Jefferson Davis, American

by William J. Cooper

  “Deeply impressed with the gravity and importance of the subject,” Davis spoke about “the grave and melancholy questions” that emerged from it. He identified as central “political strife, for sectional supremacy.” That drive led directly to “an interference with domestic affairs of the people in one portion of the Union, wounding to their pride and sensibility, and unwarranted by the compact of the confederation.” Such an intrusion might result in “a discrimination against one section of the Confederacy, the palpable object of which is totally to destroy political equality.…” On this point Davis followed Calhoun’s dictum that sectional parity was fundamental to the constitutional past and must continue unchanged because no other arrangement could guarantee tranquillity for the nation.

  Davis forecast that this treacherous tack menacing sectional equality would bring about “the foreboding fear” of Thomas Jefferson: sectional political parties. That in turn, Davis worried, could only “hasten” what he perceived as “the inevitable goal” of those who assaulted the honor of the South while they strove to deprive southerners of their constitutional rights, “the disunion of the States.” The South, he cried, can never “consent to be a marked caste, doomed, in the progress of national growth, to be dwarfed into helplessness and political dependence.”

  He called for a turning away from such a destructive course by the assertion of “patriotism and enlightened statesmanship,” which had marked earlier epochs of the country’s history. Davis certainly saw himself performing this role, for he averred that he had no desire to impose slavery on Oregon. Instead, his chief goal was to protect the constitutional rights of southern Americans. He informed his fellow senators that he neither claimed nor wanted more than strict constructionists ever had—to keep the federal government from exercising unconstitutional powers that had never been granted to it. In his reading, the U.S. Constitution had nowhere authorized Congress to prohibit slavery in any territory.

  Senator Davis took his constitutional text on what he termed the founding document’s recognition of property “in persons,” pointing specifically to the provisions requiring the return of fugitives from service or labor and permitting Congress to outlaw the international slave trade after twenty years. With this view almost all contemporary interpreters concurred, even supporters of the Wilmot Proviso, though a contrary opinion held by some radical antislavery writers argued that because the word “slavery” never appeared in the Constitution, the framers had refused to give it their blessing. Moreover, these proponents of an antislavery Constitution maintained that the power given Congress to ban the international slave trade meant the Founding Fathers thought slavery temporary. More crucially, they argued, the ban signaled that Congress held the authority to act on other aspects of slavery. This antislavery reading of the Constitution never triumphed in Congress before the Civil War.33

  Davis went on to say that the federal government had recognized slavery in treaties completing the acquisition of the Louisiana Purchase and Florida as well as ending the War of 1812. He claimed that his foes had no such stronghold. Even when he admitted that the Constitution did allow the government to make rules for territories, he, like most southerners, construed that grant narrowly, to refer solely to territories as public lands. To him the constitutional phrase “territory or other property” demonstrated his conclusion “too distinctly to require elucidation.” Only needful measures like the creation of territorial courts could be passed. As for the power inherent in the federal government’s right to acquire territory, Davis grasped his states’ rights standard: because the federal government acted as the agent of the sovereign states, “the acquisition must inure to the benefit of the States, in whose right alone it could be made.” In the same sense, Congress could not turn over any decision regarding slavery to the settlers in a territory because they had no claim to sovereignty; only the states were sovereign, except where the Constitution made an explicit grant of power to the federal government.

  In addition, Davis addressed a concept that would become even more fractious in the upcoming clash over organizing the Mexican Cession: the legitimacy of the laws of the previous owner. He ridiculed the proposition that the preceding legal provisions retained their legitimacy until replaced by new American legislation; in his opinion the Constitution automatically and in full force followed the flag, protecting all American citizens in all of their rights. No other view contained any logic. If he were to give any credence to this illogical and wrong-headed consideration, he said he could use it for Oregon, where the American claim came from Spain, in whose empire slavery existed at the time the title was transferred to the United States. Thus, it would still be legal. Of course, in the Mexican Cession the reverse would obtain, for Mexico had abolished slavery.

  No matter whether that premise would help or hurt his cause, Davis dismissed it as preposterous. “Shall the citizen,” he asked his colleagues, “who, rejoicing in the extended domain of his country, migrates to its newly acquired territory, find himself shorn of the property he held under the Constitution by the laws of Mexico? Shall the widow and orphan of him who died in his country’s quarrel, be excluded from the acquisition obtained in part by his blood, unless they will submit to the laws of the power he bled and died to subdue?” His answer resounded: “Never, Never! Reason and justice, constitutional right and national pride, combine to forbid the supposition.”

  Finally, Davis confronted those who asserted that the South demanded nothing more than an abstraction. If that were the case, he wanted to know why the opponents of the South “so obstinately resisted” its claims. He did not minimize principle, announcing, “The men who have encountered past war for the maintenance of principle, will never consent to be branded with inferiority—pronounced, because of their domestic institutions, unworthy of further political growth.” In Davis’s mind the political future moved the subject from the abstract to the concrete. As he comprehended the ultimate goal of many of his opponents, they desired to forbid the extension of slavery in order “to obtain in the future such preponderance of free states as will enable them constitutionally to amend the compact of our Union, and strip the South of the guarantees it gives.” “The lust of power, and an irrational hostility to your brethren of the South,” he identified as prompting what he saw as an unjustified attack, which if kept up could end only by “staining the battle-fields of the Revolution with the blood of civil war.”

  Davis did not believe that destruction of the Union and fraternal bloodletting were inevitable, however. Praising the tradition of compromise and pledging southern loyalty to that custom, he pointed to the three-fifths provision in the Constitution and the Missouri Compromise of 1820 as examples of the forbearance that had been synonymous with American patriotism. He was willing, he told his listeners, to adhere to that honorable practice of finding a middle way because “to compromise is to waive the application, not to surrender the principles on which a right rests, and surely give no claim to further concession.” While asserting he would forever cling to principle, Davis enunciated clearly that he would make a deal, but only if the other side evinced a willingness to meet him at least partway.

  At the time Jefferson Davis explained at length his position on the territorial issue, the Senate was seeking a path around the formidable political barrier erected by the Oregon version of that question. With President Polk’s backing, an effort was already underway to extend the Missouri Compromise line westward from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, thus making Oregon free because it lay north of the 36°30′ boundary that separated slavery from freedom in the Louisiana Purchase. Even as the Senate considered the Missouri extension, which was overwhelmingly opposed by northerners of both parties, it tried yet another initiative produced by a special committee chaired by Delaware Whig John M. Clayton. This measure, which took on Clayton’s name, had two major provisions. First, it created a territorial government for Oregon that allowed an antislavery ban by an unofficial provisional government to s
tand until the new territorial legislature decided for or against slavery. Second, it established territorial governments for California and New Mexico, but specifically prohibited them from acting on slavery. Instead, in those territories it turned the decision on the legality of slavery over to the federal judiciary. Although the Senate narrowly approved Clayton’s offering, the House refused to go along chiefly because of powerful northern opposition, linked with a few southern Whigs who claimed to be worried about ceding southern rights to the courts.

  Congress seemingly faced adjournment with Oregon still unorganized and no mechanism in sight to handle the looming problem of the Mexican Cession. The Senate hoped that an appeal to the past might win last-minute approval for extending the Missouri Compromise line. With Davis in the majority, the Senate passed the bill on August 11 and sent it to the House. Led by Whigs, northern congressmen remained adamant and removed all reference to the Missouri Compromise in the Oregon bill that went back to the Senate. There, most southerners, including Davis, refused to ratify the measure without the Missouri Compromise provisions, but at almost the last hour three slave-state senators broke ranks, and the Senate put its seal on the House bill by the narrow margin of 28 to 25, with Davis on the losing side. Although President Polk had threatened to veto any organization of Oregon without mention of the Missouri Compromise and would have negated the Wilmot Proviso, he did sign this Oregon act with the notation that he did so only because the territory rested north of 36°30′. Through all the weeks of congressional wrangling, one circumstance was crystal clear—in both houses the overwhelming majority of northern members of both parties opposed giving the South what almost all southerners considered their rights, a fact not lost on Jefferson Davis.34

  While speaking for what he judged the constitutional rights of the South and slaveowners in the territories, Davis did not hesitate to defend openly the South’s “paternal institution.” Noting the existence of slavery among the Hebrews of the Old Testament, Davis claimed biblical legitimacy and sanction. When he discussed the racial slavery practiced in his section, he praised its positive impact on the blacks, whom he described as being far better off than either the free blacks in the North or those recently emancipated in the West Indies.35

  According to Davis, a major reason for the well-being of the slaves rested in a critical fact: “slaves are capital; and in the mind of the master, there can be no contest between capital and labor—the contest from which so much of human suffering and oppression has arisen.” In Davis’s definition of slavery, kindness and self-interest meshed to restrain “the sordid and vicious” practices that prevailed with hired labor. In his script the slaves themselves recognized the validity of his interpretation of their situation. Three months earlier he had pronounced them “happy and contented,” living in “the kindest relation that labor can sustain to capital.” As a result he had no fear at all of slave “insurrection,” informing the Senate that he had “no more dread of our slaves than I have of our cattle.” An added boon from southern slavery was the equality of all whites because Davis argued that real social equality could never occur where the same race performed as both “master and menial.” Although he spoke sincerely about his sense of the political and social interrelationship among southern whites, his defense of slavery oversimplified and made much gentler an affiliation between master and slave that in reality was both more complex and harsher. But as advocate for his side, he felt no need to make the case for his opponent.36

  Davis linked the alleged benignity of slavery to territorial expansion by invoking a version of the hoary diffusion theory that had been periodically touted by exponents of slavery expansion since the time of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. In Davis’s rendition, the master-slave connection took on a more kindly character when slaves were dispersed and owned by many individuals who maintained personal contact with their bondspeople. Confining slavery geographically meant, in Davis’s view, large holdings, often with “agents” or overseers standing between masters and slaves, making for a harsher system. Thus, Davis avowed that the absence of limits would secure the best treatment of slaves. Moreover, affirming that slavery became the preferred form of labor only in frontierlike conditions, Davis claimed that as population density increased, free workers became more profitable. For Davis, however, the implementation of this social law in the South faced severe difficulties because the slaves composed “a distinct race” that must be kept in bondage even when unprofitable, for white and black could not live together peaceably in any other relationship.37

  Even so, Davis foresaw a future that might lead to what he described as having happened in the Northeast—a slave population so decreased that emancipation could be contemplated and even enacted. And Davis could not resist noting that northeasterners only began condemning slavery as “the sin and opprobrium of the nation” after slavery had disappeared from their region. Continued expansion westward and southward, he speculated, might eventually lead toward the tropics, where blacks could congregate in communities separated from whites and relieved from “the condition of degradation.” Holding out that possibility, he denounced abolitionists for their “indecent intrusion on the domestic affairs of others—I ask what remedy do you propose?” He answered his own question by claiming that his enemies had none, for they knew the impossibility of emancipating a distinct race. Even if the states agreed, Davis asserted that the federal government did not have sufficient funds. Besides, he posited, the end of slavery would result in the demise of cotton and that would ruin the northern economy. His conclusion was obvious: immediate, radical change simply could not occur; only the longest-term kind of solution could be taken into consideration.

  Although no reason exists to doubt the sincerity of Davis’s argument, he did skim over difficulties and inconsistencies. His “distant future” when slavery might vanish was so far off as to be practically unimaginable. For example, he knew that in Virginia, the state with the largest number of slaves, servitude had survived for two centuries. He never suggested a chronology. Doing so honestly would have entailed setting forth a time frame basically impossible to comprehend and one that certainly would not attract any support from antislavery battalions. Davis also thought of himself and his brother Joseph as kind masters, and he defended their stewardship of their slaves. Yet both owned large slave corps with overseers operating between them and their human property, as did many of their social friends. Whatever Davis precisely intended, he clearly did not mean exactly what he said.

  Over the next two years Davis amplified his wide-ranging and vigorous defense of slavery. As he explained to a friend in 1849, “it is time for our justification before the uninformed and that we may be understood by posterity as well as by contemporaries that the long continued and gross misrepresentations of our slave institutions should be answered.” Davis believed this duty especially pressing, for “in an evil hour some of the most distinguished southern stat[es]men admitted that slavery was an evil.” Such an admission, Davis professed, “takes from us all gro[und] of defence save that of presen[t neces]sity, and not only warrants the attempts of others for its abolition but also demands of us constant efforts to remove the obstacles to its abatement.” On the floor of the Senate he announced that “the decree of God” underlay slavery, which he found “sanctioned in the Bible, authorized, regulated, and recognized from Genesis to Revelation.” To a Mississippi audience he emphasized that slavery made possible white equality. “No white man in a slave community,” he preached, “was the menial servant of anyone.” Yes, he acknowledged the permanence of fundamental social distinction; but in the South he insisted that it rested on color and race, whereas in the North and in Europe, wealth denoted the division.38

  To his overall justification of slavery Davis conceded only one exception, the professional slave trader whose confinement of slaves impaired their health. In the Senate he admitted “the odium which exists against this class of traders,” even observing that his own community shar
ed it, as he did personally. Giving on that particular, he almost immediately pulled back by asserting that such men were usually northerners, “who came among us, but are not of us.”39

  Publicly and privately Jefferson Davis stood foursquare behind the institution that he had known since childhood and that provided the foundation for his and Joseph’s prosperity and way of life. His constituents applauded. When the Mississippian announced its publication of his Oregon speech, the paper praised it as “conclusive and unanswerable; and so we think every candid and unprejudiced mind will regard it.”40

  With the adjournment of Congress on August 14, Senator Davis departed for Mississippi by the western route. After stopping in Kentucky, he reached home by mid-September and almost immediately discovered himself in the midst of a presidential contest that had a special resonance for him. Zachary Taylor was the candidate of the Whigs, not Davis’s Democratic party. Since early in the year Davis had seen presidential politics infecting congressional deliberations.41

  Davis’s relationship with Taylor placed him in an unusual situation. Their friendship had continued on an intimate level even after both had returned to the United States. Taylor, who called Baton Rouge, Louisiana, home but also owned a large cotton plantation in Jefferson County, Mississippi, not far from Davis Bend, really considered Jefferson and brother Joseph as family. When Taylor stopped by Hurricane after visiting his Mississippi plantation, he wrote Jefferson that he did not think of himself as a guest, but rather amid “near & dear relatives.” He shared his political views openly and in detail with Davis, partisanship notwithstanding. Basically a nonpartisan professional soldier before the Mexican War, Taylor inclined more toward the Whigs as his heroic image made him an increasingly attractive presidential possibility. The old general was undoubtedly influenced by his feeling that the Polk administration had treated him shabbily.42