Heather Cox Richardson: Just before he became vice president of the Confederate States of America in 1861, Alexander Stephens of Georgia made it clear what that country, and the upcoming Civil War, was about: Slavery, the supremacy of white men, and that “slavery subordination to the superior [white race is [the Black man’s natural and normal condition.” Stephens dreamed of spreading this ideology around the world.
Richardson:
On March 21, 1861, former U.S. senator Alexander Stephens of Georgia delivered what history has come to know as the Cornerstone Speech, explaining how the ideology and power of elite enslavers in the American South were about to usher in a new era in world history.
Speaking in Savannah, Georgia, just before he became the vice president of the Confederate States of America, Stephens set out to explain once and for all the difference between the United States and the Confederacy. That difference, he said, was human enslavement. The American Constitution had a crucial defect at its heart, he said: it based the government on the principle that humans were inherently equal. Confederate leaders had fixed that problem. They had constructed a perfect government because they had corrected the Founding Fathers’ error. The “cornerstone” on which the Confederate government rested was racial enslavement.
In contrast to the government the Founding Fathers had created, the Confederacy rested on the “great truth” that some people were better than others. Black Americans were “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.”
Stephens believed that the new doctrine of the Confederacy would spread around the world until southerners had the gratification of seeing “the ultimate universal acknowledgment of the truths upon which our system rests.” Stephens expected the old Union to dissolve and the Confederacy to be “the nucleus of a growing power which, if we are true to ourselves, our destiny, and high mission, will become the controlling power on this continent.”
And yet, when we remember the era that elite southern enslavers thought would see their ideology spreading around the globe and ushering in a new era in human history, we do not remember it as the “Stephens Era.” It is the Era of Lincoln, the man who came to represent those who stood against Stephens and his ilk.
