April 29, 1861 – Jefferson Davis Reports on Happy Docile Slaves in his First Message to the Confederate Congress

Jefferson Davis, born in 1808, was originally a member of the Democratic Party who represented Mississippi in both the U.S. House of Representatives and in the U.S. Senate. He switched his allegiance to the Confederate States of America, and was inaugurated as its president on February 18, 1861.

President Jefferson Davis

In his first message to the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States of America on this day in history, Davis began by expressing astonishment that the North claimed “the government thus formed [by the U.S. Constitution] was not a compact between States, but was in effect a national government, set up above and over the States.”

“The people of the Southern States,” he continued, “early perceived a tendency in the Northern States to render the common government subservient to their own purposes by imposing burdens on commerce as a protection to their manufacturing and shipping interests.”

But it was even worse! Talking about slavery, Davis claimed that at the time the country was formed, slavery was held to be sacrosanct:

. . . the right of property in slaves was protected by law. This property was recognized in the Constitution, and provision was made against its loss by the escape of the slave. . . . . in no clause can there be found any delegation of power to the Congress authorizing it in any manner to legislate to the prejudice, detriment, or discouragement of the owners of that species of property, or excluding it from the protection of the Government.”

However, Davis pointed out, as soon as abolitionists got a controlling voice in Congress, they inaugurated “a persistent and organized system of hostile measures against the rights of the owners of slaves in the Southern States.”

Moreover:

Fanatical organizations, supplied with money by voluntary subscriptions, were assiduously engaged in exciting amongst the slaves a spirit of discontent and revolt; means were furnished for their escape from their owners, and agents secretly employed to entice them to abscond; the constitutional provisions for their rendition to their owners was first evaded, then openly denounced as a violation of conscientious obligation and religious duty; men were taught that it was a merit to elude, disobey, and violently oppose the execution of the laws enacted to secure the performance of the promise contained in the constitutional compact . . . .”

Congress made it its business not “to promote the general welfare or insure domestic tranquillity,” but rather, “to awaken the bitterest hatred against the citizens of sister States by violent denunciation of their institutions . . . ” Most egregiously, they thus rendered “the property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless, and thereby annihilating in effect property worth thousands of millions of dollars.”

But the best in his speech is yet to come. Showing a total divorce from reality, Davis then claimed:

“In the meantime, under the mild and genial climate of the Southern States and the increasing care and attention for the well-being and comfort of the laboring class, dictated alike by interest and humanity, the African slaves had augmented in number from about 600,000, at the date of the adoption of the constitutional compact, to upward of 4,000,000. In moral and social condition they had been elevated from brutal savages into docile, intelligent, and civilized agricultural laborers, and supplied not only with bodily comforts but with careful religious instruction. Under the supervision of a superior race their labor had been so directed as not only to allow a gradual and marked amelioration of their own condition….”

Needless to say, in Davis’s world, there was no violence involved in keeping slaves “docile.” He makes no mention of how much difficulty the plantation owners experienced keeping these “contented” slaves in place once the war started, which would hardly have been necessarily if what he said were true, or even how it turned out that the numbers of slave were so augmented without any more slave trade. This process [i.e., rape by white masters] must have been part of the “bodily comforts” to which he alludes….

Davis concluded:

In the exercise of a right so ancient, so well-established, and so necessary for self-preservation, the people of the Confederate States, in their conventions, determined that the wrongs which they had suffered and the evils with which they were menaced required that they should revoke the delegation of powers to the Federal Government which they had ratified in their several conventions. They consequently passed ordinances resuming all their rights as sovereign and independent States and dissolved their connection with the other States of the Union.”

 
You can read the entire speech here.