JEFFERSON DAVIS AND RACE RELATIONS

JEFFERSON DAVIS AND RACE RELATIONS

Michael T. Griffith

2003

@All Rights Reserved

Simply put, Jefferson Davis treated blacks with respect and received their respect in return. Critics will reply that Davis believed in white supremacy, i.e., that he believed that whites were superior to blacks. But these critics almost never explain that nearly all Americans in that day believed the same thing. This was true of the average man on the street right up to the nation's leaders in all parts of the country. For example, prominent Northern politicians like Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas repeatedly said they believed whites were superior to blacks. Douglas even said the Declaration of Independence's statement about all men being created equal referred only to white men, and Lincoln referred to the declaration as "the white man's charter of freedom." Fortunately, we have come a long way since then.  But I don't think it's fair to condemn Davis because he held racial views that were shared by nearly all white Americans in his day. Cooper does a good job of putting Davis's racial views into proper perspective:

At the end of his life, Jefferson Davis believed unequivocally in the superiority of his race. He also had serious reservations about black people ever achieving any kind of equality with the superior race. Yet he was no race-baiter or racial demagogue. . . . His conviction about the innate supremacy of his race did not require hatred or viciousness. . . .

While not all Americans joined his embrace of slavery, few dissented from his belief in the superiority of the white race, an outlook shared by almost all white Americans as well as Western Europeans."47