A Vision of Violence in General Orders No. 100

This essay analyzes General Orders No. 100, a U.S. Civil War document considered the fırst modern codifıcation of the rules of war. Recent scholarship praises the humanitarian nature of the legal code, especially as it concerns the emancipation of slaves. Without rejecting these features, I argue that the code marks a key shift in the legal framing of war. The author, Francis Lieber, uses new spatial and temporal boundaries to forge a sprawling and timeless fıeld of battle while amplifying the moral mandate of war to grant legitimacy to numerous acts of harsh violence. The only safeguard to Lieber's broad mandate for military force is a vague notion of self-restraint that I label “humane nationalism.” Given the enormous influence of the Lieber Code, its rhetoric marks a powerful antecedent to how nations conduct warfare and legitimize what we now call “total war.”