Sarah Tyson Rorer and America's Food Safety Revolution

Most Americans today rarely think about the basic rules of food safety. Vegetables are washed before cooking. Milk is refrigerated. Kitchen counters are wiped down without much thought. Recipes come with precise measurements and expiration dates guide daily decisions. These habits feel so routine that they appear timeless, but, they are not. Here, Eric Schubert explains the important role of Sarah Tyson Rorer and America’s food safety revolution.

Sarah Tyson Rorer.

At the turn of the twentieth century Americans were navigating a food system changing faster than their understanding of it. Cities were expanding rapidly and food increasingly traveled long distances before reaching consumers. Milk, meat, and produce passed through a growing chain of handlers. Refrigeration remained limited food inspection laws were inconsistent, and germ theory was still filtering into everyday life. The consequences were immediate. Milk carried disease, meat spoiled quickly, and markets varied widely in cleanliness. For many households, the kitchen had become a place of uncertainty rather than comfort.

Long before federal agencies regulated food production and decades before food safety became government policy Americans often turned elsewhere for guidance. One of the most influential voices was Sarah Tyson Rorer, an educator, lecturer, and cookbook author who helped millions understand how food preparation sanitation and nutrition affected health. Though largely forgotten today, she helped shape what became the modern American kitchen.

Mrs. Rorer Arrives

Born Sarah Tyson Heston in 1849, Rorer grew up during a period when food and health were increasingly linked in public thinking. Later accounts often repeated a story that her mother used diet to manage her father’s illness. Whether fully accurate or not it reflected a broader nineteenth century belief that food could function as medicine and that the kitchen played a central role in health.

Her rise began in 1882 with the founding of the Philadelphia Cooking School. While cooking schools existed before Rorer’s institution emphasized something different. It focused on principles rather than recipes alone. Students learned nutrition sanitation household management and food preparation as part of a structured system of instruction. Cooking was reframed as discipline rather than tradition. This aligned with broader changes in American life where expertise standardization and efficiency were reshaping industry medicine and education. Rorer positioned the kitchen within that same modern framework. It was not separate from scientific progress but an extension of it applied to everyday life!

The Kitchen as a Laboratory

Rorer’s influence came from precision and repetition. Earlier recipes often relied on vague measures and inherited assumptions that varied widely between households. A ‘handful’ or a ‘cup’ could differ dramatically depending on the cook. Rorer replaced this uncertainty with standardized instructions and repeatable methods. Ingredients were measured carefully and procedures were written so that results could be reproduced in any home. The goal was consistency and reliability across households that shared no common training. The kitchen in her view should function with the same order and discipline as a laboratory!

In works such as Mrs. Rorer’s New Cook Book and Diet for the Sick she consistently linked food preparation to health outcomes, an example being cleanliness, freshness, and proper handling of ingredients were not optional details. They were essential to preventing illness and supporting recovery.

America's First Food Influencer

Rorer reached audiences far beyond Philadelphia by mastering the expanding media landscape of her time. She wrote for widely-read publications including Ladies’ Home Journal, published cookbooks that circulated nationally, delivered lectures, and conducted cooking demonstrations across the United States. Her advice reached thousands of households simultaneously and helped define how Americans understood domestic responsibility in an age of rapid change.

In effect, she became one of the first nationally recognized food authorities and dieticians in the United States. Her public presence extended to major national exhibitions, including the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis where ideas about modern living and domestic science were showcased on a national stage. By the early twentieth century, “Mrs. Rorer” had become a familiar name in American households.

Before Federal Regulation

Rorer’s career unfolded during a period when food regulation in the United States was still developing. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was not published until 1906, and meaningful federal oversight of food production would take years to fully emerge. In this gap between scientific knowledge and government regulation, education played a central role. It is why “Mrs. Rorer”, in part, was so successful. Again, all these ideas may appear ordinary today but at the time they marked a significant shift in expectations about domestic life.

Conclusion

By the time Sarah Tyson Rorer died in 1937 near Mount Gretna and Colebrook in Pennsylvania, the world she had helped shape was already being reorganized. Domestic science had moved into universities and home economics departments while government agencies assumed larger roles in food regulation and public health. The era of the traveling domestic educator was fading. Her influence remained visible in everyday practice, though. The expectation that recipes should be precise, that kitchens should be sanitary, and that food preparation has direct implications for health, all reflect changes she helped bring into the mainstream. “Mrs. Rorer’ did not invent modern food safety, but she played a central role in teaching Americans how to live with it.

The history of public health is often told through laboratories laws and institutions. Sarah Tyson Rorer reminds us that it was also shaped in kitchens through cookbooks lectures and the daily labor of households adapting to a rapidly changing world. Long before food safety became federal policy it became a daily practice and she helped make that possible. Her significance lay not in generating scientific breakthroughs, but in translating scientific ideas into practical household routines that ordinary families could follow.

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Sources

Levenstein, Harvey. Revolution at the Table The Transformation of the American Diet, Oxford University Press (1988).

Rorer, Sarah Tyson. Good Cooking. Philadelphia: Curtis Publishing Company, (1898).

Rorer, Sarah Tyson. Mrs. Rorer’s New Cook Book Arnold and Company (1902).

Rorer, Sarah Tyson. Diet for the Sick Arnold and Company (1917).

Shapiro, Laura. Perfection Salad Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century, Farrar Straus and Giroux (1986).

The Lexington Intelligencer (August 10, 1917). Sarah Tyson Rorer: Great Food Expert.

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. "Sarah Tyson Heston Rorer." New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed May 31, 2026.

Weigley, Emma Seifrit. Sarah Tyson Rorer The Nation’s Instructress in Dietetics and Cookery American Philosophical Society (1977)

Bio:

Eric Schubert is a public historian, internationally featured genealogist, and human identification expert as seen on Good Morning America, People Magazine, and more. As a White-House Historical Association Next-Gen Leader, his public history work focuses on Presidential history and local biography topics throughout Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. His Master’s Thesis topic from Millersville University of Pennsylvania “Barr Spangler (1822-1922) and the Prohibition Party of Pennsylvania” was awarded by the Pennsylvania Historical Association, he co-wrote the award-winning documentary “The Prospect For Freedom: on Civil Rights Trailblazer W. Miller Barbour (1908-1957) while also organizing the W. Miller Barbour Lecture Series with colleague Abigail Sholes, and his research on Rorer contributed to the new biography “Sarah Tyson Rorer: The Pure Food Movement & Mount Gretna’s Rorer Hall of Cookery”.

Why Were Time Zones Were Created by American Railroads in 1883?

Before November 18, 1883, noon in New York was not noon in Philadelphia. Not noon in Pittsburgh. Not noon in Chicago. Each city kept its own time, measured against the position of the sun directly overhead that town, that day. This was not a flaw. It was how time had always worked. Here, Ali Mujtaba Zaidi looks at the change.

A 1948 map of standard time zones of the United States.

In the US in 1883, the different times in different cites made railroads dangerous.

A passenger leaving Boston in the 1870s carried a watch set to Boston time. At Providence, the station clock showed something slightly different. At New Haven, different again. By the time the train reached New York, a traveler paying close attention had passed through four or five quietly disagreeing versions of the same afternoon. Most people found this mildly irritating. Railroad schedulers found it a genuine operational nightmare.

Conductors often carried small handwritten conversion tables in their breast pockets, noting the difference between their company's internal clock and whichever local time the next station was running on. A few minutes here. Eight minutes there. It sounds trivial. On a single-track line with two trains moving toward each other from opposite ends, it was not trivial at all.

The Fragmentation Problem

By the early 1870s, the United States had somewhere between 50 and 80 separate railroad time standards running simultaneously. Some estimates go higher, depending on how you count regional variations and company-specific practices. No authoritative single number exists. What does exist is a picture of fragmentation serious enough that the Railroad Gazette, which tracked industry operations closely, was publishing regular complaints about it through the 1870s.

The safety concern was specific. Single-track railroads, which described most American rail infrastructure at the time, required trains traveling opposite directions to pass at designated sidings. That coordination depended entirely on agreed timing. If a stationmaster in one town and a stationmaster forty miles away were working from clocks even three or four minutes apart, the margin for error on a high-speed approach shrank considerably.

Collision records from the period are difficult to analyze cleanly. Mechanical failures, poor track conditions, and miscommunication caused most accidents, and historians are rightly cautious about attributing too many disasters to timing alone. But the rail industry itself identified clocking inconsistencies as a contributing factor in enough incidents that by the late 1870s, reform was no longer a theoretical debate. It was an economic and safety priority.

The resistance to solving it was partly political, partly institutional. Each railroad company had built its own internal timekeeping standard, often based on the solar time of its headquarters city. Adopting a rival company's time standard felt, to many managers, like a concession. Who sets the reference clock was also a question about whose city, whose meridian, whose commercial center stood at the center of the network.

The Man With the Proposal

William Frederick Allen did not invent the idea of time zones. Several astronomers and geographers had proposed versions of the concept through the 1860s and 1870s, including the Canadian engineer Sandford Fleming, whose advocacy for global standardized time ran through the same decade. What Allen did was take a workable version of the idea and spend years making it acceptable to the people who actually controlled American rail operations.

Allen was secretary of the General Time Convention, a body representing the major American railroad companies. His position was essentially that of a technical administrator and industry diplomat. He had access to the people whose agreement he needed. He also understood the practical constraints well enough to design a proposal that asked rail operators to give up as little as possible while gaining the coordination they needed.

The compromise he eventually brought to the table divided the continental United States into four time zones, each one hour apart, pegged to specific meridians. Eastern, Central, Mountain, Pacific. The boundaries were drawn to follow existing railroad operating regions as closely as practical, which meant they were not perfectly aligned with longitude in every case. They still aren't.

Some city newspapers resisted. Detroit refused to adopt standard time for years. A handful of municipalities held out on principle, arguing that the federal government had not actually mandated anything, which was technically true. Congress had not passed a law. No executive order had been issued. The railroads, as a private industry consortium, had simply decided on the change and implemented it. The rest of the country followed because the railroad schedule was now the most authoritative clock in most people's lives. If your town clock didn't match the station clock, you would miss your train.

November 18, 1883

At noon Eastern Standard Time on November 18, 1883, railroad station clocks across the country were adjusted. Telegraph operators, who were also the communication backbone of rail operations, had coordinated the synchronization. Some stations had to move their clocks forward. Some had to move them back. In a few cities, the adjustment was significant enough that the same afternoon briefly contained two noons, one solar and one standard, about sixteen minutes apart in some cases.

Chicago's adjustment was memorable enough to get newspaper coverage. The city's clocks were moved back nine minutes and thirty-two seconds to align with the new Central time standard. A reporter for the Chicago Tribune noted that two separate stroke-of-noon signals came from different city clocks that day, and that pedestrians near the Board of Trade briefly stopped to figure out which one to trust.

Most people simply reset their watches and continued with their afternoon.

The federal government took another 35 years to formally recognize what the railroads had created. The Standard Time Act of 1918 made the four-zone system law, largely because the First World War had made coordinating national logistics across incompatible regional times an obvious liability. For those 35 years between 1883 and 1918, standard time in the United States was a corporate convention, not a legal one. Society had adopted it, practically and almost entirely, because it was more convenient than the alternative.

What This Actually Changed

The railroad companies were not trying to reshape how Americans experienced their days. They were not, as some later commentators have suggested, attempting to impose industrial discipline on an agrarian population attached to solar rhythms. That interpretation is not entirely wrong, but it reverses the causation. The companies were trying to stop trainsfrom crashing into each other. The larger social consequences came afterward and were largely unplanned.

Once synchronized time existed as infrastructure, other institutions built on top of it. Factory shift schedules became easier to coordinate between sites. Banks in different cities could agree on a common closing hour. Telegraph servicesthat operated nationally needed a single temporal reference for message timestamps. Each of these adaptations reinforced the standard, made defection from it more costly, and gradually turned a railroad scheduling solution into something that felt like a natural feature of reality.

This is how most large infrastructure changes actually settle into a society. Not through a single dramatic moment of adoption, but through accumulated dependency, each new use case making the underlying standard harder to dislodge.

The Inheritance

The time zone structure that Allen's 1883 compromise created has been modified at the edges many times since. International conferences in the late 19th and early 20th centuries extended the logic globally. Individual countries have shifted zones for political reasons. A handful of places use half-hour or quarter-hour offsets that fit awkwardly inside the original framework. China officially observes a single time zone across a landmass that geographically spans five.

But the basic architecture is the same. The world runs on a grid of standardized longitudinal bands, each offset from a reference meridian by a fixed number of hours, the direct descendant of what four railroad companies and one patient industry secretary agreed to in the autumn of 1883.

Standard time, which most people now experience as an unalterable fact of the physical world, is younger than the telephone. The telephone was patented in 1876. Standard time came seven years later. People alive in 1883 had spent their entire lives in a world where every town kept its own time as a matter of course, where the question "what time is it here?" had a genuinely local answer, and where the idea of a single synchronized clock across an entire continent would have seemed either visionary or absurd, depending on who you asked.

That the change happened within a single generation, driven by the operational needs of one industry, and was absorbed so completely that most people today can't name its origin date, says something worth thinking about. Not about railroads specifically. About how quietly the structures that organize daily life get built, and how invisible they become once they work.

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References

Allen, William F. History of the Adoption of Standard Time. American Railway Association, 1884.

Bartky, Ian R. Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-Century Timekeeping in America. Stanford University Press, 2000.

O'Malley, Michael. Keeping Watch: A History of American Time. Viking, 1990.

Prerau, David. Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time. Thunder's Mouth Press, 2005.

The Historical Insights, Why Time Zones Were Created in 1883: https://thehistoricalinsights.page/2026/04/why-time-zones-were-created-1883.html

About the Author: Ali Mujtuba Zaidi is a civil engineering scholar at Jamia Millia Islamia and the lead researcher for The Historical Insights, an independent publication focused on forgotten logistics, historical infrastructure, and systems history.

The History of the German Colonial Empire Before World War 1

The 19th and the early 20th century were characterized by the major powers of Europe possessing massive, worldwide colonial empires. Often, when people think of colonial powers, popular imagery depicts the British Empire, one of the largest in history, or the French Empire. But as many empires rise and dominate, many more are short-lived but equally as impactful, with one such being the colonial empire of Germany from 1871, when the nation was unified, to the 1stWorld War.

Harrison West explains.

Four German soldiers in a camel patrol in German South West Africa. Attribution: Bundesarchiv, Bild 105-DSWA0095 / Walther Dobbertin / CC-BY-SA 3.0, available here.

The German Empire

Germany lies at the center of Europe, rich in culture and dense history going back to Neolithic settlers thousands of years ago. At the turn of the 20th century, Germany was a constitutional monarchy under the leadership of Kaiser Wilhelm II, with Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg leading the executive, and the parliament (the Reichstag), having limited power. The state capital was Berlin, with cities like Hamburg, Dresden, Cologne and more being large hubs of industry. By 1914, the German Empire was the largest economic power in all of Europe, ahead of nations like Britain in world trade, and becoming a dominant player in the global export of steel and electrical equipment. The empire was one of Europe’s fastest-growing nations, with major population increases, urbanization, and being a leader in the manufacturing of chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and electrical engineering. On the downside, industrial workers faced restricted political rights, leading many to support socialist parties. And internationally, a system of alliances had isolated the country, with poor relations with France, Russia and Britain, but it did have allies in the form of Austria-Hungary, and Germany was pursuing global expansion to secure national prestige, economic resources, and geopolitical power. Another reason was to rival that of the British and the French. Officially proclaimed in the 1880s, by 1914, the German Colonial Empire spanned from the rainforests of Cameroon to the small islands, like Samoa and the Marshalls, deep in the Pacific Ocean.

Colonial administration of the colonies was through either direct decrees from the Kaiser, or, if not imperial, cases could be issued by the Colonial Office, and then the Reichstag could issue laws regarding Germans. Colonial organization and self-governance depending on the influence of the colony.

African Colonies

Kamerun

Kamerun was a protectorate in central Africa, under the leadership of Governor Karl Ebermaier; its territory spans over modern-day Cameroon, Nigeria, Chad, the Central African Republic, Gabon and Congo. The protectorate was first established in August 1884 after German explorers signed a treaty with local chiefs in the region during the scramble for Africa. Over time, the colonial capital shifted three times, with Jaunde (present-day Yaoundé) serving as the capital by 1914. The colony’s main exports were rubber, palm oil, palm kernels, cocoa, and bananas, produced through cash-crop plantations that relied on forced and harsh labor. The infrastructure of the colony comprised two major railways, which the colony relied heavily on as road construction was minimal, and ports such as Duala, with the colonial population being 4.645 million by 1912. Military-wise, there was the Schutztruppe (protection troops), which comprised 1,855 men—mostly Africans soldiers led by German officers—and 1,530 armed police. Inside the colony, German was the official language, but Basaa, Beti, Duala, and other local languages were common. Many local communities fiercely protected their sovereignty, leading to various forms of resistance against the Germans.

Togoland

Togoland was a protectorate in West Africa, at the time under the leadership of Duke Adolf Friedrich of Mecklenburg, from 1912 until August 1914, when Hans Georg von Doering became acting governor. This colony spans modern-day Ghana and Togo, with this colony first being established in the same year as Kamerun, by the same method, during the scramble for Africa. Similar to Kamerun, the colonial capital also shifted three times over the course of its history, with Lomé being the capital since 1897, and considered one of the prettiest cities in West Africa at the time. This colony mainly exported similar goods as Kamerun, but also cotton and coffee, with efforts to make Togoland a cotton-producing hub, but it failed to meet Germany’s needs, and the plantations for these goods were also cash crops manned by forced laborers. Regarding infrastructure, Tongoland possessed three major railway lines connecting Lomé to the colony’s interior, with the capital also being the principal port. The population of the colony was estimated to have numbered roughly 920,000, with the official language being German, but local languages like Ewe, Kotokoli and Kabye were also common, and other European languages such as French and English were used as a trade language. A small police force numbering 1,500 by 1914 was stationed to protect the colony, with this force mainly comprising Africans and very few Germans. Life in the colony varied with traditional structures, beliefs, and practices remaining central to the lives of many, with some local resistance rising to combat the harsh colonial treatment of the Germans.

German East Africa

German East Africa that spans over what is now the modern-day African nations of Tanzania, Kenya, Burundi and Rwanda. By 1914, the colony was under the leadership of Governor Heinrich Schnee, with the colonial capital being the city of Dar es Salaam in present-day Tanzania. The colony was established in 1885 during the scramble for Africa via treaties with local chiefs and sending warships to cement claims against the Sultan of Zanzibar. The main exports of this colony include Sisal, which was the largest source of income for plantations, coffee, rubber and other agricultural products like hides and oil seeds. The majority of these goods were sold to places like Britain and Australia, with only some being shipped back to the German homeland. The main backbone for transportation in the colony was railways, with two main lines, one connecting the capital to the coast, whilst the other connected the ports to the highlands. Roads were present, but mainly used for administrative needs, rather than for the general public. The population of the colony was around 7.7  million, with German being the official language, but many local languages, like Arabic, Swahili and Kirundi, were also commonly spoken. For defense, the Schutztruppe numbered 14,700 men in strength, with 3,000 of them being Europeans. Similar to Togoland, life here was a mixture of traditional, native practices and culture, and brutal German colonial control that prioritized the establishment of cash crops.

German South West Africa

German South West Africa (modern-day Namibia) was the final German colony on the African continent for their overseas colonial empire. The Germans had a presence there as early as 1883, leading to the establishment of a protectorate the next year to prevent British encroachment. By 1914, the governor of the colony was Theodor Seitz, with the colonial capital being Windhuk. The main exports of this colony were diamonds, copper, hides and produce coming from cattle. The transport for this was done by railways, the backbone of transportation infrastructure in the German colonies in Africa, as we have seen, with these rails connecting the interior to ports along the coast. The total population of the colony by 1914 was around as much as 200,000, with the majority being native Africans, and the official language was German, with local languages like Afrikaans and Khoekhoegowab also being commonly spoken. Life in this colony varied, with the indigenous people facing dispossession, forced labor, and genocide, which even led to a genocide in 1904 after an uprising against German authorities. Meanwhile, for German settlers, life was mixed, with settlers celebrating traditional German holidays, including beer and bratwurst culture, but life was often harsh, forcing many to take up many trades. By 1914, the colonial defenses comprised 3,000 soldiers of the Schutztruppe and 6,000  reservists.

Pacific & Asian Colonies

German New Guinea

Moving beyond the lands of Africa, we have the vast Pacific islands, starting with German New Guinea. The Germans claimed the territory in 1884, partly to challenge British interests in the Pacific, and it was originally administered by the  New Guinea Company until 1899, when the state took over control. This territory included the northeastern part of the island (Kaiser-Wilhelmsland), the Bismarck Archipelago, the islands of Buka and Bougainville in the northern parts of the Solomon Islands chain, Palau, the Caroline Islands, Nauru, the Mariana Islands & the Marshall Islands. Regarding the land beyond New Guinea, the Solomons & Bismarck’s, those were bought from the Spanish in the late 1800s. By 1914, the colony was under the administration of Eduard Haber, with the colonial capital being Simpsonhafen (present-day Rabaul) on the island of New Pomerania (New Britain). The main export commodities of this colony were copra, rubber and other products grown in plantations, along with minerals like copper and phosphates. Infrastructure varied tremendously throughout the islands, with a main focus on maritime transportation to trading ports along the coast, but due to the tropical and mountainous environment of New Guinea, road infrastructure was very limited.

By 1914, the population of the colony numbered around 600,000, with the majority being native people, and a fraction being Asian or European, with the official language being German, but Papuan and Austronesian languages were also common in the vast islands. Life amongst the colony varied, with the Germans heavily enforcing plantation expansion, forcing local inhabitants into labor, with coastal and island settlements experiencing some development, European presence remained limited, especially in the interior of New Guinea. German New Guinea itself was defended by a light force of 240 Melanesian Polizeitruppe and 61 German officers, all cantered around protecting Simpsonhafen.

German Samoa

German Samoa was the farthest extent of the German colonial empire, comprising modern-day Samoa; it was nearly double the distance from Germany itself compared to German South West Africa (Namibia). This territory was acquired at the turn of the century, after a civil war saw the Samoan islands divided up between the Germans and the Americans (the British were initially interested but withdrew). By 1914, the colonial capital was Apia on Upolu Island, with the protectorate being under the leadership of Erich Schultz-Ewerth. Similar to New Guinea, the main export was coconut products coming from plantations, with cocoa and rubber also being cultivated and exported as well. German Samoa was considered one of the most well-developed German colonies in the Pacific, allowing the colony to become nearly self-sufficient, with the Telefunken Railway connecting the capital's harbor to Mount Vaea and some roads. By 1914, the population was estimated to be just over 40,000, the large majority of those being Samoans, with German being the official language, but native Samoan was also widely spoken. The Germans co-operated with local chiefs, with the Germans respecting Samoan customs and culture, although they banned activities like gambling. For colonial defense, the islands had an extremely small force of  50 ceremonial guardsmen and an equally small volunteer force.

Kiautschou Bay Leased Territory

The final possession of the German colonial empire was a leased territory in eastern China, established following a military occupation of parts of the Shandong province around the port of Tsingtau (Qingdao), and the signing of a treaty with the Qing securing a 99-year lease for a naval coaling station and economic exploitation in 1898. By 1914, the leased territory was under the administration of Vice Admiral Alfred Meyer-Waldeck, with the capital being the port of Tsingtau. The main export goods of this territory were mostly agricultural products like soy and sesame, but beyond that, coal was also exported widely as well.

Being a vital port for the Germans in the region, the territory’s deep-water port was well built, with a smaller harbor for commercial shipping also being present, a shipyard and dry docks. As well as the Tsingtao-Jinan railway line, which linked the deep-water harbor to the interior of the Shandong province, and lastly, paved and wide streets that are often compared to those in German cities. By 1914, the population was around 200,000, the large majority being Chinese, whilst only a handful of Germans. Life and culture in this territory were characterized by the mixing of Bavarian-style buildings and Western-style services, with Chinese culture, customs and language, similar to the situation in Samoa, even serving as a safe haven for those trying to escape the Boxer Rebellion in 1911. In defense of the territory was the German Navy (Kaiserliche Marine) East Asia Squadron with a few ships and a small garrison force.

The End of Germany’s Empire

Now, to answer the question, what happened to them? And to summarize, when World War 1 began, each one of the German overseas territories and protectorates found themselves occupied by the Entente. Germany’s African colonies were conquered by the British and the French (with Belgian assistance), the Kiautschou Bay Leased Territory was besieged and occupied by the Japanese until the 20s when it was returned to China, Samoa surrendered quickly to New Zealand, Australia occupied German New Guinea, and the Pacific Islands went to Japan as a mandate. The signing of the Treaty of Versailles marked the official end of the German Empire.

With the benefit of hindsight, Germany's attempt at colonialism was poorly handled. Despite holding vast territories across the globe, colonies were managed to benefit a tiny minority of German settlers, while indigenous populations were treated as subordinate. Colonial rule relied on forced labor, was poorly managed, and colonies were not economically successful, providing low returns and often requiring significant state funding for infrastructure and military control.

Interested in European colonialism? Now read about France’s role in Algeria here.

Sources

1.     Michael Stuermer, 2013, THE GERMAN EMPIRE 1871 - 1919, book

2.     James Hawes, 2018, The Shortest History of Germany, book

3.     Helmut Walser Smith, 2020, Germany A Nation in Its Time: Before, During, and After Nationalism, book

George Eastman: The Man Who Put Photography in the Hands of the World

George Eastman (1854-1932) stands as one of the most consequential figures in the history of photography—not because he invented the medium, but because he changed who it belonged to. Through technical innovation, shrewd business strategy, and a stubborn belief in simplicity, he helped move photography from a demanding scientific craft into a shared social habit. In doing so, he reshaped how modern life is documented and remembered, building Kodak into one of the most influential companies of the industrial age.

Brian D’Ambrosio explains.

George Eastman.

Born on July 12, 1854, in Waterville, New York, Eastman grew up in modest circumstances. His father, George Washington Eastman, died in 1862, forcing him to leave school early and help support the family. He found steady work as a bank clerk in Rochester—a job that sharpened his methodical habits but offered little outlet for invention. Photography entered his life in the late 1870s, when he bought equipment for a planned vacation. What he encountered—glass plates, bulky cameras, portable darkrooms, and finicky chemistry—was so cumbersome that it pointed to a different problem. Photography’s greatest obstacle was not artistic skill. It was, perhaps, access.

By then, photography had already evolved through several distinct phases. Since the unveiling of the daguerreotype and calotype in 1839, the medium had advanced in fits and starts. The wet-plate collodion process of the 1850s produced sharper images but required photographers to coat, expose, and develop plates while still wet, often on location. It was exacting work—expensive, technical, and largely confined to professionals. Eastman, working at first with limited support, began to focus less on image quality than on ease of use—a quiet shift that would, indeed, alter the medium’s future.

Success

His first major success came in 1880 with a machine for coating dry photographic plates. Unlike wet plates, these could be prepared in advance, stored, and used when needed. In 1881, he incorporated the Eastman Dry Plate Company in Rochester, laying the groundwork for what would become the Eastman Kodak Company.

The real breakthrough followed quickly. In 1884, Eastman introduced roll film, initially backed with paper, replacing fragile glass plates and making smaller, more practical cameras possible. Four years later, Kodak released its first camera, preloaded with enough film for 100 exposures and marketed with the now-famous slogan, “You press the button, we do the rest.” Customers mailed the camera back for developing, printing, and reloading. With that, nearly every technical barrier fell away.

The effect was immediate. Photography slipped its tripod and chemistry kit and went out into the world—portable, affordable, and within reach of people who had never considered using a camera. In 1889, Kodak introduced transparent flexible film, a development essential not only to still photography but to the emerging motion-picture industry. Early pioneers, including Thomas Edison and his collaborators, relied on such film stock, extending Eastman’s influence into cinema. Photography, once slow and deliberate, began to move—into narrative, into motion, and into mass circulation, perhaps the most far-reaching consequence of his work.

Under Eastman’s leadership, Kodak expanded aggressively in the early twentieth century. The introduction of the Brownie camera in 1900—priced at one dollar—helped fix photography as a mass activity, especially among families and children. Over time, Kodak refined film quality, camera design, and processing systems, dominating the global photographic market. Eastman remained closely involved, insisting on research, vertical integration, and—perhaps most importantly—consumer trust.

He was also ahead of his time in his treatment of workers. Eastman introduced employee benefits that were rare for the era, including pensions, disability coverage, and profit-sharing. A successful company, he believed, owed its workforce more than wages; it owed stability.

Philanthropy

His philanthropy became one of his most enduring legacies. Over his lifetime, he donated more than $100 million—much of it quietly. He was a major benefactor of the University of Rochester, helping elevate it into a leading research institution, and a crucial supporter of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose future he helped secure during uncertain years. He also funded dental clinics for children across the United States and Europe, reflecting a practical belief that preventive care could change lives.

In 1921, he established the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, which quickly became one of the world’s leading conservatories. His giving was direct and purposeful, aimed at education, science, and health rather than personal memorial. Eastman believed wealth carried an obligation: to widen opportunity. That belief was, indeed, borne out in the institutions he helped sustain.

In his later years, the old photography baron suffered from a painful degenerative spinal condition that restricted his mobility. In 1932, at seventy-seven, he took his own life, leaving behind a brief note: “My work is done. Why wait?” By then, his impact on photography—and on American industry—was secure.

Conclusion

George Eastman did not invent photography, but as a proverbial innate captain of industry he permanently altered its course. By simplifying its tools, reorganizing its economics, and placing it in the hands of ordinary people, he helped make photography a common language of modern life. Long after cameras changed shape and film gave way to pixels, his central idea endured: that memory should not belong to the few. It should, indeed, belong to everyone.

Brian D'Ambrosio is the author of Montana Eccentrics, New Mexico Eccentrics, and Italian-Americana: Explorers, Entertainers, and Eccentrics. Available here: Amazon US | Amazon UK

References

George Eastman Museum/Online Collections

PBS/American Experience/George Eastman

Miscellaneous obituaries: Daily Sentinel, March 15, 1932; Passaic Daily Herald, March 15, 1932.

The 1857 Dred Scott Decision

The Dred Scott decision (1857) was critically important in precipitating the Civil War because it invalidated the Missouri Compromise, declared African Americans were not U.S. citizens, and asserted Congress couldn't ban slavery in territories, infuriating the North, galvanizing the Republican Party, and intensifying the national debate, proving to many Northerners the South's "Slave Power" dominance and making compromise impossible. This ruling destroyed the delicate balance between free and slave states, pushing the nation further towards secession and war.

Lloyd W Klein explains.

Dred Scott.

Who Was Dred Scott?

Dred Scott was an escaped slave who sued for his freedom and that of his wife, Harriet, and their two daughters. Scott and his wife claimed their freedom because they had lived in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory for four years as free blacks; in these states, slavery was illegal and the state laws said that slaveholders gave up their rights if they (escaped slaves) stayed for an extended period. When his owners brought him back to Missouri, Scott sued for his freedom: first in Missouri state court, which ruled that he was still a slave under its law, and then in US federal court, which ruled against him, deciding that it must apply Missouri law. He ultimately appealed these rulings to the US Supreme Court. The legal case that forms the basis of Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) is, in fact, a collection of lawsuits initiated in Missouri courts that ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

The main plaintiff was Dred Scott, a previously enslaved individual who had been living as a freed man. The defendant was Irene Emerson and subsequently John F. A. Sandford (the widow of Scott’s owner and her brother). Scott filed a lawsuit for his freedom in the Missouri state court, asserting that he had been taken by his owner into free jurisdictions where slavery was prohibited. Scott had lived for extended periods in areas where slavery was prohibited by law: Illinois (1833–1836) was a free state under Illinois law and Wisconsin Territory (1836–1838) which was governed by the Northwest Ordinance and later the Missouri Compromise, both of which prohibited slavery. Scott contended that his residence in these free regions rendered him legally free, as Missouri had previously acknowledged the principle that residing in a free jurisdiction emancipated an enslaved person.

His full background was crucial to the case. He was born a slave around 1799. In 1818, Scott was taken by Peter Blow and his family to Alabama. In 1830, the family abandoned farming and relocated to St. Louis. Scott was sold to Dr. John Emerson, a surgeon in the U.S. Army. One unresolved controversy is whether Blow passed away before or after the sale was completed. Scott was dissatisfied with Dr. Emerson and attempted to escape, but was eventually recaptured. In 1833, Emerson moved to Illinois, a free state, and in 1837 to the Wisconsin Territory, which was also free. There, he met his wife, Harriet, who was also enslaved, and they married, a union that was not legally recognized among slaves; this fact became another point of contention. Harriet was subsequently sold to Emerson. They had two sons. In 1840, Emerson returned to Missouri, a slave state, and he died in 1842, with the Scotts being inherited by Emerson’s wife, Irene. In 1846, Scott offered Irene $300 to buy their freedom, but she declined; this is another noteworthy aspect, as it demonstrated he possessed his own funds from his labor. In 1846, Mr. Scott sued for his freedom, arguing that living in free states and territories for prolonged periods of time had made him and his wife free.

Scott first sued for freedom in St. Louis Circuit Court. Initially, Scott won his freedom at trial in 1847. On appeal, the Missouri Supreme Court reversed the decision in 1852, ruling that residing in a free territory did not automatically emancipate him (Scott v. Emerson (15 Mo. 576). Scott remained enslaved under Missouri law. Meanwhile, Dred, Harriet and their family lived in Wisconsin. The question was raised whether or not the cases should be heard there, not Missouri, which made it unclear which, if either, state jurisdiction had standing in the case.

The cases then moved to Federal Court In 1853, Dred Scott sued John F. A. Sandford, who had inherited him, in federal court in St. Louis. The Blow family supported Scott’s case financially. Scott argued he was a U.S. citizen and thus could invoke diversity jurisdiction under Article III of the Constitution (allowing a citizen of one state to sue a citizen of another state in federal court). In lower federal courts, he continued to lose but remained living freely in Wisconsin. The federal courts initially split on jurisdiction. Scott appealed to the US Supreme Court in 1856, 10 years after his initial suit. He had been living on his own all of that time. 

The Dred Scott Decision

Legal scholars have traditionally considered the Dred Scott Decision the worst SCOTUS decision in history. Several reasons exist for its poor status in antebellum legal jurisprudence, including the merits of the legal case, its overreaching opinion beyond the case itself (obiter dicta), its inhibition of further legislative compromise on the slavery issue, and its direct influence in precipitating the Civil War. A full comprehension of the legal issues it raised and the catastrophe of its dreadful racial pronouncements are necessary to appreciate its appalling and shocking conclusions. In this regard, it may actually be far worse than the infamous Cornerstone Speech because it supposedly reflected the rule of law.

On March 6, 1857, Chief Justice Roger B Taney read his opinion, speaking for the majority. The United States Supreme Court decided 7–2 against Scott, finding that neither he nor any other person of African ancestry could claim citizenship in the United States, and therefore Scott could not legally bring suit in federal court. On behalf of the majority, Taney ruled that because Scott was considered the private property of his owners, he was subject to the Fifth Amendment, prohibiting the taking of property from its owner "without due process". Hence, Scott's “temporary residence” outside Missouri did not bring about his emancipation, as it would "improperly deprive Scott's owner of his legal property".

This ruling appeared to be in conflict with the provisions of the Missouri Compromise, passed in 1820 that admitted Missouri as a slave state, in exchange for legislation which prohibited slavery north of the 36°30′ parallel except for Missouri. Taney noted that the Compromise's legal provisions was intended to free slaves who were living north of this borderline in the western territories. Taney decided that this requirement constituted the government depriving slaveowners of their property. Therefore, the Missouri Compromise, which had kept the peace for 37 years, was determined to be unconstitutional, even though this finding was unnecessary to the decision in the case. It was also actually moot, because the provisions of the Missouri Compromise forbidding slavery in the former Louisiana Territory north of the parallel 36°30′ north were effectively repealed in the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854.

The decisive elements of the verdict were the determination that slaves were legally designated as property, and that black people could never be US citizens, even if freed as recognized by state laws. Taney’s ruling meant that a man could be recognized as a citizen of a state but not a citizen of the country. But Taney continued: he ruled that slavery could not legally be excluded from U.S. territories or states because it is recognized in the Constitution. 

Minority Opinions

Justice McLean argued that by ruling that Scott was not a citizen, the Court had also ruled that it did not have jurisdiction to hear his case. Consequently, McLean contended that the Court should have simply dismissed the case without further judgment. He attacked much of the Court's decision as obiter dicta (literally: by the way) and thus an opinion that is not legally binding.

Justice Curtis objected to the accuracy of the majority’s historical data, noting that Black men were allowed to vote in five of the thirteen states of the Union at the time of the ratification of the Constitution. He viewed the right to vote as evidence that Black men were already citizens of both their states and of the United States. To argue that Scott was not an American citizen, Curtis wrote, was “more a matter of taste than of law.” 

Taney directly ruled that state citizenship did not accord African-Americans the rights of national citizenship. This seemed to directly contradict Article IV, section 2: "The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States." 

Free Blacks were given full citizenship and voted in some states - but not allowed on juries.  There was no precedent to be a state citizen and not a US citizen. Such a conclusion leads to highly questionable justice. A Black person could, in theory, sue in their own state (for example, Pennsylvania) if an illegal seizure occurred within that state’s borders. Once the person was taken across state lines, state courts lost jurisdiction, and it became a federal case. But that raised a problem if the plaintiff was a black person who wasn’t a citizen of the country.  No one had any idea what to make of this but it appeared as if the free black person had no recourse, and hence there was no remedy for kidnapping across state lines.

Dred Scott and his family lost the case but remained free. The Scott’s were purchased by the owner’s sons, who sold them to Taylor Blow, who manumitted them in May 1857.  A year later, Scott died of tuberculosis. Harriet lived for another 19 years as a free woman in St Louis, dying in 1876. Many people, both then and now, believe that both Scott, who could have just escaped, and the owner, Sandman, saw this as a test case and there was never really any plan to re-enslave them.

Binding Rulings (Ratio Decidendi) versus Obiter Dicta (Not Necessary to the Decision)

The only binding legal ruling in Dred Scott was that Black people are not citizens of the United States, which meant that Blacks, whether free or enslaved, had no standing to sue in federal court. This conclusion was necessary to decide the case — the Supreme Court dismissed Scott’s federal lawsuit on this basis. Dred Scott had no right to sue in federal court because he was not a citizen. Scott could not invoke diversity jurisdiction under Article III of the Constitution.

A central legal principle is that a ruling should be based on legal principles and not give opinions about extraneous questions. Taney went out of his way to give opinions that had nothing to do with Mr. Scott’s suit. These statements were not required to resolve Scott’s claim but became infamous for their political and legal implications:

1.     Congress cannot prohibit slavery in federal territories.

2.     The Missouri Compromise of 1820 was unconstitutional, because Congress had no authority to ban slavery in the territories. Reason: Slaveholders’ property rights are protected by the Fifth Amendment.

3.     Slaves are property under the Constitution.

4.     The Constitution protects slave owners’ property rights across state lines.

5.     Assertions that Blacks were “beings of an inferior order… so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

Despite its immense controversy and broad rejection throughout the North, the Dred Scott decision stood as the prevailing law of the land. Those portions of the decision that were central to the decision, like any SCOTUS ruling, are binding law. The question raised was, were the obiter dicta opinions enforceable? Several states passed laws contradicting the ruling, a form of nullification. Central to the ruling was the Court’s declaration that Congress lacked the power to ban slavery in federal territories. This point, which was not strictly necessary to resolve Dred Scott’s specific case (and thus, technically, "obiter dictum"), had immense political consequences. Although such commentary was not legally binding, Taney and his allies intended it as an authoritative reading of the Constitution. Southern leaders and Democrats quickly treated this territorial claim as settled constitutional doctrine, insisting that slavery was lawful in all federal territories.

Taney’s Flawed Legal Reasoning

The Constitution does not explicitly exclude free Black individuals from citizenship. In fact, at the time of its drafting, several states recognized free Blacks as citizens, granting them rights such as voting and property ownership. Moreover, Black individuals contributed to the nation’s founding; for instance, Crispus Attucks, a Black man, was a casualty of the Boston Massacre, and many others served in the Continental Army. These historical realities directly undermine Chief Justice Taney’s claim that the framers unanimously viewed Black people as outside the political community.

Likewise, Taney’s assertion that Congress lacked authority to restrict slavery in federal territories disregarded both historical precedent and established law. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787—subsequently reaffirmed by the First Congress—prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 similarly regulated the expansion of slavery and had long been accepted as a valid exercise of congressional power.

Taney’s opinion, therefore, was not compelled by the Constitution—it was a partisan, pro-slavery interpretation that projected into the document values which were never explicitly present. The dissenting justices underscored this point, arguing that both citizenship and the regulation of territories were matters traditionally left to congressional and state authority. Many scholars consequently regard Dred Scott as a paradigmatic instance of judicial activism—a case in which the Court inserted itself into a contentious political debate, expanding the reach of slavery instead of addressing only the case at hand. Thus, while Taney’s decision may have reflected the prevailing political influence of slaveholders, it was neither required by law nor morally defensible, even within the context of the antebellum Constitution.

Legal Consequence for Black Americans

The excerpts presented in table 2 demonstrate the harsh language employed by Taney and the majority. Upon examining these statements, the ramifications of Taney’s decision are appalling. This ruling signified that Black individuals were denied acknowledgment as citizens of the United States and would indefinitely remain in that condition. Dred Scott, along with all subsequent Black plaintiffs, was prohibited from filing lawsuits in federal court, nor could they pursue legal actions if the issue crossed state lines, leaving them completely powerless due to their race and status as former slaves. Additionally, slaves are categorized as property protected under the Fifth Amendment, meaning they cannot be taken from their owners without permission. The Constitution was interpreted as institutionalizing the denial of rights based on skin color, a circumstance that cannot be undone. The ruling expressed that the natural or inherent rights of individuals to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were never intended to apply to Black individuals. As a result, Black people are not considered fully human and lack legal equality with white individuals. Simply living in free territory or being independent for a prolonged period would not provide sufficient grounds for their emancipation.

The legal consequences were disastrous. Blacks would have no rights that whites are required to honor. This ruling denies Blacks, whether free or enslaved, the ability to stand in federal court. If no Black individual can ever file a federal lawsuit, they are left utterly powerless. Black individuals would be susceptible to federal crimes committed against them, as they cannot seek justice in a federal court.

The Fifth Amendment

Taney's majority opinion highlighted that enslaved individuals were regarded as property, which meant that the federal government could not intervene in a slave owner's right to transport their property into any territory. The 5th Amendment states that no individual can be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor can private property be taken for public use without just compensation. Taney’s opinion was based on the 5th Amendment's protection of property, explicitly referencing the Due Process Clause. This legal reasoning necessitated two conditions: 1) that slaves possessed none of the natural rights of men, and 2) that the US Constitution legally classified them as property.

Taney contended that enslaved individuals were legally recognized as property under both state and federal law (as safeguarded by the Constitution’s acknowledgment of slavery in provisions such as the Fugitive Slave Clause and the Three-Fifths Clause). Consequently, if Congress enacted a law—such as the Missouri Compromise—that prohibited slavery in federal territories, it would be unconstitutional as it deprived slaveholders of their property (enslaved individuals) without due process of law. He stated: “An act of Congress which deprives a citizen of his property merely because he brought his property into a particular Territory of the United States … could hardly be dignified with the name of due process of law.”

Taney reasoned that enslaved individuals were a type of property recognized by law. Slaveholders were “citizens” entitled to protections under the Fifth Amendment. Thus, any federal law prohibiting slavery in a territory infringed upon property rights without due process. If slaves were considered persons, they could not be deprived of their liberty without due process of law. However, if slaves were deemed “property,” then masters could not be deprived of their property without due process. From the viewpoint of 1789, the only reasonable interpretation of the 5th Amendment was to conclude that slaves were legally not persons.

There was legal precedent for this interpretation.  Justice Story said (in the majority opinion of Prigg vs Pennsylvania 1842), ”We have said that the clause (article 4 section 2) contains a positive and unqualified recognition of the right of the owner in the slave, unaffected by any state law or legislation whatsoever, because there is no qualification or restriction of it to be found therein, and we have no right to insert any which is not expressed and cannot be fairly implied … The owner must, therefore, have the right to seize and repossess the slave., which the local laws of his own state confer upon him as property ….”

The Tenth Amendment

The Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution had implications for slavery that were profound but are often misunderstood. It provides that powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people. Before 1857, this language reinforced a widely accepted constitutional arrangement: slavery was regulated by state law. Because the Constitution granted Congress no general authority over slavery within existing states, regulation of the institution inside state borders was understood to belong to each state. Massachusetts could abolish slavery; South Carolina could entrench and expand it. Congress, as a rule, did not interfere with slavery where it already existed under state authority.

But the Tenth Amendment did not protect slavery everywhere. It reserved undelegated powers to the states; it did not retract powers that were expressly delegated to Congress. Among those enumerated powers was authority over federal territories under Article IV, Section 3—the Territorial Clause. Under that authority Congress had governed slavery’s status outside the states, most notably through the Northwest Ordinance, which prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory, and later through the Missouri Compromise. Congress also exercised its commerce power to end the international slave trade in 1808. None of these measures were thought, prior to 1857, to violate the Tenth Amendment, because they operated in areas where federal authority was textually grounded.

Pro-slavery constitutional theorists frequently blurred this distinction. They argued that because slavery was a “state right,” it carried a kind of constitutional immunity wherever Americans went. That reading converted a rule about reserved powers into a claim of national protection for slavery, something the Constitution nowhere explicitly declared. Properly understood, the Tenth Amendment meant that slavery inside a state depended on that state’s law. It did not mean that Congress was powerless in the territories, nor that slavery enjoyed automatic constitutional shelter beyond state borders. The constitutional struggle before the Civil War centered precisely on where state authority ended and federal authority began. Slavery stood at that fault line.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott transformed that equilibrium. Taney held that enslaved persons were property protected by the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause and that Congress therefore lacked authority to prohibit slavery in the territories. In practical effect, this reasoning nationalized slavery. What had previously been treated as a matter of state law within states and federal discretion in territories became, under Taney’s logic, a constitutionally protected property right that Congress could not exclude from federal soil. The earlier balance: state control locally, congressional control territorially, was overturned. The Tenth Amendment’s reservation of powers to the states remained textually intact, but its practical significance for containing slavery was gutted.

The Political Rise of Abraham Lincoln

It was at this moment that Abraham Lincoln made his decisive political move. Before Dred Scott, most Americans accepted that states controlled slavery within their borders while Congress governed it in the territories. The Court’s decision shattered that arrangement by declaring that neither Congress nor territorial voters could bar slavery’s expansion. Lincoln grasped immediately that this logic placed slavery on a trajectory toward nationalization. In his “House Divided” speech, he warned that the country could not endure permanently half slave and half free because the constitutional barriers to slavery’s spread were being dismantled.

Lincoln’s brilliance lay not merely in opposing slavery but in explaining how the Court’s reasoning reordered the Constitution itself. By locating slavery’s protection in the Fifth Amendment and denying Congress authority in the territories, the Court rendered the earlier federal-state balance effectively meaningless. Lincoln translated that constitutional disruption into a moral and democratic argument ordinary voters could understand: self-government was being made powerless. If majorities in the territories could not decide the status of slavery, then “popular sovereignty” was a façade. By exposing that contradiction, Lincoln built a coalition that understood the crisis not simply as a sectional dispute but as a threat to constitutional democracy. His capacity to connect technical constitutional reasoning with a compelling public narrative is central to his enduring stature in American political history.

Conclusion

The consequences of Dred Scott were devastating. By denying Black Americans citizenship, the Court stripped them of access to federal courts, leaving free Blacks defenseless against kidnapping across state lines. By constitutionalizing slave property, it placed slavery beyond democratic control. If Congress could not regulate slavery in the territories, then neither could settlers. The institution was no longer local—it was being made national.

In trying to settle the slavery question, the Court destroyed the constitutional middle ground. The nation was now forced to choose: slavery would either expand everywhere or be stopped by political resistance. Abraham Lincoln saw the crisis and articulated its impact before anyone else: a political opening he grasped.

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The Case That Made the Supreme Court Supreme: Martin v Hunter’s Lessee

In 1816, a quiet property dispute in Virginia produced one of the most powerful rulings in American constitutional history. Two centuries later, the decision in Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee still determines who gets the last word on the Constitution.

Randall Griffin explains.

Justice Joseph Story. Painting by George Peter Alexander Healy.

Who Owns the Northern Neck?

From the late 1680s to the 1700s, the British Crown granted vast tracts of land in Virginia to the Fairfax family.

During the Revolution, Virginia passed a law that allowed for the confiscation of Loyalists’ property. When Thomas Fairfax, 6th Lord Fairfax of Cameron - despite staying neutral during the Revolutionary War to protect his land - died in December 1781 without an heir in Virginia, the state moved to seize his property.

Part of his property was called the Northern Neck, a massive tract of roughly 300,000-acres along of the northernmost of Virginia’s three peninsulas on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay.

But international agreements complicated things. The Treaty of Paris (1783, which ended the Revolutionary War) and Jay’s Treaty (1795) both protected the property interests of British subjects living in America, essentially nullifying the Virginia confiscation.

The nephew and heir of Lord Fairfax, Denny Martin Fairfax, a British subject who had never lived in Virginia, hired attorneys James and John Marshall and, in the case of Hite v. Fairfax (1786), won recognition as Lord Fairfax’s legal heir.

A year later, the Virginia legislature voided the Fairfax land grant and confiscated the property, granting a portion (739 acres) to David Hunter.

Martin, who had sold his land interest to John and James Marshall, challenged the confiscation. He initially won his court case (Fairfax’s Devisee v. Hunter’s Lessee), but lost on appeal to the Virginia Supreme Court, which upheld the confiscation by ruling that the federal treaties did not cover the dispute in question.

In 1810, the Virginia Court of Appeals upheld Hunter’s claim to the land.

The case was appealed to the Supreme Court, which, in 1813, reversed the Virginia Court of Appeals’ decision. Finding that the Treaty of Paris and Jay’s Treat applied in the dispute, the Court remanded (sent back) the case back to the Virginia court to litigate.

But the Virginia Court, instead of reconsidering the case, set the stage for one of the most important legal battles in American history.

The Legal Battle Begins

The Virginia Supreme Court ruled that the US Supreme Court did not have authority over cases beginning in state courts, arguing that Section 25 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 (which established the federal judiciary) was unconstitutional. The Virginia court ruled that both state and federal courts were of equal standing and the supreme decider of the law in their own governments, neither having superiority over the other.

What began as a land dispute had become something much bigger: is Section 25 of the Judiciary Act, which grants the US Supreme Court appellate review over state court cases involving federal law, unconstitutional?

The Virginia courts had said yes, but the Supreme Court said no. Justice Story, writing in a unanimous decision, ruled that federal treaties superseded state laws under Article VI of US Constitution (the Supremacy Clause) and, along with the appellate jurisdiction in Article III, gave federal courts the power to review state decisions involving federal law or the Constitution.

Justice Story rejected the claim that the state and federal courts were co-equal interpreters of the Constitution.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court stated the importance of having a single, coherent interpretation of the Constitution and federal laws rather than each individual state interpreting its own versions.

Justice Story specifically called out Article III, which states that the Supreme Court may review state court decisions.

Article III, Section I: The judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.

Article III, Section II: The judicial power shall extend to all cases, in law and equity, arising under this Constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made, or which shall be made, under their authority… to controversies between two or more states; between a state and citizens of another state; between citizens of different states; between citizens of the same state claiming lands under grants of different states, and between a state, or the citizens thereof, and foreign states, citizens, or subjects.

Justice Story ruled Congress had specifically granted the Supreme Court the power under Section 25 of the Judiciary Act to review state court decisions when federal issues were involved.

Critics of Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee argued that the decision gave too much authority to the federal judiciary. Virginia judges flatly rejected the Court’s authority, declaring that “the appellate power of the Supreme Court of the United States does not extend to this court.” At the same time, long-standing fears about judicial power resurfaced. As the Anti-Federalist writer ‘Brutus’ had warned decades earlier, the Supreme Court could become “exalted above all other power in the government.” Yet Justice Story defended the ruling as essential to national unity, cautioning that without federal review, “the Constitution… would be different in different states.”

The Supreme Court further upheld its authority in the 1821 case of Cohens v. Virginia, which addressed whether the Supreme Court had the power to hear appeals concerning state criminal cases.

Why Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee Still Matters Today

Two centuries after Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee, the Supreme Court still acts as the nation’s final referee, stepping in when state courts and federal law collide. Many court cases we’re familiar with today come from this 1816 ruling.

Miranda v. Arizona (1966)

Anyone who has watched a police procedural can probably recite the Miranda rights. The reading of a citizen’s rights during arrest grew from a landmark case involving Ernesto Miranda, whose confession was used against him in an court.

In 1966, Arizona police arrested Miranda for kidnapping and rape. After hours of police questioning, he confessed and signed a written statement. Miranda was not advised of his Constitutional rights, especially that he had the right to remain silent or the right to counsel.

The Arizona courts upheld the conviction. The Supreme Court reviewed the case, and in a 5-4 decision ruled that Miranda’s  Fifth Amendment rights had been violated, creating the famous ‘Miranda warning.’

Bush v. Gore (2000)

Most of us remember the disputed 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore.

The case centered on the vote in Florida, where the margins were tiny – only a few hundred votes out of almost six million. Because the margin was so slim, the Florida Supreme Court ordered a manual machine recount, where disputes arose on whether the manual recounts would continue if several counties’ ballots were unclear (inventing the phrase ‘hanging chads’).

The situation dragged on until December 12, 2000, when the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, overruled the Florida Supreme Court and ordered the manual recount stopped. The Court cited that the way the recounts were being conducted in the various counties with no consistent statewide standard violated the Equal Protection Clause. The Court also said that there was not enough time to establish a new recount system before the deadline for selecting presidential electors.

Using the authority it gained from Martin v Hunter’s Lessee, the Supreme Court overturned the Florida supreme court ruling. Bush won Florida by 537 votes, and the state’s electoral votes made him President.

Obegefell v Hodges (2015)

Obergefell v. Hodges is considered the landmark decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.

Several same-sex couples across the country had challenged state laws banning same-sex marriages or the refusal to recognize marriages performed in other states. One plaintiff, Jim Obergefell, sued the state of Ohio after it refused to list him as the surviving spouse on his husband’s death certificate.

In another 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court overruled the various state’s laws. In finding that marriage is a fundamental liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court ruled states must allow same-sex marriage and recognize those marriages performed in other states.

Each of these cases shows the same fundamental rule established in Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee, in that state courts may decide cases involving federal law, but the Supreme Court has the ultimate authority to review and correct them if necessary.

What began as a quarrel over confiscated farmland in Virginia two centuries ago ultimately answered a question that still shapes American law today: when state courts and federal law collide, who has the last word?

Later cases since have strengthened Court’s authority, but Martin v Hunter’s Lessee laid the foundation for the Supreme Court to be the last guardian of constitutional rights. By reviewing state court decisions when necessary, the Supreme Court ensured that for generations the civil rights granted under the Constitution would be enforced uniformly nationwide.

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King Leopold II of Belgium: The King of Terror

The year is 1909. A 75-year-old King Leopold appears calm despite the dreary circumstances and his physical distress. He peacefully welcomed his untimely end. In his final moments he was surrounded by his loyal staff and several members of his family, except his two daughters Princess Louise and Stephanie. After his passing on December 17, 1909 his funeral followed in quick concession, though he wished for it to be a private affair this was ignored and the state provided a formal public display for their dead King. His funeral was met with a public outcry of boos and jeers. This begs the question: who was King Leopold, and how did his actions impact both his private and public life?

Sophie Riley explains.

King Leopold II of Belgium by Louis Gallait.

International Brutality

King Leopold’s interest in the Congo started in the mid 1870s after he reviewed a report by Henry Morton Stanley in which he detailed his exploration of the region and he noted how it had access to uncharted natural resources.

Leopold’s seizure of the Congo began in 1876, when he hosted the Brussels Geographic Conference where he publicly established the International African Association. This was the first step in his humanitarian and scientific campaign in the Congo.

He then moved to active exploration of the area. This involved sending Henry Stanley to the Congo where his mission was to establish over 27 principal stations along the Congo River. These stations would act as signals to the local population and his rival European powers that this was his territory. In addition to this he was also instructed to secure the land rights from the Congolese chiefs through cloth and trinket treaties. Stanley would collect more than 450 treaties from the locals in exchange for cloth, alcohol, and local trinkets. In response the chiefs would place an x on the dotted line of a treaty they could not read and ultimately swore over their land and their states’ sovereignty.  What appeared to be diplomacy revealed itself as deception.

The impact of these treaties would hit the Congolese in several stages. Firstly, in the 1880s some would realize the deception as local chiefs who resisted the Belgians or did not sign the treaties were either replaced or killed. Secondly, Leopold issued a tax decree in which he would claim all the occupied land and its resources as state property. This meant that the villagers were branded as thieves for harvesting their own resources.    

The next phase of Leopold’s plan was to receive recognition for his control of the Congo on the world stage. This recognition would be received through deception; he would use the rising tensions between Britain, Germany, and France to his own end. He went to each country individually and convinced each one that the Congo should remain under neutral Belgium’s control instead of risking it falling into the hands of their rival.  

In addition to this he replaced the International association of the Congo with his own political body to govern the territories that Stanley had acquired a few years earlier.

This chapter in Congo’s independence would close when King Leopold declared himself as the sovereign king of the free Congo state in 1885. Over the next few decades the Congolese would revolt and resist the ongoing takeover of their nation by the Belgians - this would result in millions of Congolese deaths through torture, famine and violence. The Congolese would unfortunately not receive full independence until 1960.

Leopold’s Legacy

King Leopold left behind a legacy that was complex and tainted with human suffering and bloodshed. The brutality of his rule in the Congo was so extreme that it drew international condemnation from other European colonists in 1908.  His actions have been described by historians as callous, ruthless, and the almost unrestrained pursuit of power and wealth, raising enduring questions about moral responsibility and imperialist madness.  

Nevertheless, historians and Belgian records have highlighted areas where King Leopold positively impacted the modernization and economic expansion of Belgium during his 44-year reign.  Early in his rule he earned the nickname the builder King for his focus on the urban identity and public health of Belgium.  One of his first initiatives involved engineering a plan to cover the heavily polluted Senne River in 1867, to help stop the spread of cholera. In 1873, he commissioned the Royal Green houses in Laeken which helped advance botanical studies, and in 1880, he oversaw the creation of Cinquantenaire park to celebrate Belgium’s 50th anniversary as an independent state.   

As his reign progressed Leopold shifted his focus towards public education and the economic expansion of Belgium. During this time his government established a state funded school system, and oversaw the modernization and expansion of Antwerp’s docks, transforming the city’s docks into the world’s first commercial port. By the end of this period, Belgium had expanded significantly in both economic strength and national infrastructure, while political reforms extended universal suffrage to all men.

In the last years of his reign, Leopold’s focus shifted towards social reform and the question of his legacy. His last decade saw the introduction of laws that would change the daily lives of his citizens. Child labor for children under the age of 12 was abolished, and the restrictive worker’s booklet which had restricted their mobility was removed. However, these reforms were met by more controversial measures, including the introduction of compulsory military service where one son per family would have to serve 15 months in the army.    

Despite what he did in the Congo, Leopold’s reputation within Belgium remained largely intact. It would take over 90 years for the Belgians to shift their perspective. The catalyst for change started in 1999 when Adam Hochschild wrote a book entitled King Leopold’s Ghost. His book was met with high acclaim due to its in-depth view on Leopold’s colonial atrocities in the Congo. While being widely acclaimed, the book reopened old wounds within Belgian society, particularly for the older conservative generation who still believed that Leopold was an ambitious hero.

In contrast the younger generations alongside many institutions began to question the narrative of their past, and this led to the gradual removal of statues of their former king.  

This reckoning reached a turning point in 2020, amid global protests against racism in response to the murder of US citizen George Floyd. In Belgium, statues of King Leopold were either defaced or spray painted red with the words assassin or I cannot breathe. While none were officially destroyed, this would eventually lead to some statues being placed into museum storage. Due to the public’s tenacity, the Prime Minister at the time, Charles Michel, would apologize for the kidnapping of mixed-race children during the 1940s and 1950s. However, no formal apology has been made towards the Congolese people for the atrocities committed under Leopold’s rule, with the Belgian state offering admissions of regret rather than full acknowledgement.  It is within the tension between remembrance and reckoning that Leopold’s legacy must ultimately be understood.  

Final Thoughts

In the end, the story of King Leopold II resists a simple verdict. He was a ruler who reshaped Belgium’s cities, economy, and institutions, yet he also presided over one of the most brutal colonial regimes in modern European history. These two legacies do not cancel each other out but they do exist side by side, forcing us to confront the uncomfortable reality that progress and suffering are often intertwined.  

Leopold’s life and legacy reveals as much about the present as it does the past.  The conversation surrounding his actions has shifted from admiration to scrutiny, from silence to debate.

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The Gettysburg of the West - The 1862 Battle of Glorieta Pass

Union cavalrymen appeared on the cliffs above the Confederate camp.  “Who are you down there” shouted one of the horsemen.  “Texans, goddamn you” was the reply.  Pleasantries completed, the riders dismounted, clambered down the cliff, brushed aside the few defenders, and secured the camp.  The Confederate conquest of the Southwest had come to a screeching halt.

Here, James F. Byrne Jr looks at the 1862 Battle of Glorieta Pass.

The Battle of Glorieta Pass - Pigeon's Ranch by Roy Andersen.

The outbreak of the Civil War found the U.S. Army occupying ten outposts in the New Mexico territory.  Offered command of U.S. troops in the territory, Colonel Henry Sibley instead took  ownership of all the arms and supplies he could seize and departed with his plunder for Texas and a commission in the Confederate Army.

Sibley saw the weak Union presence in the Southwest as an opportunity to march into Colorado and then westward to California.  Rebel occupation of the Southwest would provide access to mineral resources  and  Pacific ports.  Pursuing his vision of a Confederate manifest destiny, Sibley set up headquarters in San Antonio and recruited a 3000 man army.   He struck north up the Rio Grande in February 1862.

Future events were to reveal Sibley’s leadership shortcomings.  His tactical acumen did not match his strategic vision, and he failed to fully consider supply requirements when developing his grandiose plans.  But his most significant shortcoming was captured in the nickname bestowed on him by his subordinates – the walking whiskey keg.

Sibley’s invasion was opposed by Colonel Edward Canby, who proved adept at husbanding his own combat strength while enabling Sibley’s to wither away.  Canby consolidated his scattered forces at Fort Craig, 170 miles north of El Paso, and unsuccessfully attacked Sibley’s column as it approached the nearby Valverde ford.  Beaten but not defeated, Canby retreated to his fortifications while Sibley continued north, occupying Santa Fe in mid-March.

Fort Union

Sibley had won a major battle and seized the territorial capital.  However, if his campaign were to continue, he needed to capture the supplies at Fort Union, 110 miles north along the Santa Fe Trail.  Fortunately for the Union cause, 1000 volunteers from Colorado commanded by Colonel John Slough were  moving rapidly south to reinforce the fort.  However once at Fort Union Slough disregarded instructions to remain there, and soon moved his command down the trail.

Twenty three miles east of Santa Fe at Glorieta Pass, Slough’s advance guard encountered and drove back Confederate scouts.  Informed of the setback, the walking whiskey barrel ordered up additional troops under the command of Col William Scurry.  As Scurry advanced, he left the army’s supply train in a small canyon west of the pass.  At midday on March 28th the battle was joined at the pass, and Scurry soon gained the upper hand, driving Slough back up the trail.

However, Slough had earlier detached 500 cavalrymen to move over an adjacent mesa and strike the flank of the Confederate column.  After hours of meandering, the cavalrymen arrived at a cliff overlooking the supply encampment.  Scattering the startled defenders, they set ablaze the captured supply wagons loaded with ammunition, food, and medical supplies.  Within an hour the Union force departed, leaving behind smoldering ruins and the shattered dreams of the Confederate conquest of the Southwest.

Up at the pass the main Union force continued to slowly withdraw, leaving the Confederates in possession of the battlefield.  However, as one rebel soldier described the situation, “here we are 1000 miles from home, not a wagon, not a dust of flower, not a pound of meat.” 

The “victorious” rebel force retreated down the Rio Grande while Canby herded the increasingly bedraggled invaders out of the territory.  Following a devastating 1000 mile march the tattered remnants of the Confederate column staggered back into San Antonio.  Over 40% of the proud “Texans, goddamn you” who struck the Santa Fe Trail in February, remained there in shallow graves.

Sibley was courts martialed for drunkenness and cowardice in 1863.  Elements of his defeated  army spent the remainder of the war fighting in Texas and Louisiana.  The remnants surrendered in Houston at the end of the war, a long way from the Pacific ports they sought in the heady days of 1862.

Lessons Learned

·       Armies need supplies.  “Hand waving” logistics planning is seldom an effective approach.

·       Do not assume you can live off the land.  An arid wasteland provides few opportunities for supplementing needed supplies. 

·       Tactical victories do not guarantee success.   Confederate “victories” weakened the force and left it unable to achieve strategic objectives. 

·       Victory does not require annihilation.  Slough kept his outnumbered force intact and allowed the enemy to self-destruct.

·       Do not bring a knife to a gunfight.  Sibley’s force was inadequate for the mission of securing half a continent.

·       Leadership is a combat multiplier.  Rank and file contempt for Sibley’s keen sense of self-preservation eventually hobbled the army’s morale and fighting ability.

·       Force protection matters.  Scurry’s failure to protect his supply train doomed the entire Confederate campaign.

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The Conduct of War: The Lieber Code Part 2

At the start of the Civil War, the 1806 Articles of War was the only official document governing how the US military governed itself during conflicts. Based in large part on the British articles, it mainly stipulated the characterization and response to drunkenness, insubordination, desertion, etc. in other words, internal management. The 1806 Articles of War were revised with the Lieber Code (1863), to legally allow the Union Army to combat Confederate guerrillas and enemy civilians. The Lieber Code became the military law that governed the wartime conduct of the Union Army by defining and describing command responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity; and the military responsibilities of the Union soldier fighting against the Confederate States of America.

Lloyd W Klein explains.

Francis Lieber.

On April 24, 1863, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln issued “General Orders No. 100: Instructions for the Government of the Armies of the United States in the Field,” commonly known as the “Lieber Code” after its main author Francis (Franz) Lieber. The Lieber Code set out rules of conduct during hostilities for Union soldiers throughout the U.S. Civil War. Even today, it remains the basis of most regulations of the laws of war for the United States and is referred to in the foreword to the Department of Defense Laws of War Manual. The Lieber Code inspired other countries to adopt similar rules for their military and was used as a template for international efforts in the late 19th century to codify the laws and customs of war.

Lieber started with the problems raised by the US Army presence as an invading army on enemy soil that hadn’t been encountered by the US in the 3 previous wars. The Lieber Code was the first US attempt to codify the laws of war. Although they were binding only on the forces of the United States, they correspond to a great extent to the laws and customs of war existing at that time. There are 157 articles, and can be found here: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/liebercode-1863

Although made as a sincere attempt to make warfare more civilized, it failed to do so materially in the Civil War. This was a significant lesson in history which needed to be learned in practice. This paper looks at specific articles of the Lieber Code and identifies why it failed to succeed in its task.

Specific Codes of War

1. Reprisals Against Civilians and Prisoners

Lieber Code (Article 27, 28, 59): Permitted reprisals against civilians and even prisoners under certain conditions—such as when the enemy engaged in unlawful warfare or mistreated POWs.

Geneva Conventions (1949): Strictly prohibit reprisals against protected persons (civilians, POWs, medical personnel).

Example: Article 13 of Geneva III (POWs) and Article 33 of Geneva IV (civilians) forbid all reprisals against those groups.

2. Destruction of Civilian Property as Hard War

Lieber Code (Articles 14, 15, 44, 50): Permitted the widespread destruction of civilian property, including homes, food stores, and infrastructure, if justified by military necessity.

Geneva Conventions (Additional Protocol I, Article 52): Prohibit the indiscriminate destruction of civilian property and infrastructure unless there is a direct military advantage.

Example: Sherman’s March—burning crops, homes, and public buildings—was lawful under the Lieber Code but would likely be considered disproportionate or indiscriminate today.

3. Use of Starvation as a Military Strategy

Lieber Code (Article 17): Acknowledged that starving the enemy, including civilians in fortified places, could be a lawful strategy. Article 17 provides that it is lawful to starve civilians:

‘War is not carried on by arms alone. It is lawful to starve the hostile belligerent, armed or unarmed, so that it leads to the speedier subjection of the enemy.’

This is no longer legal in warfare.

The code basically built in a loophole: that none of its principles applied if by breaking them, a war’s end would be expedited.

Geneva Conventions (Protocol I, Article 54): Explicitly forbid starvation of civilians as a method of warfare.

Modern precedent: The use of siege warfare to starve civilians in Syria and elsewhere has been condemned as a war crime under international law.

4. Execution of Irregular Combatants Without Trial

Lieber Code (Articles 82–85): Allowed summary execution of guerrillas, spies, and other irregulars (e.g., Franc-tireurs) without due process.

Geneva Conventions: Require fair trial guarantees even for irregular combatants or suspected spies.

Example: Geneva Convention III, Article 84, ensures POWs cannot be sentenced without proper judicial process.

5. Permissibility of Occupation Requisitions Without Compensation

Lieber Code (Article 52): Allowed occupying forces to requisition supplies from civilians without compensation, depending on circumstances.

Geneva Conventions (Article 53, Geneva IV): Allow requisitions only under strict limitations, and generally require compensation.

One of the more contentious issues addressed in the Lieber Code was the treatment of fugitive and freed slaves that entered the Union territory. Lieber took the view that international law did not distinguish between people based on color (Art. 58) and that the law of nature and nations has never acknowledged slavery (art. 42). He therefore included provisions that held that fugitive slaves that escaped to the North became free (Arts. 42, 43) and that all soldiers no matter their skin color must be awarded POW status (Art.57).

Finally, in modern warfare, were a commander to order soldiers to enter a home to steal valuables and they instead murdered the man and raped the women, the commander as well as the soldiers would be breaking the rules; but under the Lieber Code, the commander would not be considered to have done anything illegal.

https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2018/04/the-lieber-code-the-first-modern-codification-of-the-laws-of-war/

The chapter on “military necessity” is a well-known part of the Lieber Code which one author calls its “greatest theoretical contribution to the modern law of war.” The Lieber Code allows the use of military force which is justified by “military necessity,” defined as “measures which are indispensable for securing the ends of the war, and which are lawful according to the modern law and usages of war.” (Art. 14).

This loophole no longer exists for the most obvious reason that it is ensures that no rule of law would apply. The appropriate balance between military necessity and humane behavior remains controversial. Lieber was specific that mlitary necessity is limited by the principle of humanity.

The Lieber Code therefore states in article 16 that:

“Military necessity does not admit of cruelty—that is, the infliction of suffering for the sake of suffering or for revenge, nor of maiming or wounding except in fight, nor of torture to extort confessions. It does not admit of the use of poison in any way, nor of the wanton devastation of a district. It admits of deception, but disclaims acts of perfidy; and, in general, military necessity does not include any act of hostility which makes the return to peace unnecessarily difficult.”

Application to Sherman’s March

“ We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.” – William T Sherman

The Union army cut a swath of devastation approximately 60 miles wide and 300 miles long from Atlanta to Savannah. The severity of the destruction varied by location and depended on the resistance encountered, but overall, it was devastating. The troops dismantled railroad tracks, heating and twisting them to make them unusable and irreparable. Telegraph lines and bridges were also destroyed to cripple Confederate communication and transportation. Soldiers confiscated livestock, burned crops, and destroyed mills to deprive the Confederacy of essential supplies.

Sherman's march to the sea. By F. O. C. Darley.

Bringing the “hard hand of war” to civilians — especially as practiced by Union forces in campaigns like Sherman’s March — sits at the uneasy intersection of morality, military necessity, and the evolving laws of war. The Lieber Code (General Orders No. 100, issued April 1863) provided a legal and ethical framework for Union conduct during the Civil War. It did permit certain harsh measures against civilians under the doctrine of military necessity, but also imposed limits and obligations to avoid cruelty for its own sake.

The Lieber Code recognized that war sometimes requires harsh treatment, including against civilians, if they support or aid the enemy. Key sections include:

Article 14: “Military necessity… consists in the necessity of those measures which are indispensable for securing the ends of the war.”

Article 15: Military necessity does not admit of cruelty, torture, or wanton devastation.

Article 17: It is lawful to starve the hostile belligerent, armed forces or civilians, to reduce them into submission — but only as a measure of necessity.

Article 44: Destruction of property is lawful if demanded by the necessities of war.

Sherman argued his actions were not cruel for cruelty’s sake, but necessary to shorten the war and reduce total bloodshed. He avoided mass killings and tried to maintain discipline, though looting and violence did occur.

Arguments for moral justification:

It was a lesser evil: harsh tactics avoided longer, bloodier battles.

It targeted infrastructure and morale, not mass murder.

It followed legal principles of military necessity as codified in the Lieber Code.

Arguments against:

Civilians, especially women, children, and the elderly, bore undue suffering.

The line between necessity and punishment blurred.

In practice, looting and sporadic personal violence violated the spirit, if not always the letter, of the Code.

The Lieber Code allowed the application of the hard hand of war to civilians under strict conditions of military necessity. Sherman’s actions were arguably within its bounds, though the morality remains debatable. The Code tried to humanize war within the brutal logic of total conflict — but in practice, it offered a legal cover for actions that tested the limits of ethical warfare.

The March created severe food shortages for both civilians and the Confederate army. Many homes, barns, and businesses were burned, though some private homes were spared, especially if their occupants did not resist. Public buildings, factories, and Confederate government facilities were often deliberately targeted. Although the march inflicted severe hardship on the civilian population through widespread destruction, it was not intended to be, nor was it officially conducted as, a campaign of deliberate personal violence against civilians. While civilians undoubtedly suffered as their homes, livelihoods, and communities were devastated by the march, the intent was to break the Confederacy’s ability to wage war rather than to deliberately harm the civilian population.

The extent of the damage was severe, and arguably, the South never fully recovered from its effects. The march inflicted an estimated $100 million (equivalent to billions today) in damage. Although Savannah was largely spared destruction when it surrendered without a fight, cities like Atlanta, Milledgeville, and Griswoldville suffered heavy damage. Thousands of enslaved people fled plantations to follow Sherman’s army, further disrupting the Southern economy and labor force.

While the campaign inflicted significant damage, especially to infrastructure and Confederate military resources, some myths have overstated the extent of civilian suffering and total devastation. While Atlanta was heavily damaged, Savannah was largely spared because it surrendered without a fight. Many towns along the march suffered property destruction, but not all were burned to the ground. There is no evidence of mass killings of civilians. While foraging was often aggressive and left many families struggling, Union soldiers were under orders to avoid unnecessary harm to noncombatants. While some private homes were burned, most destruction focused on railroads, factories, mills, and farms that supported the Confederate war effort. Some homes were looted or destroyed if resistance was encountered, but not all were systematically targeted. 

In 1864, the convention that dictated the rules of war was The Lieber Code (1863): A set of military regulations issued by the U.S. during the Civil War, which influenced later international laws. Sherman’s March was within the law set by code, but it went right up to the line, thanks to certain exceptions and in some cases, beyond.

Let’s look at a few of its provisions and see what happened on the March. 

Article 15

 – Military necessity allows destruction of enemy forces and materials, but not cruelty for its own sake.

Sherman’s view: Destroying infrastructure, supplies, and morale was a legitimate strategy to shorten the war. He believed “hard war” would reduce bloodshed in the long run.

Technically adherent—Sherman could argue that all actions were militarily necessary. But looting and personal attacks on women, children, and the elderly can’t be defended by this clause. 

Article 17

Sherman’s March can be defended under Article 17 of the Lieber Code as a harsh but lawful application of military necessity. However, it tests the limits of that doctrine

Article 17 of the Lieber Code does not explicitly allow the deliberate starvation of civilians. However, it does create legal and moral space for actions that may incidentally cause civilian suffering—if those actions are deemed necessary for military success.

“War is not carried on by arms alone. It is lawful to starve the hostile belligerent, armed or unarmed, so that it leads to the speedier subjection of the enemy.”

Therefore, by saying the idea was to hasten the end of the war, legally Sherman could say it was military necessity to starve women and children and the elderly. A great example of how Sherman went right up to the line of legality, but did not cross it.

Article 22

 – The unarmed citizen is to be spared in person, property, and honor as much as possible consistent with military necessity.

Reality on the ground: Civilians were subjected to:Home invasions, looting, threats

Destruction of food, tools, personal items

Occasional physical violence and

 unprosecuted sexual assault

Technically compliant only if military necessity is broadly interpreted. In practice, this principle was often undermined by lack of discipline, particularly among foraging parties (“bummers”).

Article 31

 – A victorious army may appropriate supplies but must distinguish between military and private property

Sherman’s orders:

Special Field Orders No. 120 instructed foraging but prohibited personal pillaging and trespass.

Enforcement was inconsistent, and in practice, private homes and valuables were often looted.

Violated in practice, though Sherman issued technically legal orders. He at times turned a blind eye to violations, perhaps often,  prioritizing momentum and morale. If foragers drove off an old lady’s cows, for example, this is not covered under the Lieber Code, unless that old lady was a military threat or assisting the war effort, or generally to hasten the end of the war. This is how Sherman could say he was working under the Lieber Code.

Article 44

 – All wanton violence against persons, especially women and children, is prohibited.

No widespread directive or sanction for such violence from Sherman, but:

Documented instances of abuse, harassment, and some killings of civilians.

Rape likely occurred, though not prosecuted.

 Not directly ordered, but tolerated through weak enforcement.

Article 51

 – Military commanders must try to restore public order and protect persons and property in occupied areas.

Sherman’s army often left chaos in its wake—most notably the burning of Columbia, SC, where drunkenness, looting, and fire caused mass civilian displacement.

Technically breached—Sherman and his officers failed to control their troops in several instances.

One of the Lieber Code’s most crucial provisions is Article 22, which declares the importance of “the distinction between the private individual belonging to a hostile country and the hostile country itself.” Article 22 puts forward “the principle…. that the unarmed citizen is to be spared in person, property, and honor as much as the exigencies of war will admit.”

Key provisions of the Code on civilian property include:

Protection of Civilians: The code emphasizes the protection of civilian persons and property from military operations.

Prohibition of Destruction: It prohibits the destruction of civilian property unless absolutely necessary for military operations.

Respect for Private Property: The code instructs military personnel to respect private property and avoid unnecessary harm.

 Articles 37, 38, 46 & 47.cover this area as well.

It’s anyone’s subjective interpretation as to whether or not what Sherman ordered, versus what was often carried out, fits within these precepts. Either way, it’s a very close call.

Lieber himself was uncertain how to apply the principles. Military necessity, Lieber wrote, “allows of all destruction of property, and obstruction of the ways and channels of traffic, travel, or communication, and of all withholding of sustenance or means of life from the enemy; [and] of the appropriation of whatever an enemy’s country affords necessary for the subsistence and safety of the army.” Rather than constrain hard war, such language helped to make it possible.

https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/hard-war-in-virginia-during-the-civil-war/

Examples of personal injury and attacks: There were documented instances of personal violence against noncombatants, especially theft, property destruction, intimidation, and some physical abuse. While not officially sanctioned, these acts occurred frequently enough to be a recognized part of the civilian experience of the march. They highlight the blurred line between “hard war” and civilian victimization and are critical to understanding the real human impact of Sherman’s campaign. These accounts show theft, intimidation, physical abuse, and psychological terror, though—as with all wartime narratives—some must be read with attention to context, bias, and verification.

What Is the Function of Rules of War?

Whether creating rules or laws to govern war is t one of history’s most painful and persistent tensions: the desire for moral restraint versus the brutal realities of war. Are the “rules” or “laws” of war phony? No, they’re not phony—but they are imperfect and often inconsistently applied. The laws of war, such as those codified in the Lieber Code (1863), the Hague Conventions (1899, 1907), and the Geneva Conventions (especially after WWII), are real legal instruments. They’re backed by treaties, military doctrine, and in some cases, courts (like the International Criminal Court).

These laws serve several purposes:

Limit unnecessary suffering, especially of civilians and prisoners.

Maintain some moral legitimacy—for both domestic and international audiences.

Prevent escalation into unbounded barbarism (e.g., genocide, torture as routine policy).

Set standards for holding individuals accountable (think of the Nuremberg Trials or modern war crimes prosecutions).

However: Enforcement is uneven, often dependent on power dynamics. Victors rarely face the same scrutiny as the losers. States violate them regularly, sometimes justifying actions as “military necessity.” Non-state actors may ignore them entirely. So yes, there is hypocrisy—but that doesn’t mean the rules are fake. They are aspirational boundaries in an inherently chaotic and destructive endeavor.

Is winning all that matters? Militarily, winning ends the war. But how you win shapes the peace—and your legacy. If “winning” alone were the only standard:

Atrocities would become normalized.

Reprisals would spiral, making wars bloodier and longer.

The legitimacy of power would corrode, both domestically and abroad.

History is full of cautionary tales: the legitimacy of power depends on how its used. Overly severe punishment of the losers leads to long-lasting enmity . For example:

·       Sherman’s March was brutally effective, yet carefully (if controversially) calibrated under the laws of war at the time. It was one of the events leading to the Lost Cause.

·       Our treatment of Native Americans especially as illustrated at Sand Creek was abominable: immoral and illegal. Our relations with our aboriginal brothers remain tense over a century later.

·       The terms of the WW1 peace led almost directly to WW2.

·       Nazi Germany won many early battles, but their brutality turned most of the world against them.

·       The US offered Germany the Marshall Plan after WW2 while the Russian raped their way through the country. How has that turned out?

·       The My Lai Massacre during Vietnam might have had no strategic benefit but inflicted lasting moral and political damage on the U.S. As did napalming villages randomly.

Ethics in war isn’t about being gentle—it’s about staying human. Even amidst destruction, maintaining rules is an act of defiance against the abyss. Its a false binary to offer either winning or being humane. A civilized nation tries to do both. How you win determines who you become and whether your victory can endure the peace that follows.

Summary

The Lieber Code was written to provide a moral framework to guide the conduct of modern war. In that sense, it was a humanitarian step forward and became the basis of modern rules of war set under the Geneva Conventions. However, General Sherman used a loophole to get around its application in the March to the Sea. It is arguable that this loophole was expressly inserted for this purpose.

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The U.S. Civil War and the Inspirational Mary Edwards Walker, Congressional Medal of Honor

In the long and often turbulent history of the Medal of Honor, one name stands entirely alone: Mary Edwards Walker. She remains the only woman ever to have received the United States' highest military decoration, and her life was as unconventional as the distinction itself. A surgeon, reformer, prisoner of war, and tireless advocate for women's rights, Walker's story is inseparable from the upheaval of the American Civil War, a conflict that reshaped the nation and, in her case, opened a narrow but historic path into military service.

Terry Bailey explains.

Mary Edwards Walker.

Mary Edwards Walker was born in 1832 in Oswego County, New York, into a household that quietly defied many of the era's expectations. Her parents were progressive thinkers who believed firmly in education, self-reliance, and physical health. Her father, a farmer with reformist views, insisted that his daughters receive the same rigorous schooling as his sons—an unusual stance in mid-nineteenth-century America. From an early age, Mary absorbed the idea that intellectual capacity was not determined by gender. She also rejected restrictive clothing, later arguing that heavy skirts and corsets were both unhealthy and symbolic of women's social confinement.

Her determination led her to pursue a medical career at a time when female physicians were rare and frequently dismissed. She enrolled at Syracuse Medical College, one of the few institutions willing to admit women, and graduated in 1855 with a Doctor of Medicine degree. Even with credentials in hand, she struggled to establish a practice. Patients were hesitant to trust a woman doctor, and professional networks largely excluded her. Yet she persevered, convinced that her skills would eventually find their proper arena.

That arena emerged with the outbreak of civil war in 1861. As the Union and Confederate states mobilized for what would become a four-year struggle of unprecedented scale, medical services were rapidly overwhelmed. Disease—typhoid, dysentery, pneumonia—claimed more lives than bullets, and battlefield surgery was often conducted in makeshift tents or barns with limited anesthesia and rudimentary sterilization. Determined to serve, Walker travelled to Washington, D.C., and petitioned the War Department for a commission as an army surgeon. She was refused solely because she was a woman.

Undeterred, she offered her services as a volunteer and began working in Union hospitals. Over time, her persistence and demonstrated competence earned her a contract appointment as an acting assistant surgeon with the Army of the Cumberland. This placed her in the Western Theatre of the war, where campaigns through Tennessee and Georgia were marked by relentless maneuvering and ferocious engagements. The struggle for control of strategic rail hubs such as Chattanooga and the drive toward Atlanta produced waves of wounded soldiers, and medical personnel worked under constant strain.

Walker frequently placed herself near the front lines, tending not only to Union troops but, when possible, to civilians caught in the crossfire. Her medical practice was guided by both professional duty and humanitarian conviction. In April 1864, during operations connected to the Atlanta Campaign, she crossed into territory controlled by Confederate forces to treat wounded men and suffering civilians. It was a bold and dangerous act. Confederate soldiers arrested her, suspecting that a woman in modified military attire moving between lines must be a spy. She was transported to Richmond, Virginia, and held as a prisoner of war. Confinement was harsh, food scarce, and uncertainty constant. Yet Walker endured several months of captivity before being exchanged in August 1864 as part of a formal prisoner swap. Her experience gave her a rare distinction: she was one of the few women formally held as a prisoner of war during the conflict.

In 1865, after the war had drawn to a close, President Andrew Johnson signed the order awarding Mary Edwards Walker the Medal of Honor. The citation recognized her meritorious service, devotion to the wounded, and steadfastness during captivity. Although the criteria for the award were broader in the nineteenth century than they would later become, her work near the front lines and her imprisonment under enemy authority were extraordinary by any standard.

Decades later, in 1917, a review board reassessed earlier awards and rescinded hundreds of Medals of Honor deemed inconsistent with newly tightened combat requirements. Walker's medal was among those revoked. She refused to surrender it, asserting that her service had been honorable and that no bureaucratic revision could erase lived reality. She continued to wear the medal daily, a small but potent act of defiance. In 1977, long after her death, the U.S. government restored her award, reaffirming her singular place in American military history.

Walker's postwar years were as combative in their own way as her time in uniform. She became a prominent advocate for women's suffrage, lecturing across the country and arguing that the Constitution already guaranteed women the right to vote. Her reformist zeal extended to dress reform; she adopted tailored jackets and trousers, insisting that practicality and health should outweigh social convention. For this she was ridiculed and occasionally arrested for "impersonating a man," yet she remained resolute. While she sometimes clashed with more cautious leaders within the suffrage movement, her independence and courage commanded respect.

Mary Edwards Walker died in 1919, just one year before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment secured women's suffrage nationwide. She did not live to cast a ballot in a federal election, but her life had already redefined the boundaries of possibility. In war, she proved that medical skill and personal bravery transcended gender. In peace, she continued to challenge the assumptions that had once barred her from a commission. Her Medal of Honor—awarded, revoked, and restored—serves as more than a military decoration. It stands as a testament to endurance in the face of prejudice, to professional commitment under fire, and to a lifetime spent pressing against the limits imposed by society. In Mary Edwards Walker's story, the upheaval of civil war intersected with the broader struggle for equality, and from that intersection emerged a legacy unlike any other in American history.

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