This may be too minor for this venue. Please let me know if this is inappropriate, and so if it can instead be in Friday Free-for-All or some such.

I had seen occasional references to people needing passes to go through the United States lines in the Civil War. I wondered whether this was due to martial law, or military order, or Presidential proclamation. I also wondered at the exact provisions of blockade / closing the ports of the South, and seizing their ships at sea. It was actually statute.

Source: https://www.loc.gov/law/help/statutes-at-large/37th-congress/c37.pdf , "PUBLIC ACTS OF THE THIRTY-SEVENTH CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES, Passed at the first session which was begun and held at the City of Washington, in the District of Columbia, on Thursday, the fourth day of July, A. D. 1861, and ended on Tuesday, the sixth day of August, A. D. 1861." (Note that at this stage, Washington was one of the cities in the District of Columbia.)

PDF page 1, source page 255, "Chap. III - An Act further to provide for the Collection of Duties on Imports, and for other Purposes.", July 13, 1861.

Section 1's precondition is used throughout much of the act:

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That whenever it shall in the judgment of the President, by reason of unlawful combinations of persons in opposition to the laws of the United States, become impracticable to execute the revenue laws and collect the duties on imports by the ordinary means, in the ordinary way, ...

Sections 1-4 are indeed on collections of customs duties. 1: if they can't collect duties in some ports of a collection district, the President can authorize any ports in the district. 2: if they can't collect duties at any of the ports in a collection district, he can establish a custom-house in a secure place in the district, whether on land or on a ship, but a ship getting to such a custom-house can freely redirect to some other post in an undisturbed district. 3: the army and navy may be used to protect such places and any vessels and cargos.

4 is a bigger one: it allows for closure of the ports, and says that any vessel that enters or tries to enter, and everything in it, is forfeit. I don't know that this was used, or whether it was a wartime blockade instead. I recall from The Battle Cry of Freedom, I think, that the British said that they would not take any notice of the closure of ports.

Sec. 4. And be it further enacted, That if, in the judgment of the President, from the cause mentioned in the first section of this act, the duties upon imports in any collection district cannot be effectually collected by the ordinary means and in the ordinary way, or in the mode and manner provided in the foregoing sections of this act, then and in that case the President is hereby empowered to close the port or ports of entry in said district, and in such case give notice thereof by proclamation; and thereupon all right of importation, warehousing, and other privileges incident to ports of entry shall cease and be discontinued at such port so closed, until opened by the order of the President on the cessation of such obstructions; and if, while said ports are so closed, any ship or vessel from beyond the United States, or having on board any articles subject to duties, shall enter or attempt to enter any such port, the same, together with its tackle, apparel, furniture, and cargo, shall be forfeited to the United States.

Section 5: it's even longer, so I'll quote the margin-note summary: "The President, in certain cases, may declare the inhabitants of a State, &c, to be in a state of insurrection. Commercial intercourse thereupon to cease. Certain goods to be forfeited. [Actually all the goods &c, and their vessels and vehicles.] President may permit intercourse in certain cases, and under regulations. Officers of customs may be appointed, &c."

Section 6: any vessel owned or part-owned by an inhabitant or citizen of such a place (sec. 5) found at sea or in a US port, is forfeit.

Section 7: The President can use revenue cutters or any other vessels (marginal note: the navy) to enforce those provisions.

Section 8: forfeitures and seizures can be remitted by the Secretary of the Treasury pursuiant to an existing act of 1797.

Section 9: any proceedings due to such seizures and forfeitures may be pursued in any US courts in the district in which the property was taken.

Week 19

 

Last week, we covered a large portion of the parliamentary debate over the leaked Treaty of London, the principle of nationalities and the future direction of Italian foreign policy; that took place during the extended two weeks session from February 12^th to 24^th .

Surprisingly absent from that debate, except from a few remarks by Claudio Treves^1 , were the big names of the Socialist Party. This becomes less surprising if one takes into account the fact that the socialists had more urgent matters of internal policy to attend.

On February 26^th the Socialist Party newspaper “Avanti!” opened with the title: “The Lazzari-Bombacci trial – for the circulars of the socialist Party” and below: “the defense questions the constitutionality of the Sacchi decree”. Two days later: “The Sacchi decree against the actions and ideals of the socialist Party – five years and three months of jail and a six thousand lire fine to Lazzari and Bombacci”. If you think a few lines are missing here and there, that's because of press censorship – the law allowed the press to circulate with the extent of the censoring noticeable.

 

Costantino Lazzari, the Secretary of the Socialist Party, and (unlike what various sources claim, not Nicola Bombacci, his Deputy) had been arrested^2 on January 24^th – his arrest would be followed by that of another influential member of the party direction, Giacinto Menotti Serrati (in May 1918). The accusation involved internal circulation of instructions between the party direction and local sections in order to spread pacifist propaganda^3 .

The Party direction had, since the beginning of the war, fallen into the hands of the “left” group, itself a patchwork force of men like Serrati, Lazzari and Bombacci – some of whom had looked at the war almost with favor as a chance for a radicalization of the socialist movement, while others had opposed it (it was Lazzari who had chosen the formula “neither support nor sabotage”). While the more moderate parliament group under the leadership of Turati, Treves and Modigliani had to “restrain” itself and at the same time try to shield the party institutions and trade unions from the repressive actions of the Government, the “left” wing in control of the “Avanti!” tried to preserve those direction functions over the local sections and organized workers, somehow tentatively encouraging socialist practices without initiating them – namely the direction could not start strikes or organize anti war propaganda of any sort, for both the organizational limitations of the party structure and the immediate and inescapable reaction that would have followed, but on practical terms, they could neither restrain those initiatives or oppose them openly where they had begun spontaneously, for the very same organizational limitations and the legitimate fear of losing those men who were already growing apart from the socialist parliamentary group.

This diverging practice resulted in the creation of an untreatable fracture between the parliamentary reformers and the maximalist party direction that would result in the 1919 turn and Bombacci's short lived leadership of the Party.

 

The Socialist Party – despite being the first Italian party where you could recognize the features of a modern mass party: a leader, a board of direction^4 , local sections and individual card membership – had spent the first twenty five years of its existence in a peculiar condition: being legal only as far as it wasn't declared illegal. This meant that many typical manifestations of the life of a modern party – rallies, congresses, meetings, publications, press – had to be arranged under a persistent uncertainty whether they would be allowed or not and whether – for instance – the deliberations of a congress could be considered evidence of a crime.

This had not made easy for the socialist leadership – themselves spending their political formative years during the time of conspiracies and semi-clandestine existence – to transition the newly established force into a regular, political, parliamentary force. At the same time, it had left in the public force – that had often trained exactly to spot those conspiracies and saw in the crimes against the state their most insidious adversary – a general suspicion against the socialists and their methods, even when and in those measures they had been legitimized by their large participation to parliamentary life.

To make things worse the Socialist Party, founded more or less officially in 1892 had been forced to face an immediate crisis at the time of the so called revolt of the Sicilian fasci, during the years 1893-94. The fasci were a collection of heterogeneous land workers groups under the leadership of men of questionable socialist faith like De Felice Giuffrida, held together under a generic “socialist” ideal. The origin of the revolt, that spread among the lowest ranks of the agrarian proletariat, was in short the especially miserable conditions of the working men in the Sicilian country.

While the socialist leaders understood that the movement had very little of a socialist (let alone Marxist – G. Salvemini spoke of them as a proper jacquerie) conscience, they nonetheless decided to support the insurrection in hope to provide it with a nation wide echo chamber – the Socialist Party, despite having notable intellectual groups from the South, saw most of its support base in the Northern regions, among organized land and factory workers – against the severe repressive measures adopted by Prime Minister Francesco Crispi.

In 1889 the old Piedmontese Penal Code of 1859 (more or less a direct filiation of the Napoleonic Code of 1810) had been replaced with the fairly progressive code known by the name of the Minister of Justice Giuseppe Zanardelli. Among various innovations, such as the abolition of death penalty, the distinction between felonies and misdemeanors, the classification of crimes on the basis of the kind of good affected, there was the introduction of a few measures of tolerance towards social revendications: strikes were allowed – but the public force retained the right to establish whether a strike fell under the allowed specie^5 – and provisions were made to safeguard individual liberties, limiting the range of preventive measures available. Overall, even with the large discretionary powers left to the public force, the Code marked an attempt to address the growing social conflict with a more neutral position of the state authority.

In this perspective one can put initiatives such as the removal of the specie of “suspicion”, that allowed the public authority to apply administrative actions on the basis of someone's condition (vagrancy), previous behavior (time served) or as the name shows, suspicion (being for instance a “notorious subversive”).

If the Penal Code had rid itself of “public suspicion”, the Law of Public Security of the same year had retained it; showcasing a tendency to develop two parallel systems: one for the public force to deal with the sphere of private (ordinary) relations between citizens and one for the public force to deal with the special relations between the state and its subjects. Here a large tradition of “compelling instruments” existed for the public authority that had been established during the years of Brigandage in Southern Italy (Law Pica 1863): notorious among them that of “forced residence” or confinement, but one must also remember that the Law allowed for the first time to subject a large portion of Italy (i.e. the Southern regions at the time) to a “special non extraordinary” legislation that removed the guarantees of the Statute and submitted all citizens to military legislation, where collective crimes such as “brigandage” were punishable.

Quelled the brigandage plague in the South, such institutions had been laid to rest. The revolt of the fasci prompted Prime Minister Crispi to resurrect the special legislation (Special Law 316 of July 19^th 1894 – abolished in December 1895) that for instance allowed confinement for those who had been put on trial for crimes against public order (regardless of whether they had been acquitted), or were known members of “associations against the social organisms”. Where special legislation for political crimes did not cover the issue, special legislation for public order (under the comfortable wings of military legislation) helped by allowing confinement as a preventive measures against “individuals that constituted a danger for public order”.