hase or confiscation of slaves, the traditional
Southern temper instantly recoiled from the suggestion. A Government
possessed of great numbers of slaves, whether bought or appropriated,
would have in its hands a gigantic power, perhaps for industrial
competition with private owners, perhaps even for organized military
control. Besides, the Government might at any moment by emancipating
its slaves upset the labor system of the country. Furthermore, the
opportunities for favoritism in the management of state-owned slaves
were beyond calculation. Considerations such as these therefore explain
the watchful jealousy of the planters toward the Government whenever it
proposed to acquire property in slaves.

It is essential not to attribute this social-political dread of
government ownership of slaves merely to the clutch of a wealthy class
on its property. Too many observers, strangely enough, see the latter
motive to the exclusion of the former. Davis himself was not, it would
seem, free from this confusion. He insisted that neither slaves nor
land were taxed by the Confederacy, and between the lines he seems
to attribute to the planter class the familiar selfishness of massed
capital. He forgot that the tax in kind was combined with an income tax.
In theory, at least, the slave and the land--even non-farming land--were
taxed. However, the dread of a slave-owning Government prevented any
effective plan for supplying the army with labor except through the
temporary impressment of slaves who were eventually to be returned to
their owners. The policy of emancipation had to wait.

Bound up in the labor question was the question of the control of slaves
during the war. In the old days when there were plenty of white men in
the countryside, the roads were carefully patrolled at night, and
no slave ventured to go at large unless fully prepared to prove his
identity. But with the coming of war the comparative smallness of the
fighting population made it likely from the first that the countryside
everywhere would be stripped of its white guardians. In that event, who
would be left to control the slaves? Early in the war a slave police
was provided for by exempting from military duty overseers in the
ratio approximately of one white to twenty slaves. But the marvelous
faithfulness of the slaves, who nowhere attempted to revolt, made these
precautions unnecessary. Later laws exempted one overseer on every
plantation of fifteen slaves,