Thompson, John A. Quitman, Henry S. Foote, Robert J. Walker,
Sergeant S. Prentiss, and Jefferson Davis. Not one of them was
born in the State. Thompson was born in North Carolina; Quitman
in New York; Foote in Virginia; Walker in Pennsylvania; Prentiss
in Maine; Davis in Kentucky. In 1861 the State was but forty-four
years old, younger than its most illustrious sons--if the paradox
may be permitted. How could they think of it as an entity
existing in itself, antedating not only themselves but their
traditions, circumscribing them with its all-embracing,
indisputable reality? These men spoke the language of state
rights. It is true that in politics, combating the North, they
used the political philosophy taught them by South Carolina. But
it was a mental weapon in political debate; it was not for them
an emotional fact.

And yet these men of the Southwest had an ideal of their own as
vivid and as binding as the state ideal of the men of the eastern
coast. Though half their leaders were born in the North, the
people themselves were overwhelmingly Southern. From all the
older States, all round the huge crescent which swung around from
Kentucky coastwise to Florida, immigration in the twenties and
thirties had poured into Mississippi. Consequently the new
community presented a composite picture of the whole South, and
like all composite pictures it emphasized only the factors common
to all its parts. What all the South had in common, what made a
man a Southerner in the general sense--in distinction from a
Northerner on the one hand, or a Virginian, Carolinian, Georgian,
on the other--could have been observed with clearness in
Mississippi, just before the war, as nowhere else. Therefore, the
fulfillment of the ideal of Southern life in general terms was