The following is a guest post by Bayleigh Baldwin, an intern with the Digital Resources Division of the Law Library of Congress. She is an undergraduate student studying history and Spanish at the University of California, Davis.
The digital Lieber Collection is a part of the Law Library’s Military Legal Resources Collection and is provided to the Library of Congress by the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center. The 154-item collection contains the library of Brigadier General Guido Norman Lieber and the items he inherited from his father, 19th-century “political philosopher and jurist,” Dr. Francis (Franz) Lieber. This blog post will summarize the background of the Lieber family and act as a guide to the contents of the collection.
The Lieber Family
Dr. Francis Lieber was born in Germany in 1798. He is most known for writing the Lieber Code, the “first modern codification of the laws of war,” which established the guidelines for the Union Army’s conduct during the U.S. Civil War. All three sons of Francis Lieber and his wife, Matilda, would serve during the Civil War, though on opposing sides of the battlefield. Their oldest son, Oscar Lieber, wrote three publications in geology that can be found in this collection. His brother, Guido Norman Lieber, was the youngest of the three sons and worked to maintain the legacy of the Lieber Code throughout his life. Guido Norman Lieber was promoted to brigadier general of the U.S. Army in 1885. In the same year, he began to lead the Judge Advocate General’s Department, and he would become the longest holder of the position in the Army’s history. The Judge Advocate General’s Department has held the Lieber Collection since 1947 when BG Lieber’s daughter Mrs. C. F. Stearns (Amelia Lieber) gifted the collection to the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps. It has remained at the JAG Legal Center in Charlottesville, Virginia since 1965.
The Contents of the Collection
The Lieber Collection covers a variety of subjects and research needs. To begin, the collection is multilingual. There are 116 items in English, 25 in German, 7 in Latin, and 4 in French. Two linguistic outliers remain: a dissertation in both Latin and German and “Novum Testum Tetraglotton,“ the New Testament in four languages (English, German, Latin, and Greek.)
Additionally, most materials were created in the 19th century, with 136 out of the 154 items being created in that period. The average year of publication or creation for all the items is 1846, 17 years before the issuance of the Lieber Code. The earliest created item in the collection is the Latin and German dissertation on military deserters from 1714. On the other hand, the latest dated item is a telegram to the Judge Advocate General’s Department from 1933.
The most common types of publication in the collection are published books and pamphlets. Any pamphlet from the last 500 years can generally be defined as “a complete work, shorter than a book, bound (if at all) in wrappers, plain or printed.” However, the pamphlets in this collection represent the 18th-century trend of spreading political opinion writing through pamphlets. Sixteen of the pamphlets in the collection came from the same slipcase, titled “Pamphlets Vol. II.”
The collection also spans a variety of legal and historical topics for anyone to explore. It includes works related to military law, constitutional law, international law, criminal law, political science, economics, European history, and legal history. Importantly, the Lieber Code itself is valuable for learning about the beginnings of international humanitarian law. Here is a selection of items written by members of the Lieber family:
Items written by Francis Lieber related to law and political science:
- Instructions for the government of armies of the United States in the field (The Lieber Code), 1898.
- The ancient and the modern teacher of politics, 1860.
- Essays on property and labour as connected with natural law and the constitution of society, 1842.
- Fragments of political science on nationalism and inter-nationalism, 1868.
- Guerrilla parties: considered with reference to the laws and usages of war, 1862.
- Legal and political hermeneutics, or, Principles of interpretation and construction in law and politics: with remarks on precedents and authorities, 1839.
- Letter to His Excellency Patrick Noble, Governor of South Carolina, on the penitentiary system, 1839.
- On international copyright, 1840.
- A popular essay on subjects of penal law, and on uninterrupted solitary confinement at labor, as contradistinguished to solitary confinement at night and joint labor by day, in a letter to John Bacon…President of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating, 1838.
Items written by BG Lieber on military and constitutional law:
- Constitutional Uses of the Military Forces of the United States, 1898.
- Remarks on the army regulations and executive regulations in general, 1898.
- The use of the army in aid of the civil power, 1898.
Items written by Oscar Lieber on geology:
- Art. V–Sketch of the Geology of Mississippi
- Art. V–Some Remarks on the Metalliferous Veins of the South
- Quarries and clays: The Talladega Marble Quarries
Additional Items
The Lieber Collection contains more than just books and pamphlets. One of my favorite items in the collection is this needlepoint bookmark with the German words Gott Liebe Dich, or “God loves you” in English, sewn in red thread. The bookmark was originally found within the pages of the item “Novum Testamentum Tetraglotton.”
More noteworthy items include:
- A punctuation pamphlet once belonging to GN Lieber
- A handwritten note initialed F.L. and left within a published pamphlet that reads: “this is a choice volume and by no means to be disposed of as mere old pamphlets by my heirs”
- A copy of the German children’s novel, Peter Schlemihl’s wundersame Geschichte
- A large chart comparing the constitutions of 31 states, created sometime after California’s admission into the Union in 1849
- A post-humous account of Francis Lieber’s contributions to international law, written by his scholarly peer Johann Kaspar Bluntschli
What else will you discover?
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