Alexander Stephens
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| Alexander Hamilton Stephens | |
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Provisional Vice President/
Vice President of the Confederate States |
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| In office February 11, 1861 – May 11, 1865 |
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| President | Jefferson Davis |
| Preceded by | Office instituted |
| Succeeded by | Office abolished |
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| Born | February 11, 1812 Taliaferro County, Georgia |
| Died | March 4, 1883 (aged 71) Atlanta, Georgia |
| Nationality | American |
| Political party | Whig, Democratic |
| Profession | Lawyer |
- This is an article about the Confederate Vice President. For the shipbuilding company, see Alexander Stephen and Sons
Alexander Hamilton Stephens (February 11, 1812 – March 4, 1883) was Vice President of the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War. He also served as a congressman from Georgia (both before the Civil War and after Reconstruction) and as Governor of Georgia from 1882 until his death in 1883.
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[edit] Early life and career
Stephens was born on a farm near Crawfordville, Taliaferro County, Georgia to Andrew B. and Margaret Grier Stephens. He grew up poor and acquired his education through the generosity of several benefactors, one of whom was the Presbyterian minister Alexander Hamilton Webster. Out of deep respect for his mentor, Stephens adopted Webster's middle name, Hamilton, as his own. (He was not named after Alexander Hamilton as most assume.) Stephens attended the Franklin College (later the University of Georgia) in Athens, where he was roommates with Crawford W. Long and a member of the Phi Kappa Literary Society. He graduated at the top of his class in 1832.
After an unhappy couple of years teaching school, he pursued legal studies, passed the bar in 1834, and began a successful career as a lawyer in Crawfordville. During his 32 years of practice, he gained (among other things) a reputation for being a capable defender of the wrongfully accused. Of all his defendants charged with capital crimes, not one of them was executed. One notable case was the trial of a black slave woman who was accused of attempted murder. Despite the circumstantial evidence presented against her, Stephens volunteered to defend her in court and successfully persuaded the jury to acquit the woman, thus saving her life.
Stephens suffered from illness and disease throughout his life; he weighed only 96 pounds. But he was a skillful lawyer and wonderful orator. While his voice was described as shrill and unpleasant, at the beginning of the Civil War, a northern newspaper described him as "the Strongest Man in the South" because of his intelligence, judgment, and eloquence. His generosity was legendary. His house, even when he was governor of Georgia, was always open to travelers or tramps. He personally financed the education of over a hundred students, black and white, male and female. So prodigious was his charity, that he died virtually penniless.
As his wealth increased, Stephens began acquiring land and slaves. By the time of the American Civil War, Stephens owned 34 slaves and several thousand acres. In 1836, Stephens began what became a lifelong career in public service when he was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives. He served there until moving on to the Georgia State Senate in 1842.
[edit] Congressional career
In 1842, Stephens was elected as a Whig to the United States House of Representatives to fill the vacancy caused by the resignation of Mark A. Cooper. He was re-elected to the 29th through 31st Congresses, as a Unionist to the 32nd Congress, as a Whig to the 33rd Congress, and as a Democrat to the 34th and 35th Congresses, serving October 2, 1843 to March 3, 1859.
As a national lawmaker during the crucial two decades before the American Civil War, Stephens was involved in all the major sectional battles. He began as a moderate defender of slavery, but later accepted all of the prevailing Southern rationales used to defend the institution.
Stephens quickly rose to prominence as one of the leading Southern Whigs in the House. He supported the annexation of Texas in 1845. Along with his fellow Whigs, he vehemently opposed the Mexican-American War. He was an equally vigorous opponent of the Wilmot Proviso, which would have barred the extension of slavery into territories acquired by the United States during the war with Mexico. Stephens along, with fellow Georgia congressman Robert Toombs worked diligently to secure the election of Zachary Taylor in 1848. Both were chagrined and angered when Taylor proved less than pliable on aspects of the Compromise of 1850. The death of Taylor removed the major barrier to passage of the compromise measures. Stephens and Toombs both supported the Compromise of 1850, and then returned to Georgia to secure support for the measures at home. Both men were instrumental in the drafting and approval of the Georgia Platform, which rallied unionists throughout the Deep South.
By this time, Stephens had departed the ranks of the Whig party—its northern wing proving inimical to what he regarded as non-negotiable Southern interests. Back in Georgia, Stephens, Toombs, and Democratic Congressman Howell Cobb formed the Constitutional Union Party. The party overwhelmingly carried the state in the ensuing election and, for the first time, Stephens returned to Congress no longer a Whig. Stephens spent the next few years as a Constitutional Unionist, essentially an independent. He vigorously opposed the dismantling of the Constitutional Union party when it began crumbling in 1851. Political realities soon forced the Union Democrats in the party to affiliate once more with the national party, and by mid-1852, the unnatural combination of Democrats and Whigs, which had formed a "party" behind the Compromise, had come undone.
The sectional issue surged to the forefront again in 1854, when Stephen A. Douglas's attempt to organize the Nebraska territory, all of which lay north of the Missouri Compromise line, spawned the Kansas-Nebraska bill. This legislation aroused fury in the North because it applied the popular sovereignty principle to the territory, thereby negating the Missouri Compromise. Had it not been for Stephens, the bill would have probably never passed in the House. He employed an obscure House rule to bring the bill to a vote. He later called this "the greatest glory of my life."
From this point on, Stephens voted with the Democrats. It would not be until after the congressional elections of 1855 that Stephens could be properly called a member of the Democratic party, although even then he never officially declared it. During those elections, Stephens broke irrevocably with thousands of his former Whig colleagues in Georgia and elsewhere who had flocked to the short-lived Know Nothing Party when the Whig Party disintegrated after the national election of 1852. Stephens fiercely opposed the Know Nothings both for their secrecy and their opposition to immigrants and Catholics.
Despite his late arrival to the Democratic Party, Stephens quickly rose, even serving as James Buchanan's floor manager in the House during the fruitless battle for the Lecompton Constitution for the Kansas Territory in 1857. He was instrumental in framing and passing the so-called English bill after it became clear that Lecompton would never pass.
Worn out and disgusted, Stephens did not run for renomination to Congress in 1858. As sectional peace eroded during the next two years, Stephens became increasingly critical of southern extremists. Although virtually the entire South had spurned Stephen A. Douglas as a traitor to Southern Rights (because he had opposed the Lecompton Constitution and broken with Buchanan), Stephens remained on good terms with the Illinois senator and served as one of his electors in the election of 1860.
[edit] Vice President
In 1861, Stephens served as a delegate to the Georgia convention that voted to secede from the United States. During the state convention, as well as during the 1860 presidential campaign, Stephens called for the South to remain loyal to the Union, likening it to a leaking but fixable boat. During the convention he reminded his fellow delegates that Republicans were a minority in Congress (especially in the Senate) and, even with a Republican president, would be forced to compromise just as the two sections had for decades. And, because the Supreme Court had voted 7–2 in the Dred Scott case, it would take decades of Senate-approved appointments to reverse it. He voted against secession in the Georgia convention but asserted the right to secede if the federal government continued allowing northern states to effectively nullify the Constitutionally empowered Fugitive Slave Law with so-called "personal liberty laws" that made recapture go through trial. He was elected to the Confederate Congress, and was chosen by the Congress as vice president of the provisional government. He was then elected vice president of the Confederacy. He took the oath of office on February 11, 1861, and served until his arrest on May 11, 1865. Vice President Stephens officially served in office eight days longer than President Jefferson Davis; he took his oath seven days prior to Davis's inauguration and was captured the day after Davis.
On the brink of the Civil War, on March 21, 1861, Stephens gave his famous Cornerstone Speech in Savannah, Georgia. In it he reaffirmed that "African Slavery … was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution." He went on to assert that the then-prevailing "assumption of the equality of races" was "fundamentally wrong." "Our new [Confederate] government is founded … upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition," and, furthermore, "With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system."
In 1862, Stephens first publicly expressed his opposition to the Davis administration.[1] Throughout the war he denounced many of the president's policies, including conscription, suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, impressment, various financial and taxation policies, as well as Davis's military strategy.
In mid-1863, Davis dispatched the vice president on a fruitless mission to Washington to discuss prisoner exchanges, but in the immediate aftermath of the Federal victory of Gettysburg, the Lincoln government refused to receive him. As the war continued, and the fortunes of the Confederacy sank lower, Stephens became more outspoken in his opposition to the administration. On March 16, 1864, Stephens delivered a speech to the Georgia legislature that was widely reported both North and South. In it, he excoriated the administration for its support of conscription and suspension of the writ and, further, he supported a block of resolutions aimed at securing peace. From then until the end of the war, as he continued to press for actions aimed at bringing about peace, his relations with President Davis, never warm to begin with, turned completely sour.
On February 3, 1865, serving as one of three commissioners representing the Confederacy, he met with President Abraham Lincoln on the steamer River Queen at the Hampton Roads Conference, a forlorn effort to discuss measures to bring an end to the fighting.
[edit] Postbellum career
Stephens was arrested at his home in Crawfordville, Georgia, on May 11, 1865 and was imprisoned in Fort Warren, Boston Harbor, for five months until October 1865. In 1866 he was elected to the United States Senate by the first legislature convened under the new Georgia State constitution, but did not present his credentials, as the State had not been readmitted to the Union. He was elected as a Democrat to the 43rd Congress to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Ambrose R. Wright, and was re-elected to the 44th and to the three succeeding Congresses, serving from December 1, 1873 until his resignation on November 4, 1882, at which time he was elected governor of Georgia. His tenure as governor proved brief; Stephens died on March 4, 1883, mere weeks after taking office. According to a former slave, a gate fell on Stephens "and he was crippled and lamed up from dat time on 'til he died." [1]
He was interred in Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta, then re-interred on his estate, Liberty Hall, near Crawfordville, Georgia.
He published A Constitutional View of the War between the States (two volumes, 1868-70), the ablest defense of the South's position on state sovereignty and secession.
He is pictured on the CSA $20.00 banknote (3rd, 5th, 6th, and 7th issues).
Toccoa, Georgia serves as seat of a county in north Georgia that bears his name, as does a state park just outside of Crawfordville, Georgia.
Georgians frequently refer to Stephens as "Little Aleck," as did his contemporaries.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Schott, Thomas E. (1988). Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia, 357 ff..
- Thomas E. Schott, Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia: A Biography (1988)
- Rudolph R. von Abele, Alexander H. Stephens: A Biography (1946)
- William C. Davis, The Union that Shaped the Confederacy: Robert Toombs & Alexander H. Stephens (2002)
- Richard Malcolm Johnston & William Hand Browne, Life of Alexander H. Stephens (1883). Originally published in 1878.
- Henry Cleveland, Alexander H. Stephens in Public and Private, with Letters and Speeches (1866)
- W.P.Trent, Southern Statesmen of the Old Régime (1897)
- Jon L. Wakelyn, Biographical Dictionary of the Confederacy
- Wilson, Edmund. Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962) ch 11, on his book
- Biographical article from Harper's Weekly, February 23, 1861.
[edit] External links
- Alexander Stephens at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
- Timeline and biography of Alexander Stephens
- The Life and Work of Alexander Stephens
- "Cornerstone" Speech
- What I Really Said in the Cornerstone Speech Stephens clarifies his statements
- Another explanation
- A. H. Stephens State Historic Park
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