Alexander H. Stephens

American politician

• Born: February 11, 1812
• Birthplace: Wilkes County, Georgia
• Died: March 4, 1883
• Place of death: Atlanta, Georgia

Called “Little Aleck” by his colleagues because he weighed only one hundred pounds, Stephens served in the U.S. Congress until the eve of the Civil War and then became vice president of the Confederate States of America. After the war, he returned to the U.S. Congress and served as governor of Georgia.

Early Life

Alexander Hamilton Stephens was born in the Georgia Piedmont about fifteen miles southwest of Washington, Georgia. He was the third child of Andrew B. and Mary Stephens. Soon after his birth, his mother died. Alexander inherited his mother’s poor health and was plagued by illnesses throughout his life. In 1813 his father married Matilda Lindsey, the daughter of a Revolutionary War veteran. Alexander did not get along well with his stepmother, but he was close to his father, who was a skilled craftsperson and teacher.

From 1820 through 1824, Alexander attended his father’s school. In 1826, Andrew Stephens died at the age of forty-four, and Alexander was sent to Warren County, Georgia, to live with his uncle, Aaron Grier. At first he attended a Roman Catholic school, but in 1827 he entered an academy in Washington, Georgia, to study Latin and geography. While there he lived at the home of Alexander Hamilton Webster, a Presbyterian minister. Alexander’s admiration of Webster led to his adoption of Hamilton as his own middle name. In 1828 he entered Franklin College in Athens, Georgia, and he graduated first in his class in 1832 at the age of twenty.

Following his graduation from college, Stephens took a teaching position in Madison, Georgia; however, he left that position after only four months. He then worked as a tutor for the children of a doctor in Liberty County in southeastern Georgia. In January, 1834, he moved to Crawfordville, Georgia, and began to study law. In July of that year he passed the bar and, at the age of twenty-two, began to practice law in Crawfordville.

Life’s Work

In 1836 Stephens began his political career in Taliaferro County, Georgia, when he was elected by a two-to-one margin to the Georgia House of Representatives. He served in that position until 1841. He then left politics to concentrate on his law practice but returned two years later and was elected to the state senate, where he served for two years. During his six years in the Georgia legislature, Stephens learned how to respond to his constituents and mastered the skills of legislative tactics, parliamentary procedure, and party strategy.

In 1843 Stephens was selected by the Whig Party to run against the Democratic candidate, James H. Starke, for the U.S. House of Representatives. In a statewide campaign, Stephens, defending the Whig program of tariffs, distribution, and a national bank, defeated Starke by a vote of 38,051 to 35,001. He then began a political career in the U.S. House of Representatives that lasted until 1859. In Congress, Stephens supported the annexation of Texas in 1845, not solely for the purpose of extending slavery but also to increase southern political power in the Union. However, while Stephens condemned the slave trade, he defended slavery by arguing that it would always be necessary wherever white and black people lived together in comparable numbers. Stephens supported both the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, both of which attempted to establish criteria for the extension of slavery into the territories.

After the Whig Party disintegrated during the 1850’s, Stephens reluctantly joined the Democratic Party. During intraparty battles between 1857 and 1860, Stephens defended Senator Stephen A. Douglas and popular sovereignty and consistently opposed secession. In 1859 Stephens made a speech in which he advocated reopening the African slave trade, a position that few southerners supported. His argument was based on the idea that if there was an expansion of the slave states admitted to the Union, it would be necessary to secure more slaves to occupy these new states. If the prohibition against the slave trade continued, the South would have to abandon its race with the North for colonizing new states.

Following the election of Abraham Lincoln as president in 1860, Stephens argued in a speech before the Georgia legislature that Georgia should remain loyal to the Union. He believed that Lincoln’s election had been constitutional and that there was not sufficient grounds to secede from the Union. Furthermore, if the South seceded it would be committing the aggression. He argued that the South should wait for the North to commit an act of aggression against the region before trying to secede. Stephens’s position, however, was largely rejected.

On January 16, 1861, a convention was held in Milledgeville, Georgia, to consider the question of secession. Stephens was offered the presidency of the convention, but he declined. He argued against secession once again, saying that the point of resistance should be the point of aggression. He felt that a united South could obtain a redress of grievances in the Union and said that he would vote against secession because no existing cause warranted it. Despite Stephens’s plea, the ordinance of secession passed by an overwhelming majority.

Shortly thereafter, Stephens was selected as a delegate from Georgia to go to Montgomery, Alabama, for a convention of the seceded states, where he served on a committee that drafted the Constitution for the Confederacy. The document was remarkably similar to the U.S. Constitution except for the provisions that recognized and protected slavery. Included in the document was a provision supported by Stephens and his moderate allies that would allow the admission of nonslave states to the Confederacy.

The convention also chose former U.S. senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi as president of the Confederacy and Stephens as vice president. On February 11, 1861, Stephens took the oath of office as vice president of the Confederacy on his forty-ninth birthday. Soon thereafter, Davis asked Stephens to lead a Confederate commission to go to Washington, D.C., to negotiate with the United States for the transfer of forts at Charleston, South Carolina, and Pensacola, Florida. Stephens refused since he saw such efforts as futile.

Despite the fact that they held the top two positions in the Confederacy, the relationship between Davis and Stephens quickly cooled. Two measures passed by the first Confederate Congress, a conscription law and an act authorizing the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in the Confederacy, were strongly opposed by Stephens. He argued that such measures were despotic and threatened constitutional liberty. In February, 1865, Stephens headed the Confederate commission to a peace conference at Hampton Roads, Virginia. This effort failed.

Following the end of the Civil War, Stephens was arrested in Crawfordville. On May 25, 1865, he was sent to prison at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor. One month after he was imprisoned, Stephens applied directly to President Andrew Johnson for a pardon. In his letter to President Johnson, he reviewed his political career, his support of states’ rights and the Constitution, and his opposition to secession. Johnson felt it was important that Stephens and other moderates who would support Johnson’s plan for Reconstruction should be at home instead of in jail. In October, 1865, Johnson granted Stephens a pardon. Stephens met with Johnson in Washington, D.C., after his release and pledged support for Johnson’s policy for Reconstruction. He then returned home to Crawfordville, Georgia, and became involved in politics.

In 1866 Stephens was elected to the U.S. Senate; however, he was denied his seat because Georgia had not properly reconstructed according to congressional guidelines. Stephens then wrote a two-volume work titled A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States (1868-1870) in which he presented the South’s position on states’ rights and secession. He argued that the South had failed in its efforts in part because of the Confederacy’s attempt to centralize power.

During this period Stephens also argued that the Democratic Party should oppose Reconstruction, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and test oaths to determine eligibility for office in the post-Civil War South. To accept these things would be a repudiation of secession and states’ rights. However, between 1868 and 1870, Georgia was subject to Radical Reconstruction. During this era, the Ku Klux Klan was organized in Georgia, and the Klan functioned as the military arm of the Democratic Party, attacking the freedmen and their white supporters. Despite Stephens’s states’ rights beliefs, he rejected the activities of the Ku Klux Klan because it went outside the law.

Stephens’s view of the role of African Americans also changed after the Civil War. He proposed a system of representation for the new Georgia Constitution based on class. He argued that at first the freedmen should have their franchise restricted or should be required to have white representatives; however, he felt that political rights ought to be granted to them for the South’s own future good, that provisions for the education of African Americans should be granted immediately, and that school attendance should be compulsory.

In December, 1868, Stephens was offered the position of chair of history and political science at the University of Georgia, but he declined it because of poor health. He returned to political life in 1873 when he was elected to the U.S. Congress, where he remained until 1882; however, his focus on constitutional issues had ceased to be relevant to a country that was concerned with economic growth. He returned to Georgia in 1882 and ran for governor despite his poor health. On October 4, 1882, Stephens was elected governor by over sixty thousand votes, carrying 130 out of 137 counties. In February, 1883, Stephens went to Savannah, Georgia, to speak at the city’s sesquicentennial celebration. Exposure to the cold and damp air, however, resulted in his final illness. On March 4, 1883, Stephens, the Georgia statesman and political leader, died after serving only 119 days as governor.

Significance

Despite his small stature and poor health, Alexander Stephens was one of the dominant figures in Georgia politics during the nineteenth century. His political life seemed to be a series of contradictions. Politically, he went from being a Whig to a Democrat. He was a strong supporter of states’ rights, but, as the South moved toward secession, Stephens stressed the virtues of the Union and became a reluctant supporter of the Confederacy. While he served as vice president of the Confederacy, Stephens found himself in conflict with President Jefferson Davis over the relationship between the Confederacy and its members. He strongly opposed the centralization of power even though the Confederacy was involved in a war.

Some historians view Stephens as an impractical idealist; others view him as a man who lived by his principles. Despite the contradictions in his life, Stephens remained enormously popular in the state of Georgia throughout his life. His election as governor in 1882, with over 60 percent of the vote, illustrated that Little Aleck’s popularity with the people of Georgia was a constant in a personal life filled with contradictions.

Bibliography

Brumgardt, John A. “The Confederate Career of Alexander H. Stephens.” Civil War History 28 (March, 1981): 64-81. A sympathetic analysis of Stephens’s philosophy and conflicts with Jefferson Davis during the Civil War.

Davis, William C. The Union That Shaped the Confederacy: Robert Toombs and Alexander H. Stephens. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001. Documents Stephens’s friendship with Toombs, the secretary of the Confederacy. The two men served in the Georgia legislature and U.S. Congress; during the war, they were members of the Confederate government, rebelling against the leadership of Jefferson Davis. Meticulously researched account by an expert in Civil War history.

Rabun, James Z. “Alexander Stephens and Jefferson Davis.” American Historical Review 58 (January, 1953): 290-321. An analysis of the two major leaders of the Confederacy. This article analyzes the differences and conflicts between the two men and how they symbolized the differences that existed in the Confederacy itself.

Richardson, E. Ramsey. Little Aleck: A Life of Alexander H. Stephens, the Fighting Vice-President of the Confederacy. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1932. A biography of Stephens that presents a sympathetic interpretation of his life and accomplishments.

Scholt, Thomas E. Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. The most comprehensive biography of Stephens’s personal and political career.

Stephens, Alexander H. Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens: His Diary Kept When a Prisoner at Fort Warren, Boston Harbor, 1865. Reprint. Edited by Myrta L. Avary. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998. A reprint of a 1910 volume, it includes reflections on his prison life and reminiscences.