the Government which secession had created, it is often said that
the explanation is to be found in a generous as well as politic
desire to put in office the moderates and even the conservatives.
Davis, relatively, was a moderate. Stephens was a conservative.
Many of the most pronounced opponents of secession were given
places in the public service. Toombs, who received the portfolio
of State, though a secessionist, was conspicuously a moderate
when compared with Rhett and Yancey. The adroit Benjamin, who
became Attorney-General, had few points in common with the great
extremists of Alabama and South Carolina.

However, the dictum that the personnel of the new Government was
a triumph for conservatism over radicalism signifies little.
There was a division among Southerners which scarcely any of them
had realized except briefly in the premature battle over
secession in 1851. It was the division between those who were
conscious of the region as a whole and those who were not.
Explain it as you will, there was a moment just after the
secession movement succeeded when the South seemed to realize
itself as a whole, when it turned intuitively to those men who,
as time was to demonstrate, shared this realization. For the
moment it turned away from those others, however great their part
in secession, who lacked this sense of unity.

At this point, geography becomes essential. The South fell,
institutionally, into two grand divisions: one, with an old and
firmly established social order, where consciousness of the
locality went back to remote times; another, newly settled, where
conditions were still fluid, where that sense of the sacredness
of local institutions had not yet formed.