Jefferson Davis Quotes
... the most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man
Jefferson Davis, 1808-1889, U. S. Congressman & U. S. Senator (Democrat, MS), U. S. Secretary of War President, Confederate States of America, Characterization of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Quoted in James M. McPherson, Embattled Rebel, 2014
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Nathaniel Gordon was the first American slave trader to be executed after the slave trade was made illegal. The Erie was his slave ship where, as was typical, many of the captured Blacks, died as a result of the inhuman conditions. Although Gordon was the first person executed in America, the act making the slave trade an act of piracy dated from 1820. See {68753} .
Griffin was fired by CNN as a result of her inappropriate behavior.
Marx followed the American Civil War very closely. The freeing of the slaves caused an immediate social, moral and economic revolution, the results of which we live with today.
Butler was at the time the Union general in charge of Louisiana. He had on his hand a large group of slaves whose owners had abandoned the area. There was no emancipation yet. He wrote for instructions. The result was the first actual emancipation of slaves.
In the early days of the Civil War slaves who escaped and reached the Northern lines were routinely returned to their Southern owners as the Fugitive Slave Act required. The first actual emancipation of the Civil war was not the President’s proclamation but was Butler who as a Union General ordered that the slaves escaping from Virginia no longer be returned. He was accused of violating the then existing law, however he had a legal rationale which hoisted Virginia on its own petard.
When the Confederate Government realized that the Union was planning to arm escaped slaves and induct them into the Union Army, they quickly passed a law that declared any escaped slave who joined the Union Army or wore its uniform was guilty of Treason and would be executed. Most Union Generals one way or another got word to the Confederate Officers that they had better treat all Negro Union Soldiers as prisoners of war. Even President Lincoln warned the South. Butler, however, had a large number of Negro troops in his area and had heard threats of some of the Southerners to execute Black prisoners of war. He had a way of making things very clear, and he was able to prevent murder of any of his Negro troops despite the Treason law.
He may well have been right if the South had capitulated. But that is exactly what happened when they did not and were beaten. So the worst that the South could have ended up with by not following Vance’s view would be what they ended up without the many deaths and wounded and the massive destruction of property that took place in the latter part of the war.
The early Union military leadership was so poor and timid that it was not clearly demonstrated that a Confederacy was not viable until later in the war, and the Southerners possessed an extraordinary capacity for ignoring reality and self-delusion, that it was not demonstrated until Grant’s major victories and Sherman’s March through Georgia and the Southern East Coast that an independent South was not going to be.
Note that Lincoln did not justify the emancipation proclamation on moral or humanitarian grounds, but on the grounds of military necessity.
Lincoln was worried about Louisiana reverting back to the slavery era. He was right to be worried, and led the fight to pass the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery forever. So the white racist elements of Louisiana used Jim Crowe discrimination instead.
At the beginning of the Civil War, Lincoln and many of the Union politicians hoped that the South would “come to its senses” and end the rebellion. As a result, they did not want to take all the draconian steps that they were able to. They wanted to give the Southern moderates room to maneuver and persuade the firebrands. However, there was a fundamental issue at stake—slavery—where there was no real compromise left that would have any lasting effect. The slaveholders would be destroyed in their view—possibly by the war, but certainly in the Union where the majority was strongly opposed to slavery on moral grounds.
Essentially, the case of moral hazard was made against paying the slave owners. Lincoln took a pragmatic approach. However, not only was Northern opposition too strong for this proposal, but the Southern slave holders would never agree to selling their slaves. What Lincoln and most “pragmatic” Northerners did not realize is that even if the slave owners would get a fair market price for the slaves, they would be left with land and no way to work it. Their families would have no servants. They might have to work themselves like Northern farmers did, and their entire standard and style of living would be destroyed. Their sons were not well educated as many Northern young men were and were brought up to be gentlemen, politicians, and occasional soldiers—not work with their hands. They could not compete. And the slaveholders were right as the whole history of Reconstruction and backwardness demonstrated for more than 100 years.
At the time, the prevailing federal policy was to return fugitive slaves to their owners. Lincoln was intent on keeping Kentucky and Maryland, both slave states, in the union, even at the cost of returning fugitive slaves. Shortly after, he came up with the policy of always returning fugitive slaves except in the rebellious states of the confederacy where the slaves were legally defined as ‘contraband’—war material, and thus could be seized by Union forces. Many fugitive slaves were thus employed by the Union for construction projects. Later, the Emancipation Proclamation set the slaves of the Confederacy free.
This was one of the several early unofficial Emancipations that was issued in the Civil War.
He was explaining his repudiation of General John Fremont’s military proclamation in Missouri confiscating rebel property and emancipating their slaves. See {633732} .
And so they were. However, Calhoun had already concluded which alternatives the South would take. See {635930}
Jefferson Finis Davis was an American politician who served as the president of the Confederate States from 1861 to 1865. As a member of the Democratic Party, he represented Mississippi in the United States Senate and the House of Representatives before the American Civil War. He previously served as the United States Secretary of War from 1853 to 1857 under President Franklin Pierce.
