The Carolinas Campaign

This chapter examines the destructive Carolinas Campaign of 1864–1865 as a strategic culmination of the war by means of the transferal to the eastern theater of hard-war tactics that had long characterized the American Civil War’s western theaters. Infliction of property damage and psychological warfare expanded to wholesale destruction of towns and cities, widespread targeting of White civilians, male and female, summary punishment for irregular warfare, and the liberation of slaves in South Carolina as retribution for that state’s overwhelming and initial decision to secede. Federal commanders and soldiers alike, most from the West, were eager to implement this harder form of warfare in a theater known for a more traditional, limited mode of war making. The use of Black troops was most fully employed in the eastern theater in the Carolinas, much as it had been in the West in the Lower Mississippi Valley. As the war neared its end, the desperate Confederate commander in North Carolina, Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, unsuccessfully sought to prevent Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman’s troops from accomplishing destructive warfare, and thus victory, there. Sherman’s conciliatory surrender terms for Johnston’s army, which occurred days after Pres. Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, were rebuffed by angry Republicans in the cabinet, the War Department, and Congress, for whom leniency was now furthest from their minds.

Organization of the keeping of interned servicemen of the Czechoslovak Legion in the Suzdal camp of the NKVD of the USSR (1940–1941)

The presented article, based on an analysis of yet unpublished documents contained in the archives of the Information Center of the MIA of Russia Administration for the Vladimir Region, reveals some aspects of organizing the keeping of interned servicemen of the Czechoslovak Legion in the Suzdal camp of the NKVD of the USSR in the period from the summer of 1940 to September 1941. The article explores legal relations related to the organization, legal confirmation and practice of keeping interned servicemen, as well as the norms of domestic legislation, law enforcement practice and archival data on the problem under study. The purpose of the study is to identify and characterize the main issues of organizing the keeping the category of foreign citizens under study in the Suzdal camp of the NKVD of the USSR during the above-indicated period. The methodological basis of the research was formed by the dialectical method, analysis, synthesis, induction, system-structural, formal-logical methods, as well as the method of historical-legal analysis and formal-legal method. As a result of the work carried out, the prerequisites for the formation of a specialized structural unit in the NKVD system of the USSR were analyzed, the main task of which was the keeping of prisoners of war and internees, the structure of management of the Suzdal camp was also described. The main normative legal acts establishing the procedure for keeping prisoners of war and internees in the camps of the NKVD of the USSR are defined and characterized. The article reveals issues of implementation of internal regulations and disciplinary practice in relation to interned servicemen of the Czechoslovak Legion, as well as some features of their involvement in labor. Conclusions were made about the special status of the Czechoslovak Legion, which was separated from the prisoners of war, and the internees were provided with different conditions and a relatively favorable regime was created, respectively, the organization of the stay in the Suzdal camp of the NKVD of the USSR for such a category of persons in specific historical conditions met the requirements of international law. Keywords: internees, the Czechoslovak Legion, the Department for Prisoners of War, Department for Prisoners of War and Internees of the NKVD of the USSR, the Suzdal camp of the NKVD of the USSR, the organization of the keeping.

Z badań nad białostockim epizodem w biografii Rafała Lemkina

Rafał Lemkin became famous in historiography as the creator of the concept of genocide (genocide). This Polish lawyer of Jewish origin, graduated from the Faculty of Law at the University of Jan Kazimierz in Lviv and was a pupil of the outstanding Polish criminal lawyer Juliusz Makarewicz. From his student days, he became interested in the lack of legal regulations in the field of criminal liability for committing mass murders on a specific national or ethnic group. An important impulse for the development of this thought for the young Lemkin were the famous trials of the assassins Talaat Pasha, responsible for the slaughter of Armenians during the Great War, and Symon Petlura, charged with the responsibility for pogroms against Jews in Ukraine. Before the outbreak of World War II, Rafał Lemkin, as part of his activity in the Polish section of the International Criminal Law Association, presented at a conference in Madrid in 1933 the first visions of the concept of international criminal jurisdiction of genocide offenses. After the outbreak of World War II and his escape to the United States, he started working in the War Department and as a university lecturer. In 1944, he published his opus magnum – “The Axis Rule in Occupied Europe”, where he formulated and accurately described the concept of genocide as a crime of international law. Lemkin’s idea was quickly appreciated. As early as December 1946, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution recognizing genocide as a crime of international law, and two years later it adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. He described his extremely interesting life in the autobiography entitled “Totally Unofficial”, which was translated and published in Poland in 2018. Rafał Lemkin describes many details of his life, but omits the period of his residence in Białystok, where he allegedly passed his matriculation exams in 1919, and his student days at the Jagiellonian University, when he gained the necessary experience and knowledge in legal fields to help him develop the concept of criminalisation of genocide.

“No Operation in an Academic Ivory Tower”: World War II and the Politics of Social Knowledge

America's sprawling system of colleges and universities has been built on the ruins of war. After the American Revolution the cash-strapped central government sold land grants to raise revenue and build colleges and schools in newly conquered lands. During the Civil War, the federal government built on this earlier precedent when it passed the 1862 Morrill Land-Grant College Act, which created the nation's system of publicly supported land-grant colleges. And during Reconstruction, the Freedmen's Bureau, operating under the auspices of the War Department, aided former slaves in creating thousands of schools to help protect their hard-fought freedoms. Not only do “wars make states,” as sociologist Charles Tilly claimed, but wars have also shaped the politics of knowledge in the modern university in powerful and lasting ways.

State Preventive Medicine: Public Health, Indian Removal, and the Growth of State Capacity, 1800–1840

Despite growing awareness of the American state's active role in the early nineteenth century, scholars have tended to ignore the early republic's public health apparatus. The few studies that do chronicle antebellum health initiatives confine themselves to programs intended to directly reward citizens—and particularly those who contributed politically or economically to the nation's founding and expansion. As this detailed study of the Indian Vaccination Act of 1832 makes clear, however, antebellum policymakers saw value in providing medical care to those outside their settler citizenry. Blending liberal, republican, and ascriptive ideas, the vaccination program joined two competing political logics: one emphasizing the humanity of indigenous people and the importance of providing for their welfare, and the other prioritizing the state's interest in an efficient “removal” process. Evidencing far more autonomy and administrative capacity than the average nineteenth-century bureaucracy, the War Department played a pivotal role in petitioning Congress for, and ultimately administering, the vaccination program. Unwilling to cede regulatory power over indigenous health to more proximate local governments or private parties, the War Department preferred its own military manpower—a decision that would profoundly shape the design and reception of subsequent Native health programs.

A Great Social Problem

The war for Union, Abraham Lincoln reasoned, would be won on its balance sheet as much as in the hearts and minds of its citizens. This was true both from the perspective of the War Department and individual northern households. Union soldiers—volunteers, draftees, and substitutes—poured from the North toward the South to vanquish the slaveholders’ aristocracy. The manpower that went into their killing and dying work produced the movement of thousands of white and black southern refugees to the households of white northerners. Recruiters, brokers, benevolent societies, and northern families—all believers that free labor could emancipate them—would try to seize the power, the capital, embedded in the labor of the men, women, and children fleeing to them. Doing so would help them win the war for Union.

Guns for the Government: Ordnance, the Military “Peacetime Establishment,” and Executive Governance in the Early Republic

During the 1810s and 1820, officials in the War Department engaged in military state building, which transcended partisanship and contributed to the development of executive autonomy. The process revealed the ability of the executive to shape national security, while also foreshadowing Progressive Era trends toward expertise-based bureaucratic autonomy. The activities of the Ordnance Department suggest that the connection between war and early American state building was forged in the efforts to bolster the armaments industry. Ordnance officers established autonomy partly through arms expertise, and they were not necessarily coalition builders like the late nineteenth-century Post Office and Department of Agriculture bureaucrats, especially because they generated more hostility. Thus, there were different routes by which autonomy was and is established, but in the first decades of the nineteenth century, this autonomy depended on national security and war preparations. This article uses War Department papers, armory records, and congressional debates to show how certain bureaucrats developed the ability to work against congressional limits to their functionality. Ordnance ultimately succeeded because its leaders executed a nonpartisan military agenda and demonstrated an ability to effectively manage the nation's security apparatus, especially in times of peace.