: All that moral grandeur embodied in one government, and one government alone. I have only pointed out a persistent syndrome. Am I comparing Confederates and Taliban? I think not. Anyway, a host of northern writers and pundits have been doing just that ever since 9/11. Mr.Victor Davis Hanson can’t let a day pass without praising General Sherman for burning and looting his way across Georgia and South Carolina. (As if to prove my point, he has issued another NRO medal to Sherman in his column of April 30.) Other kindly souls have taken to calling Confederates “terrorists” and recommending Mr. Lincoln’s brazen usurpations of power to meet the present situation. I suppose it’s their idea of reasoning by historical analogy. Nonetheless, they have set the terms of discussion. I do wish those fellows would quit fightin’ that old war.
May 1, 2002
Copyright © 2002 LewRockwell.com |
All
this brings me to the colorful memoirs of Admiral Raphael Semmes,
CSN, best known as Captain of the very successful Confederate raider,
Alabama. I should preface this section by saying that, as
an advocate of free markets and commerce, I do not regard attacks
on private property and shipping as a really good idea, even –
or especially – in wartime. (
In
the hands of someone like Semmes, such naval operations were carried
out with maximum adherence to the rules. Some have found him the
model of absurdly outmoded punctilio on the grounds, one reckons,
that Total War was the wave of the future and that the Future must
always be embraced. That’s progress, you know. If the old rules
said that a raider must utter a particular formula, treat those
on board an enemy ship with a certain respect, and stand by to aid
those in danger of drowning once a battle was over, Semmes followed
them. 
Joseph
R. Stromberg [