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.
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