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Transatlantic Exchange: Introducing Francis Lieber

Transatlantic Exchange: Introducing Francis Lieber

It is remarkable how quickly America was transformed from an isolated agrarian republic in 1800 into a hegemonic industrial power by 1900. Intellectual and cultural changes that began taking root in the early half of the century yielded a cornucopia of new fruits in the latter half, including tax-supported public libraries, the rise of the scientific professions, and German-style graduate education. The impact of democracy, nationalism, industrialization, the reform crusades, sectionalism, urbanization, commerce, and immigration together gave new urgency to Crevecoeur’s old question: “What is this new man, the American?” 

Cultural nationalism 

The self-conscious nationalism that shook the old empires of Europe was the leading edge of a wave of revolutionary cultural change that eventually swept across the globe. Though we may find forerunners in the Dutch revolt against the Spanish Habsburgs, the English civil wars, and the American War for Independence, the real impetus of modern revolutionary nationalism came from the French Revolution. The revolutionaries drew their inspiration from diverse sources: English deism, dissent, and empiricism; French rationalism and anticlericalism; German historicism, illuminism, and romanticism.[1]

Matters quickly took an ugly turn as liberty, equality, and fraternity each fought for preeminence and the revolution began devouring itself. When republican (and later imperial) France made ideological warfare on the crowned heads of Europe, the newly independent Americans, hardly yet a nation, began choosing sides while staying mostly on the sidelines. In his Farewell Address (1796), George Washington emphasized the importance both of strengthening unity among citizens and resisting divided loyalties based on partisan, regional, or foreign interests and sympathies.

The American republic was a cultural melting pot from its inception. Prior to the War for Independence four distinct waves of English colonization duplicated much of the character of the regions from which they were drawn, leaving a distinct imprint upon a physical landscape that was already laced with pockets of Dutch, Swedish, Huguenot, and German settlement.[2] To fashion a new nation out of such a hodge-podge required some unifying principle to replace the firm hand of the British Crown. The founding documents,[3] the Christianity of the great revivals, and the English common law traditions were among the earliest of these unifying factors, but even these soon became tangled in fractious partisan divisions – Federalists vs. Republicans, church establishments vs. dissenters – that pitted Northern commercial and Southern agricultural interests against each other.[4] The house soon began to divide over foreign entanglements and commercial rivalries.

Against these centrifugal tendencies, a new generation of nation-building patriots, including Noah Webster, Jedidiah Morse, and Timothy Dwight, drew on a predominately British cultural tradition while introducing republican educational and cultural innovations. National aspirations stirred by the French Revolution produced strong sympathetic vibrations on both sides of the Atlantic that harmonized with this quest for a distinctly American national self-identity. A more conservative variety of cultural nationalism initially took root as part of a generalized search for common roots in the language, history, native soil, and folkways of the people.[5] But then the generation of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe looked outward once again and reshaped America’s cultural landscape while drawing, directly and indirectly, upon European scholarship and cultural themes. 

The German connection 

A German or, more specifically, Prussian influence on American education and culture grew rapidly during the half century following the War of 1812 and helped give rise to the modern university system after the Civil War. Transmitted in part by English Romantics like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle, its by-products in the 1830s included New England’s Transcendentalist Club, the public education movement promoted by Gov. Edward Everett and his political ally, Horace Mann, and much of the idealism that helped mobilize as well as polarize the social reform movements.

The highly systematic, philosophically- and historically-based, critical research methods cultivated by the German universities were introduced into American cultural circles by at least three distinct groups. The avant garde included an assortment of scholars, promoters, and popularizers: William Bentley, the American polymath; the celebrated Madame de Staël; Washington Irving in literature; Victor Cousin in philosophy; and Giovanni (or Johann) Pestalozzi in education.[6]

Madame de Staël’s On Germany, published in New York in 1814, inspired a second group, composed of young Harvard scholars, to pursue graduate studies in the German universities,[7] much as earlier generations of Americans had gone to England and Scotland to study theology, law, and medicine. This new wrinkle on the traditional Grand Tour produced a very influential band of German-educated scholars and political figures, the earliest of whom included Edward Everett, George Ticknor, George Bancroft, and Joseph Green Cogswell, who studied at the University of Göttingen between 1815 and 1819.[8] A third group included such émigré scholars as Carl Beck, Charles (Carl) Follen, and Francis Lieber, who arrived between 1824 and 1827.[9] They had been preceded a generation earlier by the geographer, Alexander von Humboldt, who visited from 1804 to 1805.

Among the European visitors whose observations of American life found a ready audience on both sides of the Atlantic was an enterprising refugee from Prussia who quickly won a place among the scholars, jurists, and literati of his day on both sides of the Atlantic. Simultaneously a legal scholar of international standing and a brilliant polymath who cultivated an astonishing range of activities and interests, Franz (Francis) Lieber (1798-1872),[10] personified a peculiarly American character-type by combining a jack-of-all-trades inventiveness with dogged perseverance and endless self-promotion to carve a niche for himself in the New World. He was to play a role in the process of national self-definition while helping to facilitate a growing transatlantic cultural exchange.[11] Yet this self-styled publicist has been unaccountably neglected since his death, despite some renewed attention. 

An American entrepreneur 

If Francis Lieber (1798-1872) had been a tinkerer, like Thomas Alva Edison or George Westinghouse, he might be remembered today for patenting a great variety of inventions. Yet he was an innovator in several fields. His active concerns as a political economist, scholar, and writer ranged through the industrial as well as the liberal arts.

Lieber was an early advocate of an international copyright. He urged Congress to establish an office of statistics to aid scientific research. Later, he took a lead in military and legal reform, drafting a standardized code of military conduct (known as the Lieber Code), which predated and influenced both the Hague and Geneva conventions.[12] His contributions to international law were later publicly acknowledged by Elihu Root, a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

As a young man of twenty-nine, Lieber started the first swimming program in the United States at a gymnastics school he operated. Seven years later, in 1834, he drew up the famous education plan for Girard College. Lieber was an able linguist and philologist whose scholarly research included work with Laura Bridgman, a blind deaf-mute. As a political economist, he helped introduce Frederic Bastiat to an American audience and wrote on the fallacies of protectionism. In the fields of history and political science, which Lieber taught at South Carolina College (now University) and Columbia, many of the concepts he popularized and political terms he coined – such as individualism, nationalism, internationalism, city-state, Pan-American, and penology – have become part of our language.

If Lieber had held high political office, he might be recognized as one of the great statesmen of his time. Even so, he looms large in the circle of public figures. Lieber interacted and corresponded with many prominent political leaders – among them Joseph Story, James Kent, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, Charles Sumner, and Hamilton Fish – and served three administrations in various capacities during the last decade of his life. His work on penology and prison reform brought him international attention, including the offer of an administrative post by the Prussian king.

Finally, if Lieber had made his mark as a literary lion, his contributions as an observer of American and European political and cultural trends might have earned him the renown of an Edgar Allan Poe, a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, or an Alexis de Tocqueville, all of whom he knew. His works are marvels of erudition that make few concessions to the casual reader. His poetry was written and published in two languages. He mastered several European languages of his day and knew the classical tongues.

But it was as an encyclopedist – and not as a published poet or linguist – that Lieber came to the attention of the general public. His thirteen volume Encyclopedia Americana (1829-1833) drew contributions from some of the great writers and thinkers of his day. The encyclopedia also provided a channel for introducing and popularizing German cultural trends in America many years before the Transcendental Club was formed and the public education movement that patterned itself upon the Prussian model. Sets of the encyclopedia were owned by Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln.

In sum, Lieber’s personal accomplishments in physical education, political science, penology, linguistics, military justice, international law, and other fields merit his acknowledgment as a significant contributor to each. Remarkably, this great American teacher, writer, and patriot first arrived in America in 1827 – years before the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 – as a political refugee like so many others before and since.

Lieber devoted a lifetime of study to analyzing the origins of modern liberty and the threats posed by what he called monarchical and democratic absolutism. It is in this – his capacity as a critic of centralizing tendencies – that we should consider Lieber today.  

Francis Lieber: émigré scholar 

Franz (Francis) Lieber was born on March 18, 1798 (or 1800)[13] in Berlin into a once prosperous business family that had suffered financial reverses during political upheavals spawned by the French Revolution. Forever etched into his memory was the shame a young boy felt at his country’s defeat in the Battle of Jena (1806) followed by the parade of Napoleon’s troops outside his window on Breite Strasse in Berlin where, later, on his 50th birthday, the opening battle of the Revolution of 1848 was to be fought.

In March 1815, Franz interrupted his preliminary medical studies to enlist in the Prussian army. Before three months had passed, he was severely wounded and left for dead at the Battle of Namur during the Waterloo campaign. It took him a nearly a year and two long convalescences before he could return home to Berlin. There he fell under the influence of the nationalistic leader of the Turner movement, Friedrich Jahn, and enrolled at the University of Berlin, where he attended lectures by the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher.

The Age of Napoleon was succeeded by the Age of Metternich and of political protests. The increasing radicalism of this early German youth movement may be attributed in part to the reactionary policies of Prince Metternich and the failure of the Prussian king to grant constitutional liberties. Lieber enrolled at the gymnasium operated by Friedrich Ludwig Jahn as well as a military swimming school, joined the ultranationalistic Turnerschaft movement, where he soon assumed a leadership position, and came under the influence of Friedrich Schleiermacher. He later helped compile the official Turner songbook, which Father Jahn complained was too radical.

Lieber’s prominence in radical student circles led to his imprisonment for few months following the assassination of Count Kotzebue, the Austrian playwright, although he was not personally implicated. Afterwards banned from Prussian universities for his radical associations, the student movement was suppressed and the Turner drill grounds (Hasenheide) were closed by the Prussian government. The police confiscated Lieber’s diaries and published some of his most strident poems, which served only to provide an ampler forum for disseminating his political views.

Following his release from prison, Lieber sought admission to the University of Berlin in the safe subject of mathematics but his application was rejected by the rector on orders from the police. He lodged a protest with Freiherr von Stein zum Stein, the liberal Minister of Education, who responded by barring his entry into any Prussian university. He then surreptitiously matriculated in theology at the University of Jena in the Spring of 1820, which had been declared off limits to Prussian students because it was a center of radical activity. Soon he switched to the liberal arts with an emphasis on mathematics, and earned a Ph.D. after less than four months in order to acquire the privileges of "an academic citizen." The police regarded his acquisition of the Ph.D. after four months as another political offense and kept him under surveillance, but no one questioned the degree’s validity. Soon it would open doors that might otherwise have been closed to him.

The following year, Lieber escaped Germany to fight in an early phase of the Greek war for independence (as did Lord Byron and Samuel Gridley Howe later). The experience left him disillusioned and destitute. He left for Italy in the spring of 1822 and called upon the great liberal historian, Barthold Niebuhr, who was then Prussia’s ambassador to Italy. Niebuhr took pity upon the young man, hired him to tutor his son, helped moderate his revolutionary fervor, and introduced him to international cultural circles.

The year-long association with Niebuhr had a profound influence on Lieber’s intellectual development. Niebuhr’s Anglophilia is especially evident in Lieber’s subsequent development and undoubtedly inspired the contrast he later made between Anglican and Gallican liberty.[14] During his stay in Rome, Lieber published an account of his experiences in Greece and met both Alexander von Humboldt and the Prussian king, Frederick William Ill. Niebuhr interceded with the king on Lieber’s behalf and won a pardon for him. Lieber returned to Germany with Niebuhr late the following summer. Even so, Lieber continued to face difficulty and eventually spent more time in prison after refusing to identify his earlier compatriots.

Faced with an uncertain future at home, Lieber slipped away in May 1826 to London, where he spent an impecunious year in London, often living hand to mouth as a tutor, but met his future bride, Matilda Oppenheimer, when her father hired him to teach her Italian. He also met John and Sarah Austin, Jeremy Bentham, George Grote, Henry Brougham, and John Stuart Mill.

Lieber had been preceded into exile by Karl (Charles) Follen, who had already reached America the previous year and been installed as a professor at Harvard University. It was this dual association with Follen and the Austin circle that brought Lieber to the attention of a group of Americans who invited him to take charge of a new gymnastic school in Boston. So, with great expectations, he set out in June 1827 for this "land of progress, where civilization is building its home." As he wrote his family from England[15]

“Believe me that I do not expect a paradise, but I look forward eagerly to the prospect of a more settled and active life, and an honorable and useful position in a young republic, which, however imperfect it may still be, yet gives a field for the practice and application of talent and ability.” 

The convivial Lieber, who arrived in America late in June 1827, soon found his way into the affections of New England society. Combining a jack-of-all-trades inventiveness with a facility for self-promotion, Lieber came to embody a peculiarly American character-type: the entrepreneur or self-made man. Waning public interest in gymnastics and the swimming school he opened soon offered him time to begin work as an American correspondent for a German newspaper chain with the help of Barthold Niebuhr and to launch the Encyclopaedia Americana (1829-1833), which became the first American encyclopedia as well as a major early conduit for the transmission of German cultural influences to America.

Lieber’s initial work as an encyclopedist and translator represents one of the earliest and most significant conduits through which German scholarship was introduced to America before it blossomed forth with the rise of the Transcendentalist literary movement. Several Harvard graduates, notably Edward Everett, George Ticknor, George Bancroft, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, had studied at German universities prior to Charles Follen’s arrival in 1825 and were already spreading the fruits of their education.

Lieber promoted this transatlantic cultural exchange to an unprecedented degree through his popular encyclopedia, the original thirteen volumes of which were completed by 1833. This helped break ground for the campaigns of Victor Cousin, Horace Mann, and other educational reformers to win support for systems of public education along the lines of the Prussian state school system. Lieber himself showed a similar devotion to educational innovation, having written favorably on the Lancastrian system of education while still in Germany and subsequently studied it firsthand while in England.

The foci of Lieber’s efforts as a publicist (a term he coined) evolved through several stages, beginning with his pioneering work in physical education and the popular dissemination of knowledge. From there he proceeded to criminology, penology (another of his many coinages), linguistics, hermeneutics, political ethics, political economy, and the study of nationalism and international law.

Lieber won his first academic appointment at what is now the University of South Carolina in 1835. For the next twenty-one years, he devoted his tremendous energies to writing and teaching in South Carolina during the school year followed by extended working vacations in New England and occasional trips abroad. Despite his repeated and futile efforts to secure a teaching position in the North, these years proved to be the most productive of his life, in which he embraced and to some extent mediated European and American cultural concerns as well as Northern with Southern sensibilities.

In 1856, Lieber reached a professional impasse when the board rebuffed his bid for a permanent appointment to the presidency. Politically vulnerable on campus and mindful of the deepening sectional conflict and the awkwardness of his situation as a Union supporter, Lieber resigned his teaching position and moved his family to New York City early in 1857, four months before the board of Columbia in New York approved his long-sought appointment. There he held the chair in history and political science, the first political science position in the country, until an unfriendly new president abolished it in 1865. Lieber transferred to the law school, where he filled the chair of constitutional history and public law, which he held until his death in 1872.

Lieber, who helped lay the foundations of academic political science, was equally influential in the field of constitutional law. During the Civil War, he drafted the rules of land warfare, known as the Lieber Code,[16] and later promoted an international conference of legal scholars he never lived to witness. Eventually, through the efforts of his close friend, J.C. Bluntschli, the Hague Convention of 1899 adopted Lieber’s rules, which in turn helped shape the Geneva Convention.

Making a case for the nation-state 

Alan Grimes has summarized Lieber’s place in American political thought as follows[17]

“The decline of the constitutional and legal approach to an understanding of the nature of the American Union, and the rise of the organic concept of the nation is well illustrated in the writings of Francis Lieber. An immigrant from Germany, Lieber skillfully synthesized the English emphasis on civil liberty and the importance of local political institutions, with the German emphasis on nationalism. Thus, Lieber’s nationalism was built upon decentralized institutions which in turn helped protect the civil rights of the citizens. It was, Lieber believed, the happy combination of local institutions and national purpose which protected and fostered civil liberty in a modern nation state.” 

Besides the Lieber Code, Lieber’s most important single contribution to the literature of political science may be his theory of institutional liberty, which links civil liberty with the self-government of the active citizen.[18] Behind this capacity for popular self-governance, lies a set of "mediating structures"[19] – moral, educational, and ultimately religious – that support the progressive growth and the strengthening of republican institutions.

Lieber associated the rise of the nation-state with the development of autonomous institutions. He identified three major characteristics of the development of the modern epoch.[20] First is the national polity or nation-state. Second is "the general endeavor to define more clearly, and to extend more widely, human rights and civil liberty."[21] Third, amidst the breakdown of universal empires has come the simultaneous flowering of many leading nations under the aegis of international law and "in the bonds of one common moving civilization."[22] Even so, he also believed that "there will be no obliteration of nationalities" in this commonwealth of nations.

Lieber articulated a liberal form of nationalism. He consistently encouraged economic free enterprise in his teaching and writings.[23] He believed that national institutions permit the encouragement of commerce and interdependence among nations. This, in turn, puts absolutism – whether monarchical or democratic – on the defensive.

This growing interdependence, then, permits the principle of institutional liberty to operate on a global scale as well as locally. It is this third characteristic of the modern epoch – the flourishing of many nations "in the bonds of one common moving civilization" – that seems to have been the greatest encouragement to Lieber’s hopes for the continued growth of liberty. 

 

Notes:

[1]See James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 4, 17-20; Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man (New York: William Morrow, 1938). Lieber’s chief contribution to the literature of nationalism is "Nationalism and Internationalism (1868)." Francis Lieber, Miscellaneous Writings, Vol. 2: Contributions to Political Science (Philadelphia: J. B, Lippincott & Co., 1881), 225-43. The Oxford Universal Dictionary gives the dates of the introduction of "nationalism" and "internationalism" into English as 1844 and 1877 respectively.

[2]David Hackett Fischer identifies these four folkways as Puritans from East Anglia who made an exodus to Massachusetts, 1629-1641; Cavaliers from the South of England who migrated to the Chesapeake region, 1642-1675; Friends from the North Midlands who went to the Delaware Valley, 1675-1725; and Borderers from North Britain who settled the Backcountry, 1717-1775. David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). See also Henry A. Pochmann, German Culture in America: Philosophical and Literary Influences, 1600-1900 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961). In the South and West, Spanish and French communities would soon be absorbed into the new republic.

[3]See Steven Alan Samson, “Engines of Liberty: American Experiments in Self-Government,” The Market for Ideas, 25 (Sept.-Dec. 2020). http://www.themarketforideas.com/engines-of-liberty-american-experiment-in-self-government-a612/

[4] See Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965).

[5]While Napoleon’s troops still occupied Berlin, Johann Gottlieb Fichte laid the intellectual foundation for German nationalism in his Addresses to the German Nation (1808), where he called for a national system of public education. John H. Hallowell, Main Currents in Modern Political Thought (New York: Henry Holt, 1950), p. 567. By this time, the Grimm brothers had begun collecting folk tales. Here literary romanticism gave rise to a sense of national self-identity. George L. Mosse, The Culture of Western Europe: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: An Introduction (Rand McNally, 1961), 41-42.

[6]Pochmann, 101-03, 226, 367-81-. There was much cross-pollination. Pestalozzi drew on Locke and Rousseau. Prussian education was influenced by the English industrialist and utopian socialist, Robert Owen, who later established a commune at New Harmony, Indiana. George Hillard, a longtime friend and correspondent of Francis Lieber, was an early supporter of the Prussian model of public education publicized in Cousin’s 1832 report to the French government. Others influenced by the same report were Sarah Austin in England, Calvin Stowe (the husband of Harriet Beecher), and Horace Mann. See John Albrecht Walz, German Influence in American Education and Culture (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1969 [1936]), 14-23.

[7]Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England, 1815-1865 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1936), pp. 73-88. See also Jurgen Herbst, The German Historical School in American Scholarship: A Study in the Transfer of Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1965), 1-22; Pochmann, op. cit, 66-75. Benjamin Franklin visited the University of Göttingen in 1766. Franklin’s University of Pennsylvania (built on the site of George Whitefield’s Charity School) subsequently appointed Johann Christoph Kunze, a German-American minister and classicist, to a chair in philosophy. The turmoil that accompanied the War for Independence also disrupted American higher education through the War of 1812. A revival of learning soon followed, accompanied by an amazing degree of voluntary social activism.

[8]Ibid., pp. 75-76. These early students paid visits to such luminaries as to Goethe, Cousin, and Christopher Daniel Ebeling, the Hamburg geographer and librarian who was the chief German expert on America and whose library of Americana was donated to Harvard after his death in 1817. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Motley, a student of Cogswell and Bancroft at their German-style Round Hill School, studied in Germany at a later date. Together these six "literary pioneers" are the subject of Orie William Long’s Literary Pioneers: Early American Explorers of European Culture (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963). Even so, their personal impressions of German intellectuals were in many ways unfavorable and the feeling appears to have been reciprocated. "Ticknor was shocked to find that almost all the intellectuals he met swore abominably, even professors of divinity and the ladies ‘in whom such an intimation is horrible’. David B. Tyack, George Ticknor and the Boston Brahmins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 59. See also Pochmann, op. cit., 73-74 on Bancroft’s reactions.

[9]Pochmann, 1, 14-28. Beginning in 1825 Follen lectured on German and civil law, then in 1828 became instructor in ethics and ecclesiastical history at the Divinity School, and finally Professor of German Literature in 1832, the same year Beck was elected professor of Latin. Andrews Norton (the father of Charles Eliot Norton), a professor of theology at Harvard, was one of the first Americans to become acquainted with German theology. He later raised the charge of infidelity against its chief exponents, sparking a continuing controversy among American theologians (pp. 109-14, 148-51). Earlier émigrés, such as the H. M. Mühlenberg (an early graduate of Göttingen) and his sons, as well as Johann David Gros, also brought German scholarship and educational methods with them but had a more limited impact on American thought (pp. 43, 304-05). On Gros’s contribution to moral philosophy, see Anna Haddow, Political Science in American Colleges and Universities, 1636-1900 (New York: D. Appleton-Century Crofts, 1939), 65-67. Lieber is treated on pp. 138-44.

[10]See Frank Freidel, Francis Lieber: Nineteenth-Century Liberal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1947). Helpful secondary literature on this period includes Alice Felt Tyler, Freedom’s Ferment: Phases of American Social History to 1860 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1944); and Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Avon Books, 1978). My early research for this article – the first part of which is offered here – was supported through grants by the Marguerite Eyer Wilbur Foundation. This article is drawn from an unpublished 1995 paper and other essays as well as from “Francis Lieber: Transatlantic Cultural Missionary,” in Francis Lieber and the Culture of the Mind, ed. Charles R. Mack and Henry H. Lesesne. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005.  http://www.sc.edu/uscpress/2005/3535.pdf

[11]Lieber claimed to have coined or introduced several neologisms, including penology, jural, city-state, nationalism, internationalism, and individualism (which his friend Tocqueville also claimed in Democracy in America). Francis Lieber, "What I Have Done," Huntington Library. "Cultural" and "bureaucracy" may be added. The OED and the Oxford Universal Dictionary of Historical Principles (1955) give 1868 as the earliest known use of "cultural." Yet Lieber’s lecture on "The History and Uses of Athenaeums" at the Columbia (South Carolina) Athenaeum, March 17, 1856 uses it: “I have omitted an entire important class of cultural institutions, of recent origins. I hope you will allow the word cultural to pass without censure. We stand in need of a term for the distinct idea it expresses, and having agricultural from agriculture, I do not see why we should not have cultural, since we have culture." Francis Lieber, Miscellaneous Writings, Vol. 1 : Reminiscences Addresses, and Essays (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1881), p. 303.

[12] See Richard Shelly Hartigan, Lieber’s Code and the Law of War (Chicago: Precedent, 1983).

[13]Most sources give the year as 1800. Frank Freidel claims he was born in 1798. This account is largely drawn from Freidel, op. cit., and Pochmann, op. cit., 125-27. See also Lewis R. Harley, Francis Lieber: His Life and Political Philosophy (New York: AMS Press, 1970 [1899]); Charles Franklin Thwing, The American and the German University: One Hundred Years of History (New York: Macmillan, 1928), 79-84, which relies on Harley.

[14]Freidel, op. cit., pp. 37-38. NOTE: Friedrich Hayek’s A Constitution drew on Lieber’s “Anglican and Gallican Liberty.” The same piece also provided a template for “Rival Traditions of Liberty,” originally presented at the Academia Romana in March 2017. See Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 55; Steven Alan Samson, “Rival Traditions of Liberty: America vs. the European Union,” The Review of Social and Economic Issues, 1:4 (2017): 96-133.

[15]Thomas Sergeant Perry, ed. The Life and Letters of Francis Lieber (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1882), 69-70.

[16]See Richard Shelly Hartigan, Lieber’s Code and the Law of War (Chicago: Precedent, 1983).

[17] Alan Pendleton Grimes, American Political Thought, revised ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), 283

[18]See Steven Alan Samson, “Francis Lieber on the Sources of Civil Liberty,” Humanitas, IX, 2 (1996): 40-62. http://nhinet.org/samson.htm

[19]"Mediating structures" is simply one phrase among many, like "voluntary associations" and Edmund Burke’s "little platoons," for the "institutional mechanisms" that support a pluralistic polity and, for that matter, a market economy. See, e.g., Joshua Mitchell, The Fragility of Freedom: Tocqueville on Religion, Democracy, and the American Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

[20]Francis Lieber, Miscellaneous Writings, vol. 2: Contributions to Political Science, Including Lectures on the Constitution of the United States and Other Papers (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1881), pp. 225-43.

[21]Ibid., 222, 239.

[22]Ibid., 222, 239.

[23]See "Notes on Fallacies of American Protectionists," in Ibid., 389-459; "A Letter of Dr. Francis Lieber to D. J. McCord," in Frederic Bastiat, Sophisms of the Protective Policy, trans. D. J. McCord (New York: Geo. P. Putnam, 1848), pp. 5-14.

 
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