Lieber, Francis (Franz) b. March 18, 1800; Berlin, Prussia d. October 2, 1872; New York City
German American jurist, scholar of international and constitutional law, penologist, educator, and author. As a teenager, Lieber fought against Napoleon. After recovering
from his wounds, he returned to Berlin to study at the Gymnasium under Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, the founder of the modern Turner movement, and then at the University of Berlin under Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Jakob Friedrich Fries, and Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, where his participation in the activities of the student fraternities (Burschenschaften) brought him into conflict with the conservative and reactionary forces of the time.
The defeat of Napoleon had given fuel to the nationalist and democratic aspirations of the students, who were critical of the Prussian government. The assassination in 1819, by a member of the Jena Burschenscha.fi, of Karl Ludwig Sand, a popular poet and conservative writer, gave the authorities the excuse they needed to repress the growing student movement and the activities of political liberals throughout the German states. Among others, Lieber was arrested and imprisoned because of some poems in his notebooks. Later he would say that he thus got a reputation as a poet in spite of himself. Upon his release, forbidden to study at any Prussian university, he finished his studies at Jena. And when the Greek revolution began in 1822, like many other idealists across Europe, he made his way to the land of classic learning, where, after much hardship and penury, he made his way to Rome on foot. There he made the acquaintance of the historian Reinhold Niebuhr and served as his son’s tutor for a year. He then returned home, only to be imprisoned once more, whereupon with Niebuhr’s help he was again released. Fearing further prosecution and finding it impossible to live under such a reactionary and illiberal regime, he made his way to England in 1826, where he eked out a living working as a tutor and journalist.These early experiences forever set him against despotism and absolutism of all kinds and instilled in him a love of liberty and order, of freedom guaranteed by laws and the nation-state that is the realization of those laws. For Lieber, these freedoms and liberties develop through the habit of self-governance in the day-to-day experiences of a people, those historical institutions that arise from the customs and mores of a society out of its material and spiritual needs and activities. This was Lieber’s guiding and central idea. When he arrived in Boston in 1827 to teach gymnastics, he hoped to bring the ideas of Jahn and the new discipline of the Turnkunst, the collective practice of physical fitness tuned to the ethos of the regimental army, to the sons of New England. However, he quickly found that such ideas were alien to American soil.
While in Boston, he produced and edited the first American encyclopedia, an adaptation of the Brockhaus Konversations- Lexicon (Conversations-Lexicon). In so doing, he improved his facility with the English language and wrote many of the articles himself, embarking on a literary career that would encompass political theory, historical biography, and penal and educational reform. He elaborated the legal and social bases of the nation-state as an organic and historical development arising out of the institutions and social needs of a given people, helping to level the Rousseauian contract theory of the state and its natural rights ideology. In 1835, at much personal cost, he took a post in the heart of the Black Belt at the College of South Carolina where he taught history and political economy and served as acting president during the year of 1849. By 1854 the presidency of the college had again become vacant, and Lieber genuinely believed he would be chosen to fill it. After a suspenseful year of waiting, his bid to become college president failed. Suspected by his Southern colleagues of having Republican and abolitionist sympathies, yet accused of being a pro-slavery man by his Northern friends because of his deep respect for the Constitution and the Union (he had worked tirelessly against the secession of South Carolina after the Compromise of 1850), he could no longer contain his moral repugnance on the issue of slavery.
He resigned his appointment, sold his slaves, and left the South. Freed from his economic ties to the South, he took a violent stand against slavery and would join his fellow emigre Carl Schurz in support of Lincoln and the Republican Party. In 1856 he accepted a position at the School of Jurisprudence at the newly reorganized Columbia College (now University). While at the College of South Carolina, he developed his ideas of nationalism and fought for unity against Southern secession, articulated the legal and constitutional bases of Unionism, and produced the two volumes upon which his reputation rests: Political Ethics (1838—1839) and Civil Liberty and Self-Government (1853). At Columbia he was given the honor of titling his chair “Professor of History and Political Science,” thus becoming the first to do so in the United States. During the Civil War, he gave of himself personally and professionally. His oldest son died for the Confederacy, while his other two sons fought for the Union. President Abraham Lincoln and his generals solicited from him the rules for the conduct of the armies in the field and the laws of war, the most famous of which, General Orders No. 100, “Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field,” later served as the model for the rules of warfare that would emerge from The Hague and Geneva. After the war, he helped to found the American Social Science Association and laid the groundwork for the school of political science established by his successor, John W Burgess.Tibor Baukal
See also Burgess, John William; Encyclopaedia Americana; Turner Societies
References and Further Reading
Brown, Bernard E. American Conservatives:
The Political Thought of Francis Lieber and John W Burgess. New York: Columbia University, 1951.
Curti, Merle. “Francis Lieber and Nationalism.” In Probing Our Past. New York: Harper, 1955, pp. 119-151.
Dorfman, Joseph, and Rexford Guy Tugwell. “Francis Lieber: German Scholar in America.” Columbia University Quarterly vol. 30 (September, December 1938): 159-190.
Freidel, Frank. Francis Lieber, NineteenthCentury Liberal. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1947.
Perry, Thomas Sergeant, ed. The Life and Letters of Francis Lieber. Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1882.