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There's more starting here. It goes on for pages and pages with some interruptions by other senators. Davis speaks out against the idea of "natural rights," which is a little surprising since much of the speech is about the unfairness of the North towards the South and the need for equality between free and slave states.

Davis also attacks a book - probably one discussed here - for pointing out how much the South imports from the North. He misses the point that books like that were written to counter the idea that all the wealth in the country came from cotton. Davis sees "vain boasting" and "deep-rooted hate" in Northern insistence that cotton wasn't really king and that the South depended on the North as much as the North depended on the South.

It's a little confusing with the slave trade. Davis doesn't come out and say that the transatlantic slave trade should be made legal, but there's enough in the speech to appeal those who think that the debate ought to be reopened and enough that a Northern listener might become uneasy. I don't think he favors reopening the slave trade or even the debate over it, but it did benefit him to be seen as a moderate, as opposed to those who advocated a repeal of the ban.

Towards the end of his speech Davis attacks Britain for encouraging abolitionist sentiment that threatens to divide the country. He says the South is immune to British influence, but he's pretty clearly only looking at abolitionism, since other British influences on the country that tend towards disunity are ignored. Davis would go on to divide the country and seek British recognition and aid, so his analysis here looks comical

Davis also says that while we are patrolling the seas and sending slave ships back to Africa, the British are enslaving the returnees with apprenticeships and other schemes similar to slavery. And he attacks the British for "kidnapping" Chinese coolies for work in their colonies, on the theory that the Chinese are "a race of men sufficiently high on the scale of creation to value family ties and to feel the sentiment of home," whereas the Africans are "a race of men that was never free" and presumably was never sufficiently high on the scale of creation.

What I get from the speech is that politicians speak to the issues of the day. They might claim to be highly moral, but if the situation changes, so do their speeches. Davis attacked the British for claiming only to want to abolish the slave trade and going on to abolish the whole institution in their colonies, but he doesn't see that his own views and strategies also change over time, or that a change in policy can reflect the closer application of a principle, rather than its abandonment.

It might have been a good thing if more of the Southern Whigs had joined the Democrats. They could have been a moderating influence and maybe kept the party together. They could have appealed to Northern Whigs and, if they didn't win the election, they could have made the losers's response less extreme. But it wasn't going to happen. The country was already too divided.

x: "It's a little confusing with the slave trade.
Davis doesn't come out and say that the transatlantic slave trade should be made legal, but there's enough in the speech to appeal those who think that the debate ought to be reopened and enough that a Northern listener might become uneasy.
I don't think he favors reopening the slave trade or even the debate over it, but it did benefit him to be seen as a moderate, as opposed to those who advocated a repeal of the ban."

Thanks for expanding our understandings of Senator Jefferson Davis' opinions in May of 1860.

I agree that the issue of transatlantic slave importations is not as simple as anyone might suppose, and we can begin with asking: why did Thomas Jefferson oppose transatlantic importations?
Answers include not just the moral question, but also economic self-interests of Virginia slaveholders.
Virginians developed a hugely profitable business raising and then "exporting" slaves to deeper South states.
But transatlantic importations would provide slave-buyers with an alternate source and thus threaten slave prices.
And since slaves were, if not in Jefferson's time then certainly by 1860, the single largest asset in the United States, any threat to slave values threatened also the economic underpinnings on which Americans depended.

So, for Senator Davis to outright demand an end to outlawing transatlantic importations would make him very unpopular in slave-surplus states like Virginia.
But it would make him very popular in slave-importing states like Mississippi.
Indeed, in November 1858 the Wanderer landed on Jekyll Island, Georgia with 409 slaves from the Congo.
It's owners were prosecuted, but not convicted, and of course the imported slaves remained slaves.

And even as we speak (so to speak) in May of 1860, another slave-ship, Clotilda, has landed in Mississippi near Mobile, Alabama, with a load of 110 slaves.
They had cost the ship-owner about $9,000 total in Dahomey (today Benin), Africa and were worth over $100,000 in US slave markets.
To avoid prosecution, the owners will burn the Clotilda and so keep it hidden until recently discovered, that discovery first reported in May 2019!

It would not take a rocket scientist to figure out the profits from buying slaves in Africa for $100 each then selling them in, say, New Orleans for $1,000 each.
Of course slave-exporters in states like Virginia would not like it, but then that is why master politicians like Senator Davis made the big bucks to support one side without alienating the other.
Possibly even, a brilliant mind like Davis' could figure out that very high slave prices were emptying non-cotton Border States of their slaves and thus weakening their "peculiar institution" in precisely the states the cotton-South needed as stalwart allies.

Wanderer and Clotilda: