consequences as regards neutrals. They cannot ask a court to affect technical ignor ance of a war which all the world acknowl edges to be the greatest civil war known in the history of the human race, and thus crip ple the arm of the Government and paralyze its power by subtle definitions and ingenious
Copyright by Hampton L. Carson.
sophisms. The law of nations is also called the law of nature; it is founded on the com mon consent as well as the common sense of the world. It contains no such anomalous doctrine as that which this court is now for the first time desired to pronounce, to wit: that insurgents who have risen in re bellion against their sovereign, expelled her courts, established a revolutionary govern-
ment, organized armies and commenced hos tilities, are not enemies because they are traitors; and a war levied on the Govern ment by traitors in order to dismember and destroy it, is not a war, because it is an in surrection." In marked contrast to the strained con-
Courtesy of P. U'~. Ziegler and Company.
struction of the law of treason which so long stained the annals of English jurisprudence, is his lucid statement, in United States v. Hanway, 2 Wallace, Jr., 204, of the Ameri can doctrine. The defendant was charged with participation in an armed opposition to an enforcement of the fugitive -slave law. The conspiracy and the insurrection con nected with it," Justice Grier charged the
