“You mean I wasn’t the first?”
Posted on 02/20/2009 1:45:46 PM PST by Non-Sequitur
There are a couple of good books on the Union use of the Telegraph BTW. They laid out something like 10-15K miles of lines just for military use, first time in history electronic communication was set up strictly for military use.
OK, how about this chestnut?
"We recognize the negro as God and God's Book and God's Law in nature tells us to recognize him - our inferior, fitted expressly for servitude. Freedom only injures the slave. The innate stamp of inferiority is beyond the reach of change. You cannot transform the negro into anything one-tenth as useful or as good as what slavery enables him to be."-- Jefferson Davis, March 1861
The belief that a group of people are not really human is behind slavery, ethnic cleansing, religious war (jihadi's view of Jews, Americans, etc.). Just take a look at the writing about the "enemy" during any war. Look at Arab newspapers now. When you stop looking a people as humans, they are much easier to enslave, starve or otherwise kill.
Just knowing which Confederate senior officers were “in town” would have some value. If, for instance, Stonewall Jackson were reported to have passed through Jeff Davis’ office it could mean that the Army of the Valley was not in the Shennandoah Valley.
Confederate Newspapers would probably report that as well, but that kind of meeting might take place in the dead of night so to speak.
As bad as that sounds it STILL doesn’t say they are not human.
Keep trying. :)
They weren't human, they were property.
Where in the Confederate Constitution does it specifically say “slaves are not human” or “slaves are inhuman” or “the negro is not a human being.”
Property who were human beings.
Not in the eyes of Jeff Davis. Not according to anything I've read of him and by him.
So you are equating Jefferson Davis with Adolph Hitler?
Again, I’ve seen no quote yet that specifically cites Davis saying “Slaves are not human” or “the negro is not a human being”.
Well they both ran countries that depended on slave labor.
Actions speak louder than words.
Who was Jeff Davis to decide what was a savage and what was civilized?
“You mean I wasn’t the first?”
It would be silly to assume savages could be made into docile slaves for hard labor. I don’t think they would’ve submitted to it.
Look at Afghanistan.
It would thus be, ahem, prudent to not claim that the slaves were formerly savages.
[Regarding a free black woman posing as a slave in the Davis household.] Information about her is scanty. One good source is Thomas McNiven, who posed as a baker while making daily rounds as a Van Lew agent in Richmond. From him, down the years, came the report that she “had a photographic mind” and “Everything she saw on the Rebel President’s Desk, she could repeat word for word.”
Jefferson Davis’ widow, Varina, responding to an inquiry in 1905, denied that the Richmond White House had harbored a spy. “I had no ‘educated negro’ in my household,” she wrote. She did not mention that her coachman, William A. Jackson, had crossed into Union lines, bringing with him military conversations that he had overheard. In a letter from Major General Irvin McDowell to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, “Jeff Davis’ coachman” is cited as the source of information about Confederate deployments. A butler who served Jefferson Davis also made his way to Union lines.
Although McDowell and other Union generals could attest to the value of the Black Dispatches, the best endorsement came from General Robert E. Lee. “The chief source of information to the enemy,” he wrote, “is through our negroes.”
Sounds like these "docile, intelligent, and civilized agricultural laborers" made a pretty useful contribution to the war effort. At least three in Davis's household alone risked their lives to bring down his rebellion and its "peculiar institution."
That description by Davis is no different than those you’ll see from Jefferson or Lincoln about the Indian race. They were all condescending toward less civilized cultures. They were men of their times.
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