On November 7, in a shocking ideological reversal, Jefferson Davis endorsed a plan to buy forty thousand slaves who would take up arms for the South and receive freedom at the end of the war—that is, if the South won. The only alternative to this radical concession was total defeat, Davis concluded, but the response of constituents was overwhelmingly hostile. In the words of Howell Cobb of Georgia, who helped to create the Confederacy, “The day you make soldiers of [slaves] is the beginning of the end of the revolution. If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is
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