[451] taken in connection with the arming of negroes for military service, and the attempted breaking up of plantation work, was construed throughout the South as the initiative of a policy designed to instigate servile insurrection. Southern people were alarmed at the atrocious results that could ensue through the United States military under. some officers who had already manifested the desire to use negro insurrection as a means to a quick though horrible suppression of the rebellion. The soldiers being absent from their unprotected homes were also greatly incensed by a war measure so violative of the usages of civil war. These fears felt at home by defenseless women, and the indignation of the armies in the field, demanded the attention of the Confederate President and Congress.
The question was raised in Congress for the first time by the introduction by Mr. Semmes, of Louisiana, of the following strong resolution:
Resolved by the Congress of the Confederate States. That the proclamation of Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America, issued in the city of Washington in the year 1862, wherein he declares ‘that on the first of January in the year of our Lord 1863, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated parts of a State whereof the people shall be in rebellion against the United States shall be henceforth and forever free,’ is leveled against the citizens of the Confederate States, and as such is a gross violation of the usages of civilized warfare, and an invitation to an atrocious servile war, and therefore should be held up to the execration of mankind, and counteracted by such retaliatory measures as in the judgment of the President may be best calculated to secure its withdrawal and arrest its execution.
Very violent speeches were made, and some indefensible measures of retaliation were proposed during the discussion of the preliminary emancipation measure. The earliest impulses of the South, under the feeling that a
