That's what I would guess.
It was surprising that he said those things about Jefferson Davis and Davis allowing some slaves to be educated.
I am pretty sure that isn't true. There has yet to be a source (a reliable one) on this claim.
"This view of slavery under the Davis brothers originated with Varina in her Memoirs, published in 1890, and in her subsequent correspondence and in letters written by Joseph's granddaughter almost two decades later. ... no other contemporary documents verify this plantation Eden. That such a fascinating system of slave management run by two such prominent individuals in such an accessible location completely escaped notice is puzzling." - William Cooper, Jefferson Davis, American
He did allow enslaved families to stay together (allegedly) and other "plantation privileges:"
https://www.jstor.org/stable/27530928?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
This is Davis:
Davis had no ambiguities about slaves, their inferiority and that they should remain in bondage. As he so “eloquently” noted on the floor of the US Congress “this government was not founded by Negroes nor for Negroes but by white men for white men”. Davis had no intention of ever ending slavery as he believed that the “inequality of the white and black races was stamped from the beginning”.
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In the meantime, under the mild and genial climate of the Southern States and the increasing care and attention for the well-being and comfort of the laboring class, dictated alike by interest and humanity, the African slaves had augmented in number from about 600,000, at the date of the adoption of the constitutional compact, to upward of 4,000,000. In moral and social condition they had been elevated from brutal savages into docile, intelligent, and civilized agricultural laborers, and supplied not only with bodily comforts but with careful religious instruction.
Under the supervision of a superior race their labor had been so directed as not only to allow a gradual and marked amelioration of their own condition, but to convert hundreds of thousands of square miles of the wilderness into cultivated lands covered with a prosperous people; towns and cities had sprung into existence, and had rapidly increased in wealth and population under the social system of the South; the white population of the Southern slave-holding States had augmented from about 1,250,000 at the date of the adoption of the Constitution to more than 8,500,000 in 1860; and the productions of the South in cotton, rice, sugar, and tobacco, for the full development and continuance of which the labor of African slaves was and is indispensable, had swollen to an amount which formed nearly three-fourths of the exports of the whole United States and had become absolutely necessary to the wants of civilized man.
- Address to the Confederate Congress, 29 April 1861
