Alexander Hamilton Stephens (February 11, 1812 – March 4, 1883) was an American politician who was the only vice president of the Confederate States from 1861 to 1865, and later the 50th governor of Georgia from 1882 until his death in 1883. A member of the Democratic Party, he represented the state of Georgia in the United States House of Representatives before and after the Civil War.
Stephens attended Franklin College and established a legal practice in his hometown of Crawfordville, Georgia. After serving in both houses of the Georgia General Assembly, he was elected to the U.S. Congress, taking his seat in 1843. He became a leading Southern Whig and strongly opposed the Mexican–American War. After the war, Stephens was a prominent supporter of the Compromise of 1850 and helped draft the Georgia Platform, which opposed secession. A proponent of the expansion of slavery into the territories, Stephens also helped pass the Kansas–Nebraska Act. As the Whig Party collapsed in the 1850s, Stephens joined the Democratic Party and worked with President James Buchanan to admit Kansas as a state under the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution (which was overwhelmingly rejected by Kansas voters in a referendum).
Stephens declined to seek re-election in 1858 but continued to publicly advocate against secession. After Georgia and other Southern states seceded and formed the Confederate States of America, Stephens was elected as the Confederate Vice President. On March 21, 1861, Stephens delivered his infamous Cornerstone Speech while visiting Savannah, Georgia, which defended slavery; enumerated contrasts between the American and Confederate foundings, ideologies, and constitutions; and laid out the Confederacy's rationale for seceding. Stephens would attempt to deny and retract this speech following the Confederacy's defeat in 1865. In the course of the war, he became increasingly critical of President Jefferson Davis's policies, especially Confederate conscription and the suspension of habeas corpus. In February 1865, he was one of the commissioners who met with Abraham Lincoln at the abortive Hampton Roads Conference to discuss peace terms.
After the war, Stephens was imprisoned until he was pardoned by President Andrew Johnson in October 1865. The following year, the Georgia legislature elected him to the U.S. Senate, but the Senate declined to seat him due to his role in the Civil War. He won election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1873 and served until 1882, when he resigned from Congress to become governor of Georgia. Stephens served as governor until his death in 1883.
Early life
Alexander Stephens was born on February 11, 1812.Memoirs of Georgia (Atlanta: Southern Historical Association, 1895), Vol. I, p. 238. His parents were Andrew Baskins Stephens, a teacher and schoolmaster, and Margaret Grier.James D. Waddell, Biographical Sketch of Linton Stephens (Atlanta: Dodson & Scott, 1877), p. 3. Andrew, a native of Pennsylvania, came to Georgia at 12 years of age in 1795. According to the Biographical Sketch of Linton Stephens, Andrew B. Stephens was "endowed with uncommon intellectual faculties; he had sound practical judgment; he was a safe counselor, sagacious, self-reliant, candid and courageous."Biographical Sketch of Linton Stephens, p. 3. Margaret was a Georgia native and sister of Grier's Almanac founder Robert Grier. From both his parents, Alexander had a sister, Mary, and a brother, Aaron Grier. His half-siblings, from Andrew Stephens and Matilda Lindsay, were John, Linton, Catherine, Andrew and Benjamin; the latter two were stillborn. Alexander was named after his paternal grandfather. The Stephenses lived on a farm in Taliaferro County, near Crawfordville. At the time of Alexander Stephens's birth, the farm was part of Wilkes County. Taliaferro County was created in 1825 from land in Greene, Hancock, Oglethorpe, Warren, and Wilkes counties.
His mother died in 1812 at the age of 26; Alexander Stephens was only three months old. According to the introduction to Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens, "Margaret came of folk who had a liking for books, and a turn for law, war, and meteorology."Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens: His Diary Kept When a Prisoner... (New York: Doubleday, 1910), p. 3. The introduction continues: "In her son's character was a marked blending of parental traits. He [Alexander Stephens] was thrifty, generous, progressive; one of the best lawyers in the land; a reader and collector of books; a close observer of the weather, and father of the Weather Bureau of the United States."Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens, pp. 3–4. In 1814, Andrew B. Stephens married Matilda Lindsay, daughter of Revolutionary War Colonel John Lindsay.Biographical Sketch of Linton Stephens, pp. 3–4. Alexander's relationship with Matilda was cold; he recalled being whipped by Matilda as a child, and his biographer Thomas Edwin Schott speculated that she thought he "was a bad boy". Alexander loved his father, on the other hand, and saw him as a role model despite his strictness. Alexander was physically weak but did chores around the family farm. From 1820 to 1824 his father gave him a formal education.
In May 1826, when Alexander was 14, his father and stepmother died of pneumonia only days apart. Alexander and Aaron were sent to live with their maternal uncle and aunt, General Aaron W. Grier and Elizabeth Grier, near Raytown (Taliaferro County), Georgia. Matilda's relatives received Alexander's half-siblings. Alexander inherited a female slave named Ebe from his father, who at the time of his death owned eight other slaves. General Grier had inherited his own father's library, said to be "the largest library in all that part of the country."Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens, p.3. Alexander Stephens, who read voraciously even as a youth, mentions the library in his "Recollections." Alexander and Aaron occasionally went to school in Locust Grove; they did not go full-time because the Griers gave them many chores in exchange for their stay.
Education In 1826 Stephens came to the attention of a Presbyterian minister (whom Schott denotes simply as Williams) who afforded him a term at a Sunday school. The school's superintendent, Charles C. Mills, referred Stephens to Washington Academy in Washington, Georgia, in 1827. There, Stephens met Presbyterian minister Alexander Hamilton Webster, who became his mentor and close friend. Stephens took Webster's middle name, Hamilton, after "learning Webster's full name from the cover of a book". Webster thought that Stephens's character was ideal for the ministry, but Stephens rejected the offer. After Webster died, Stephens made plans to leave the school, but received assistance and accommodation from Webster's friend Adam L. Alexander, as well as some local families. Thus he stayed until June of 1828.
Stephens enrolled in Franklin College (later the University of Georgia) in Athens, Georgia in August of that same year. The admissions examiner quizzed him about Cicero, whom he had not studied on, but Stephens passed anyway by impressing the examiner with a reading of an excerpt about capital punishment (with which Stephens was more familiar). At Franklin, he was a roommate of Crawford W. Long and a member of the Phi Kappa Literary Society. He got along with his peers and professors, the former of whom often visited his dormitory like a "resort" at which to have conversations with him. He raised funds for Phi Kappa Hall, located on the university campus. His time practicing rhetoric and oratory at Franklin sparked his interest in politics. Stephens graduated at the top of his class in August of 1832.
Early career
Stephens found work, immediately after his graduation, as a schoolteacher in Madison, Morgan County. He was, according to Schott, a highly competent teacher who "secured perfect order in his half of the class" by means including corporal punishment. However, he found the job miserable, for he thought a career of teaching to be below himself, and quit in November of 1832. From then to January 1834, he was a tutor for Louis LeConte's children in Liberty County. Stephens began legal studies, was admitted to the Georgia bar in 1834, and began a successful career as a lawyer in Crawfordville. During his 32 years of practice, he gained a reputation as a capable defender of the wrongfully accused. None of his clients charged with capital crimes were executed. As his wealth increased, Stephens began acquiring land and slaves. By the time of the Civil War, Stephens owned 34 slaves and several thousand acres. He entered politics in 1836 and was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives, serving there until 1841. In 1842, he was elected to the Georgia Senate.
Stephens served in the U.S. House of Representatives from October 2, 1843, to March 3, 1859, during the 28th through the 35th Congresses. In 1843, he was elected to the House as a Whig, in a special election to fill the vacancy caused by the resignation of Mark A. Cooper. This seat was at-large, as Georgia did not have U.S. House Districts until the following year. Stephens was re-elected from the 7th District as a Whig in 1844, 1846, and 1848, as a Unionist in 1850, and again as a Whig (from the 8th District) in 1852. In 1854 and 1856, his re-elections came as a Democrat. As a national lawmaker during the crucial decades before the Civil War, Stephens was involved in all of the major sectional battles. He began as a moderate defender of slavery but later accepted the prevailing Southern rationale utilized 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, and later became an equally vigorous opponent of the Wilmot Proviso, which would have barred the extension of slavery into territories that were acquired after the war. He also controversially tabled the Clayton Compromise, which would have excluded slavery from the Oregon Territory and left the issue of slavery in New Mexico and California to the U.S. Supreme Court. This would later nearly kill Stephens when he argued with Georgia Supreme Court Justice Francis H. Cone, who stabbed him repeatedly in a fit of anger. Stephens was physically outmatched by his larger assailant, but he remained defiant during the attack, refusing to recant his positions even at the cost of his life. Only the intervention of others saved him. Stephens's wounds were serious, and he returned home to Crawfordville to recover. He and Cone reconciled before Cone's death in 1859.
Stephens and fellow Georgia Representative Robert Toombs campaigned for the election of Zachary Taylor as president in 1848. Both were chagrined and angered when Taylor proved less than pliable on aspects of the Compromise of 1850. After Taylor supported the ratification of New Mexico's anti-slavery state constitution and threatened to send troops to defend it against Texas's territorial claims, Stephens published an open letter in the National Intelligencer calling for Taylor's impeachment, and he warned that if the United States were to fire the first shots against Texas it would lead to the Southern states to secede from the Union. Stephens and Toombs both supported said compromise between slave and free states, though they opposed the exclusion of slavery from the territories on the theory that such lands belonged to all of the people. The pair returned from the District of Columbia to Georgia to secure support for the measures at home. Both men were instrumental in drafting and approving the Georgia Platform, which rallied Unionists throughout the Deep South.