History is complex, messy, and unyielding to our dearest wishes for easy categorization. That Alexander Stephens understood the Confederacy through its cornerstone of slavery is plainly true and explained in his own words. But the “Cornerstone Speech” goes further, planting the other corners of the Confederate state in concerns over federalism and sovereignty.
Anxious onlookers packed the Savannah Athenaeum on the night of March 21, 1861 to hear the newly appointed Confederate States Vice President, Alexander Stephens. He had held the office a little over one month and played a central role in crafting the Montgomery Constitution, itself adopted only ten days previous. Few Southern politicians were as well placed as “Little Alec” to tell his fellow Georgians what the document contained and how it defined the new Confederate nation. Yet, as one biographer noted, “Stephens got caught up in his own eloquence” and devoted a portion of his speech elaborating on slavery and its central place in the creation of the C.S.A., calling it the “cornerstone” of the new Southern Republic. From that day, his speech became known simply as the “Cornerstone Speech” and continues to play a lead role in understanding the meaning of secession and the Civil War.[1]
Of the Confederacy’s cornerstone, as described by Stephens, there can be no doubt. His language was straightforward and unequivocal. The “proper status of the negro… was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.” The Founders struggled with the notion of equal rights, that slavery and the slave trade were “in violation of the laws of nature,” and that the peculiar institution would someday fade away. Stephens believed that Jefferson, Madison, and their ilk erred badly. “They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was in error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the ‘storm came and the wind blew.’” The new Southern Republic, therefore, aimed to rectify these errors, and he declared that “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.” Stephens based this “great truth” on the grounds of science (likely his reading of the French racial theorist Arthur de Gobineau) and the “social fabric” of the South.
The substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it, and by experience we know that it is best, not only for the superior, but for the inferior race, that it should be so. It is, indeed, in conformity with the ordinance of the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of His ordinances, or to question them. For His own purposes, He has made one race to differ from another, as He has made ‘one star to differ from another star in glory.’ The great objects of humanity are best attained when there is conformity to His laws and decrees, in the formation of governments as well as in all things else. Our confederacy is founded upon principles in strict conformity with these laws. This stone which was rejected by the first builders ‘is become the chief of the corner’ the real ‘corner-stone’ in our new edifice.
African slaves may someday improve, Stephens suggested, but only through the schooling in work and civilization that plantation slavery offered. Southern plantations would, in fact, offer the symbol of Southern nationality to the world. “In olden times the olive branch was considered the emblem of peace; we will send to the nations of the earth another and far more potential emblem of the same, the cotton plant.”[2]
The speech did Stephens and Confederacy no favors. It complicated the Confederate cause in Europe, as England and France hesitated to jump to the defense of a new nation advertising its foundations in the preservation of slavery, and muddied the waters for Southern defenders who claimed their cause solely based in states’ rights. After the war, Stephens well knew the hostility toward his speech and fought a stubborn rear-guard historiographical battle to revise perceptions. He claimed the speech was “extemporaneous,” the reporters’ notes were “very imperfect” and necessitated his corrections, a sort of nineteenth-century “fake news.”
“Slavery was without doubt the occasion of secession,” he admitted, and then attempted to walk back his assertion that the old Constitution was flawed compared to the C.S.A., an unconvincing revision considering his extended meditation on the Philadelphia Constitution’s “sandy foundation.” Several reporters from Savannah newspapers covered the speech and their recollections are nearly identical. The Savannah Republican printed a transcription of the address. The Savannah Daily Morning News merely provided a summary, but their editorial shorthand followed Stephens’ intent precisely: “A fundamental error in the old government had been corrected in the new. The old government was framed on the false theory of the equality of the races—that what God had made unequal was equal. Ours was based on the inequality of the races—on truth.”[3]
The “Cornerstone Speech,” however, should have come as no surprise. Stephens had been discussing these themes for years. When he retired from the House of Representatives in 1859, he spoke the language of racialism, of “gradations in the races of men, from the highest to the lowest type.” Nine days before his Savannah speech, Stephens proclaimed to an Atlanta audience that the Confederate founders in Montgomery had “solemnly discarded the pestilent heresy of fancy politicians, that all men, of all races, were equal, and we had made African inequality and subordination, and the equality of white men, the chief corner stone of the Southern Republic.” Two days later in Augusta, he hit the same notes, claiming the new constitution’s protections of slavery “the principal and most important point of all” and “the prime cause of our separation from the United States,” and that the Philadelphia Constitution was flawed—“it was founded upon the idea that African slavery is wrong, and it looked forward to the ultimate extinction of that institution. But time has proved the error, and we have corrected it in the new Constitution.” The three speeches were thematically identical.[4]
The metaphor of a cornerstone was also unoriginal. Stephens borrowed it from Justice Henry Baldwin’s decision in the 1833 Johnson v. Tompkins case over the retrieval of a fugitive slave. Baldwin wrote:
Thus you see that the foundations of the government are laid, and rest on the rights of property in slaves—the whole structure must fall by disturbing the corner stones—if federal numbers cease to be respected or held sacred in questions of property or government, the rights of the states disappear and the government and union dissolve by the prostration of its laws before the usurped authority of individuals.
As one legal historian notes, Baldwin’s opinion “would no doubt have met with the approval of the most radical defenders of slavery.” In addition, all through the winter of 1861, Southern secession commissioners developed these themes repeatedly. Mississippi commissioner Jacob Thompson, for example, told the Florida secession convention in January, “Within this government two societies have become developed. The one is based on free labor, the other slave labor… The one embodies the social principle that equality is the right of man; the other, the social principle that equality is not the right of man, but the right of equals only.” There is also no hard evidence Jefferson Davis regretted Stephens’ speech, despite suggestions to the contrary. In fact, one month after Savannah, President Davis declared to the Confederate Congress that the war began over slavery, and that the institution intended to change “brutal savages into docile, intelligent, and cultivated agricultural laborers.” In short, the Savannah speech was consistent with Stephens’ publicly elaborated ideas on slavery and Southern politicians’ explanations of their reasoning and conduct.[5]
Yet Stephens’ speech was more than the cornerstone; his remarks on slavery occupied less than a quarter of the whole. A canny and intelligent public man, he chose his metaphor carefully and deliberately. Most buildings have four corners, and though the cornerstone attracts the eye, the other three corners are no less important to holding up the structure. Stephens dove into considerable detail on the Confederate Constitution recently shaped in Montgomery, Alabama, that it improved upon the U.S. Constitution, and in so doing planted all four corners of the Southern Republic. Slavery held up the Confederate States of America, but so did observations on the nature of power, be it the government’s public purse, the executive, or the basis of Confederate nationality.
The Montgomery Constitution made essential changes to the Old Constitution to protect “all our ancient rights, franchises, and liberties,” Stephens asserted, and in so doing “it is decidedly better than the old.” Many of these changes involved government revenue and expenditures, particularly the tariff. The tariff regimes of the 1820s and 1830s, perceived by many Southerners as biased toward Northern interests, almost caused “a rupture of the Old Union, under the lead of the gallant Palmetto State,” but the new constitution’s language provided for a revenue tariff. There would be no more “building up class interests, or fostering one branch of industry to the prejudice of another under the exercise of the revenue power.” In other words, as he expressed days earlier in Augusta, “the merchant, the mechanic, the businessman, and the laborer, are all placed upon the same footing in that respect—one interest has no more claim to the protection of the Government than another.” In consequence, tariff rates would fall and the new republic would therefore embrace free trade “as far as practicable,” a qualification a former Whig like Stephens was happy to insert.
In the past, revenues had been applied to the building of internal improvements in the states, but these projects too were injudiciously funded to the benefit of Northern states. “The Confederate framers were convinced that internal improvements should be a state function,” historian Marshall L. DeRosa notes. Stephens gloried in the change: “The true principle is to subject the commerce of every locality, to whatever burdens may be necessary to facilitate it. If Charleston harbor needs improvement, let the commerce of Charleston bear the burden.” The changes to the government’s revenue and spending powers signaled two major changes: a revenue tariff would prevent “the extravagance and profligacy of appropriations by the Congress,” and demonstrate the Confederacy better reflected the American revolutionary tradition, that “representation and taxation should go together.”[6]
Stephens also mentioned executive branch power in the new Southern Republic and its contrast with that of the Philadelphia Constitution. He and fellow Georgian Robert Toombs admired the British system of filling the cabinet with parliamentary members, who sat in the Commons and defended their policies directly. Stephens called it “one of the wisest provisions of the British Constitution.” Had they succeeded in altering the Constitution to these ends, it would have modified the separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches.
“[It] would give the legislature a closer check upon the executive,” historian Charles Robert Lee explained, “it would keep the Congress better informed as to administrative policy, and finally, it would place more direct responsibility upon the department heads.” At Montgomery, however, they met with only partial success. While cabinet members did not double as congressmen or senators, they would be given seats on the floor “to participate in the debates and discussions.”[7]
One of the great virtues of this, Stephens believed, was that it allowed cabinet secretaries to trumpet their policies directly to Congress and the country, rather than indirectly through the newspapers. This brought one of the biggest ovations in his speech, as it alluded to the deep-seated corruption involved in the party press system, where lucrative government printing contracts purchased newspaper influence and the monies spread liberally to create a network of loyal papers in every state. In addition, the presidency would be limited to a six-year term with no allowance for reelection, which Stephens called “a decidedly conservative change.” As DeRosa describes it,
They aimed at establishing a custodial executive who would obstruct congressional excesses, would not pit the general government against the state governments, and would use the executive branch to secure the common interests of the states as collectively defined by the latter. Thus, the energy (i.e. power) of the general government would be kept in check by disrupting its stability (i.e. continuity).
For Stephens, this was a change in the interest of good government. “It will remove from the incumbent all temptation to use his office or exert the powers confided to him for any objects of personal ambition.”[8]
These changes and many others, however, depended on the C.S.A. protecting its recently declared sovereignty. In a dangerous world of a hostile Northern republic and European empires, Stephens believed the South had the makings of a “high national career.” It represented a sizeable extent of territory stretching from the Atlantic to the western frontier beyond the Mississippi, more than double the size of the original thirteen colonies when they declared their independence. It comprised five million people of both races, although Stephens jumped over the question of citizenship and rights for black Southerners. The South encompassed enormous wealth, income, and land (and slaves), with collective state debts a fraction of the Northern states. Such heralds, he hoped, would attract upper South states to the Confederate cause, and perhaps even beyond into amenable Northern states. “Should they do so, our doors are wide enough to receive them, but not until they are ready to assimilate with us in principle… this process will be upon no such principles of reconstruction as now spoken of, but upon reorganization and new assimilation.” If that occurred, reunion would be consummated under the Montgomery Constitution. Days earlier in Augusta, he explained:
To the North, there are North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Missouri—all gravitating towards us. And we shall not stop here—even the great North-west is gravitating towards us; and, as the rot of disintegration progresses in the old Confederacy, States will be broken up, and may come in to us, when they see that we possess the best of government… But let me say here, that if any of those States desire to join with us, they must first prove that they are worthy to associate with us; that they have changed the erroneous principles which they now hold, and take upon themselves the true principles which we maintain.
Stephens warned that the foundations of the new Southern Republic were only as solid as the virtues and unity of the Southern people (“a people possessing the most conservative character,” he observed in Augusta). The Revolution of 1860 was not like the French Revolution: “France was a nation of philosophers. These philosophers become Jacobins. They lacked that virtue, that devotion to moral principle, and that patriotism which is essential to good government.” If divisions, partisanship, and selfishness emerged, however, “I have no good prophesy for you.”
History is complex, messy, and unyielding to our dearest wishes for easy categorization. That Alexander Stephens understood the Confederacy through its cornerstone of slavery is plainly true and explained in his own words at Savannah and elsewhere. It was a slave-holding republic. But the “Cornerstone Speech” goes further, planting the other corners of the Confederate state in concerns over federalism and sovereignty. His speech was an explanation of what Montgomery meant, about slavery and beyond. Although the document did not perfectly reflect his ideas, Alexander Stephens supported it vigorously in these weeks before the attack on Sumter, and it gives us a glimpse of the full nature of America’s Southern constitution.
The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.
Notes:
1 Thomas A. Schott. Alexander H. Stephens: A Biography (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1988) 334-335.
2 Don H. Doyle. The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 2015) 36-37; the unabridged text of Stephens’ Cornerstone Address can be found at the State Historical Society of Iowa.
3 Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens. Ed. Myrta Lockett Avary (New York: Doubleday, 1910) 172-175.
4 Thomas E. Schneider. Lincoln’s Defense of Politics: The Public Man and His Opponents in the Crisis over Slavery (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006) 26-27; Charles B. Dew. Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001)16; Atlanta Southern Confederacy, March 13, 1861; Albany Patriot, March 28, 1861.
5 Johnson v. Tompkins, 13 FED CAS. 54 (1833); Earl Maltz, “Majority, Concurrence, and Dissent: Prigg v. Pennsylvania and the Structure of Supreme Court Decisionmaking,” Rutgers Law Review, 31 (Winter 2000), 378; Dew, Apostles of Disunion, 14-15, 43.
6 Marshall L. DeRosa. The Confederate Constitution of 1861: An Inquiry into American Constitutionalism (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991) 94.
7 Charles Robert Lee. The Confederate Constitutions (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963) 97.
8 DeRosa, Confederate Constitution, 80-82.
The featured image is a portrait of Alexander Hamilton Stephens, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Alexander Stephens was a smart man and would have better served the South as President or a next President than Jefferson Davis. Of course had the South continued to flourish Robert E Lee would have certainly been elected President. Deo Vindice.
Alexander Stephens likely took his theories of race not from Gobineau but from the scientific race theories of Samuel George Morton of the University of Pennsylvania and Louis Agassiz of Harvard. Josian Nott, of yellow fever fame and South Carolina, took his theories from Morton and Agassiz and spread them through the South. Stephens was repeating the “modern science” of his age.
I very much enjoyed this article. Thank yo for writing it.
The Cornerstone speech has too much hyperbolic rhetoric to be taken this seriously. The fact remains, Alexander Stephens argued and advocated against secession and said so as a slave owner. Sam Houston did the same. Those who think the war was about slavery ought to ask: would slavery ever be abolished without secession? It would not. Slavery was not being threatened by Lincoln and the Republicans. No slave would be freed under the Republican platform of 1860. So why secession?
It’s my understanding that many southerners didn’t trust Lincoln’s assurances that slavery in the states that it currently existed would not be threatened. And why wouldn’t they be suspicious? Lincoln consistently railed against slavery. He proposed that slavery not be allowed in any new states. Whether slavery would or would not have been abolished is a hypothetical – the issue is whether southerners believed slavery was threatened, and whether that belief played a part their decision to choose secession.
Alan, you are exactly right, the South had a hissy fit over the election of Lincoln and the take over of the Federal government by what they called, the “Black Republicans.” They saw this as the beginning of the end for slavery, and they rebelled to try to save it from ultimate extinction. The irony is that that rebellion led to its much quicker extinction than would otherwise have happened. Lincoln, while he did not always support racial equality, had since a young man supported the end of slavery as a personal position. In the famous Greeley letter he makes a clear distinction between his personal feelings and his position as president and his reading of his constitutional duties. Without the rebellion, Lincoln would have had no opportunity to allow his personal feelings to override his strict constructionist reading of the constitution. His war powers as commander-in-chief gave him the authority to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and put us on the road to the 13th Amendment. As the author of this article says, history is complex and, I might add, is also full of unintended consequences.
Having seceded, the South turned down every offer made by Lincoln to return to the Union and keep slavery. The most significant was the Corwin Amendment which would have placed slavery beyond the amendment process making it forever permanent as long as Southern States desired. All the South need do is return to the Union and it had the votes to easily ratify. Corwin had already passed both houses of a Republican controlled congress by super-majorities and fully supported by Lincoln. And it had already been ratified by five Northern States. All the South need do was return to the Union and slavery was protected by what would have been one of only two amendments in the Constitution that could never be removed! The South seceded anyway because preserving slavery was not its cause.
The so-called “Cornerstone Speech is one of the go-to documents of purveyors of the “Pious Cause Myth.” Stephens’ extemporaneous and misquoted speech, delivered March 3, 1861, begins with a list of grievances and cures the Confederate Constitution provides regarding the old Union: the sectionalism of fostering industry to the prejudice against agriculture; the “old thorn of the tariff is forever removed from the new;” sectional use of revenue for internal improvements is prohibited; cabinet members having input in congressional bodies is added; one tenure in the presidential office to prevent reelection cronyism.
This brings us to the passage that sends a tingle down the leg of Southern hating “pious causers;” the passage they lift out of the previous context of multiple reasons the South seceded and attempt to make it stand alone. Never mind that it appears buried in the middle of the speech revealing it held lower priority. Never mind that Stephens is quoting a US SCOTUS justice who made the same claim about the US Constituion (see Henry Baldwin, Assoc.SC Justice, in Johnson v. Tompkins, 1833). Never mind that the ultimate meaning is the Constituional right to legal slave property based on what then was a universal belief, both North and South, that blacks were inferior to whites and therefore subordination his natural condition. As Lincoln stated:
“… while they do remain together there must be a position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”
Never mind all the above. What matters to pious causers is the tingle when this next passage is taken out of context. Let’s numb that tingle a bit.
“Our new government…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…”
This is the “go to” quote for the purveyors of the pious cause myth. They claim this somehow sets the CSA apart from the US. Actually it is an example of the racist attitudes that were commonly held by most all both North and South. Only the North wanted slavery ended because it wanted blacks gone!
There is however in Stephens’ speech an oft overlooked characteristic of how white supremacy played out quite differently in the South compared to the North. In the North the inability to make slavery profitable had led to its end. Because of Northern racism the few remaining blacks were ostracized into segregated shanty towns, and their freedom greatly restricted by Northern black codes. In some cases the bodies of blacks were removed from cemeteries to complete the ethnic cleansing.
In the antebellum South white supremacy played out in a vastly different way, particularly given slavery had evolved in a more humane manner into the 19th century. Though there was racial subordination, there was not segregation. The Southern people socialized, worked, worshiped, and as children played together regardless of race. This kind of human intimacy created bonds that weren’t broken but rather affirmed by abstract notions of natural rights. Those notions had led most in the South to, as Lee said, consider slavery as evil and a violation of natural rights. Something Lincoln himself affirmed about the South, “If it did not exist among them now, they would not introduce it.”
Abolitionist societies in the South outnumbered those in the North by a four to one margin. But Southern ambition to end slavery contained two elements that Northern abolitionism lacked. Northern abolitionism called for immediate, uncompensated emancipation backed by terrorist threats. All this was motivated by an antagonism against the race of the slave and the economic/political power that slavery gave the South. Lacking was any real concern for the welfare of the slave or the Southern economy evidenced by the call for an immediate and uncompensated, unplanned emancipation. Northern sentiment was merely end slavery and by that end Southern power and the presence of the black man in America. The black man was to either “die out” having been cut off landless and penniless from the welfare of the master and unable to compete, or be driven out of the country by colonization that amounted to any godforsaken place but here. Abolition sentiments in the South, were it not for the onslaught of Northern “anti-slavery,” could have had time to cultivate a plan of and support for a gradual emancipation that would be to the benefit of the Southern society, economy and the welfare of the freed slaves. But the Northern onslaught of anti-slavery propaganda against masters, coupled with leaflets calling for slave revolts, destroyed any chance of Southern abolitionist success. Instead it caused the South to “dig in its heels,” (as Northern Senator Daniel Webster had noted) to avoid economic disaster, to avoid a harmful displacing of the slaves, and to counter Northern attempts to dictate its will to the South.
Southerners having grown up with black folk had no problem with the idea of living with them slave or free. The South had a larger free black population than did the North. Colonization sentiments were not near as strong in the South. Poems circulated decrying the plan of colonization based on familial bonds. Jeff Davis and his brother wrote a manual teaching the masters how to prep their slaves for eventual freedom. Lee had expressed how immediate unplanned emancipation would cause more harm than good.
This is the context in which we should read the last portion of Stephen’s “Cornerstone” passage:
“We hear much of the civilization and Christianization of the barbarous tribes of Africa. In my judgment, those ends will never be attained, but by first teaching them the lesson taught to Adam, that ‘in the sweat of his brow he should eat his bread,’ and teaching them to work, and feed, and clothe themselves…”
Stephens understands slavery will eventually end, “We hear much of the civilization and Christianization of the barbarous tribes of Africa” (White Americans often referred to blacks in America as “Africa.” Union General Butler wrote, “I shall call on Africa to intervene” in his want of reinforcements to defend his Department of the Gulf.) Stephens says its end must be preceded by a preparation for living in the civilized Christian society that was America,
“in the sweat of his brow he should eat his bread,’ and teaching them to work, and feed, and clothe themselves…”
This is an example of the “positive good” doctrine that had long been developed in the South. Contrast this with Lincoln’s conviction that blacks could NEVER be assimilated into American society:
“… there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races from living together on terms of social and political equality.”
Stephens defense of slavery must be understood within the context that the Southern people found imposed on them by the North. The North was against emancipated slaves migrating North or West. How was the South to accommodate a suddenly freed, uneducated, landless, and penniless population equal to almost one half of the total population of the South, all within the limited borders of the South alone? There were vast territories to the West where, as Jefferson had suggested, the freedmen could be dispersed and given land. But the Republican party (as did most Northern sentiments) wanted those lands preserved for the white race alone. And most in the North wanted no part of a compensated emancipation (even though that would have been the just approach to take, given the North’s foundational role in slavery), because they did not want the economic cost, nor the social cost of freed blacks migrating North.
Those pushing for emancipation in the North wanted it to be immediate, unplanned, uncompensated, and the Southern economy and welfare of the blacks be damned. That is the context wherein slavery as a “positive good” can be understood. Otherwise Southerners saw it as much a violation of natural rights as the North. Stephens had long believed in liberty for all:
“I am no defender of slavery in the abstract —liberty always had charms for me, and I would prefer to see all the sons and daughters of Adam’s family in the full enjoyment of all the rights set forth in the Declaration of American Independence…” Texas Speech, 1845.
But slavery was not an abstraction. It was a problematic reality, and ending it on Northern terms meant either the Darwinian “dying out” or deportation of the black folk Southerners often considered as close as family. Prior to Lincoln’s unplanned emancipation (except to the extent it could be leveraged as a “war measure”), there was no major political party that proposed emancipation simply because no one wanted to bear the economic or social cost it would demand if done with the welfare of the black folk in mind. The South had no choice but to consider slavery as the best of a bad historical situation given the corner they were backed into by the North.
The North was perfectly content to abide slavery as long as it was kept bottled up in the South. This attitude leads directly to Stephens next most poignant statement. All the North had to do to cleanse itself of the repugnant stain of slavery was to let the South go its own way. Why was “Union” so important that the North would go to war to keep the slave States in the union? Stephens nails the reason, which again enlightens us as to why the South sought to secede – to free itself from being yoked to a section of the country that sought only to possess the Southern spoils:
“While it is a fixed principle with them (Republicans) never to allow the increase of a foot of slave territory, they seem to be equally determined not to part with an inch of the ‘accursed soil’… notwithstanding their professions of humanity, they are disinclined to give up the benefits they derive from slave labor. ..The spoils is what they are after though they come from the labor of the slave…Why cannot the whole question be settled simply by…giving their consent to the separation, and a recognition of our independence?”