From a physical standpoint, Alexander Stephens made a rather ironic spokesman for the superiority of the white race. Standing 5 feet 7 inches in height, Stephens wasn’t terribly short or tall by 19th century American standards, but he possessed a frame more suited to a 12 year old boy than a grown man. Weighing a shade under 100 lbs soaking wet and perpetually in bad health, Stephens looked like a young Southern Benjamin Button. With his well-worn, yet somehow puckish features and his spindly limbs peeking out from underneath his two-sizes-too-big suits, Stephens truly looked like a man who was aging in reverse—a small child living in a shriveled old man’s body. Upon first encountering him, Abraham Lincoln described Stephens as, “a little slim, pale faced, consumptive man,” but went on to say that whatever physical deficiencies he possessed were more than outweighed by his skills as an orator.“[Stephens] has just concluded the very best speech, of an hour’s length, I ever heard”, Lincoln wrote in the winter of 1848. “My old, withered, dry eyes are full of tears yet.”

13 years after Lincoln first heard him speak, Stephens took to the stage at the old Athenaeum in Savannah to deliver a speech that would justify the praise lauded on him in easier days by the newly elected President of the United States and to outline in no uncertain terms the causes and conditions that had led the country to the brink of civil war. It was March 21st when Stephens spoke—the first full day of a spring that both the speaker and the captive audience filling the Athenaeum beyond capacity surely felt was being mirrored in the birth of their new nation, the Confederate States of America. When Stephens, who had just been elected as the vice president of this new—yet unrecognized—nation, spoke to the people of Georgia that night, he did so in the uneasy limbo that lay between the formation of the Confederacy and the hostilities at Fort Sumter that would signal the start of the Civil War. Just 10 days earlier Stephens and other members of the Confederate brain trust had put the final touches on the country’s constitution and the newly elected vice president took it upon himself to explain to his people the raison d’etre of the Confederacy. What followed was the now infamous Cornerstone Speech.

An old tintype of Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens

The Cornerstone Speech got its name from a line in Stephens’s oratory that left no doubt as to why the states of the lower South had seceded. After describing slavery as, “the immediate cause of [this] late rupture and present revolution”, and going on a long diatribe about why Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers were fundamentally wrong in their presumption that the enslavement of African Americans was a moral and political evil that would eventually fade away, Stephens told the assembled crowd that,

“Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone 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, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

There is no ambiguity in such a statement. Just as there is no ambiguity when Mississippi’s Declaration of Secession states that, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery– the greatest material interest of the world” or when Jefferson Davis, in his farewell speech to Congress, proclaims that his home state is leaving the Union because“the theory that all men are created free and equal [has] made the basis of an attack upon her social institutions.” Any man or woman who endeavors to argue that anything other than slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War is simply engaging in that magical thinking promulgated after the fact by groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy in order to create a narrative that not only lionizes the actions of the Confederate soldier, but serves as a tool to promote the aims of white supremacy.