he papers came out in mourning type.

Two great figures now advanced to the center of the Congressional
stage--Jefferson Davis, Senator from Mississippi, a lean eagle of a man
with piercing blue eyes, and Judah P. Benjamin, Senator from Louisiana,
whose perpetual smile cloaked an intellect that was nimble, keen, and
ruthless. Both men were destined to play leading roles in the lofty
drama of revolution; each was to experience a tragic ending of his
political hope, one in exile, the other in a solitary proscription amid
the ruins of the society for which he had sacrificed his all. These men,
though often spoken of as mere mouthpieces of Yancey, were in reality
quite different from him both in temper and in point of view.

Davis, who was destined eventually to become the target of Yancey's
bitterest enmity, had refused ten years before to join in the secession
movement which ignored Calhoun's doctrine that the South had become a
social unit. Though a believer in slavery under the conditions of the
moment, Davis had none of the passion of the slave baron for slavery at
all costs. Furthermore, as events were destined to show in a startlingly
dramatic way, he was careless of South Carolina's passion for state
rights. He was a practical politician, but not at all the old type of
the party of political evasion, the type of Toombs. No other man of the
moment was on the whole so well able to combine the elements of Southern
politics against those more negative elements of which Toombs was the
symbol. The history of the Confederacy shows that the combination which
Davis now effected was not as thorough as he supposed it was. But at the
moment he appeared to succeed and seemed to give common purpose to the
vast majority of the Southern people. With his ally Benjamin, he struck
at the Toombs policy of a National Democratic party.

On the day following the election of Pennington, Davis introduced in
the Senate a series of resolutions which were to serve as the Southern
ultimatum, and which demanded of Congress the protection of slavery
against territorial legislatures. This was but carrying to its logical
conclusion that Dred Scott decision which Douglas and his followers
proposed to accept. If Congress could not restrict slavery in the
territories, how could its creature, a territorial legislature do so?
And yet the Douglas men attempted to take away the power from Congress
and to retain it for the territorial legislatures. Senato