He participated in the Black Hawk war, and when that redoubtable chief surrendered, the duty of escorting him and his braves to Fort Jefferson, near St. Louis, was assigned to Lieutenant Davis.

In recognition of his efficient services he was selected for promotion, and was appointed adjutant of the First Regiment of the United States dragoons at its organization.

He was immediately ordered with his regiment to what was then the extreme frontier, at Fort Gibson, Iowa Territory, and was constantly engaged in reconnoissances and expeditions against the hostile Indians of the wilderness beyond, in which he rendered conspicuous and daring services, characterized always by devotion to duty and by an enterprising eagerness to seek employment on every difficult or dangerous service.

While still in the regiment of infantry, then commanded by Colonel Zachary Taylor, he had met and fallen in love with his colonel's daughter, and had proposed to and been accepted by her.

In 1835 he resigned from the army and married Miss Taylor. He then determined to devote himself to the occupation of a planter, and, accepting the invitation of his eldest brother, Joseph E. Davis, he, with his bride, removed to his brother's plantation in Warren county, Mississippi, and employed himself in the opening and establishment of the Brierfield plantation, adjoining that of his brother.

Very soon after his arrival both he and his wife were attacked with malarial fever, and within a few months after his marriage his young bride succumbed to it, and he was left to struggle with his own desperate illness. Although his life long trembled in the balance, he recovered, and after recruiting his shattered health by a winter in Havana, followed by a visit to Washington, he returned to his brother's plantation, and applied himself anew to the development and cultivation of Brierfield.

His plantation life during the next seven years was one of the most interesting and fruitful episodes of his career.

His brother, Joseph E. Davis, twenty years his senior, was a very remarkable man. Educated as a lawyer and long engaged in successful practice, he had abandoned his profession, and for many years had lived in seclusion on his plantation. He had accumulated a large and well selected library, and was an omnivorous reader and • student. He had an alert and active intellect, greedy of knowledge, acutely observant of current events, deeply interested in all the living questions of the time, with pronounced convictions and a prone

ness for polemical discussion, in which his keen logic and rare faculty of expression made him a master. I have heard those who knew them both, and were ardent admirers of the younger and more distinguished brother, express doubt as to whether the elder was not even his superior in intellectual powers.

Jefferson Davis was a man of similar tastes and temperament. He had always been a student. Those who knew him during his army life attest that he always evinced a contemptuous aversion to the common dissipations and frivolities of the camp, and that whenever not engaged in active duty he devoted himself to diligent and instructive reading.

These two congenial spirits thus thrown together in their rustic seclusion, employed the large leisure which the planter's life of that day afforded, in eager and systematic intellectual culture and training. They read everything and they discussed everything. Their constant exchange of ideas and impressions on every variety of subjects, enlarged and precised their knowledge, and the frequent clashes of their minds in keen debate fixed the clearness and certainty of their convictions, and developed the power of enforcing them by logical exposition and copious argument and illustration.

From this veritable gymnasium, Jefferson Davis emerged at the end of seven years, a trained intellectual athlete, with all the muscles of his mind perfectly developed and thoroughly fit for any service which might be thrown upon them.

No one who knew Mr. Davis in after years could fail to be impressed with the extraordinary range, accuracy, and variety of his knowledge on all kinds of subjects, or to wonder how, in so active a life, he had found time to gain it.

All equally wondered at the marvelous aptness and power as an orator and debater, displayed from the very opening of his public career by a man whose previous life had been passed in active military service on the frontier, and afterwards in the seclusion of rural life.

These marvels are no doubt accounted for in part by his great natural gifts, but also in large degree by the results of these fruitful years which he passed in study, discussion and debate with his gifted brother.

Amongst the subjects which engaged their special attention were political economy, political history and philosophy, and especially • the Constitution of the United States, its history, its construction and the true theory and nature of the government established

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thereby. Although not a professional lawyer, I make bold to say that Jefferson Davis became one of the greatest constitutional lawyers that this country has ever produced.

He then became a thorough convert to what was known as the State's rights school of politics, based upon the doctrine that the Constitution of the United States was a purely federal compact, enered into between sovereign and independent States, which did not, by entering into such a compact, forfeit or yield up their sovereignty, but had merely agreed to delegate certain powers to the federal government instituted thereby, as a common agent, without limitation as to time and subject to recall and reassumption by any one of the sovereign principals that conferred them whenever in its judgment they had been abused or perverted to its injury.

Mr. Davis was a constant advocate of this doctrine from the beginning of his public career down to the last moment of his life. He announced it with equal frankness when Massachusetts proclaimed her right to secede from the Union because of the admission of Texas as a State, as when his own State of Mississippi actually seoeded.

The doctrine, perhaps, sounds strangely to-day in the ears of a generation which has been reared since the war under a constitution interpreted by the fiery edict of battle to import forever an indissoluble union, and under a defiant national government which brooks no denial of its sovereignty. I am not here to arraign or question the finality of the dread arbitrament of war. I am not here to deny that the right of secession has been practically eviscerated from the constitution by the bloody Caesarian operation of battle. I am not here even to deny that it may be better for us all and better for the world that such a settlement has been made. I yield to none in patriotic devotion to the Union as it stands to-day. I proclaim my readiness to cast in my lot and that of my posterity under the protection of the "Indissoluble union of indestructible States" which has been established by the war, but speaking from the ante-bellum standpoint, viewing it as a purely historical question, in vindication of the cause for which our brothers and our fathers fought, I am bound to declare my unalterable conviction that the theory of the constitution, adopted and advocated by Jefferson Davis, and acted on by the Southern States when they seceded, was the true theory of that instrument as it was designed and came from the hands of its framers, and was the only theory upon which it could have ever secured the consent of the States.

The constitution had its origin in the exercise of the right of secession from the former's federal compact, which existed between the States, although the articles of confederation expressly declared that the union established thereby was to be a "perpetual union." Nobody had the temerity to propose such a provision in the new constitution, nor does it contain a word which hints at the surrender of this then acknowledged and asserted right of secession from the former federal compact. A proposition to invest the federal government with power to coerce a recalcitrant State was made in the convention, but was overwhelmingly defeated, and this denial of power to compel a State to remain in the union was surely, for all practical purposes, an acknowledgment of its right to secede. Moreover, the conventions of several of the States, in their acts of ratification of the constitution, expressly reserved the right of the people of the State to reassume the powers delegated whenever they shall be perverted to their injury or such reassumption "should become necessary to their happiness.

Numerous attempts were made in the convention to impress on the government instituted by the constitution the character of nationality, but everyone was overwhelmingly defeated, and the most solicitous care was taken at every point and in every step to preserve its character as a purely federal compact between sovereign and and independent States which retained their inherent sovereignty, and all the powers pertaining thereto, except the carefully limited functions which were expressly delegated to the federal government as a common agent.

But I must not allow myself to be drawn into further discussion of this great question. Fortunately, Jefferson Davis, aided by the exhaustive researches of Albert Taylor Bledsoe and of our distinguished and venerable fellow-citizen, B. J. Sage, has formulated the whole argument in his "Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government.' I have recently re-read that matchless argument. It is comprised in the fifteen chapters of part II of that work, and embraces only 112 pages.

Speaking with all due temperance and strictly as a legal critic, I pronounce it one of the most powerful and masterly legal and constitutional arguments of which I have any knowledge in the English language. In logical arrangement, in lucidity of expression, in closeness of reasoning, in the amplitude and precision with which it marshals the facts and evidence, in the candor and force with which it states and refutes the assumptions and arguments of his opponents,