the vision of things hoped for by the new men of the Southwest.
The features of that vision were common to them all--country
life, broad acres, generous hospitality, an aristocratic system.
The temperaments of these men were sufficiently buoyant to enable
them to apprehend this ideal even before it had materialized.
Their romantic minds could see the gold at the end of the
rainbow. Theirs was not the pride of administering a
well-ordered, inherited system, but the joy of building a new
system, in their minds wholly elastic, to be sure, but still
inspired by that old system.

What may be called the sense of Southern nationality as opposed
to the sense of state rights, strictly speaking, distinguished
this brilliant young community of the Southwest. In that
community Davis spent the years that appear to have been the most
impressionable of his life. Belonging to a "new" family just
emerging into wealth, he began life as a West Pointer and saw
gallant service as a youth on the frontier; resigned from the
army to pursue a romantic attachment; came home to lead the life
of a wealthy planter and receive the impress of Mississippi; made
his entry into politics, still a soldier at heart, with the
philosophy of state rights on his lips, but in his heart that
sense of the Southern people as a new nation, which needed only
the occasion to make it the relentless enemy of the rights of the
individual Southern States. Add together the instinctive military
point of view and this Southern nationalism that even in 1861 had
scarcely revealed itself; join with these a fearless and haughty
spirit, proud to the verge of arrogance, but perfectly devoted,
perfectly sincere; and you have the main lines of the political
character of Davis when he became President. It may be that as he