Alexander
Stephens (1812-1883)
Most famous for serving as the vice
president of the Confederacy, Alexander Hamilton Stephens was a
near-constant force in state and national politics for a half
century. Born near Crawfordville on February 11, 1812, the young
Stephens was orphaned at fourteen, which intensified his already
melancholic disposition. He graduated from Franklin College (later
the University of Georgia) in 1832 and gained admittance to the bar
two years later. There followed a steady and uninterrupted rise to
political prominence.
Early Career
Frail and sickly, the lifelong
bachelor poured his nevertheless considerable vigor into public
life. Elected as a Whig to the state legislature in 1836, he served
there for seven years. During his political apprenticeship Stephens
made a lifelong friend and ally in a man who was in many ways his
opposite, the robust and blustery Robert Toombs. He moved on to the
U.S. House of Representatives in 1843, where he remained until 1859.
Like most southern Whigs, Stephens maintained a delicate balance
between supporting states' rights and backing the party's
nationalist program. An ardent defender of slavery, he favored the
annexation of Texas but also played a critical role in getting the
Compromise of 1850 passed. In the early 1850s, Stephens and Toombs
seized leadership of the state party from the less politically
adroit John M. Berrien. The team later put their weight behind the
Kansas-Nebraska Act, and both men resisted secession before U.S.
president Abraham Lincoln's election. Unlike Toombs, though,
Stephens continued to oppose separation right up to the time it
became a fait accompli for Georgia in January 1861.
Confederate Vice President
Despite grave misgivings, Stephens
ultimately signed Georgia's ordnance of secession. To his
consternation, the recently retired congressman was then selected
with nine others to represent his home state at the Provisional
Confederate Congress in Montgomery, Alabama, in February. There his
status as the South's most outspoken former Unionist won him the
vice presidency.
By so elevating Stephens, the Montgomery
delegates hoped to solidify support for the new nation among
cooperationists and other moderate elements.
Initially, Confederate president
Jefferson Davis consulted his vice president frequently, and
Stephens appeared to be part of the president's inner circle. That
changed, however, once military concerns began to consume the
administration's attention. "Little Aleck" was no military man, and
Davis found little time for him after hostilities began in earnest.
Stephens likewise had less and less use for the Richmond, Virginia,
government, and the amount of time he spent in the Confederate
capital decreased commensurately. He grew disaffected with Davis's
nationalist bent and lent encouragement to Georgia's governor,
Joseph Brown, who was a vigorous advocate of states' rights.
Still, Stephens continued to perform
some governmental function, and in 1863 he attempted to initiate an
exchange of prisoners with the North. That effort failed, but the
diminutive vice president used the correspondence with his Northern
counterparts to begin to push for a negotiated end to the war. There
was little enthusiasm for such a solution in either the North or the
South, but Stephens persisted in his hope that diplomacy could
prevail. When a meeting with Lincoln and Secretary of State William
Seward was arranged at Hampton Roads, Virginia, in February 1865,
Davis—who, significantly, did not attend—sent Stephens to head the
Southern delegation. Of course, the North could accept no terms that
allowed the Confederacy to continue to exist, and the negotiations
came to nothing. In general, then, Stephens's tenure as the
Confederate vice president may be characterized as a rarely broken
string of frustrations and disappointments.
Postwar Career
After the war Stephens was
imprisoned for five months at Boston's Fort Warren. Upon his
release, Georgia's citizens in 1866 elected him to the U.S. Senate
under President Andrew Johnson's forgiving Reconstruction scheme.
Northerners were naturally dismayed by the prospect of the vice
president of the Confederacy sitting in the Senate chambers a year
after the Civil War ended in 1865, and congressional Republicans
refused to seat Stephens. He used the resulting hiatus from public
life to pen A Constitutional View of the Late War between the
States (1868-70), his turgid, two-volume apology for the
Confederacy.
Although not a member of the Bourbon
Triumvirate that ruled over a "redeemed" Georgia, Stephens rose once
more to political prominence after Reconstruction. Georgians
returned Stephens to the House of Representatives in 1877, and he
served there until 1882. That same year he was elected governor of
the state but died in office on March 4, 1883. |