All we ask is to be left alone.

In Jefferson Davis’s mouth, the plea to “be left alone” typically functions as a political claim: that the Confederacy (or the slaveholding South more broadly) sought noninterference rather than conquest. Read rhetorically, it casts secession and the defense of slavery as a defensive posture—an appeal to autonomy and local self-government—while shifting moral responsibility for conflict onto outside “aggression.” The line’s force lies in its simplicity and its implied innocence; it compresses a complex constitutional and moral dispute into the language of personal privacy and self-determination. Historically, however, the claim is inseparable from the Confederacy’s foundational commitment to slavery and from the fact that “being left alone” meant preserving that system against federal restriction.