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Vice-President of the Confederacy

Originally aired on March 29, 1996 - In part 83 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson profiles the life and career of the Vice-President of the Confederate States, Alexander H. Stephens.

#83 – Vice-President of the Confederacy

In all histories of the Southern Confederacy, much is made of its chief executive, Jefferson Davis. But what of Davis’ vice president? Why does Alexander H. Stephens seldom appear on center stage? In the answer lies one of the fatal weaknesses of the Southern nation.

Born in Georgia in 1812, Stephens was a son of yeoman stock. He was sickly throughout his life: a wispy man who never weighed 100 pounds. A host of physical maladies, plus the early death of his father, gave Stephens a crippling melancholy that always plagued him.

To compensate, he adopted driving ambition and combined it with superior intelligence and an extraordinary capacity for work. He became a U. S. congressman and leading spokesman for the South, despite regular exhibitions of pettiness, discourtesy, and sarcasm. “The Little Pale Star from Georgia” (as he was often called) had a reputation as an undersized moralist with an oversized vanity. By his nature, Stephens had no wife nor any chance of ever getting one.

Still, he was elected vice president of the newly formed Southern Confederacy. Stephens at once became the self-styled legal conscience of the nation. Ever a theorist, Stephens was a visionary out of place in a setting where pragmatism held forth. He never learned otherwise.

The amiable relations between President Davis and Vice President Stephens quickly deteriorated. They were too authoritative, too proud, too much alike, to be close friends. Stephens initially believed slavery to be the cornerstone of the Confederacy. Davis at the outset thought the major issue was the rights of the Southern states versus national authority. Both were major issues; both men came in time to support the two principles. Yet in the process, neither would compromise with the other.

Nor was Stephens conciliatory as presiding officer of the Confederate Senate. One day a bombastic speaker went beyond the limits of propriety. Stephens called him to order. The senator glared angrily at the chair and sneered: “Be quiet, little man, or I will come up there and eat you alive.”

An unperturbed Stephens answered: “You would not dare, sire. That would put more brains in your belly than you have in your head.”

By 1862 the split between Stephens and Davis was unalterable. Thereafter, the fiery and spiteful Georgian spent more time in Georgia lambasting Davis publicly than in supporting the floundering Confederate ship of state. This internal squabble helped seal the doom of the Confederacy.

Union soldiers captured Stephens at the end of the war. He spent five months in a Federal prison. In 1866 he was elected to the U. S. Senate. Like so many ex-Confederates, Stephens was not permitted to take his seat. He spent five years fighting poor health while writing a ponderous, two-volume work entitled A Constitutional View of the Late War between the States. Its explanation of slavery, justification of succession, and interpretation of the nature of the federal union, make it still the ablest defense of antebellum Southern principles ever produced.

In 1873 Stephens returned to the U. S. House of Representatives. He remained there until his 1882 election as Governor of Georgia. A bare 100 days into his term, Stephens died from a combination of illnesses.

For the large number of Southerners who opposed secession from start to end, Alex Stephens was their spokesman. Individual liberties and state rights he considered far more hallowed than the power of a centrist government (Union or Confederate). Stephens nevertheless offered the undermining spectacle of a nation’s second-in-command opposing most of the major policies of that nation. Had Stephens done the decent thing, he would have resigned his office. That would have avoided the stigma of hypocrisy that continues to besmirch his place in history.

Dr. James I. "Bud" Robertson, Jr., is a noted scholar on the American Civil War and Alumni Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Virginia Tech.