1862 CONFEDERATE "PIRATES." Abraham Lincoln Attempts to Commit War Crimes? Confederates Classed Pirates to be Hanged.

This is one Abraham Lincoln didn't win, and rightfully so. The present document records the legal trial and diplomatic crisis that helped define the legal status of warfare at sea during the American Civil War. Following President Abraham Lincoln’s April 1861 proclamation [present in the Appendix] declaring that Confederate privateers operating under Jefferson Davis’s letters of marque would be treated as criminal pirates subject to execution by hanging, the captured officers and crew of the Confederate privateer Savannah were put on trial for piracy in Federal court in New York. The core issue of the trial was whether the Federal government could treat Confederate commerce raiders as illegal criminals or if it was bound by international maritime law to recognize them as lawful belligerents. 

The trial ended in a hung jury, and when Jefferson Davis threatened retaliatory executions of Union officers held as prisoners of war if the Savannah crew were executed, Lincoln’s administration backed down. By abandoning further piracy prosecutions and transferring the crew to regular prisoner-of-war exchanges, the United States effectively conceded belligerent rights to the Confederacy in practice, making this trial a crucial turning point in early Civil War legal history and Lincoln's wartime administration.

Nice provenance, being gifted to George Henry Warren from S. M. L. Barlow, in 1862. George Henry Warren [1823-1892] was an influential New York City lawyer and Samual Mitchill Latham Barlow [1826-1889], another New York lawyer and a significant 19th century collector of books and Americana. 

[Civil War, Confederacy, Pirates] Trial of the Officers and Crew of the Privateer Savannah, on the Charge of Piracy, in the United States Circuit Court for the Southern District of New York. Hon. Judges Nelson and Shipman, Presiding. Reported by A. P. Warburton, Stenographer, and Corrected by the Counsel. New York. Baker & Godwin, Printers. 1862. 385pp.

Fair copy in original boards attached with a buckram tape overspine, now not functioning at the rear so that the spine of the block itself is visible from the internal rear hinge. Textually generally clean and crisp; well worth preserving. Ex library from the Albertson Public Library of Orlando.