Refining War: Civil Wars and Humanitarian Controls

I. Introduction

War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it. . . . You might as well appeal against the thunder-storm as against these terrible hardships of war.

Major General William Tecumseh Sherman, to the Mayor of Atlanta September 1864 ¹

Sherman’s remarks were part of a rejection of the Mayor’s plea that the city be spared and its inhabitants reprieved from the order to evacuate their homes following the fall of Atlanta to the Federal army. The creation of a significant refugee population and the ensuing disorder were central to the conduct of this phase of the US Civil War. John Bell Hood, the commander of the defeated Confederate forces, characterized this assault against civilians as an “unprecedented measure” which “transcends, in studied and ingenious cruelty, all acts ever before brought to my attention in the dark history of war.” ² There was considerable prophecy behind his grandiloquence; regional resentments have persisted for more than 130 years despite an ultimately successful reconstruction that included a promotion of civil rights and economic development.

In the dark century that would follow, the “unprecedented” campaign against uninvolved civilians, economic infrastructure, and supportive civic culture would become unexceptional, surpassed on exponentially greater scales by societies representing both the highwaters and the backwaters of apparent progress. It will take many generations to absorb the meaning and consequences of the extermination of European Jewry, the killing fields of Cambodia, and the instigation of mass famine by the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China against their own population.

The US Civil War is a proper starting point for this study because it is familiar, because it has receded from current events into national history, and because of its more accessible scale. The property of civilians was sometimes destroyed or confiscated with the expectation of depriving enemy armies of food and shelter, institutionalizing at least some of the patterns for twentieth century war. Sherman, who saw his mission in Georgia and the Carolinas as economic war against an opposing army’s civilian base, came to personify the ethical complexity of the post-Enlightenment commander.

The US Civil War is also instructive in the ways it differed from twentieth century wars directed distinctively or solely against civilian populations. Normally, civilians were not targeted for destruction by the armies of either the North or South. In the strategic encounters at Gettysburg and New Orleans, for example, there were accepted codes on avoiding civilian casualties. In particular, the United States Army General Order No. 100, Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field (known as the Lieber Code), which constituted the first comprehensive codiþcation of the rules and regulations concerning land warfare, expressly protected the civilian population. ³

Today civilians are often targeted for destruction. The Red Cross estimates that most of the casualties in modern wars are civilian, especially women, children, and the aged. ⁴ Those civilians who are not killed are often forced from their homes, becoming refugees or internally displaced persons. A major root cause of refugee displacement is civil conflict. These phenomena have had their major resonances in the international public health community where crisis induced refugee care has produced a literature and catalogue of responsive institutions. ⁵ Of these, the applied policy domain remains most underdeveloped. As with environmental dangers and even, in a sense, nuclear war, we have learned that the most effective preventive approaches lie in public policy that organizes the conduct of institutions, from armed forces to corporations.

Notwithstanding statistics from the Red Cross, modern states have created rules to regulate the conduct of wars, especially wars of an international character. The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 codified, among others, a set of regulations governing land warfare and, to a lesser extent, sea warfare. The four Geneva Conventions of 1949, building upon the work of the Hague Conventions, further extended the protective regime for the victims of war, whether they be the wounded and sick members of armed forces in the field (I), wounded, sick and shipwrecked...