Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 14.djvu/438

 432 Southern Historical Society Papers.

Bunker Hill marked the dividing line between rebellion and civil war, between treason and war.

" It created," he said, " at once a state of open public war. There could no longer be a question of proceeding against individuals as guilty of treason or rebellion." So Mr. Charles Francis Adams, the American minister to England, in June, 1861, wrote to his govern- ment that the recognition by the European powers of belligerent rights in the Confederate States relieved the government of the United States of responsibility for any misdeeds of the Confederates towards foreign persons or property. As soon as hostilities began, England and France recognized the Confederate States as entitled to rights of belligerents in lawful war. The Union government per- mitted flags of truce and exchange of prisoners, and for four years the status of war was self-evident, and admitted by all the world. As soon as the war began, the United States claimed and exercised the right of blockade, which, as it affects foreign nations, can only be exercised in a war. As soon as peace was restored, the civil courts in the Union were forced, by the inexorable logic of history, of law and of justice, to decide anywhere all sorts of questions, in all sorts of cases, that the war was a civil war, with all the legal con- sequences of public war.

The Supreme Court of Maine led off in deciding in an insurance suit between citizens of Maine, that a capture by the Sumter was a capture in war, and that Semmes's flag was a lawful flag, and not a piratical one. The Supreme Court of the United States also held in a suit against a Massachusetts Insurance Company, that the Con- federate flag was a lawful one, and a Confederate capture on the high seas a capture in war.

The Federal courts everywhere have established the same propo- sition.

The Supreme Court, in numberless cases, has held that the war was a civil war, with all the consequences of public war. A New Hampshire man sued an Arkansas man, who pleaded the statute of limitation to a debt created before the war. The court held that the war stopped the running of the statute.

A New York man was sued on liabilities created during the war by a partnership, of which he was a member in Mobile. The court held that the war dissolved the partnership. In another case it has de- cided that a corporation chartered by the Confederate State of Ala- bama continued to exist after Alabama returned to the Union, and it exists now. Numerous attempts have been made to hold Confede-