Every Civil War historian has written that, bad as Abraham Lincoln had it, it was nothing compared to Jefferson Davis' travails. 

The Confederacy was a very conservative society and it is important that we understand and never forget what it was trying to conserve: It was an aristocracy.(1) "All men are created equal" does not appear in the founding documents of the Confederacy; it had no use for democracy(2) or majority rule, its constitution did not provide for a popular vote of its president. The states of the Confederacy wanted to be left alone in their simple planters economies, they wanted no central authority in politics or economics, Davis was constantly regaled by state governors who bristled at the centrality needed to fight a war; they had no need for banks, why do we need banks? (3) Capitalism? What's that involve? Nuh-uh, not down heah, suh--no need for economies of scale, they had their slaves to work the cotton fields. They had no interest in say, industrializing, as the rest of the western world was with alacrity.

[A periodical] editor noted that if there was a new factory on every stream and in every valley the South would become a different sort of place. It would be overrun with factory workers..."No wonder," he mused, "that those who cling with love...to the old framework of our society, shudder at the thought of a Lowell on the Appomattox or a Manchester in the Piedmont region." Catton, Terrible Swift Sword, "The Pressures of War, 403.

Neither did the South want much use for education for its white people and especially of course for its black slaves, and as a consequence of all its white people were lazy, they were not used to work and from what they saw of it they didn't want to do it. Confederate soldiers bristled at an order from their general to dig ditches, it was beneath their dignity as Southern white men. (4) Time (5) and again in Catton's history I have read of Southern laziness; the Confederate leadership complained of the lack of a Southern work ethic.(6) You can read of it in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn too: of young men with nothing to do and too much time to do it in loitering on street corners smoking or chewing tobacco. Even today we know how that song ends--in trouble and violence. 

This was Southern conservatism at the time. Much as it is today.

 

1. "If the Southern volunteer," said [vice president] Stephens, oddly, "should ever come to forget that he is a gentleman then it will merely be a struggle between matter and matter, and the biggest and heaviest body will break the other." Ibid, The Time for Compulsion, "The Military Paradox," 182; "We have allowed our chivalry to cool most wonderfully, while we have been pluming ourselves on being 'the superior race'...An Arkansas newspaper editor. Ibid "Time for Compulsion," 179; "...an aristocratic society must, in the very nature of things, be able to govern itself better than a democracy." Catton, The Coming Fury, (Volume I) Two Presidents, "The Man and the Hour, 208.
2. e.g. "The famous 'We the people' opening sentence [of the U.S. Constitution] was modified [in the C.S. Constitution] so as to suppress the faint, haunting echo of Democracy's trumpets; it was made clear that the people were acting through sovereign and independent states rather than just the people." The Coming Fury, 207; "Undiluted democracy, indeed, was one of the things from which the cotton belt was seceding." The Coming Fury, 208; Robert E. Lee letter to wife, Jan. 23, 1861, "It has been evident for years that the country was doomed to run the full length of democracy. To what a fearful pass it has brought us." Catton, The Coming Fury, The Long Farewell, "Everything, Even Life Itself", 203.
3. When the Secretary of the Treasury, Christopher Memminger, assumed office there was not one sheet of bank-note paper in the entire Confederacy to print money on. "The Pressures of War," 401.
4. "Railroad to the Pamunkey," 315.
5. "[we have been] wondering 'if such a people could ever be conquered.'...They may be. Not by force of arms but from decay of chivalry and innate love of ease." "Time for Compulsion", 179. (original italics)
6. "General Bragg was gloomily saying that...most of the rank and file had never done a day's work in their lives..." "The Vulture and the Wolf, 217.