(CIVIL WAR CONFEDERATE) Message of President Jeff Davis ann

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(CIVIL WAR--CONFEDERATE.) "Message of President Jeff. Davis" announcing the commencement of hostilities, in an issue of a Confederate newspaper, the Charleston Daily Courier. 2 pages, 29½ x 21 inches, on one sheet; moderate wear at intersection of folds, minor foxing and toning; uncut. Charleston, SC, 1 May 1861

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Contains the full text of Davis's first message to the new Confederate Congress, announcing the ratification of the Constitution and the commencement of war.

Neither side in the Civil War ever issued a formal declaration of war; Lincoln never recognized the Confederacy as a sovereign nation, but rather an internal rebellion. In this message, Davis treats Lincoln's actions at Fort Sumter and his militia proclamation as a de facto declaration of war, to which the Confederacy had no choice but to respond.

Davis also argues at length for the centrality of slavery to his cause: "The African slaves . . . had been elevated from brutal savages into docile, intelligent, and civilized agricultural laborers, and supplied not only with bodily comforts, but with careful religious instruction . . . and the productions of the South in Cotton, Rice, Sugar, and Tobacco, for the full development and continuance of which the labor of African slaves was, and is, indispensable, had swollen to an amount which formed nearly three fourths of the exports of the whole United States, and had become absolutely necessary to the wants of civilized men."