Posted in Slavery, White Supremacy, White Supremacy Apologetics

Jefferson Davis and the Constitutional Right to Own Slaves

   Published Date: November 17, 2021  23 Comments on Jefferson Davis and the Constitutional Right to Own Slaves

Many of us learned in school to revere the Constitution as a “Charter of Freedom,” a Magna Carta of rights for the ordinary citizen. More recent scholarship grounded in Critical Race Theory challenges that view and argues that while the Constitution does not mention slavery, its provisions provided all the protections slavery needed for the first seventy years of our nation’s history. This CRT contention gets support from someone who at first glance is an unlikely source, Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

In February 1850, Davis, then a United States Senator, delivered a two day speech in Congress “on the subject of slavery in the territories.” What would be called the “Compromise of 1850” was taking shape over the fate of the territory taken from Mexico following the successful United States invasion of that country. Deals were being struck over whether slavery would be allowed in territories which had been free soil under Mexican governance. Davis claimed that all of the territories should be open to slavery and that the Constitution protected the rights of white people to enslave Blacks in all of the new parts of the United States.

Davis said that the Northern states in 1850 were nearly unified in their opposition to slavery. A decade before Lincoln’s election, Davis said that the Northern states “have declared war against the institution of slavery.” This “moral” crusade against slavery, he warned, threatened the future of the Union because slavery was “an institution so interwoven with the [the South’s] interests, its domestic peace, and all its social relations, that it cannot be disturbed without causing their overthrow.” Furthermore, he argues in his speech, it is the duty of the Federal government to uphold slavery. Here is the passage from the third page of the speech.

While Davis knows that there is no proposal under Senate consideration to actually abolish slavery in the South, he is mustering the full pro-slavery argument to defend against contentions that the Federal government could restrict slavery in the territories and the District of Columbia. Davis attacks the Free Soil argument that Congress can prevent slaves from entering territories not yet admitted as states and that slavery can only exist in a state if a local law allows it. Davis slams this argument saying that slavery “derived from the Constitution that recognition which it would not have enjoyed” otherwise. Here are his own words on the subject:

While an area is a territory, Davis says, not only can’t Congress prohibit slavery there, neither can the people living in the territory. It is only after a territory becomes a state that its voters can decide whether it is to be Slave or Free.

Davis says that all Americans have a Constitutional right to free trade in every part of the United States. “That right equally applies to the transfer of slave property” he argues.

Apart from being Constitutional, Davis claims, slavery and the slave trade was the greatest benefit for the Black men, women, and children enslaved by Southern whites. While other Southerners denounced the international slave trade, Davis says that the shipping of captured Blacks in chains to America was a boon to the enslaved Africans (p. 16).

As Davis wrapped up his speech, he discussed the possibility of Southern secession to protect slavery and allow its expansion. Davis knew that some Northerners believed that the South would not secede because doing so would expose it to slave uprisings. Davis replied:

Eleven years before the actual outbreak of the Civil War Davis championed the proposition that slaves would continue to be subservient to their White masters if the South seceded, and would serve as a strength of any new confederation founded on slavery. (p. 31)

While we usually associate Davis’s secession rhetoric with the period immediately before the Civil War, a full decade earlier he was playing the secession card and associating secession exclusively in defense of slavery. His vision of the Constitution as a bulwark of white control of Black bodies would become an accepted part of proto-Confederate ideology during the 1850s.

The speech itself was considered so important by defenders of the theory that the Constitution was a pro-slavery document that it was published in pamphlet form.

Harper’s Weekly May 17, 1862 Secession was an egg Jefferson Davis had been hatching for more than a decade. 

Note on Feature Illustration: Cover of The Jefferson Davis Coloring Book By Ernesto Caldeira, Illustrations by James Rice Pelican Publishing Company (1982). Pelican is a Lost Cause publishing house.

 

 

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Author: Patrick Young

23 thoughts on “Jefferson Davis and the Constitutional Right to Own Slaves”

  1. This is a good article and its’ citation of key primary evidence is fantastic.

    But it’s also important for full heuristic knowledge a number of things ought to be disclosed with this evidence and theses’ in accordance with it. I could go on and on, (and if I were to do that, nothing would take away from the quality of scholarship in this article, which is evident as heck).

    At this same time, both Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln cited the same arguments about the US Constitution as Davis did here. It is meaningless that the US Constitution, in difference to the CS Constitution, did not explicitly state ‘slave, slaves, slavery, bondage, chattel human property’, etc, etc, etc.
    The wording of the Constitution and its interpretational application rendered the legal and living reality in just as stark terms in the 3/5 and Fugitive tenets. These sections and their applications were not the stuff of semantics.

    As well, it ought be just as disclosed that though Davis was a defender of slavery, it is wrong to depict him as adhering to these views. In other words, the Confederate American President could conceive of the end of slavery and a future without it. It is wrong and inaccurate to depict otherwise.

    As early as this exact timeframe, Davis would outline that allowing slave-owners to bring their slaves into the acquired, Western territories had a built in mechanism to increase the number of emancipated Black Americans. He argued that slave owners would find the institution unviable in the new areas and this would in turn induce them to manumit slaves and reduce the slave population of America.

    How viable or practicable this outline was is a matter of sound debate; however, it is proof that Davis was willing to conceive of emancipation as early as 1850.

    In February of 1861, he opined that slave owners would have to accept that eventually, all their slave property would be lost.

    The technicalities of his arguments about which political unit had the jurisdiction to permit slavery in a territory or state would have key importance early in the war when he received the offer of Santiago Vidaurri, (one of the most adamant and committed Abolitionists in the world), and the Governor of Mexico’s provinces of Nuevo Leon and Coahuila, desired to have his provinces annexed to the Confederate state of Texas. The deal would have been that these areas would be made part of the state of Texas, itself; not territories administered by it. The reason for this was that Vidaurri insisted that the Texas legislature would have to pass legislation declaring these areas off-limits to slavery, as emancipation was the jurisdiction of the states in the Confederacy. Davis was highly intrigued by the offering, but politely declined on good terms, as France was in the process of colonising Mexico and he desired to obtain recognition from that power.

    As well, Davis supported the 1862 Confederate Emancipation Treaty with France and Britain as announced in the 25 January 1862, ‘UK Spectator’, and he fully supported emancipation in the latter Duncan F. Kenner Mission in the winter of 1864-65.

    For the sake of brevity, I have kept my reply here to the scope of Davis and emancipation.

    Reply

    1. Dear Hugh,
      Yours is not the first writing I have seen speaking of Davis conceiving “of the end of slavery and a future without it,” but I have, so far, been unsuccessful in my attempts to find any source of these statements. I would very much appreciate if you could point me in the right direction with regards to finding a source or sources for both the aforementioned sentiment and the 1862 Confederate Emancipation Treaty, as I had never heard of that Treaty before now.
      Thank you,
      Baker

      Reply

  2. Baker-

    No worries.

    Here is a link to Davis’ cited speech on 13-14 February 1850 in the Senate.

    In it, he argues that the presumably non-profitable to slavery conditions in the new Western Territories would naturally induce slaves brought there to be manumitted by their owners, thus increasing emancipation.

    How viable was this vision is a whole other debate, but it’s on the public record that Davis said it.

    https://archive.org/details/speechofmrdaviso00lcdavi

    Reply

  11. Lastly, the proposed said 1862 Confederate Emancipation Treaty with Britain and France very arguably appears to have influenced Abraham Lincoln’s political and military decisions to launch the Emancipation Proclamation.

    Read Gideon Welles’ diary from about 12-15 July 1862, along with Seward’s papers and they note him as seemingly driven with purpose. You get the sense he was aware of more than what he was disclosing g.

    Anyways, at this time, Lincoln had gathered representatives from the Border States to try to entice them to a policy of manumission of all their slaves and the federal government would pay for their financial losses, believing that ending of slavery was the key to end the war. Only Washington DC accepted the scheme. All other Border Stares refused.

    However, 7 representatives were convinced of the essential soundness of Lincoln’s idea and motives and wrote him a letter of support.

    In it, the fact is made perfectly clear; Lincoln must have been already aware of the proposed Confederate
    Emancipation Treaty, as the letter of support shows even these Border States representatives were aware of such!

    The letter and citation details are as follows. You can look up the actual original letter online in the Library of Congress’ webpage.

    “ By July 15, 1862, we find even stronger evidence from a domestic source. Seven Union loyal border State Congressmen write emphatically in a letter to Lincoln that the CS offer to end slavery is reality:
    “We are the more emboldened to assume this position from the fact, now become history, that the leaders of the Southern rebellion have offered to abolish slavery amongst them as a condition to foreign intervention in favor of their independence as a nation. If they can give up slavery to destroy the Union; We can surely ask our people to consider the question of Emancipation to save the Union.”

    (Abraham Lincoln papers, Library of Congress, Washington DC, Series 1/General Correspondence/1833 – 1916: Border State Congressmen to Abraham Lincoln, Tuesday, July 15, 1862).

    Reply

  12. Sorry, I’ve included a bit of another writer’s text there w/o meaning to. The relevant component from above is-

    “We are the more emboldened to assume this position [to support the end of slavery in America] from the fact, now become history, that the leaders of the Southern rebellion have offered to abolish slavery amongst them as a condition to foreign intervention in favor of their independence as a nation. If they can give up slavery to destroy the Union; We can surely ask our people to consider the question of Emancipation to save the Union.”

    (Abraham Lincoln papers, Library of Congress, Washington DC, Series 1/General Correspondence/1833 – 1916: Border State Congressmen to Abraham Lincoln, Tuesday, July 15, 1862).

    Reply

  13. If you want to know more of Davis’ later willingness to abolish slavery, after he realised the mistake in quashing the Cleburne Plan (which Robert E. Lee had fully endorsed), and/or the Duncan F. Kenner Mission, please ask.

    Even Howell Cobb was willing to abolish slavery in order to achieve Confederate independence.

    Reply

    1. Dear Hugh,
      I just opened this page to see if you had replied and goodness gracious this is amazing. Thank you so much for taking the time to reply to me in this manner. I really appreciate having this information available.
      Thanks again,
      Baker

      Reply

      1. Certainly. No trouble at all.

        First off, I would encourage you to read the several superb articles the Admin has on this page of how/why Davis refused to support the Cleburne Plan in early 1864 for a grounding.

        In my own opinion, part of Davis’ ‘err’ with regards to slavery and how he conducted the war was that he was never able to seemingly understand that the overwhelming, vast majority of White American Southerners did not, nor ever would they, view the institution in the same terms as he and his family personally did.

        That’s a whole other story.

        Reply

  16. This biography of Kenner also cites a vast array of other primary sources, almost all of which are free on either Haithitrust or archive.org

    Reply

  18. See the 24 January 1865 statement of the Texas Brigade in the ANV.

    It implies a willingness to abolish slavery in order to achieve Confederate independence.

    https://archive.org/details/resolutionsoftex00conf/page/2/mode/1up?view=theater

    “Resolved, 3d. That after calmly considering the present situation of affairs in the Confederate States, we can see little cause, if any, for losing confidence…That there is much yet to be done, we admit, and we declare ourselves prepared to undertake it.”

    This is the same language, essentially, that Mason impressed upon the British government at this same time, emphasising the implication to render the point plain, that if slavery was what was preventing recognition and independence, it was dispensable.

    Reply

  19. Perhaps a bit of ‘revision of views, due to events’, on their part, but more to same point, ibid-

    “ That before the commencement of the great struggle for our rights and liberties we considered well the causes and consequences…that our cause was just and that no sacrifice was so threat that it could not be made in defence of such a cause.”

    Reply

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