A History of the American People

I have no fear of insurrection, no more dread of our slaves than I have of our cattle ... Our slaves are happy and contented.' Not only was it in the interests of blacks to be slaves, it was likewise to their benefit that slavery be extended. Davis never possessed more than seventy-four slaves and knew all of them well: it was his policy. He maintained it was wrong for whites to own more slaves than they could personally care for, as he did. If cruelty occurred, it was because sheer numbers undermined the personal owner-slave relationship. So the more slavery spread out geographically, the more humane it would be. This was his argument for dismantling Mexico, turning its territories into new states, and making slavery lawful there and even north of the Missouri Compromise line. Slave-owners must be able to take their slaves with them into new territories just as immigrants had always taken any other form of property with them, such as waggons or cattle. Joseph had dinned into him the fundamental principle:Any interference with
the unqualified property of the owner in a slave was an abolition principle.'
Davis believed that the Southern case for slavery and its extension rested on firm moral
foundations. Indeed he was morally aggressive, accusing the North of hypocrisy: You were the men who imported these negroes into this country. You enjoyed the benefits resulting from their carriage and sale; and you reaped the largest profits accruing from the introduction of the slaves.' Abolition was nothing butperfidious interference in the rights of other men.' He did not see the
agreements of 1820 and 1850 as compromises' but as Southern concessions, the limit to which the South could reasonably be expected to go. Further limitations on slavery were merely Northern attacks on the South motivated not by morality but by envy and hatred:The mask is
off: the question is before us. It is a struggle for political power.' The Constitution was on the
South's side. The federal government had no natural authority: It is the creature of the States. As such it can have no inherent power; all it possesses was delegated by the States.' If what Davis calledthe self-sustaining majority' continued its oppressive and unlawful campaign against the
South, the Confederation' as he called it should be dissolved:We should part peaceably and
avoid staining the battlefields of the Revolution with the blood of a civil war.’
This philosophy, inherited from Calhoun and instilled by Brother Joseph, reexamined by
Davis in his lonely musings, polished and consolidated over the years, he regarded as axiomatic.
It is significant that he never saw himself as an extremist especially over breaking up the Union.
He wrote: I was slower and more reluctant than others. I was behind the general opinion of the people [of Mississippi] as to the propriety of prompt secession.' But when his basic assumptions about slavery were challenged, he responded with paranoia. This sprang not just from his Southern conditioning but from a dominant streak of selfrighteousness in his character. A variety of incidents in his early life, in the army, in his domestic and public quarrels show that, once he had made up his mind and adopted a position, he treated any attempt to argue him out of it as inadmissible, an assault on his integrity. As he put it to his second wife, Varina:I cannot bear to
be suspected or complained of, or misconstrued after explanation.' That sentence sums up the
tragedy of his life. Senator Isaac P. Walker of Wisconsin noted: He speaks with an air which seems to say "Nothing more can be said, I know it all, it must be as I think." ' Davis himself said he ignored press criticism:Proud in the consciousness of my own rectitude, I have looked upon
it with the indifference which belongs to the assurance that I am right.'
All this suggests that Davis was better suited to a military than a political life. That was
Varina's view: `He did not know the arts of a politician, and would not practice them if
understood.' Davis got into politics in his later thirties but the Mexican War gave him the chance
to resume his army career. He was elected colonel of a regiment of Mississippi volunteers, had
the foresight to equip them with the new Whitney rifle, was favored by his commanding general