The great distinction won most deservedly by Davis, as the colonel of a raw regiment in these important engagements, is, so far as I know, without any parallel. It was but natural that he should always afterwards believe himself to be a great military genius. Of course he had become famous throughout the whole country. There was a vacancy in one of the United States senatorships from Mississippi, and Davis was appointed to fill it. I need not go into much detail at this point. He was warmly greeted at his entrance into the upper house. He maintained himself with growing ability. While he was independent and self-reliant enough now and then to differ with Calhoun, in the main he followed the latter as his leader. There was a dignity and poise in his nature that suited the senate better than the house of representatives. And he was doubtless frank when he asserted later that he preferred the senate to any other place. As I contemplate his record at this part of his life he impresses me as that one of all the more prominent southern public men who was most fixed in the opinion that the very surest preservative of the union was for the south to be always unflinching and utterly uncompromising in demanding exact enforcement of every constitutional protection of slavery. He loved the union most fondly. It was only the south that he loved more. Conscientious doctrinaire as he was, he believed that the rights of the south were so plain and palpable that if they were but stated they would be conceded by the great mass of the northern people. He thought it was to encourage disunion to surrender even a jot of our claim to equality in the Territories and that the fugitive slave law should be fully enforced. His anticipation was that the more we yielded to the anti-slavery men the more we would be asked to yield, until at last we would be driven into the ditch, when we could save the south only by secession. So he counselled with all his might that the south should resolve to surrender nothing whatever--to go out of the union rather than so to do. Let the north understand this and the abolition party will disappear. That is the only way to save the union. This explains why he refused to support the compromise measures of 1850. He was beaten for governor of Mississippi on that issue. He was classed with the fire-eaters. But that was utterly untrue. Remember that in 1860 he actually contemplated being the democratic presidential candidate, and that Massachusetts sent a delegation to the Charleston convention instructed for him.