Amnesty
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
an act declaring that certain offenses, usually political, have been overlooked. A pardon is the forgiving of an individual person for a crime committed. The offense is still an offense, and the person is still guilty, but is forgiven. In case of amnesty, proclamation is made that the offense is obliterated, and those concerned will not be punished. It is considered public policy to issue an amnesty proclamation at the close of a civil war or an insurrection. Sometimes individuals are excepted from the benefit of the proclamation. When the Stuart family was restored to England in 1660, Charles II issued a proclamation of amnesty excepting, however, thirteen persons by name, who were closely concerned in the execution of his royal father, Charles I. Two of these regicides, Goffe and Whalley, escaped to New England and lived for many years in partial concealment among their friends. At one stage of the American Revolution the British government offered a general amnesty to all Americans who should lay down their arms, John Hancock and Samuel Adams being excepted by name. The Continental Congress made a serious mistake in not issuing a proclamation of general amnesty at the close of the American Revolution. A large number of American royalists, people of intelligence and wealth, were compelled to leave for Canada and England to the corresponding loss of our own country. A general amnesty was proclaimed at the close of Shays' Rebellion , 1787; and another from which a few, notably Jefferson Davis, were for a time excepted, was proclaimed at the close of the American Civil War in 1865.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 definition — a public proclamation that an offense is "obliterated," as against a pardon that forgives a still-guilty person — remains sound law, and American presidents have kept using it: Jimmy Carter's first act in January 1977 was a blanket pardon for Vietnam-era draft evaders, and the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act granted what everyone called an amnesty to some three million people living in the United States illegally. What has changed is the word itself. Since Peter Benenson founded Amnesty International in London in 1961, and especially since it won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977, "amnesty" has meant to most readers a campaign for prisoners of conscience rather than a sovereign's proclamation after a rebellion. One loose end from the 1910 entry was tied off in 1978, when Congress posthumously restored the citizenship of Jefferson Davis, the man Aiton names as excepted from the 1865 proclamation.
Written for this edition, 2026.