Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
Thanks to the particularities of the Confederate Constitution, President Jefferson Davis had no real claim on the loyalty of his sitting vice president, Alexander H. Stephens, who was selected by the Confederate Legislature. Even so, Davis recognized Stephens's appearance before the Georgia Legislature in early 1864 as an act of utter betrayal – and not only because it fell the day after the Ides of March.
Stephens's three-hour harangue on the night of March 16 jolted the sleepy town of Milledgeville, then the state capital, with its withering attack on the Davis administration's violation of the fundamental rights of Southern whites through policies like the military draft and martial law. Stephens sent the packed crowd home with echoes of Patrick Henry's revolutionary injunction of 1775: The choice for Confederate Georgians, as it had been for Henry's generation, was the alternative of civil liberty or patriotic death, imposed by a tyrannical ruler.
Stephens's rhetorical broadside spread quickly across the wartime South and became one of the most important political developments in the Civil War's third lingering winter. The sour personal relationship between the Confederacy's top two officials was hardly news. But the rift in the South's political establishment now aligned with a building anti-Lincoln campaign in the North that was pushing hard for a negotiated peace. Those Confederates who already considered Davis to be a Southern-bred Caesar could now imagine Stephens in the role of Brutus.
Stephens raised the stakes of political opposition by presenting Richmond's governmental overreach on the same level of danger as the Union's military onslaught. An administration that had weathered three years of federal military assault now faced a profound crisis of legitimacy from within.
Tensions between Davis and Stephens emerged early in the war but were resolved, at least at first, by Stephens, a Georgia politician, withdrawing from Richmond, in the spring of 1862. From his semi-exile in his Crawfordville, Ga., home (called Liberty Hall as early as 1860), the vice president privately seethed about his boss, whom he dismissed as "weak and vacillating, timid, petulant, peevish, obstinate, but not firm."
His grievances found a ready audience among fellow Georgia politicians whose anti-Davis animus was just as bitter. Early in 1862, Gov. Joseph Brown had marshaled a states-rights critique of Richmond's new military draft. Robert Toombs followed his brief stint as Davis's secretary of state with interminable squabbling with the president and Confederate military brass; the culmination of these disputes came when Toombs was placed under military arrest just a few weeks after Stephen's "Ides of March" address. Linton Stephens, Alexander's younger brother and a state legislator, channeled his hatred of the president into a series of anti-administration resolutions taken up during his state's 1864 late winter legislative session. By the end of their March assembly, Georgia state legislators had followed the Stephens brothers' lead by passing a strongly worded rebuke of Confederate martial law.
Stephens stood out among these Georgia "malcontents" for his oratorical skills no less than for the high office he uneasily occupied. His speechifying in Congress 20 years earlier had brought tears from Representative Abraham Lincoln. His impassioned address against disunion in November of 1860 also touched Lincoln (as it did most other Unionists) and prompted a famous interchange between the president-elect and his former Whig ally from Georgia. A few months later, Stephens offered up his so-called "Cornerstone speech," which would shape his reputation thereafter. His full-throated identification of the new Southern Confederacy with racial slavery gained international notoriety.
Stephens's "Ides of March," speech, which ranks just below his "Cornerstone" address in its rhetorical power, was built around a central tenet of classical republicanism: the fragility of popular rights during the emergency of war. "Liberty is the animating spirit, the soul of our system of government, and like the soul of man, when once lost, it is lost forever," Stephens said. Insisting that even the most dire circumstances could not justify curtailing popular rights, he noted that "without liberty, I would not turn upon my heel for independence." True patriotism required citizens to defy an overreaching government, even if that government faced the crisis of its existence. "Let no one therefore be deterred from performing his duty on this occasion by the cry of counter-revolution, nor by the cry that it is the duty of all, in this hour of peril, to support the government," he warned. "Be not misled by this cry, or that you must not say anything against the administration, or you will injure the cause."
Stephens reached a peak by warning of imminent political bondage. "I was not born to have a master from either the North or South," he thundered, insisting that he was no more willing to subordinate himself to his own Richmond government than to Lincoln's despotism in Washington. Were his options reduced to serving one or another of these two tyrants, his resolve would be clear. "I shall never choose between candidates for that office. Shall never degrade the right of suffrage in such an election." Death would be welcome in this event, since Stephens had "no wish or desire to live after the degradation of my country, and have no intention to survive its liberties."
Ironically, with Stephens away in Milledgeville defending white liberty, one of the slaves at Liberty Hall made his own bid for freedom. Stephens learned upon his return to Crawfordville in late March that a slave named Pierce had left the premises soon after he had departed, his own speech in hand, for the capital. Early reports that Pierce had been killed were updated by information that he was both alive and no longer a slave, having escaped to the Union lines and placed himself in the service of a cavalry unit commanded by Gen. Joseph Wheeler.
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This stunned Stephens. For him, the unquestioning obedience he expected from Pierce and his other 30-odd slaves was a function of their racial deficiencies. Among the central points of his Cornerstone speech was the natural subservience of the "African race" to whites, whose superiority Stephens insisted had been vindicated by modern science. Pierce's decision to abandon the role of devoted slave haunted Stephens into the postwar period. Late in 1865, during his five-month incarceration in Fort Warren and facing a possible trial for treason to the United States government, Stephens recorded several dreams of his once trusted servants. In one of the most vivid, he imagined the life that a wayward Pierce would be living beyond his master's command.
Stephens's psychic entanglement with Pierce's loyalty and his betrayal resulted from the deep history between these two men. Pierce had become Stephens' human property in 1845, at the age of 6; the master immediately laid claim to the slave by endowing him with the name of his close friend George Foster Pierce, the Methodist bishop of Georgia. As Pierce the slave grew older, Stephens worked to mold him into a trusted dependent and regularly traveled to Washington with the enslaved personal attendant.
Their history didn't end with Pierce's emancipation. When Stephens returned to take up a seat in the United States House of Representatives eight years after the Confederate collapse, he resumed contact with Pierce (who had taken the last name of Lafayette) and used his influence to gain his former slave a Civil Service appointment at the Interior Department. In a world that had made slaves into citizens, Stephens' Southern mastery was replaced by a routine act of political patronage.
But there would be no rapprochement between Stephens and Davis after the March 1864 rupture in their political and personal relationship. At the same time, fears (and hopes) that Stephens's dissent might lead to a political upheaval within the Confederate government proved unfounded. Despite his fiery rhetoric, Stephens was still doing his president's bidding up through his February 1865 meeting with Lincoln and Secretary of State William H. Seward at Hampton Roads (a vignette aboard the River Queen that Steven Spielberg's 2012 film "Lincoln" has memorably dramatized). Even under the extreme hardships of war and the looming inevitability of defeat, Stephens's allegiance to the Southern cause remained firm.
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Sources: "The Great Speech of Hon. A.H. Stephens, Delivered Before the Georgia Legislature, on Wednesday Night, March 16th, 1864"; James Z. Rabun, "Alexander H. Stephens and Jefferson Davis," American Historical Review, 1953; Henry Cleveland, "Alexander Stephens in Public and Private;" Alexander H. Stephens Papers, Library of Congress.
Robert E. Bonner is a professor of history at Dartmouth and the author of a forthcoming biography of Alexander H. Stephens.
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