Halleck himself was an authority on the laws of war and international law, and the key point, which he would repeat in a treatise on the subject published right after the war, was embodied in Articles 42 and 43 of the “Lieber Code,” as the revised military laws were known. Art. 42. Slavery . . . exists according to municipal or local law only. The law of nature and nations has never acknowledged it. The digest of the Roman law enacts the early dictum of the pagan jurist, that “so far as the law of nature is concerned, all men are equal.”
