Analysis: Jefferson Davis on the Employment of Slaves

Date: November 7, 1864

Author: Davis, Jefferson

Genre: speech; message to Congress

Summary Overview

Confederate President Jefferson Davis returned from an October 1864 tour of the troubled Deep South states and the bloodied Army of Tennessee to compose an address for the opening of the Second Confederate Congress. Davis designed the address to boost the morale of a discouraged country. He admitted to difficult circumstances the nation faced. He discounted the recent loss of Atlanta, and while pointing to minor successes elsewhere, insisted that the Confederacy consisted of ideas much more important than physical localities. A strained reason for hope, indeed, but politically necessary. Davis also admitted to the chief Confederate weakness, the shortage of men eligible to be soldiers in the army, and declared that a tightening of exemption laws would produce enough men to repel the invaders. The number of white men could be boosted, Davis maintained, if the Confederate military had access to large numbers of slaves to serve as wagon drivers, cooks, and laborers, and even as pioneer and engineer troops. He lamented that a February 1864 impressment law designed to raise 20,000 slaves for that purpose had failed to produce the required number. Impressed slaves could only be used in limited capacities owing to the fact that slave owners protective of their investments had constrained how, and how long, the state might use them. Davis cast around for ideas on how to increase the number of slaves fully committed to Confederate service.

The president found a solution not by adjusting numbers (though he did increase the requisition to 40,000 men) or reconsidering the degree of political pressure on individuals and states. Instead, he invited Congress to consider “a radical modification in the theory of the law.” Davis meant for the Confederate government to assume greater power to impress, retain, train, and utilize slave labor in larger capacities in the military effort. He stopped short of advocating the arming of slaves for service in the ranks, but claimed that should the Confederacy desire to do so, the move would be “justifiable, if necessary.” Ten months before, Davis had squelched the discussion of arming slaves when it was raised by General Patrick Cleburne. Now, Davis himself initiated a heated public discussion by suggesting, essentially, the same thing.

Document Analysis

The section of Davis’ November 7 address under review is entitled “Employment of Slaves.” He begins with a reminder that the Act of the previous February authorized the impressment of up to 20,000 slaves “if it should be found impracticable to obtain them by contract with owners.” Davis noted the problem with implementation of the Act; slave owners still possessed title to the contracted or impressed slaves and insisted on limitations to how the government employed their bondsmen. Owners included in contracts limits on amounts of time a slave could be away, and limits on the duties he might perform, thus constraining the Confederate government from obtaining a maximum amount of work.

Here is where Davis proposed “a radical modification in the theory of the law.” As property, slaves’ employment could be severely constrained by their masters. But, Davis said, “the slave…bears another relation to the state—that of a person.” This stance contradicted the pro-slavery finding by the United States Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision that black men were of such “an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations…that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Davis’s new interpretation allowed the state—the Confederacy—to recognize blacks as persons and therefore demand a greater commitment from them. In fact, he wrote, “in this respect the relation of person predominates so far as to render it doubtful whether the private right of property can consistently and beneficially be continued.” In other words, the Confederacy may interpret the law in such a way as to disregard the rights of the slave owner and elevate the status of the slave to that of a legal person. Once so interpreted, the state could then claim the ability to keep a black man in service longer, train him for skilled work, and assign him to dangerous posts—all previously forbidden by contracting masters. Davis recognized that if the state viewed the impressed slave as a person, it had an obligation to grant that slave certain rights and privileges associated with personhood. After all, would not a slave in service to the military be expected to express loyalty, endure hardship, and strive to accomplish difficult tasks? Southern states had a long tradition of rewarding faithful or valorous slaves with emancipation. The same would be expected of slaves serving the Confederacy. The promise of freedom would be “a double motive for a zealous discharge of duty.” Davis did stop to note that any such emancipation would happen only after the service was rendered, not before (as Cleburne and other advocates had suggested).

Davis demurred, however, from advocating the use of black men as soldiers. “Beyond these limits and these employments,” he wrote, “it does not seem to me desirable, under existing circumstances, to go.” However, Davis insisted that such a use would be legitimate; at least more legitimate than the Union’s use of freed slaves as soldiers , which he considered “insurrection against their masters.” If the Confederacy used slaves as soldiers, the moral world could be satisfied that the slaves did so solely “in defense of their homes.” Principle aside, Davis quickly reminded his hearers that he found the use of slaves as soldiers unnecessary so long as enough white men stood ready to fill the ranks. But should that day come when sufficient white men failed at their duty to enlist, “there seems no reason to doubt what should then be our decision.”

Davis grasped at a rhetorical maneuver Cleburne had made when Davis wrote “If the subject [the war] involved no other consideration than the mere right of property [in slaves], the sacrifices heretofore made by our people have been such as to permit no doubt of their readiness to surrender every possession in order to secure their independence.” Where the Jefferson Davis of 1861 had bound the preservation of slavery and the constitutional claim to independence into one impenetrable cause, the Jefferson Davis of late 1864 proved willing to pry them apart and elevate one over the other.

Davis’ address in regard to the potential of slave labor reads less like a lawyer’s brief and more like a man who was delicately reconsidering a fundamental belief and careful to cover his changes with plenty of caveats and conditions. Davis’ thinking about the core values of the Confederacy, though evolving, remained fundamentally conservative. His address pressed policy makers to reconsider the states’ ability to claim the labor and destiny of slave owners’ property, certainly a significant departure from the original secessionists’ protest that the state could not govern the relationship between master and slave. And though he denied that the Confederacy was so desperate as to actually need slave soldiers, he staked a claim to consider their use in the future. Such an admission stunned the Confederate political class and set off a season of vigorous debate on the topic of black men in arms.

Bibliography

Cooper, William J., Jr. Jefferson Davis, American. New York: Vintage, 2001. Print

Levine, Bruce. Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War. New York: Oxford UP, 2006. Print.