-Jacob Thompson, John A. Quitman,
Henry S. Foote, Robert J. Walker, Sergeant S. Prentiss, and Jefferson
Davis. Not one of them was born in the State. Thompson was born in
North Carolina; Quitman in New York; Foote in Virginia; Walker in
Pennsylvania; Prentiss in Maine; Davis in Kentucky. In 1861 the State
was but forty-four years old, younger than its most illustrious sons--if
the paradox may be permitted. How could they think of it as an entity
existing in itself, antedating not only themselves but their traditions,
circumscribing them with its all-embracing, indisputable reality? These
men spoke the language of state rights. It is true that in politics,
combating the North, they used the political philosophy taught them by
South Carolina. But it was a mental weapon in political debate; it was
not for them an emotional fact.

And yet these men of the Southwest had an ideal of their own as vivid
and as binding as the state ideal of the men of the eastern coast.
Though half their leaders were born in the North, the people themselves
were overwhelmingly Southern. From all the older States, all round the
huge crescent which swung around from Kentucky coastwise to Florida,
immigration in the twenties and thirties had poured into Mississippi.
Consequently the new community presented a composite picture of the
whole South, and like all composite pictures it emphasized only the
factors common to all its parts. What all the South had in common, what
made a man a Southerner in the general sense--in distinction from a
Northerner on the one hand, or a Virginian, Carolinian, Georgian, on
the other--could have been observed with clearness in Mississippi, just
before the war, as nowhere else. Therefore, the fulfillment of the ideal
of Southern life in general terms was 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,