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 went forward in his great undertaking,
as antagonisms developed, as Rhett and others turned against him, Davis
hardened. He lost whatever comprehension he once had of the Rhett type.
Seeking to weld into one irresistible unit all the military power of the
South, he became at last in the eyes of his opponents a monster, while
to him, more and more positively, the others became mere dreamers.

It took about a year for this irrepressible conflict within the
Confederacy to reveal itself. During the twelve months following Davis's
election as provisional President, he dominated the situation, though
the Charleston Mercury, the Rhett organ, found opportunities to be
sharply critical of the President. He assembled armies; he initiated
heroic efforts to make up for the handicap of the South in the
manufacture of munitions and succeeded in starting a number of munition
plants; though powerless to prevent the establishment of the blockade,
he was able during that first year to keep in touch with Europe, to
start out Confederate privateers upon the high seas, and to import a
considerable quantity of arms and supplies. At the close of the year the
Confederate armies were approaching general efficiency, for all their
enormous handicap, almost if not quite as rapidly as were the Union
armies. And the one great event of the year on land, the