Today, 21 March 2011, marks the 150th anniversary of Alexander Hamilton Stephens’ delivery of the Cornerstone Speech in Savannah, Georgia. On 20 December 1860, the state convention called by the legislature of South Carolina after the election of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency had voted for secession from the Union. By the beginning of February, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, George, Louisiana, and Texas had followed suit. And on 7 February 1861, these states joined together to form the Confederate States of America. Soon thereafter, Jefferson Davis was elected its President, and Stephens, its Vice-President.
In his Second Inaugural, looking back, Abraham Lincoln observed that, on the eve of the Civil War, “one eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern half of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.”
After that conflict, southern apologists, such as the renowned classicist Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, would insist that “the cause we fought for and our brothers died for was the cause of civil liberty, and not the cause of human slavery.” But the facts support Lincoln’s claim.
At the time of secession, for example, the state convention in Mississippi announced, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery,” and asserted, “There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union,” noting that “the hostility to this institution commenced before the adoption of the Constitution, and was manifested in the well-known Ordinance of 1787, in regard to the Northwestern Territory” and grew stronger in the succeeding decades.
No one, however, made the southern case with greater eloquence and force than Stephens, who had opposed secession in Georgia on prudential grounds and then rallied to its support once the decision had been made. When he returned to Savannah to address the George convention on 21 March 1861, this is what he said:
The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution—African slavery as it exists amongst us; the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” He was right. What was conjecture with him is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.”
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