THE GENEALOGY OF THE ARTICLES OF WAR.
As the Articles of War form the ark and constitution of the penal laws
of the American Navy, in all sobriety and earnestness it may be well to
glance at their origin. Whence came they? And how is it that one arm of
the national defences of a Republic comes to be ruled by a Turkish
code, whose every section almost, like each of the tubes of a revolving
pistol, fires nothing short of death into the heart of an offender? How
comes it that, by virtue of a law solemnly ratified by a Congress of
freemen, the representatives of freemen, thousands of Americans are
subjected to the most despotic usages, and, from the dockyards of a
republic, absolute monarchies are launched, with the “glorious stars
and stripes” for an ensign? By what unparalleled anomaly, by what
monstrous grafting of tyranny upon freedom did these Articles of War
ever come to be so much as heard of in the American Navy?
Whence came they? They cannot be the indigenous growth of those
political institutions, which are based upon that arch-democrat Thomas
Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence? No; they are an importation
from abroad, even from Britain, whose laws we Americans hurled off as
tyrannical, and yet retained the most tyrannical of all.
But we stop not here; for these Articles of War had their congenial
origin in a period of the history of Britain when the Puritan Republic
had yielded to a monarchy restored; when a hangman Judge Jeffreys
sentenced a world’s champion like Algernon Sidney to the block; when
one of a race by some deemed accursed of God—even a Stuart, was on the
throne; and a Stuart, also, was at the head of the Navy, as Lord High
Admiral. One, the son of a King beheaded for encroachments upon the
rights of his people, and the other, his own brother, afterward a king,
James II., who was hurled from the throne for his tyranny. This is the
origin of the Articles of War; and it carries with it an unmistakable
clew to their despotism.[4]
[4] The first Naval Articles of War in the English language were
passed in the thirteenth year of the reign of Charles the Second,
under the title of “_An act for establishing Articles and Orders for
the regulating and better Government of his Majesty’s Navies,
Ships-of-War, and Forces by Sea_.” This act was repealed, and, so far
as concerned the officers, a modification of it substituted, in the
twenty-second year of the reign of George the Second, shortly after
the Peace of Aix la Chapelle, just one century ago. This last act, it
is believed, comprises, in substance, the Articles of War at this day
in force in the British Navy. It is not a little curious, nor without
meaning, that neither of these acts explicitly empowers an officer to
inflict the lash. It would almost seem as if, in this case, the
British lawgivers were willing to leave such a stigma out of an
organic statute, and bestow the power of the lash in some less solemn,
and perhaps less public manner. Indeed, the only broad enactments
directly sanctioning naval scourging at sea are to be found in the
United States Statute Book and in the “Sea Laws” of the absolute
monarch, Louis le Grand, of France.[5]
Taking for their basis the above-mentioned British Naval Code, and
ingrafting upon it the positive scourging laws, which Britain was
loth to recognise as organic statutes, our American lawgivers, in
the year 1800, framed the Articles of War now governing the
American Navy. They may be found in the second volume of the
“United States Statutes at Large,” under chapter xxxiii.—“An act
for the _better_ government of the Navy of the United States.”
[5] For reference to the latter (L’Ord. de la Marine), _vide_ Curtis’s
_Treatise on the Rights and Duties of Merchant-Seamen, according to
the General Maritime Law_, Part ii., c. i.
Nor is it a dumb thing that the men who, in democratic Cromwell’s time,
first proved to the nations the toughness of the British oak and the
hardihood of the British sailor—that in Cromwell’s time, whose fleets
struck terror into the cruisers of France, Spain, Portugal, and
Holland, and the corsairs of Algiers and the Levant; in Cromwell’s
time, when Robert Blake swept the Narrow Seas of all the keels of a
Dutch Admiral who insultingly carried a broom at his fore-mast; it is
not a dumb thing that, at a period deemed so glorious to the British
Navy, these Articles of War were unknown.
Nevertheless, it is granted that some laws or other must have governed
Blake’s sailors at that period; but they must have been far less severe
than those laid down in the written code which superseded them, since,
according to the father-in-law of James II., the Historian of the
Rebellion, the English Navy, prior to the enforcement of the new code,
was full of officers and sailors who, of all men, were the most
republican. Moreover, the same author informs us that the first work
undertaken by his respected son-in-law, then Duke of York, upon
entering on the duties of Lord High Admiral, was to have a grand
re-christening of the men-of-war, which still carried on their sterns
names too democratic to suit his high-tory ears.
But if these Articles of War were unknown in Blake’s time, and also
during the most brilliant period of Admiral Benbow’s career, what
inference must follow? That such tyrannical ordinances are not
indispensable—even during war—to the highest possible efficiency of a
military marine.