Speech of Hon. J. M. Howard, of Michigan, on the Confiscation of Property
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| Hersteller: | Forgotten Books (Howard, Jacob Merritt) |
| Stand: | 2015-08-04 03:50:33 |
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Excerpt from Speech of Hon. J. M. Howard, of Michigan, on the Confiscation of Property: Delivered in the Senate of the United States, April 18, 1862 Surely we ought never to incur such a stigma. Though we all feel, all know, that the provocation which has impelled us to take up arms is wanton and wicked; though the impartial pen of history must record the fact that the insurgents never suffered a wrong at the hands of the Government, and had no ground whatever to apprehend any; though their whole conduct from the beginning has been marked by perfidies and atrocities towards the Government and its loyal supporters, unexampled even in the chronicles of civil war, yet, for the sake of the great principles of humanity, for the sake of our own good name and the future good name of our beloved country, we must not yield to the impulses even of a just resentment and suffer ourselves to do that which may be indefensible in the eyes of mankind. Does, then, the practice of forfeiture and confiscation to the use of the State, as a means of carrying on war, justly deserve the denunciation it has received in this discussion? Is it by the usage of nations excluded as an instrument of modern warfare? Is it such a violation of the rules of humanity as to have gone into disuse in modern times? I do not so read history. On the contrary, I find it to be what it ever has been, an ordinary form of reprisals, a means of carrying on hostilities as ancient as the idea of property itself, receiving the practical sanction of all ages, from the time when Nestor seized and carried off the herds of the Æleans to compel them to pay their debts, down to this very day. I find it recognized and sanctioned by the great teachers of the laws of war, and by the most distinguished and magnanimous heroes who have illustrated the art of war. As a means of hostility, history shows it to be as allowable as the killing of our enemies, making them prisoners, or weakening them and strengthening ourselves in any other manner. The history of the civil wars of England ever since the Conquest has been marked by seizures and confiscations. The very rule of the common law, by which the commission of treason is followed by a forfeiture of real and personal estate, is a plain adoption of the principle of confiscation into the law of England; and though she now discards another incident, the corruption of blood, she would, I apprehend, be the last nation on earth to reject the principle of confiscation in the prosecution of her wars. Under this form of carrying on war, and often as against the subjects of nations with whom she was at peace, she has too often filled her treasury with the gains acquired by her expeditions, almost, if not wholly, worthy of the name of plunder and piracy; too often has her navy seized upon neutral commerce; too often have her privateers plundered the ocean, carrying home from the Spanish main the rich ingots from the mines of Mexico and South America; too often have her military authorities violated all the humane rules of modern war in their treatment of the enemy; to allow her to criticise the practice of confiscation. It does not lie in her mouth to school us, or the rest of the world, on this subject. She must first blot out from her history the precedents she has set in the seizure of the Church property under Henry VIII, the terrible confiscations of lands and goods at the restoration of the dynasty of the Stuarts, whose owners were hung and quartered under the sentences of her Jeffreys and Scroggs, or forced into exile by the restored tyrants; the confiscations of the property of many of her cavaliers who fled to Virginia and elsewhere to avoid the pikes of Cromwell and his liberty-loving Puritans; and she must also expugne from her history the truth recorded against her by our fathers in their Declaration of Independence, that she had "plundered our seas, ravage
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