The Long Shadow of General Order 100: US Military Practice in the Boxer Rebellion and the Philippine War

Conventional wisdom among historians holds that the United States subscribed to no particular set of rules or practices regarding irregular warfare during the late nineteenth century. They varied with every commanding officer—each one a law unto himself. Similarly, conventional wisdom among legal scholars attributes General Order 100, a code of conduct issued during the Civil War, to the idiosyncratic views of its principal author and to the immediate requirements of the Civil War. By divorcing the code from existing practice, events from their broader context, and every commander from the next, historians and legal scholars have produced an atomized version of the past that seems to defy analysis. This paper bridges these artificial divisions to reveal a consistent pattern of U.S. military and legal practice toward irregular forces from the Amerindian wars through the Boxer Rebellion and the Philippine War.

These norms found their clearest expression in General Order 100. War was existential, ending only with the complete submission of the adversary. War was total, encompassing both combatants and noncombatants.  War was punitive, demonstrative, and retaliatory—a response to illegitimate insurrection. Far from restraining military conduct, these norms were a license allowing everything deemed indispensable, including mass violence directed at prisoners and noncombatants.

By the end of the century such norms and the practices they entailed were completely at odds with existing customary and treaty law which had grown to include an increasing number of peremptory norms and a broad interstitial requirement of humanity. Yet in the face of changing international legal standards the U.S. persisted in its practices. These practices are essential to understanding both the remarkable longevity of General Order 100 during an era characterized by the reform of international law and the systematic mass violence of U.S. forces in the Boxer Rebellion and the Philippine War.