Sunday, December 15, 2019
Hollywood Cemetery
Richmond, Virginia
Dearest Ambassador Haley,
I am writing from the distant past to offer some modest thoughts about your exciting future. I understand congratulations are in order as you embark on the journey to seek the presidential nomination of the party of states’ rights, nullification, and secession. (One hundred thirty years after my death, the irony is not lost on me that the Party of Abraham Lincoln is now where those sacred values reside.)
Now, I appreciate that you have not formally declared your intentions for 2024 or, if today’s abolitionists, free soilers, and civil rights crusaders of the North and West succeed in their current treachery, in 2020. But with the resumption of your defense of the flag of our Confederacy, you sent an unmistakable signal to our shared supporters that you shall pursue the highest office in the land.
It is on the meaning of that glorious banner under which in 1861 our “little army, derided for its want of arms, derided for its lack of all the essential material of war, has met the grand army of the enemy, routed it at every point, and now it flies, inglorious in retreat before our victorious columns” that I now offer you counsel. Having proudly defended the flag in 2015 “as a memorial, a way to honor ancestors who came to the service of their state during time of conflict” and in 2019 as representing “service, sacrifice and heritage,” you nevertheless removed our pride from the capitol in Columbia. Of the gallant avenger Dylann Roof, a young man any white Southerner with a soul could easily imagine riding alongside Nathan Bedford Forrest or marching with Stonewall Jackson, you said “the hate-filled murderer who massacred our brothers and sisters in Charleston has a sick and twisted view of the flag,” a view which “hijacked everything that people thought of.”
On this, you are tragically wrong. Dylann Roof understood what I explained all those many years ago. “Our cause was so just, so sacred, that had I known all that has come to pass, had I known what was to be inflicted upon me, all that my country was to suffer, all that our posterity was to endure, I would do it all over again.” Our glorious and heroic flag, now as then, celebrates that cause. As I proclaimed to our people after my inauguration in 1861:
“We recognized the negro as God and God's Book and God's laws, in nature, tell us to recognize him. Our inferior, fitted expressly for servitude.”
I was never shy about telling everyone, North and South, that our inheritance and our cause of its preservation came from God. Slavery was, I reminded the United States Senate in 1860, “a form of civil government for those who by their nature are not fit to govern themselves.”
“We recognize the fact of the inferiority stamped upon that race by the Creator, and from cradle to grave, our government, as a civil institution, marks that inferiority."
(It came as no surprise to anyone when I branded the so-called Emancipation Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln as “the most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man.”)
Surely Dylann Roof understood, as you apparently do not, the wisdom of Chief Justice Taney’s immortal words about that race from Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857:
They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic whenever a profit could be made by it. This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race. It was regarded as an axiom in morals as well as in politics which no one thought of disputing or supposed to be open to dispute, and men in every grade and position in society daily and habitually acted upon it in their private pursuits, as well as in matters of public concern, without doubting for a moment the correctness of this opinion.
It pains me that as a former South Carolina Governor, you would exhibit such seeming ignorance of the worthy defense of our legacy offered by famed Palmetto State Governor Strom Thurmond in 1948. “There’s not enough troops in the Army,” Thurmond warned, “to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.” It’s no wonder Thurmond’s Republican colleague and aptly titled Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott marked his 100th birthday by proclaiming:
"I want to say this about my state: when Strom Thurmond ran for President, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."
Of course, your legendary predecessor John C. Calhoun warned us all of what was to come in 1837. Years before the blessed events of 1861, Calhoun delivered a rousing rebuttal to those challenging the “positive good” of slavery.
"If we do not defend ourselves none will defend us; if we yield we will be more and more pressed as we recede; and if we submit we will be trampled under foot. Be assured that emancipation itself would not satisfy these fanatics: -that gained, the next step would be to raise the negroes to a social and political equality with the whites; and that being effected, we would soon find the present condition of the two races reversed."
As the good, Christian woman you are, you surely must know these truths were self-evident to the moral men and women of the South. Sixteen years before Edmund Ruffin launched the first shell toward Fort Sumter, the Southern Baptist Convention was founded precisely to separate itself from the abolitionist contagion of the American Baptist Church.
An evil hour has arrived...In December last, the acting Board of Convention, at Boston, adopted a new qualification for missionaries, a new rule viz, that: "If anyone who shall offer himself for a missionary, having slaves, should insist on retaining them as his property, they could not appoint him." "One thing is certain," they continue, "we could never be a party to any arrangement which applies approbation of slavery."
Regretfully, their descendants like Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee disgraced themselves in 1995 by apologizing for their just principles.
The Southern Baptists were not the only Christians who rose to defend our slave inheritance. The cracks that began between Old School and New School Presbyterians in 1837 broke wide open in 1857. One leader predicted, “The Potomac will be dyed with blood.” And in 1844, the Methodist Church, the largest organization in the country, split in two over the rising abolitionist fervor among its northern members. North Carolina’s delegates to the 1844 General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church supported the resolution of separation:
"We believe an immediate division of the Methodist Episcopal Church is indispensable to the peace, prosperity, and honor of the Southern portion thereof, if not essential to her continued existence we regard the officious, and unwarranted interference of the Northern portion of the Church with the subject of slavery alone, a sufficient cause for a division of our Church."
That sufficient cause for the division of a church was also the cause for the division of the nation, South from North. In your South Carolina, in which was once found “the old bell—Secessia—that had rung out for every state as it seceded,” the declaration of causes for secession was clear. “All the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery,” South Carolina warned, adding, “because he has declared that that ‘Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,’ and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.” Louisiana proclaimed that “The people of the slave-holding States are bound together by the same necessity and determination to preserve African slavery.” Texas declared “this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations.”
If I may, I would like to shine a beacon on my own Mississippi, which I believe articulated the necessity and justice of the sacred cause for which we soon fought:
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin...we do not overstate the dangers to our institution...
Consider, too, Ambassador, our Constitution of the Confederate States of America. In my inaugural address in 1861, “We have changed the constituent parts, but not the system of our Government.”
“The Constitution formed by our fathers is that of these Confederate States, in their exposition of it, and in the judicial construction it has received, we have a light which reveals its true meaning.”
And which “constituent parts” did Southern patriots change to “reveal its true meaning?” In Article I, Section 9, (4), the Constitution proclaimed, “No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.” We didn’t merely make the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 the law of our land in Article IV, Section 2, (1) and (3), but enshrined the principle that “the citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States; and shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired.” In Article IV, Section 3, (3), the Constitution announced our indefeasible rights to our property, no matter what President Abraham Lincoln and his “free soilers” may have wished.
The Confederate States may acquire new territory; and Congress shall have power to legislate and provide governments for the inhabitants of all territory belonging to the Confederate States, lying without the limits of the several States; and may permit them, at such times, and in such manner as it may by law provide, to form States to be admitted into the Confederacy. In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.
This command of our Confederate Constitution represented the realization of the dreams of many of our countrymen such as my Mississippi colleague, Albert Gallatin Brown. As Senator Brown described his vision for our land in 1858:
"I want Cuba, and I know that sooner or later we must have it. If the worm-eaten throne of Spain is willing to give it for a fair equivalent, well--if not, we must take it. I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican Stats; and I want them all for the same reason--for the planting and spreading of slavery."
Madame Secretary, just days after the catastrophe of Abraham Lincoln’s election by the Yankees, the Charleston Mercury explained its meaning. “The tea has been thrown overboard,” the paper announced, “The revolution of 1860 has been initiated." Four years later, Southern Punch summed up for all North and South why that revolution was initiated.
"'The people of the South,' says a contemporary, 'are not fighting for slavery but for independence.' Let us look into this matter. It is an easy task, we think, to show up this new-fangled heresy -- a heresy calculated to do us no good, for it cannot deceive foreign statesmen nor peoples, nor mislead any one here nor in Yankeeland. . . Our doctrine is this: WE ARE FIGHTING FOR INDEPENDENCE THAT OUR GREAT AND NECESSARY DOMESTIC INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY SHALL BE PRESERVED, and for the preservation of other institutions of which slavery is the groundwork."
Make no mistake, Governor, over the course of the entire War of Northern Aggression our heroic soldiers shared this sentiment. Colonel John Mosby, the officer most cited by General Robert E. Lee in his dispatches to me, declared in 1894, “I've always understood that we went to war on account of the thing we quarreled with the North about. I've never heard of any other cause than slavery.” The glorious General Nathan Bedford Forrest pointed to his 1864 slaughter of hundreds of surrendering black troops at Fort Pillow, Kentucky, to teach the Lincolnites a lesson. "It is hoped that these facts will demonstrate to the Northern people,” the future founder of the Ku Klux Klan instructed, “that negro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners." To preserve our institution of slavery, General Mahone’s troops chanted at the Battle of the Crater in July 1864, “'Spare the white man, kill the nigger!’” And for that reason, General John Bell Hood necessarily rejected the disgusting demand of the Yankee William Tecumseh Sherman that Southern men, women, and children be evacuated from Atlanta.
You came into our country with your army avowedly for the purpose of subjugating free white men, women, and children, and not only intend to rule over them, but you make negroes your allies and desire to place over us an inferior race, which we have raised from barbarism to its present position, which is the highest ever attained by that race in any country in all time. I must, therefore, decline to accept your statements in reference to your kindness toward the people of Atlanta, and your willingness to sacrifice everything for the peace and honor of the South, and refuse to be governed by your decision in regard to matters between myself, my country, and my God. You say, "let us fight it out like men." To this my reply is, for myself, and, I believe, for all the true men, aye, and women and children, in my country, we will fight you to the death. Better die a thousand deaths than submit to live under you or your Government and your negro allies.
Governor, General Hood’s manly response was both wise and natural. The North’s negro allies could never be ours. "You cannot make soldiers of slaves, or slaves of soldiers,” Howell Cobb, president of the Confederate Provisional Congress rightly posited in 1864. “The day you make a soldier of them is the beginning of the end of the Revolution. And if slaves seem good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong." I myself explained another reason why back in 1858:
You too know, that among us, white men have an equality resulting from a presence of a lower caste, which cannot exist where white men fill the position here occupied by the servile race. The mechanic who comes among us, employing the less intellectual labor of the African, takes the position which only a master-workman occupies where all the mechanics are white, and therefore it is that our mechanics hold their position of absolute equality among us.
This was not lost on our fighting men, including among those who did not own slaves. When I signed the congressional authorization for a draft in 1862, some troops were unhappy about the provision exempting those men who owned 20 or more slaves. “A law was made about this time,” Corporal Sam Watkins of Tennessee complained, “allowing every person who owned 20 slaves to go home.”
“It gave us the blues. We wanted twenty negroes. There was raised the howl, ‘rich man’s war, poor man’s fight.’”
But that fight, all knew, was for the preservation of slavery and the protection of the Southern way of life. What Vice President Alexander Stephens of Georgia proclaimed the “cornerstone” of our Confederate nation on March 21 ,1861, never changed throughout the war or after. Our right to preserve slavery, Stephens correctly declared, “was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.”
“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas [as those of slavery foes]; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
In 1861, this was obvious to all on either side of the Mason-Dixon Line. To Southern plantation owners, it was most obvious of all. Think of them as the Southern equivalent of the CEOs you described back in 2014 when you were still committed to honoring the Confederate flag in your capital city.
“What I can tell you is over the last three and a half years, I spent a lot of my days on the phones with CEOs and recruiting jobs to this state. I can honestly say I have not had one conversation with a single CEO about the Confederate flag.”
As the Governor of South Carolina, the birthplace of states’ rights, nullification, and secession, you should know that you need no one’s permission to fly that magnificent banner that waved so proudly at Manassas, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Cold Harbor. General Lee, the architect of those triumphs, spoke for me when he challenged us all to be eternally vigilant in defense of our cause:
"Everyone should do all in his power to collect and disseminate the truth, in the hope that it may find a place in history and descend to posterity. History is not the relation of campaigns and battles and generals or other individuals, but that which shows the principles for which the South contended and which justified her struggle for those principles."
I spoke of those principles and that struggle before, during, and after the Civil War. As I put it in 1858, “You cannot transform the negro into anything one-tenth as useful or as good as what slavery enables them to be.” Confederate flags of every design now as then represented not just our cause, but the righteousness of our cause. “The principle for which we contend is bound to reassert itself,” I presciently saw, “though it may be at another time and in another form.” In writing textbooks, erecting monuments, and even naming a transcontinental highway after me, the United Daughters of the Confederacy understood this. “A question settled by violence, or in disregard of law, must remain unsettled forever,” I warned in The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. “The contest is not over, the strife is not ended. It has only entered on a new and enlarged arena.” The Ku Klux Klan, the White Citizens Councils, and even Dylann Roof understood this.
Governor Haley, I know you do, too. Perhaps your obvious ambition to become president of the United States by 2024 leads you to walk a tightrope between our allies and our enemies. But everyone North and South, Democrat and Republican, knows exactly what our splendid Confederate flags stand for. Frederick Douglass, whom the current occupant of the White House proclaimed “is being recognized more and more” understood this when he declared simply, “The thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion.”
My time, once again, is up. Before I go, I would ask you to remember my parting words: “Nothing fills me with deeper sadness than to see a southerner apologizing for the defense we made of our inheritance.”
Your obedient and once again decomposing servant,
Jefferson Davis
President, Confederate States of America
