“We shall, Mr. President,” Lee said.
“I have perfect faith in your abilities—and also in those of Mr. Stephens, though we are often at odds with each other,” Jefferson Davis said: almost a mirror image of the words the Vice President had used to describe their relationship. Davis continued, “Now I must needs return to these other matters of state, particularly this latest note from the British minister regarding our prospective participation in the naval patrol off the African coast to interdict the slave trade. You have seen it, Mr. Benjamin?”
“Yes, sir,” Benjamin said.
“I do not care for its tone. Having recognized us, the British ought to use us with the politeness they grant to any other nation. Our Constitution forbids the importation of slaves from Africa, which should suffice to satisfy them but evidently does not. In any case, we, unlike the United States, have not the naval force to permit us to comply with the Ashburton treaty, a fact of which the minister cannot be unaware, but with which he chooses to bait us.” Davis’s lip curled in scorn.
Judah Benjamin said, “The nations of Europe continue to abhor our policy, try as we will to convince them we cannot do otherwise. Mr. Mason has written from London that Her Majesty’s government might well have been willing to extend us recognition two years ago, were it not for the continuation of slavery among us: so Lord Russell assured him, at any rate. M. Thouvenel, the French foreign minister, has expressed similar sentiments to Mr. Slidell in Paris.”
Slavery, Lee thought. In the end, the outside world’s view of the Confederate States of America was colored almost exclusively by its response to the South’s peculiar institution. Never mind that the U.S. Constitution was a revocable compact between independent states, never mind that the North had consistently used its numerical majority to force through Congress tariffs that worked only to ruin the South. So long as black men were bought and sold, all the high ideals of the Confederacy would be ignored.
President Davis said, “The ‘free’ factory worker in Manchester or Paris—yes, in Boston as well—is free only to starve. As Mr. Hammond of South Carolina put it so pungently in the chambers of the U.S. Senate a few years ago, every society rests upon a mudsill of brute labor, from which the edifice of civilization arises. We are but more open and honest about the nature of our mudsill than other nations, which gladly exploit a worker’s labor but, when he can no longer provide it, cast him aside like a used sheet of foolscap.”
Nothing but the truth there, Lee thought—but also nothing that would convince anyone who already opposed slavery, as did the vast majority of countries and individual men and women outside the Confederate States. Diffidently, he said, “Mr. President, now that we are no longer at war with the United States, would it not be possible to fit out a single naval vessel for duty off the African coast? The symbolic value of such a gesture would, it seems to me, far outweigh the cost it would entail.”
Davis’s eyes flashed. Lee read Et tu. Brute? in them. Then calculation replaced anger. Judah Benjamin said, “If that be feasible, Mr. President, it would go some way toward accommodating us to the usages of the leading powers.”
“And how far did those powers go toward accommodating us before we assured our own independence?” Davis said, his voice bitter with remembered slight. “Not a single step, as I recalclass="underline" confident in their strength, they despised us, Britain chief among them. And now they expect us to forget? Not likely, sir, by God!”
“In no way do I advise you to forget, sir,” Benjamin said. “I merely concur with General Lee in suggesting that we demonstrate acquiescence where we may, against a time when we are in a position to be able to give concrete evidence pf our displeasure.”
Davis drummed the fingers of his right hand on his desk. “Very well, sir. Enquire of Mr. Mallory at the Navy Department as to the practicability of doing as General Lee suggested, then prepare a memorandum detailing for me his response. If the thing can be done, I shall communicate to the British our willingness to do it. There are times, I confess, when I believe our lives would have been simpler had no Negroes ever been imported to these shores. But then we should only have required some other mudsill upon which to build our society.”
“Futile to pretend now that the black man is no part of our Confederacy,” Lee said. “And as he is such a part, we shall have to define his place in our nation.”
“One reason we fought the late war was to define the black man’s place in our nation, or rather to preserve our previous definition of his place,” Benjamin said. “Do you now feel that definition to be inadequate?”
“Preserving it may yet prove more expensive than we can afford,” Lee said. “Thanks to the Federals, the Negroes of parts of Virginia, the Carolina coast, Tennessee, and the Mississippi valley have had a year, two, three, to accustom themselves to the idea of being free men and women. General Forrest may—General Forrest had better—defeat their armed bands in the field. But can he at the point of a bayonet restore their previous habit of servility?”
For some time, none of the three men in President Davis’s office spoke. Davis scowled at Lee’s words; even Benjamin’s customary smile slipped. Lee himself felt rather surprised, for what he’d said took him farther than he’d consciously intended to go. But a smoldering slave insurrection, no doubt aided and abetted from the United States, was every Southern man’s worst nightmare.
He glanced toward Jefferson Davis. “Tell me, sir: If, earlier in the war, you found us forced to the choice between returning to the United States with all our institutions guaranteed by law and carrying on as an independent nation at the cost of freeing our Negroes, which would you have done?”
“When the delegates of the Southern states met in Montgomery, General, we made a nation,” Davis said firmly; Lee gave him credit for not hesitating. “To preserve that nation, I would at need have taken any steps required, up to and including carrying on a guerrilla war in the mountains and valleys of the interior against Federals occupying an our settled places. Any steps required, sir, any at all.”
Lee nodded thoughtfully; no one who once met President Davis could doubt that, when he said a thing, he meant it. “I am relieved it did not come to that, Mr. President.” He stroked his gray beard. “I fear I am too old to have taken up the bushwhacker’s trade.”
“As am I, but at need I should have learned it,” Davis said.
“Where now?” Judah Benjamin asked. “Shall Forrest continue unchecked with fire and the sword, or will you offer the Negroes in arms against us an amnesty during which they may peacefully return to our fold?”
“As what? As free men?” Davis shook his head. “That would create more troubles than it solves, by offering our Negroes incentive to rise up against us and, once risen, to continue their insurrection in the hope of so impressing us by their spirit that we yield them what they seek. No, let them first see that fire and the sword remain our exclusive province and that they may not hope to stand against us. Once they grow convinced of that, a show of leniency is likelier to produce the results we desire.”
“As you think best, Mr. President,” Benjamin replied.
Jefferson Davis turned to Lee. “How say you, sir?”
“I say that the prospect of armed Negroes stubbornly resisting so able an officer as General Forrest, and the performance of the colored regiments which confronted the Army of Northern Virginia, trouble me profoundly,” Lee answered. “That the one group shall be defeated, as the other was, is hardly open to doubt. But if the Negro makes a proper soldier, can he continue to make a proper slave?”