gards the miseries of sweatshops and
the sufferings of unemployed labor. Such things were bad, very bad, but
they were the accidents and not the essentials of the industrial
system. They resented the strictures of their critics; they were
apprehensive of the growing hostility in the North to their
institutions; if the national partnership was to last they must have
their rights under it; and one of those rights was an equal share in the
national domain.

Davis entered into active politics when he was elected to Congress in
1844. Repudiation was then in favor in Mississippi, and he opposed and
denounced it. He supported the Mexican War in the most practical way, by
taking command of a volunteer regiment from Mississippi. He served with
distinguished gallantry, and was severely wounded at Buena Vista. After
the war he entered the United States Senate. He supported the compromise
of 1850, regarding it as substantially a continuance of the truce
between the sections, and not now sympathizing with those who threatened
disunion. Later, President Pierce made him Secretary of War; in the
Cabinet he was the leading spirit; and this, with a weak President,
meant large power and responsibility. He showed the extent of his
partisanship by supporting with the full power of the administration the
Territorial government imposed on Kansas by a palpably fraudulent vote.

In 1856 he returned to the Senate, and came to be recognized as the
foremost champion of the Southern interest. He was not a leader in any
such sense as Jefferson or Clay or Calhoun; but he was a representative
man, thoroughly trusted by his associates, their most effective
spokesman, and going by conviction in the midstream of the dominant
tendency. He had that degree of ambition which is natural and normal in
a strong man. He was an effective and elegant orator. When secession
came he was not its originator, but one of a set of men--on the whole
the most considerate and influential men of the Gulf and cotton
States--who took the responsibility of leading their section into
revolution, in the interest of slavery.

In this typical Southern leader, as in his class, were blended the
elements of a disposition and will that would halt before no barrier to
its claim of mastery. A slaveholder, accustomed to supremacy over his
fellowmen as their natural superior; a planter, habituated to the
practical exercise of such supremacy over hundreds of dependents; a
member of an ar