Conquest
The movement claim that the post-Civil-War United States operates under continuing wartime sovereignty — because no formal peace treaty ended the war — is unsupported
The claim that the Civil War never formally ended — no peace treaty, therefore continuing wartime sovereignty over the conquered South — misreads the legal effect of the war's conclusion. The 1861-65 conflict was a constitutionally-suppressed insurrection, not a war between sovereigns. The treaty-of-peace convention applies to wars between separate sovereigns; it does not apply here, and never has.
The Legal System for Sovereign Rulers
Treatise #5 of Beers's 11-treatise corpus. Argues that conquered nations are systematically reorganized through a three-step process — fictions, equity, legislation — drawn from Sir Henry Maine's *Ancient Law*, and that this pattern was applied to America via the Civil War.
Sovereignty as Conquest (Beers)
Byron Beers's structural claim that 'sovereignty' is a foreign feudal concept — neither present in the Declaration of Independence nor part of the natural-order political philosophy of 1776 — that was imported into American law via the Civil War as conquest event, and that operates as the legal-conceptual mechanism by which a free people are converted into subjects. The framework has roots in real political-philosophy traditions but treats settled questions as still open and contested questions as settled. This page defines the framework as Beers uses it; the operative claims (the no-peace-treaty inference, the sovereign-absent-from-Declaration inference) are verdicted in companion findings.