Quotes from John Fabian Witt

David Williamson's Pennsylvania militia brought Clark's dismaying vision to life in 1782 at Gnadenhutten when they herded nearly ninety Christianized Delaware Indians into two cabins and systematically beat them to death.

Writing from Belgium in the midst of the war, John Quincy Adams predicted that the laws of civilized warfare would likely collapse in the face of Anglo-American armed conflict. "No wars are so cruel and unrelenting as civil wars," he wrote to his wife, "and unfortunately every war between Britain and America must and will be a civil war.

President Grover Cleveland proposed to execute Geronimo, but he and his band of Chiricahua Apache—men, women, and children alike—were taken by train to Florida from their native Southwest and spent more than two decades as prisoners of war.

Colonel Edwin F. Glenn led a team of water cure experts in the Philippines and was court-martialed for violating the 1863 code's prohibition on torture. Twelve years later, he drafted the field manual on the laws of war that American officers would carry into two world wars.

Webster wrote, that "an individual forming part of a public force, and acting under the authority of his Government, is not to be held answerable" for acts authorized by his sovereign.

In 1775 the Congress had called slaves "domestic enemies," tacitly reproducing the long-refuted argument that slavery was the right of the victor in war.