Story had inadvertently laid the seeds for the wartime emancipation theory in other places as well. The judge had once said in an appellate ruling that the American government could legally seize timber privately owned by British merchants during the War of 1812. When the case was appealed to the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Marshall affirmed this issue in Brown v. United States (1814). “War gives to the sovereign full right,” he decreed, “to take the persons and confiscate the property of the enemy.”7
