Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography
See below for biographies of Confederate political leaders from Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography.


DAVIS, JEFFERSON (June 3, 1808-December 6, 1889), president of the Confederate States of America, was born in Christian (now Todd) County, Kentucky, the tenth child of Samuel and Jane (Cook) Davis, who had moved westward from Georgia. Samuel Davis commanded a troop of irregular horse in the Revolutionary War. His father, Evan Davis, was a Welsh emigrant who had entered America through Philadelphia and had followed the drift of emigration southward into the new lands of Georgia. In Kentucky, the Davis family do not appear to have thriven. When Jefferson was a mere child they wandered on to Mississippi, where they found their anchorage on a small plantation near Woodville, Wilkinson County. Though Samuel Davis does not appear to have clone much by way of lifting his middle-class family in the social scale, that result was achieved by his eldest son, Joseph Emory Davis, who rapidly acquired a fortune, an education, and a prominent position in the new community of the Southwest. While Samuel Davis lapses into the background of the picture, Joseph becomes the real head of the family and the patron of his younger brother, many years his junior. Eventually Joseph Davis was considered one of the wealthiest men in the South. Jefferson Davis was an extremely sensitive, a highly imaginative child and boy. At the age of seven he rode northward, nearly a thousand miles, to become a pupil of the Roman Catholic Seminary, St. Thomas's College, in Washington County, Kentucky. That induced his Baptist parents to place him there is not known. They very nearly had a reward that doubtless would have appalled them. The impressionable lad became so fond of the priests who were his teachers that he wished for a time to adopt their religion (Davis, Memoir, post, I, 13-14). The incident in its fullness has a reminder of Henry Esmond and Father Holt. Indeed, one may find a sort of clue to Davis, to his strength and his weakness, his loftiness, ·his sensibility, his egoism and his illusions, in Thackeray's famous character. Nothing came of the juvenile Roman enthusiasm, and at nine he was back in Mississippi. After several years in local schools he was entered at Transylvania University, in 1821. Very little is known of his college life. The early records of Transylvania have been destroyed and the traditions are few. Davis himself has said, " There I completed my studies in Greek and Latin, and learned a little of algebra, geometry, trigonometry, surveying, profane and sacred history, and natural philosophy" (Memoir, I, 27). He did not finish the course at Transylvania. A Mississippi congressman nominated him to West Point. It is safe to attribute this to the growing influence, social and political, of his brother Joseph. On September 1, 1824, Jefferson Davis matriculated at West Point. In 1828 he was graduated and became a second lieutenant in the United States army. Among the other distinguished Southerners who were cadets when he was, and who were destined to have fateful relations with him in after time, were both the Johnstons and Robert E. Lee. Of the youth of Davis anecdote has preserved a good deal and if most of it may be trusted, we may think of him as a very engaging young man, fearless, generous, modest, with personal charm, and in friendship rashly loyal.

His military apprenticeship of nearly seven years was spent in Wisconsin and in the unsettled portions of Illinois, in little, remote posts, garrisoned by mere handfuls of men, in as lonely regions as the world possessed. The Black Hawk Indian war in 1832 was like a brief interlude of relieving storm that blew across this dreary period. Nobody did anything distinguished in that war. But both Jefferson Davis, as a minor officer of the regular army, and Abraham Lincoln, as an inconspicuous officer of volunteers, took part in it. They did not meet. In 1833 Lieutenant Davis was stationed much of the time at Fort Crawford, Wis., where the commandant was Colonel Zachary Taylor. He had a daughter, Sarah Knox. The young people fell in love. Colonel Taylor disapproved. But they would have their way. Davis resigned June 30, 1835; Miss Taylor sought a friendly aunt in Kentucky; Davis followed; they were speedily married and set out for Mississippi.

During the next ten years, 1835-45, from the age of twenty-seven to the age of thirty-seven, he was a planter, absorbing the mental atmosphere of the distinctive new state, which had been peopled by emigrants from so many regions and where his family was now entering the upper rank. The outward story of these years was lacking in drama except for one event. His early romance closed suddenly, tragically within three months of his marriage. Mrs. Davis died of malarial fever September 1?,'1835. Except for a little travel in Cuba while convalescing from the same malady that had killed his wife, followed by a brief visit to New York and Washington, where he made a short sojourn among important politicians at a senatorial boarding-house, the remainder of the ten years was spent quietly on his plantation or at near-by cities. The period closed with two events which took place close together, his election to the national House of Representatives and his second marriage. Varina Howell, who on February 26, 1845, became the second Mrs. Davis [q.v.] was a local beauty, a member of the upmost social rank, a high-spirited and accomplished woman. - This marriage identified him conclusively with the local aristocracy.

It was during these long quiet years as a country gentleman that Davis's mind was formed politically. His father who had died several years before had bequeathed him a little money. His brother Joseph added to it. Not far from Joseph's plantation, "Hurricane," the plantation "Brierfield" became the seat of the younger brother. It was rough new land overlooking the Mississippi. Much of it was "cleared" for the first time by its new owner. He was a hard worker, taking the most intense interest in his estate, and often sharing field work with his slaves. Nevertheless, he now became an extensive, even omnivorous, rea der especially in the fields of politics and history. Joseph was also a natural student. He had been bred to the law and never lost his delight in close argument. Frequently the brothers would spend the night at the same plantation and there would be long evenings of discussion of books and politics. Hitherto the younger Davis had lived since childhood away from home; he had been a student or a soldier in distant lands; he had . lacked the sense of soil. This he now acquired. He was permeated by that peculiar atmosphere which belonged to the Mississippi environment. Like those others whom it had drawn to itself from such great distances he became devoted to its social system.

The quietude of life at Brierfield in the late thirties was a sharp contrast with the stormy life of the nation at large. The Abolitionists had begun their crusade. The country rang with their denunciation of the Southern social system. As was often pointed out, they made no distinction between slavery and slaveholders, cursing both in the same breath. The relation of Davis to his slaves was peculiarly gentle and patriarchal. He resented bitterly the Abolitionist attack, and, like practically all the members of the planter class, met it with state-rights arguments. These were destined to be turned against him when he was chief executive of the Confederacy. It is more than likely that a temperamental influence throughout these quiet years was his deep-seated love of the army and of the military life. He had renounced it for sentimental reasons; he was destined to renounce it twice again for other reasons; but he never lost his zeal for it. Nor did he ever lose his faith in himself as a soldier. A rooted egoism was thus revealed. Though he never did anything of first importance in a military way he was capable, in the heat of the Civil War, of regarding himself as the equal of the greatest generals of the time. Another quality of his mind, his lack of humor, was brought out eventually by this invincible delusion. Mrs. Davis, with Olympian indiscretion, has preserved one of the most unfortunate of the slips in speech that have been made by men of genius. In the darkest hour of the Confederacy, Davis said to his wife, "If I could take one wing and Lee the other, I think we could between us wrest a victory from those people" (Memoir, II, 392).

This extraordinary self-confidence rested on nothing but a brief, creditable service in the year 1846, and on one very gallant action in the year 1847. He had gone to Congress as a Democrat in December 1845; the outbreak of the Mexican War was the cause of his resignation the following June. He accepted command of a volunteer regiment known as the "Mississippi Rifles," swiftly whipped it into shape, and joined General Taylor [q.v.] in time to participate in the attack upon Monterey. What had passed between himself and his former father-in-law since the death of his first wife is not known, but apparently they were again friends. Taylor appointed him one of the commissioners to negotiate the surrender of Monterey. The next year, in the strangely jumbled battle of Buena Vista, Davis won his reputation as a soldier. Very probably the stand made by the Mississippi Rifles at a crucial moment saved Taylor from defeat. The action was praised extravagantly, far and wide. There came a time when the effect of its applause upon Davis's mind formed the basis of sneers. Long afterward, a Confederate newspaper, bitter against Davis's military policy, alluded to the form in which he disposed his men at Buena Vista, and said  If the Confederacy perishes, it will have died of a V."

The course of the authorities at Washington caused Davis's second renunciation of the military life. Taylor was side-tracked in favor of Scott, and the Mississippi Rifles were left with the minor force that plainly was to have no more chances. The "Rifles" had enlisted for a short period. At its expiration in the summer of 1847 Davis withdrew from the army. Mississippi made him a national senator. He took his seat in December 1847. He was a conspicuous figure; in the popular eye, he was a " hero" of Buena Vista. But popular heroes are not always the heroes of the Senate. His first period as a senator, closing with his resignation in the autumn of 1851, lasted nearly three years, and while it gave him for the first time a national reputation politically, it ended without his having attained a commanding position in his party. In 1848 he steadily supported President Polk and opposed Calhoun, approving the great seizure of Mexican territory on which the President had set his heart. He went so far as to advocate the occupation of Yucatan by the United States, expressing the fear that otherwise it might be taken by Great Britain (Congressional Globe, 30 Congress, 1 Session, p. 729, May S, 1848). When it was proposed to organize the territory of Oregon without provision for slavery he "denied that there was any power in Congress or in the people of the Territory to interrupt the slave system" by forbidding a slaveholder to take his slaves thither (Ibid., 30 Congress, 1 Session, p. 927, July 12, 1848). In the debate over the admission of California he reiterated this position but was willing to compromise on the extension of the line of the Missouri Compromise to the Pacific (Ibid., 31 Congress, 1 Session, App., p. 286, March 8, 1850). He was one of ten senators who opposed to the last the admission of California and who signed a "Protest against the California Bill."

In his course with regard to California, Davis was opposed by his colleague from Mississippi, Senator Henry S. Foote [q.v.], a politician of great boldness. Though the legislature of Mississippi passed resolutions instructing their senators to resist the admission of California "by all honorable and constitutional means," Foote refused to be bound by them. It turned out that he had gauged the conditions at home with deep shrewdness. He was nominated for governor on a "Union" ticket, supported by Whigs and dissatisfied Democrats, and in September 1851, seemed about to carry the election. The political situation in the South in 1851 was extremely complex and Davis's relation to it is not altogether clear. The struggle against the admission of California and the failure to extend the Missouri Compromise line had produced a general movement for secession. A convention of the whole South which held two meetings at Nashville, one in June 1850, the other in November, had secession in view. The desire to secede was practically universal, but there were two policies on the subject. Extreme state rights men such as R. B. Rhett [q .v.] of South Carolina and W. L. Yancey [q.v. ] of Alabama wanted their states to rush ahead irrespective of what other states might do. The course followed by another group revealed a point of view that may be labeled Southern nationalism. Between the first and second meetings of the Nashville convention these others concluded that it was impossible to effect an immediate secession of the whole South. Thereupon they threw themselves into an attempt to arrest the secession movement, to postpone it until the whole South could be persuaded to leave the Union together. Rhett, who refused to accept this view, was eventually defeated in a popular campaign, on the issue of secession, by the South Carolina "cooperationists."

A third Southern party was for accepting the compromise measures of 1850 as the start of a satisfactory new chapter in the history of the Union. With this group Foote was associated. His opponent was General John A. Quitman [q.v.], who was in Mississippi pretty much what Rhett was in South Carolina. By September 1851 it was plain that the tide had turned. The genuine Unionists and the "cooperationists" between them were going to prevent an immediate movement for secession. The Democratic leaders in Mississippi appear to have concluded that the game was up. They looked around for a way out. Quitman was persuaded to resign; Davis was persuaded to leave the Senate and take his place. Though there is no positive evidence upon his motives a safe guess would fix upon two. He was instinctively a party man; all· his military predisposition, his esprit de corps, tended that way. The desire to save the party, to perform a strategic retreat with as much credit as possible,. must have influenced him. But it is fair to assume a deeper motive. In him, even more thoroughly than in the anti-Rhett men of South Carolina, the vision of the South as a nation was a real thing. We may conclude that Davis took the place of the secessionist Quitman with a view to relieving his party of its hasty commitment to immediate secession and for the purpose of aligning it, tacitly at least, with "cooperation." His strategic retreat was a success. A vote for a convention that was to decide the issue of secession or "submission" had given Foote a majority of 8,000, but when the vote was cast for governor, his majority was less than 1,000.

Davis resumed his life as a planter, only to reenter politics on March 7, 1853, when he became secretary of war in the cabinet of his friend Franklin Pierce. His tenure of the war office was perhaps the peak of his career; certainly no chapter of his life was more to his taste. His health, which both before and after was delicate, was during most of this period robust. The Davises were the center of a delightful coterie in Washington; Mrs. Davis, witty and charming, drew all sorts of people into her drawing-room. Despite political differences, men as unlike her husband as Seward were his close personal friends. The most brilliant portrait of him is contained in a passage from Carl Schurz : "I had in my imagination formed a high idea of what a grand personage the War Minister of this great Republic must be. I was not disappointed. He received me graciously. His slender, tall, and erect figure, his spare face, keen eyes, and fine forehead, not broad, but high and well-shaped, presented th e well-known strong American type. There was in his bearing a dignity which see med entirely natural and unaffected-that kind of dignity which does not invite familiar approach, but will not render one uneasy by lofty assumption. His courtesy was without any condescending air .... His conversation ran in easy ... well-chosen and sometimes even elegant phrase, and the timbre of his voice had something peculiarly agreeable .... I heard him deliver a speech in the Senate, and again I was struck by the dignity of his bearing, the grace of his diction, and the rare charm of his voice-things which greatly distinguished him from many of his colleagues" (The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz, II, 1907, p. 21).

Apparently, the idea of secession was allowed to lapse in Davis's mind during several years. But the idea of the South as a social and economic unit, a nation within the Union, was constant. His policies were governed by the steadfast hope of so enlarging the South territorially and of so developing it economically that it would prove the equal in political power of the opposite section. Consequently he was eager for expansion southward, and was frequently in opposition to the secretary of state, William L. Marcy [q.v.], whose eyes were on the Northern, not the Southern, wing of the party. In their general attitudes toward Spain and Mexico, Davis may be described as belligerent, Marcy as conciliatory. In the case of the ship Black Warrior seized by the Spanish authorities at Havana on a legal technicality, and in connection with the Ostend Manifesto issued by three American ambassadors as a statement of our Spanish policy Davis failed to control the foreign policy of the administration. With all the more zeal he turned to the advancement of Southern economic interests at home. Asia had become of first importance in the minds of most Americans who thought about trade. To obtain a window upon the Pacific was a great part of the inspiration of the Southern nationalists in 1850. Davis, still hoping for Southern expansion to the Pacific, took the liveliest interest in promoting a great scheme for a transcontinental railway that should be close to the Mexican border and terminate in that part of California which the Southerners in 1850 had attempted to obtain. To make such a railroad possible he induced Pierce and Marcy to acquire from Mexico the region now known as the Gadsden Purchase. To demonstrate the practicability of such a road he dispatched an expedition comprising engineers, artists, and scientists who prepared a monumental report on the Southwest which the government published in ten large volumes.

The close of his term as secretary of war (1857) was followed immediately by his reentry into the Senate. During the period in which he had been withdrawn from obvious participation in congressional politics one main chapter in American history had closed, and another had opened. He had had a part in the conclave of party leaders that met at the White House on Sunday, January 22, 1854, from which emerged the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. Just how much he contributed to this epoch-making bill must remain a matter of conjecture. Promptly after his return to the Senate he became again a conspicuous defender of the South. During the three years and more of his second period as senator his arguments are much the same as in the first period; but they are presented with more heat.  He defends slavery because it "bears to capital as kind a relation as can exist between them anywhere" and assures the South that the election of an Abolitionist as president "would be a species of 

omits all the dispatches in the Official Records, and is not complete in its selections from the Congress Globe. For the mind of Davis, previous to secession, the Globe, after all, is the true record.
His own apologia is The Rise and Fall of the Confed. Govt. (2 volumes, 1881).


J. P. Richardson, A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Confederacy (2 volumes, 1905), contains some of the state papers; others are embedded in Journal of the Congress of the Confed. States of America (7 volumes, 1904-05), being Sen. Doc. No. 234, 58 Congress, 2 Session, and in the Fourth Series of the Official Records.

Three newspapers may be regarded as government organs : the Richmond Enquirer, the Richmond Sentinel and the Charleston Courier. The official gazette of the government abroad was the Index published in London. As Davis was engaged in many controversies, all the writings of Confederate leaders contain Davis matter, but as a rule it is sharply partisan. Important recent studies are: A. B. Moore, Conscription and Confiict in the Confederacy ( 1924);

F. L. Owsley, State Rights in the Confederacy (1925) ;

R. F. Nichols, "United States vs. Jefferson Davis," American Historical Review, XXXI, 266-84 (January 1926).

A number of excellent essays on Davis have been written by Walter L. Fleming, but have not been collected.

For his military career, see G. W. Cullum, Biographical Register Officers and Grads. U. S. Military Academy (3rd ed., 1891), I, 416.]

N. W. S.


STEPHENS, ALEXANDER HAMILTON (February 11, 1812-March 4, 1883), congressman, Confederate vice-president, was born on his father's farm in that part of Wilkes County, Georgia, that later became Taliaferro County. Known by his constituents as "Little Ellick," he was of average stature, but in weight seldom if ever attained a hundred pounds. A shrill voice, a sallow complexion, recurrent illness, and occasional melancholia gave evidence of organic defects; but his mind was not often morbid, and his will was always robust. Alexander Stephens, an immigrant from England to Pennsylvania, said to have been a Jacobite who came after the failure of the rising in 1745, had married a ferryman's daughter on the Susquehanna before drifting to the Georgia Piedmont, where he lived and died as a farmer of small scale. His youngest son, Andrew Baskins Stephens, made his home nearby, supplementing the meager earnings of his farm by conducting a country school. Andrew's first wife, Margaret Grier, died after bearing a daughter and two sons, and her place was filled by Matilda Lindsey, who added five more to the tale of the Stephens children. The deaths of Andrew and Matilda in 1826 brought a dispersal of the brood into the homes of such relatives as could give them shelter. But Alexander, the youngest of the first group, managed in after years to set the feet of Linton [q.v.], youngest of all, upon the path to prominence as a jurist.

Before his father's death Alexander, despite his frail physique, was doing a plowman's work, with brief terms at school interspersed. The fate which sent him to an uncle's care was kind, for the schooling was better, and the youth's earnestness prompted a patron to send him to an academy in the Georgia village of Washington. Here his admiration for his teacher, the Reverend Alexander Hamilton Webster led the boy to adopt Hamilton as a middle name. Here also a Presbyterian educational society lent him funds for a course at the University of Georgia with a view to his preparation for the ministry should he so determine. After four happy years at Athens he graduated in 1832 at the head of his class, and having decided against a church career, cast about for a livelihood and the means to repay the charges of his education. A year and a half of rural teaching proved so full of rough episodes and so fatiguing that he read law, was admitted to the bar in 1834, and began practice at Crawfordville within a few miles of his birthplace.

The University of Georgia was in the time of Stephens' residence a place of lively debate among the students, with sentiment strong against protective tariffs and in favor of state rights. As a graduate Stephens was already primed to address his fellow-citizens on such themes; and this he did at Crawfordville on July 4, 1834, preceding his admission to the bar on July 22, Nullification he deprecated; but the right of a state to secede he upheld as a doctrine essential for keeping the central government within the bounds of constitutionality, moderation, and equity (Johnston and Browne, post, pp. 87-88). Within two years after that speech he was elected to the Georgia legislature; and, except for one term when he abstained from candidacy (1841), he was returned to one or the other of its houses until he went to Congress. His outstanding advocacy in this period was the project of the Western & Atlantic Railroad, to be built by the state as an avenue of commerce between Georgia and the grain region of the Northwest. The party with which Stephens had cast his lot embraced in the main the well-to-do folk whether on the seaboard or in the uplands. In its early phases a personal following successively of James Jackson,  William H. Crawford, and George M. Troup [q.v.], it adopted "State Rights" as its official designation in the later ‘twenties, only to merge in the 'thirties with similar elements in other states under the Whig banner. The local opposition altered its name synchronously from Clark ( see sketch of John Clark) to Union, then to Democratic, without material change of constituency. There were few substantial issues between the two except that on financial questions the Troup-State Rights-Whig party was the more conservative. It was not love of Henry Clay or indorsement of his nationalist program which led this group of Georgians into the Whig ranks, but rather a wish to link their local unit with a country-wide organization and to resist the Jacksonian surge. Stephens in particular sought in 1840 to promote the nomination of Troup for the presidency, and failing in this he declared for Harrison against Van Buren as "the choice of evils." Then and thereafter he found party restraint irksome.

Entering Congress in 1843, Stephens for a long time spoke only upon questions of large importance. His first notable speech was made at the beginning of 1845 on the Texas question. Annexation, he said, while tending to lessen the prosperity of the cotton states already in the Union, would give the South a greatly needed political weight, "thus preserving a proper balance between the different sections of the country" (Cleveland, post, pp. 301-02). He collaborated with Milton Brown of Tennessee to frame the resolution which prevailed against rival measures .and was adopted. The next year he denounced the dispatch of troops to the Rio Grande and the consequent precipitation of war with Mexico; and in 1847, deprecating the Democratic project of expansion, he censured the Wilmot Proviso particularly, saying that if its policy were pursued the harmony of the Union would give place to a "prospect of desolation, carnage and blood" (Ibid., p. 334). In July 1848, he said that had he "a voice that would echo from the mountain tops to the remotest plains and valleys of the country he would rouse the people from their slumbers to a sense of these outrages upon the great fundamental principles upon which their government was founded, and upon which their liberties rested" (Congressional Globe, 30 Congress, l Session, p . 912). The occasion was a bill to deny to Texas the Santa Fe region although it lay within the Rio Grande limits. In the next month, without such lyricism but with great elaboration, he resisted the Clayton compromise bill, as a denial of Southern rights by indirection. This bill, to organize the territories of New Mexico and California with a reference of the question of slavery therein to the courts, was indorsed by the bulk of the Whigs, but Stephens caused enough defection to effect its defeat.

Thus the middle of the century came, with a miscellany of questions at loose ends. When Clay's plan for adjusting all these was before the House, Stephens contented himself in the main with votes of indorsement, though in August he blazed forth in defiance of the North: "Whenever this Government is brought in hostile array against me and mine, I am for disunion-openly, boldly and fearlessly, for revolution. . . . I am for conciliation if it can be accomplished upon any reasonable and just principles .... You may think that the suppression of an outbreak in the southern States would be a holiday job for a few of your northern regiments, but you may find to your cost, in the end, that seven millions of people fighting for their rights, their homes, and their hearth-stones cannot be 'easily conquered'" (Congressional Globe, 31 Congress, 1 Session, Appendix, pp.l1083-84).

Like Robert Toombs and Howell Cobb [qq.v.] , Stephens was using strong words at Washington in order that if the result were favorable he might give soft counsel at home. In fact when the compromise measures were enacted, these three hastened to canvass Georgia in indorsement of the Union-saving legislation. For a convention which had been summoned with power. to take unlimited action in the name of the state, Unionist delegates were now chosen at the polls in great majority; and the convention adopted the "Georgia Platform" approving the national compromise but with a threat of secession in case Congress or the Northern states failed to maintain it in letter and spirit. Stephens claimed the authorship of this platform, "on all turning points" (Recollections, p. 27). To improve the prospect of intersectional peace he. Toombs, and Cobb-two Whigs and a Democrat -undertook to discard their accustomed connections and launch jointly a Constitutional Union party. The lack of response in distant quarters brought a collapse of this project in Georgia and the return of Stephens and Toombs to an uneasy membership in their old party. When Winfield Scott was nominated as the Whig presidential candidate in 1852, Stephens framed a public letter which several other Southern Whig congressmen signed with him, repudiating the ticket on the ground of Scott's free-soil proclivities. The Know-Nothing movement soon captured a large part of the disintegrating Whig party; but Stephens, denouncing vigorously the proscription of immigrants and Catholics, made a shift to the Democratic organization without losing his seat in Congress.

In the welter of issues and the miscellany of men at Washington, Stephens found in Stephen A. Douglas a man to admire and indorse because of his urbane spirit, his fondness for "principles," and his opposition to congressional prohibition of slavery in the territories. The Kansas-Nebraska bill of course met his prompt approval; and when it reached the House he became the floor manager in its behalf. Not only did he share in the debates, but when these threatened to become interminable in committee of the whole, he procured closure by a shrewd motion to strike out the enacting clause. Under existing rules, as few but he were aware, this motion took precedence of pending amendments, and its adoption had the effect of causing the committee to report the bill unfavorably to the House. To get it reported in any manner without amendment was the essential purpose; and its friends who seemingly had killed the bill in committee promptly revived it by having the House disagree with the committee's report. Thereupon, by narrow margin, they promptly carried its enactment. Then and for years afterward Stephens was not merely proud of his personal feat but convinced that the bill was admirable (American Historical Review, October 1902, pp. 91-97). "The moral effect of the victory on our side," said he, "will have a permanent effect upon the public mind, whether any positive advantages accrue by way of the actual extension of slavery or not" (Annual Report of the American Historical Association ... 1911 , II, 344). Moreover, the bill embodied a principle; and however ambiguous and ineffective it might prove in operation, to the principle Stephens would cling.

But the disorders in Kansas, the party platforms, the Dred Scott decision, and the ceaseless wrangles over them gave even Stephens his fill of tweedledum and tweedledee; and he turned his thoughts mainly from the question of slavery in the territories to negroes and slavery at large. In 1845, denying that he was a defender of slavery in the abstract, he had said he would rejoice to see all men free "if a stern necessity ... did not in some cases interpose and prevent" (Cleveland, p. 301). But within a decade he was praising the Southern system as the best in the world for the sustenance, advancement, and happiness of negroes (Ibid., p. 429); in 1857 he was defending slavery on biblical grounds (Ibid., pp. 557, 560); and in 1859 he was discussing with implications of approval the project of reopening the trade with Africa to procure more slaves in order to make more slave states. "African slavery with us," he now said, "rests upon principles that can never be successfully assailed by reason or argument" (Ibid., p. 647). He was ready to meet Seward on his own ground: "I, too , believe in the higher law-the law of the Creator as manifested in his works and his revelation .... We must stand on the higher law, as well as upon the constitution." Since order is nature's first law, he continued, and gradations and subordination are essential in order, enslavement of an inferior race is right: "The principle will ultimately prevail: The wickedest of all follies, and the absurdest of all crusades are those which attempt to make things equal which God in his wisdom has made unequal" (Ibid., p. 649 ). These remarks of 1859 were made in a rather vainglorious speech at Augusta telling his constituents that he would represent them in Congress no longer. The main burden of this speech was the victory of the South at all important points, the placidity of the prospect within the Union, and the consequent lack of need for such watchmen as he at Washington. In his claim of all the virtues modesty was ignored; but if he had said merely that his conscientious best was always at call in the public service, none then or now could say him nay.

After his retirement from Congress, as previously between sessions, he plied a lucrative practice in the Georgia courts, and in leisure kept open house at "Liberty Hall" in Crawfordville, with a widowed sister presiding in default of a wife. He was a kindly master to his slaves, a generous patron of youths desiring college education, and a sociable companion when health permitted. Reciprocally, a multitude, including many negroes, held him in warmest esteem. Sometimes, however, his temper had proved brittle. Quarrels with William L. Yancey and Herschel V. Johnson brought him near to duels in the middle forties; and an affray with Judge Francis N. Cone in 1848, at a hotel in Atlanta, nearly cost him his life. In 1856 a joint debate with Benjamin H. Hill resulted in a challenge which Hill declined, saying privately that he had a family to support and a soul to save, while Stephens had neither. Stephens then posted Hill in the newspapers as "not only an impudent braggart but a despicable poltroon besides " (Pendleton, post, pp. 86--87).

Though he little thought it, Stephens was but a product of his time. A sensitive soul requiring himself to be high-minded, when he found a cause to champion he sought a principle to buttress every policy. This rationalizing of his conduct, while giving him great satisfaction, produced an exaltation of the technical and the trivial. Strategy was of little moment if his tactics were expert. His essential concern, often and sincerely proclaimed, was the preservation of Southern security within a placid Union of all the states; but his inability to yield on a detail or to suffer an opponent to score a point, his relish of victory for the sake of prestige and partisan morale, paralyzed him for the greater purpose. This is the more curious in the light of his complete lack of rancor and his essential kindliness toward all men.

The retirement to "Liberty Hall" and the courts of law could not divorce him from politics. As the campaign approached in 1860 he besought his correspondents to maintain Democratic solidarity. His preference for the presidency was R. M. T. Hunter [q.v., with Douglas as a second choice. When the party split he clung to Douglas as against Breckinridge, and despite his own prior intention of abstinence, took the stump in a consciously forlorn effort to carry Georgia for the ticket. The Georgia legislature was in session when Lincoln was elected; and Governor Joseph E. Brown promptly recommended that a convention be summoned for action upon the question of secession. In this crisis the Assembly invited several prominent citizens to give their advice. On the night of November 12, Thomas R. R. Cobb spoke for secession forthwith. Toombs on the next evening proposed a quick plebiscite and secession by the legislature if the referendum should give warrant. Stephens took the rostrum on the third night, advocating not only a convention of Georgia but a conference of all the Southern states. Realizing that a policy of mere delay would be rejected, he proposed that the future convention demand of the several Northern states that they repeal their "personal liberty laws" and that Georgia retaliate in some manner upon such as might refuse. Beyond this he contemplated mere watchful waiting, with hope that the benefits of the Union might be retained but with readiness for drastic recourse if Lincoln or Congress invaded Southern rights or violated the constitution. Appealing to the spirit of Georgia's official motto, "Wisdom, Justice and Moderation," he said: "My position, then, in conclusion, is for the maintenance of the honor, the rights, the equality, the security, and the glory of my native state in the Union, if possible, but if these cannot be maintained in the Union, then I am for their maintenance, at all hazards, out of it" (War Between the States, II, 299). Toombs, seated on the platform, made interjections during the speech, and was answered in each instance. When Stephens ended he went to the desk and said with even more than his usual vigor: "Fellow citizens, we have just listened to a speech from one of the brightest intellects and purest patriots that now lives. I move that this meeting now adjourn, with three cheers for Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia!" (Pendleton, p. 163). The Damon-and-Pythias friendship of these twain was universally known; and this gesture of undiminished esteem during their brief divergence was received with great applause.

The publication of the speech brought Stephens a flood of letters, including one from Lincoln requesting a revised copy. In his reply Stephens alluded to the responsibility resting upon Lincoln in the crisis. To this Lincoln answered that he felt the weight of this, and said that any fears by the people of the South "that a Republican administration would directly, or indirectly, interfere with their slaves, or with them about their slaves" was groundless. He concluded: "I suppose, however, this does not meet the case. You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub. It certainly is the only substantial difference between us." Stephens rejoined, saying that the gravamen against the Republicans was their purpose "to put the institutions of nearly half the States under the ban of public opinion and national condemnation." He then turned to a more critical matter, for South Carolina had now seceded. Ultimate sovereignty residing always in the separate states, he said, "there is no rightful power in the general government to coerce a State in case any one of them should ... resume the full exercise of her sovereign powers. Force may perpetuate a Union. That depends upon the contingencies of war. But such a Union would not be the Union of the constitution. It would be nothing short of a consolidated despotism" (Cleveland, pp. 150-54).

Meanwhile the Georgia legislature had summoned a convention, and the delegates elected were known to be secessionist in majority. When it met at the middle of January, Stephens, who was a delegate, spoke but once and briefly, supporting a resolution which as a substitute for a pending ordinance of secession proposed a Southern convention to consider the state of affairs and determine a course of action. Expressing a persistent hope of securing Southern interests within the Union, and urging negotiations to this end, he concluded: "My judgment, as is well known, is against the policy of immediate secession for any exciting causes. It cannot receive the sanction of my vote; but ... if a majority of the delegates in this Convention shall, by their votes dissolve the compact of union . . . to which I have been so ardently attached, and have made such efforts to continue and to perpetuate on the principles upon which it was founded, I shall bow in submission to that decision." (Johnston and Browne, pp. 381-82. A fraudulent version was issued in 1863 by the Union League of Philadelphia in The Rebuke of Secession Doctrines by Southern Statesmen, and reprinted in many places after as well as before Stephens denounced it in his War Between the States, I, 23. L. L. Mackall discussed this forgery in the book section of the New York Herald-Tribune, November 9, 1924.) when the convention rejected this resolution and adopted the ordinance, Stephens signed the document without further demur.

The project in hand was centripetal as well as centrifugal. The Georgia convention, pursuing a plan already prepared, elected delegates to a convention at Montgomery, Stephens among them, to form a union of the seceded states. In this assemblage he met no substantial opposition to his own specific desire to frame a government upon the model of that of the United States. Under the quickly devised Provisional Constitution, which converted the convention into a Provision al Congress and empowered that body to choose the executives, Jefferson Davis was elected as president of the Confederate States of America and Stephens as vice-president, both of these on February 9, 1861, without overt opposition. The vice-president under this regime had no regular functions, for until the Permanent Constitution went into effect the next year there was no Senate over which he might preside. Stephens merely continued as a member of the single house and lent a hand in affairs outside as occasion invited. His most notable expression in this period was the "corner-stone speech" at Savannah, March 21. In this he surveyed the conditions of the Confederacy, praised its Constitution, and appealed for wise and patriotic support of the cause. As to negro slavery, he said that the architects of American independence, as exemplified in Jefferson, had contemplated a theoretical equality of races; but, he continued : "Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests 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" (Cleveland, p. 721). In the same speech he said: "We are now the nucleus of a growing power, which if we are true to ourselves, our destiny, and high mission, will become the controlling power on this continent" (Ibid. , p. 726). But how to procure a prosperous or a peaceful future neither he nor any other Confederate could say. To solve the specific impasse concerning the seaboard forts, a cannonade reduced Sumter on April 15, whereupon Lincoln called upon the several states for troops and Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas took steps for a junction with the original seven in the Confederacy. Stephens went as a commissioner and addressed the Virginia convention to hasten this process. This was his last official mission until the Hampton Roads Conference.

His fondness for scruples and constitutional restraint made Stephens an unhappy member of a wartime government, for exigencies were as naught in the face of his principles. Many of Davis' early appointments, and his course concerning cotton as a factor in foreign relations, were ill-judged in Stephens' opinion. But these were minor matters. The conscription of troops, the suspension of habeas corpus, and the establishment of military government in sundry localities all seemed to him outrageous invasions of civil rights. In 1862, when the Permanent Constitution gave him a Senate over which to preside, he became in a sense the leader of the opposition. His official duties, however, yielded him so little satisfaction that at one period he stayed away from Richmond for a year and a half. In public and private letters and occasional speeches he alternated censures of the administration and gloomy prognostications with appeals for support of the Confederate cause. In particular he stimulated Governor Joseph E. Brown [q.v.] to challenge the power of Davis to conscript Georgia citizens.

The war itself was keenly distressing to Stephens, and particularly the sufferings of the wounded and the prisoners on both sides. He visited hospitals and stockades often, to give such relief or solace as he might, and he concerned himself zealously with promoting systematic exchange and parole of prisoners of war. In June 1863, Stephens procured a sanction from Davis to try to open negotiations with Lincoln to regularize exchanges and perhaps to reach some arrangement for ending the war. A refusal of Lincoln to receive such a mission killed the project for the time being. In September of the next year General Sherman, having captured Atlanta, sent oral messages to Stephens and to Brown inviting them to a conference with him with a view to possible arrangements for terminating the war. Stephens, while saying that he would gladly serve as a channel for an authoritative overture, declined the invitation to a personal conference (Johnston and Browne, p. 472). Brown answered to the same effect, and the war dragged on.

At the beginning of 1865 a bill to continue the suspension of habeas corpus passed the Confederate House and met a tie vote in the Senate. Stephens announced that it was his duty to cast the deciding vote, and said that before doing so he would state the reasons which influenced him. His right to make the proposed speech was challenged, and after sundry proceedings it was permitted only in secret session. The remarks he then made (summarized in War Between the States , II, 587-89) concluded with an expression of hope for independence through negotiation. Soon afterward Francis P. Blair, Sr., came from Washington with Lincoln's permission to sound the Confederate authorities on a project of his for a truce and a joint expedition against Maximilian in Mexico. Davis broached this in confidence to Stephens, who leaped at the chance to confer with Lincoln. With R. M. T. Hunter and John A. Campbell [qq.v.] as fellow commissioners, he met Lincoln and Seward on shipboard near Fortress Monroe, February 3, only to find an armistice unattainable and a basis of peace impossible between those who stipulated Confederate independence and those who required acquiescence to the Federal laws. The commissioners returned from Hampton Roads to Richmond in failure. Stephens went sadly home; and upon the collapse of the Confederacy he was not surprised when a detail of Federal troops arrested him, May 11, at "Liberty Hall." Taken eastward in custody, he was held prisoner at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor, diminishing the tedium by writing a narrative of recent events and a diary (printed in Avary, Recollections). Released on parole, October 12, he was greeted warmly by throngs at New York, Washington, and Atlanta as he traveled homeward. At "Liberty Hall" he dwelt much as before, with former slaves of his continuing to serve him.

In January 1866 he was elected to the Senate of the United States, only to meet exclusion along with all others from the "rebel" states. On Washington's birthday he made a speech before the Georgia legislature in response to a request for his views on public affairs. In the deep adversity he counseled self-discipline, patience, and forbearance from recrimination. The total change in Southern internal polity, he said, ought to be given a fair trial, with the good will toward the negroes which their fidelity in times past had merited: "It is an ethnological problem, on the solution of which depends not only the best interests of both races, but it may be the existence of one or the other, if not both" (Johnston and Browne, p. 589). Specifically, he recommended support of the policies of President Andrew Johnson. In April he testified before the congressional joint committee on reconstruction. Questioned as to the sentiments prevailing among the people of Georgia, he said that they, while not repudiating the theoretical right of secession, were convinced by the failure of their effort and were cherishing no thoughts of such recourse in future. He described likewise a general acquiescence in the abolition of slavery and a somewhat surprising accord between the two races on the new legal and industrial basis. But as to pending projects of reconstruction by Congress he said the sentiments of Georgians, and his own, were opposed to the vesting of the suffrage in the negroes or to any constitutional amendment while a number of states were deprived of representation. In fact he denied the constitutional power of the federal government to impose conditions precedent to the restoration of the late Confederate states to their functions in the Union (Ibid., pp. 594-607). Congress proceeded with its drastic program; and Stephens accepted a publisher's invitation to write A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States.

The first of these bulky volumes was published in 1868, the second in 1870. In an ill-judged attempt at enlivening its 1,200 pages of text, the book was cast in colloquies between Stephens and sundry men of straw whom he politely but continuously knocked down. It is a tedious rationalization, obscuring the historic problem of negro slavery by refinements of doctrine on the sovereignty of the states. Dull as the book may be to readers in the twentieth century, it was a sensation in its day, evoking attacks by Northern and Southern champions of causes upon which it impinged and yielding its author some $35,000 in royalties. Stephens not only replied to critics of every sort, but assembled the reviews, rejoinders, sur-rejoinders and rebuttals in a volume, The Reviewers Reviewed (1872), which is more dull than its predecessor. Afterward he wrote a school history of the United States (A Compendium of the History of the United States, 1872) which met some success, and a stout illustrated work (A Comprehensive and Popular History of the United States, 1882), which deservedly fell flat. In 1869 Stephens was offered a professorship of political science amt history at the University of Georgia, but declined it. The next year he participated in a lease of the Western & Atlantic Railroad from the state of Georgia; but upon receiving a remonstrance from Toombs, pointing to the dubious quality of his colleagues and the questionable character of the procedure, Stephens transferred to the state his share of stock in the corporation. In 1871 he bought an interest in the Southern Sun, an Atlanta newspaper, and the next year filled its editorial page with endless arguments against the junction of the Democrats with the Liberal Republicans to support Horace Greeley. A few years of such ponderous journalism forced his withdrawal at a heavy loss.

Though reduced by rheumatism to crutches and a wheeled chair, Stephens in 1872 declared himself a candidate for the United States Senate. He was defeated by John B. Gordon, but before the end of that year he was elected to the lower house of Congress. At Washington a journalist described him as "an immense cloak, a high hat, and peering somewhere out of the middle a thin, pale, sad face." The writer continued: "How anything so small and sick and sorrowful could get here all the way from Georgia is a wonder. If he were to draw his last breath any instant you would not be surprised. If he were laid out in his coffin, he need not look any different, only then the fires would have gone out in those burning eyes .... That he is here at all to offer the counsels of moderation and patriotism proves how invincible is the soul that dwells in his shrunken and aching frame" (Pendleton, p. 387). This "queer-looking bundle," this pallid face, now seamed with "a thousand lines," remained in Congress for a decade, this cracked falsetto voice rising now and again to prove its owner still a master parliamentarian and a guardian of the public interest. In particular he counseled acquiescence in 1877 when the electoral commission decided the presidential contest in favor of Hayes, and he defended his own course, with fire on occasion, against criticism from all quarters.

Long since disabled for the practice of law, he resigned from Congress in 1882, only to find idleness a burden. He soon entered a successful candidacy for the governorship of Georgia; but he died a few months after inauguration. When his poor body lay in state "Little Ellick" had already become a tradition as one who had served his people through fair times and foul with conscience, eloquence, and unflagging zeal.

[A. H. Stephens, A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States (2 volumes, 1868-70). and M. L Avary, ed., Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens ( 1910) are in part autobiographical. R. M. Johnston and W. H. Browne, Life of Alexander H . Stephens (1878), is a full biography, though not extending to his death; Louis Pendleton, Alexander H. Stephens (1908), is briefer. Henry Cleveland, Alexander H. Stephens in Public and Private (1866) is a collection of his principal speeches to the date of publication, preceded by a eulogistic sketch. "The Correspondence of Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens, and Howell Cobb," ed. by U. B. Phillips, is in Annual Report of the American Historical Association I911 (1913), volume II, with a calendar of letters previously published. Certain letters alleged to have passed between Stephens and Abraham Lincoln in January 1860, were printed in a pamphlet by Judd Stewart, Some Lincoln Correspondence with Southern Leaders before the Outbreak of the Civil War (1909). The validity of these is effectively challenged by W. C. Ford in Proc. Massachusetts Historical Society, LXI (1928), 183-95; but the Stephens-Lincoln correspondence at the close of that year, printed in crude facsimile in Cleveland's book, is of unquestioned authenticity. Eudora R. Richardson, Little Aleck; A Life of Alexander H. Stephens ( 19.P), is a recent biography. See also J. D. Waddell. Bio. Sketch of Lincoln Stephens (1877) ; U. B. Phillips, "Georgia and State Rights," Annual Report of the American Historical Association . 1901 (1902), volume II; R . H . Shryock, Georgia and the Union in I850 (1925); obituary in the Atlanta Constitution, March 4, 5, 1883.]

U. B. P.



Source: Dictionary of American Biography, Volumes I-X, Edited by Dumas Malone, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930.