their masters, in a manner unpracticed by civilized nations." This probably had reference to the proclamation of Dunmore, the last royal Governor of Virginia, in 1775, declaring freedom to all servants or negroes, if they would join "for the reducing the colony to a proper sense of its duty." The invitation to the slaves to rise against their masters, the suggested insurrection caused, says Bancroft, "a thrill of indignation to run through Virginia, effacing all differences of party, and rousing one strong, impassioned purpose to drive away the insolent power by which it had been put forth." A cotemporary annalist, adverting to the same proclamation, said, "it was received with the greatest horror in all the colonies."
"The policy adopted by Dunmore," says Lawrence in his notes on Wheaton, "of arming the slaves against their masters, was not pursued during the war of the revolution; and when negroes were taken by the English, they were not considered otherwise than as property and plunder." Emancipation of slaves as a war measure has been severely condemned and denounced by the most eminent publicists in Europe and the United States. The United States, "in their diplomatic relations, have ever maintained," says the northern authority just quoted, "that slaves were private property, and for them, as such, they have repeatedly received compensation from England." Napoleon I. was never induced to issue a proclamation for the emancipation of the serfs in his war with Russia. He said: "I could have armed against her a part of her population, by proclaiming the liberty of the serfs. A great number of villages asked it of me, but I refused to avail myself of a measure which would have devoted to death thousands of families." In the discussions growing out of the treaty of peace of 1814 and the proffered mediation of Russia, the principle was maintained by the United States that "the emancipation of enemy's slaves is not among the acts of legitimate warfare." In the instructions from John Quincy Adams, as Secretary of State, to Mr. Middleton, at St. Petersburg, October 18, 1820, it is said: "The British have broadly asserted the right of emancipating slaves (private property) as a legitimate right of war. No such right is acknowledged as a law of war by writers who admit any limitation. The right of putting to death all prisoners in cold blood, and without special cause, might as well be pretended to be a law of war, or the right to use poisoned weapons, or to assassinate."
Disregarding the teachings of the approved writers on international law, and the practice and claims of his own government in its purer days, President Lincoln has sought to convert the South
