Ask any random group who Francis Lieber was, and most will either answer “don’t know,” or make a wild guess (such as the composer of “Silent Night”).

Those who do know are usually historians. One historian identifies Lieber as the smartest man in South Carolina in the 19th century.

Lieber was actually German, born in 1798, a witness as a child to Napoleon’s occupation of Berlin and a teenage soldier at the Battle of Waterloo.

At 24, he went to help Greece fight for independence. In Rome on his way home, he became the friend of intellectuals — Barthold Niebuhr, Leopold von Ranke, and Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt.

Arrested and imprisoned a few months, Lieber fled to London, and from there set out for America, intending to become a gymnastics teacher in Boston. (He had been a favorite student of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, a famous German gymnastic teacher.) Unfortunately, the popularity of gymnastics in America was still 75 years in the future.

Lieber moved into writing, sending lengthy observations of life in the U.S. Canada, and South America to German periodicals. He then conceived the idea of producing an Encyclopaedia Americana, and meticulously gathered information to create the massive reference work that would sell over 100,000 copies (without much financial gain for Lieber) and earn him election in 1830 to the American Academy of Sciences. Two years later, he became a citizen.

Lieber met Beaumont and Tocqueville when they were in the United States to study its prison system, and he translated into English and edited their book of findings in 1833, adding to it his own observations and publishing several pamphlets on penal reform in 1835 and 1838.

Lieber’s driving ambition was to enjoy the intellectual company of New England scholars, and most especially to teach at Harvard. Opportunities to do that eluded him, and in 1835 he began a brilliant career at South Carolina College (now the University of South Carolina) that lasted until 1856, during which time he was thrice considered for the presidency of that institution. He began his scholarly career there by producing a comprehensive study of the relationships of citizens in a democracy in which natural law guarantees the rights of individuals, but positive law is required to construct society and institutions out of the duties of individuals to one another.

His two-volume “Manual of Political Ethics” was published in 1838, followed in 1840 by his “Essays on Property and Labour.” That year he tried to persuade the federal government to improve its regular censuses by gathering better statistics and using scientific methods for this, reforms that were delayed until after the Civil War. Efforts by Lieber to reform the national postal service also were ignored. He published a significant guide of how to interpret the Constitution.

Still hoping to move north, Lieber spent his summers there trying to make contacts for employment. Discouraged, he tried to move back to Germany, but found nothing there substantial enough to support him.

Back in South Carolina, he kept his Unionist and antislavery opinions pretty much concealed, but revolutions in Europe and secession agitation in South Carolina led him to publish his two-volume “On Civil Liberty and Self-Government” in 1853, celebrating checks-and-balances limited government. With war approaching and his 1855 bid for the college presidency denied, he resigned and moved to New York.

There he landed a chair of history and political science, the first of its type, at Columbia. In wartime, the government asked him to codify field regulations, which led to General Orders 100, “Instruction for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field,” still in use today and adopted internationally by the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. As archivist for Confederate records, he rescued millions of Confederate documents from oblivion and filed them carefully for future reference.

Essays by 16 scholars on assorted dimensions of this intellectual giant have been compiled and edited by Charles R. Mack and Henry H. Lesesne in “Francis Lieber and the Culture of the Mind” (USC Press, 2005, 196 pp.).

American intellectual and social historians have made footnote salutes to Lieber for decades, and they are delighted at the appearance of more substantial tributes and biography.