page_title: Francis Lieber
section_title: European activities
hierarchical_section_title: Francis Lieber / Biography / European activities
caption_attribution_description: English: Exhibit in the Portland Museum of Art - Portland, Maine, USA.
context_page_description: Francis Lieber, known as Franz Lieber in Germany, was a German-American jurist, gymnast and political philosopher. He edited an Encyclopaedia Americana. He was the author of the Lieber Code during the American Civil War, also known as Code for the Government of Armies in the Field. The Lieber Code is considered the first document to comprehensively outline rules regulating the conduct of war, and laid the foundation for the Geneva Conventions.
context_section_description: Lieber fought briefly in the Greek War of Independence, and then spent one year, 1822–1823, in Rome tutoring the son of the Prussian ambassador, historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr. While there, Lieber wrote about his experiences in Greece.  The result was published in Leipzig in 1823 and also in Amsterdam under the title The German Anacharsis. Lieber returned to Germany on a royal pardon, but was soon imprisoned once again, this time at Köpenick. There he wrote a collection of poems entitled Wein- und Wonne-Lieder (Songs of wine and bliss), which on his release, with Niebuhr's help, were published in Berlin in 1824 under the pen name of "Franz Arnold."
  Lieber fled to England in 1825, and supported himself for a year in London by giving lessons and contributing to German periodicals. In London he met American writer and critic John Neal, who was studying gymnastics from Carl Voelker and intent on bringing the movement to the US. Neal published an article in the American Journal of Education recommending Lieber as "qualified, almost beyond example" as a teacher of gymnastics, and "the chief personage with professor Jahn himself.” Lieber also wrote a tract on the Lancasterian system of instruction, and met his future wife, Mathilda Oppenheimer.  He left England upon receiving an offer to manage a gymnasium and swimming program in Boston.
caption: American gymnastics proponent, John Neal
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