ABSTRACT
The position of armed parties loosely attached to the main body of the army, or altogether unconnected with it, has rarely been taken up by writers on the law of war. The term guerrilla is often inaccurately used, and its application has been particularly confused at the present time. From these circumstances arises much of the difficulty which presents itself to the publicist and martial jurist in treating of guerrilla parties. The subject is substantially a new topic in the law of war, and it is, besides, exposed to the mischievous process, so often employed in our day, of throwing the mantle of a novel term around an old and well-known offense, in the expectation that a legalizing effect will result from the adoption of a new word having a technical sound; an illustration of which occurred in the introduction of the Latin and rarer term repudiation to designate the old practice of dishonestly declining the payment of debts—an offense with which the world has been acquainted ever since men united in the bonds of society. We find that self-constituted bands in the South, who destroy the cotton stored by their own neighbors, are styled in the journals of the North as well as in those of the South guerrillas; while in truth they are, according to the common law—not of war only, but that of every society—simply armed robbers, against whom every person is permitted, or is in duty bound, to use all the means of defense at his disposal; as, in a late instance, even General Toombs, of Georgia, declared to a certain committee of safety of his State that he would defend the planting and producing of his cotton; though, I must own, he did not call the self-constituted committee guerrillas, but, if memory serves me right, scoundrels.
