“African slavery as it exists in the United States,” said President Jefferson Davis, “is a moral, a social and a political blessing.” A committed white supremacist, Davis owned 137 people on his cotton plantation in Mississippi. The rebel vice president, Alexander H. Stephens, was even more explicit. “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea” of racial equality, he said. “Its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery is his natural and normal condition.”
