Lieber, Francis

Lieber, Francis

(1800–72) political reformer, editor, political scientist; born in Berlin, Germany. As a youth he fought against Napoleon in the Battle of Waterloo. Persecuted, even imprisoned, as a liberal in Prussia, he fled in 1826 and arrived in Boston in 1827. Proposing to translate a German encyclopedia, he so enlarged and revised it that he ended up editing a new Encyclopedia Americana (13 vols. 1829–33). He taught at the University of South Carolina (1835–57) and Columbia University (1857–72). Two of his works, Manual of Political Ethics (1838–39) and On Civil Liberty and Self-Government (1853) provided the first thorough analysis of American government since its inception. Known for his ideas on prison reform, he also drafted a Code for the Government of the Armies of the United States (1863), which was adopted by the Union army; essentially the first code of international law governing war, it was later used as the basis for the Hague Convention.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.