The treatment of slaves in the old Southwest ranged from brutality to condescending paternalism to the anomaly of the paternalistic utopian experiment of Jefferson Davis’s brother, Joseph Davis’s, at Davis Bend, Mississippi, which will be described later. Jefferson Davis himself, the future president of the Confederacy, was a cotton planter who owned 113 slaves. His views on cotton and slavery-likes those of so many Americans- were based on business decisions, he held aggressive pro-slavery and land expansionist opinions, he viewed black people as inferior, except in individual cases. Davis did not agonize over the institution of slavery or the slave trade. He declared without sentiment, “If we had considered the purpose of humanity alone, we should have continued the slave-trade indefinitely.” He saw nothing wrong with the presence of slave pens, the holding areas for slaves before auctions, in the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C. just before he became president of the Confederacy, Davis reiterated his sanction of the international slave trade and expressed no “coincidence of opinion with those who prate of the inhumanity and sinfulness of the trade. The interest of Mississippi, not of the African, dictates my conclusion. ”