Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens : his diary kept when a prisoner at Fort Warren, Boston Harbour, 1865 ; giving incidents and reflections of his prison life and some letters and reminiscences / edited, with a biographical study, by Myrta Lockett Avary

RECOLLECTIONS OF ALEXANDER H. STEPHENS

RECOLLECTIONS
OF
Alexander H. Stephens
HIS DIARY
KEPT WHEN A PRISONER AT FORT WARREN, BOSTON HARBOUR, 1865; GIVING INCIDENTS AND REFLECTIONS OF HIS PRISON LIFE AND* SOME LETTERS AND . REMINISCENCES
EDITED, WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY, BY
MYRTA LOCKETT AVARY
NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1910

MX RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OP TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY SUNNY SOUTH PUBLISHING COMPANY COPYRIGHT, IpIO, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY PUBLISHED, OCTOBER, 1910

CONTENTS
PART I
= INTRODUCTION
Mr. Stephens's parentage -- Childhood and youth -- Edu cation -- Law student and lawyer -- His account of his political life to 1859 -- In the Legislature -- In Congress -- On slavery, expansion, imperialism -- Compromise of 1850 and Missouri Compromise -- Dred Scott case -- Retires from Congress -- A summing up of his character, activities, bene factions--Advocate of progress -- Father of Weather Bureau -- Personal appearance -- Effect as a speaker -- Social charm -- Ambition -- "Union Speech" -- Toombs in opposition -- Correspondence with Lincoln -- Stephens and Lincoln -- Secession -- Vice-President -- Stephens and Davis -- Differ ences with Confederate administration -- Lincoln's adminis tration -- Stephens's peace missions -- Liberty Hall -- Fra ternal love -- The Journal -- Motive and aim of hfs political life -- In prison ........ 3
PART II
PRISON JOURNAL OF ALEXANDER H. STEPHENS
CHAPTER I
Mr. Stephens is arrested -- Toombs's escape -- Upton's headquarters -- Crawfordville -- A parting scene -- Davis party -- The Clays -- Other prisoners -- A homeless black boy -- Meets Mr. Davis -- On the Clyde -- Discusses state of country and his "Union Speech" with Federal officers -- "Jeff and Jimmy"--Table etiquette and Mr. Davis -- Hampton Roads -- Farewell to Davis -- Other partings --

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CONTENTS

With Reagan on the Tuscarora -- Captain Frailey's atten tions -- Boston Harbour ...... 99

CHAPTER II
Fort Warren -- Good-by to Reagan -- In a cell -- Money -- Ration -- Newspaper misrepresentation -- Letter to Gen eral Dix -- Sutler's bill -- Library -- Davis in irons -- Greeley's book -- Mental agony -- Lieutenant Woodman -- Jack son and DuBose -- Appeals again to Dix -- Proclamation of Amnesty -- His position -- His slaves -- Emancipation -- Threatened with illness -- Lincoln anecdote -- Cannot eat ration -- Opinion of Greeley's book -- Will write memorial of the war--His case and Lafayette's -- Comments on report of what Davis said of Lincoln's assassination . . 127

CHAPTER III
Lincoln's assassination -- A family gathering -- Fast day for Lincoln -- Last Sunday at home -- Last sight of Linton -- Last talk with his negroes -- Departure from Richmond -- Desired welfare of both sections; no prejudice against the North -- Considers applying for amnesty -- "Loyalty," "Dis loyalty"-- Oath of allegiance -- Sutler's bill -- Glimpses Reagan -- Improved attention ? -- Stared at -- Expenses -- Governor Joe Brown -- Permitted to write home -- His cus tom about prayer -- Letter to Linton -- Mails -- Sunday --Inconsistencies in religious practice and profession -- Dogma of equality -- Golden Rule -- Walk with Wood man ........... 141

CHAPTER IV
Matutinal singing -- Letter - writing -- Court - martial in Washington -- Collapse of the Confederacy; the reason for -- Lincoln and Davis -- "Cornerstone Speech" -- A cup of tea -- No nervous dread of death -- Sustained by con science -- Soldiers' and Negroes' fare -- Use of liquor -- Meals from sutler--Canadian mission -- Davis's speech -- "Mental comets" -- Peeped at ....... 163

CONTENTS

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CHAPTER V

Letter from home -- Curious gazers -- Makes application for amnesty; no confession of guilt; reviews his course; recites his principles; never disloyal to Constitution; love for the Union; his motive; "Continental Regulator"; slavery; efforts for prisoners; accepts issues of war; would help to restore peace and order . . . . . .186

CHAPTER VI
111 -- Woodman and the surgeon -- Race riot -- Fore bodings -- Racial inequality -- His Negroes -- Wants fair trial for new system -- Gerrit Smith -- Dinner from sutler -- Views Boston from bastion -- First view of ocean, in 1833 -- Choice of "Masters" -- DuBose's letter -- Surgeon's visit -- Opinion of Greeley -- Last advice to his servant, Harry; "Harry's bottle" -- Misquoted by Botts -- The only justifi cation for secession -- "Doom of Treason" -- Wants trial -- Can meet death, but not exile! ..... 206

CHAPTER VII
His Dalton speech, 1860 -- Boyce's speech -- Secessionists freedwhilefe?isheld -- The meerschaum -- Ewell's humour -- Health exerai^ -- Constant fire -- Geary attentive -- Mitchel and O'Brien -- No letters -- Wonders if he is forgotten -- His mercy to the-unfortunate; aid to youths seeking educa tion -- Discusses Spanish history -- Overthrow of constitu tions cause of Spain's decline ? -- James Johnson, Governor of Georgia; his classmate; incidents of graduation; estimate of Johnson--Andersonville; Confederate Government and its prisoners; his advice to Davis; why it could not be followed ......... 218

CHAPTER VIII
A vigil; thoughts of home -- Report that Seward has his application -- Summer solstice and Mr. Davis's prophecy -- The President flooded with appeals for Amnesty -- Ximenes's

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mop -- An incident -- Geary "like home folks" -- Pardon and exile -- Watch-mender's kindness -- Bostonian offers aid -- Chain-gang -- News of Confederate leaders -- Mrs. Seward's death -- Heartsick -- Writes an imaginary interview with himself: South's darkest hour; a talk with Bishop Elliott recalled; slavery; Radical policy of equality; his imprison ment; amnesty; South should conform to new order; faith in the people; progress and war; the country's future j . 237

: CHAPTER IX
A mile-walk -- Flood of tears -- Dreams -- Man a triune being -- Spiritual communications -- Ominous press state ment -- Linton and Cambridge -- 111 -- Kindnesses -- Cicero's "true religion" -- A Mexican sage -- Hampton Roads Con ference -- Guards on the beat -- Reconstruction -- Negro suf frage; his plan -- Omens -- Asks Major Alien to publish a correction -- Letter to Linton; outlines remarkable plan for representative government -- The Conference again; misstatements-- Perplexed about application -- New moon -- Unlucky -- Examination for college .... 258

CHAPTER X
Imaginary interview; why he did not publish statement of Peace Conference at the time; why he allied himself with the Confederacy -- Medical Inspector's visit -- News from home -- Withdraws application -- "O that I were as in times past!" -- Reminiscence of school-days -- Judge Bingham's argument no answer to Reverdy Johnson's; the Constitution made for war as well as for peace; "life and soul of the Nation" -- Geary refuses draft ....... 281

CHAPTER XI
Reading Cicero and Job -- Cicero's love for Quintus and his love for Linton compared -- "Fancy" interview; discip line of himself; humour; the Government's inconsistency; his application -- Huzzaing; "mustered out" -- Raspberry tCci * 95

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CHAPTER XII
Fourth of July -- Incongruity between celebration and facts -- McKinley Anecdote -- A Biblical analogy -- St. Paul's defence -- A charade -- Stared at -- Farragut and Anderson -- Elder Lincoln -- Reverend Jacob Manning's speech -- Preachers as jurors -- Defect in priestly character--Naturali zation : State and United States citizenship -- A habeascorpus case -- His home and servants -- St. Paul and ath letics-- Letter from Linton! -- Balloon ascension -- Jackson released ......... 304

CHAPTER XIII
--^Sunday at Fort -- Rights without securities -- Negroes tortured -- Redfield-Saxe anecdote -- Exchanges bows with Reagan -- A soldier's courtesy -- Water-carriers -- Pauline Epistles -- Advises Linton concerning visit -- Aristotle on slaves -- Fears serious illness -- Bewails physical frailty -- Inequality of his situation with his services to mankind -- The Golden Circle -- Misquoted again . . . . .318

CHAPTER XIV
His estimate of Jefferson Davis -- Truth about Southern Cause -- Southern people led to believe secession the only way to save the Constitution; loyal to principles-of 1776; Davis at first at head of united people; sympathy of enemies -- Lincoln's usurpations -- Davis's -- Effects -- Southern leaders -- South's degradation -- "Falling from grace" -- Toombs's secession speech -- A Cabinet decision -- Stephens writes Governor Johnson of Georgia -- Incorrect versions of his speeches -- Lincoln and a Cabinet position -- Linton and secession . 326

CHAPTER XV
Dream visits -- Pauline Epistles -- "Garbled extracts" from Bible -- Suggestion for preachers -- Ideas about dreams -- Friendship -- Judge Collamer's story -- Woodman leaves soon -- Mr. Stephens saddened -- More distortion of his speeches -- Charlotte speech a warning -- General Lee's movement into Pennsylvania; Morgan's invasion of Ohio --

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"Reconstruction" -- Peace mission of 1863 -- Cotton Loan -- Opinion .of Joe Brown -- Andrew Johnson's speech in 1861-- Strange spectacle: brother fighting brother for same object .......... 345

CHAPTER XVI
Letter from Linton -- Solitary confinement -- Ewell and aide released -- Seward's reported remark -- First hand-shake in prison -- "Fancy" interview -- Grows weaker -- Held for "political speculation" -- Peculiarity of apostolic letters -- Reminiscence: admission to the bar -- Talk with Woodman -- Breaks down, weeping -- Seaverns's hospitality; Mrs. Seaverns and little Annie -- The Dictator -- Grief at Woodman's impending departure -- Letter to Seward; pleads feebleness, former acquaintance; requests interview; etc.; Hampton Roads Conference -- Writes trivialities to preserve sanity -- Flowers through the bars ...... 355

CHAPTER XVII
" Row with bedbugs" -- More bad luck-- Smoking amen ities-- Cicero on "slaves" -- Glad to see Woodman -- Dave Holt's "dripping moon" -- "Bucket Letters" -- Meets hos pital steward -- Turning-points in life -- Cicero and Paley as moralists -- Polite lies -- Lawyers and the truth -- His own rule -- A lawyer's office and duty -- Solomon and immor tality -- Mr. Davis's freedom enlarged -- Solomon's Song -- Changes at the Fort -- Major Appleton -- No news from Seaverns's appeal ....... 378

CHAPTER XVIII
Release from close confinement -- Visits -- Library and librarian -- Major Alien's congratulations -- Flowers from Mrs. Appleton -- Notable anniversary -- Code" of Jesus -- A Boston friend -- A mouse -- Curious gazers -- Grant at Faneuil Hall -- Opinion of Grant -- Had Lincoln lived -- Christ's genealogy -- Atlantic cable -- Visit from Woodman -- Letters and flowers -- Noon on the ramparts -- Friend ship -- Major Appleton's visit -- Social life on the bastions -- Captain Livermore -- The sentry -- Alone? . . 394

CONTENTS

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CHAPTER XIX i
Confiscations -- A child visitor -- President ill -- Noon signal -- Reminiscence; with Linton at the woodwright's -- Financial statement -- Newspaper bill -- A bitter journal -- Bedbugs; and observant guard -- No letters; "in prison, soon forgot" -- A walk outside the Fort -- A Georgian's grave -- Longing for home -- Woodman's attentions -- Mrs. Salter's -- Annie Seaverns's -- More gazers -- Mr. Baskerville
-- Mr. Parrott's visit ---At the Appletons' . . . 407

CHAPTER XX
In Captain Baldwin's parlour -- A visitor -- Leaves money -- A Fort fog--"The Cavalier Dismounted" -- Southern aristocracy; Cavalier and Puritan; effect of slavery; out side agitation vs. internal reform -- Georgia "self-made" -- Toombs's ancestry -- St. John's Gospel -- Hampton Roads Conference--Little Charles Nutler -- The Major's quarters-- Christ's incarnation -- His view of Toombs; an exposition -- Presentiment -- Atlantic cable -- Failing eyesight and whitening hair -- Anguish -- Walk with Major Appleton . 417

CHAPTER XXI
A luxury -- Letter from Linton -- Mabel Appleton -- Noon signal and the workmen -- A pleasure party; Mr. Stephens wounded -- Strange whisperings -- An Irish greeting -- Rawhide shoes and armed overseers -- Gun-works -- Rule for testing accuracy -- Mrs. Appleton's note -- Discusses with Mr. Burlingame, Andersonville; defends Davis; his own efforts for prisoners -- Commissary rooms -- "Pope's "Uni versal Prayer" -- Mail-carrier story -- Purchased release not desired -- Walk around the Fort -- Thermometer and guard -- Prisoner and servitor; a melon -- An old Congress friend -- Farewells -- A gracious visitor . . . .432

CHAPTER XXII
Sabbath at Liberty Hall in mind-picture -- Prison con ditions -- Senator Wilson calls -- Permission to see Reagan -- A pathetic meeting -- Harrington's good-will -- Fort music

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-- The messes -- When Atlanta "was a forest"--Dred Scott case -- Davis's flight -- Reagan's letter to Texas -- The Livermores-- Copper works -- "Fancy" interview; negro ques tion; Republic needs repose; patriot's duty -- Governor Gumming -- The cable -- Fears for Liberty Hall -- Asks President for interview -- Dr. Willis -- Letter from Lin-
ton .......... 454

CHAPTER XXIII

Hoping Linton may come -- Reagan applies for amnesty

-- Reagan's Memoirs -- Swedenborg -- Stephens's idea of

God; of man -- Last stroll perhaps with Woodman -- Bald

win's hospitality -- "Last Judgment" -- Bedbugs and mouse

-- Better quarters promised

..... 468

CHAPTER XXIV

New quarters -- Robertson's Sermons -- Courtesies to

Woodman -- Wonders why Linton figures so little in his dreams

-- A curtain -- A little boy -- Dreams of Linton -- News from

home -- At the pump -- Woodman's farewell call -- Linton

in Washington -- Opinion of Greeley -- Reagan's enlarge

ment -- Linton and Governor Brown -- Midway community

-- Advises Geary

....... 476

CHAPTER XXV

Report that Davis denounces him -- Reagan messes with

him -- " Smutty stories" -- Matthew Arnold -- Anxiety about

Linton -- Offers to teach Geary Latin -- "Dog and Wolf"

story -- Mrs. Livermore -- Old Congress days -- Letter from

Linton -- General Denver's visit -- Washington gossip --

Greeley's letter -- Seward vindictive ? -- Newspaper news --

Soldiers disciplined

. , , . . . L . 491

CHAPTER XXVI
Linton and H. V. Johnson come -- No release -- Reagan's children -- Linton and the diary -- A dinner party -- The charade -- Visits from Mr. Myers and others -- Writes Grant and the President -- Seward's reason -- Letter to Seward --

CONTENTS

xiii

Georgia news -- A friendly cat -- Indignation -- A libellous tract -- Beecher on the negro -- The President's policy -- H. V. Johnson advised; negro (education -- Cards and a story -- Writes Seward -- A sea monster -- Efforts for release -- Garrison to be mustered out -- Seward's note -- Letter to Mrs. Appleton -- Reagan's good news -- Mrs. Salter and daughters -- Harry's letter -- President's policy -- Letter from Grant's aide -- Letter to Miss Van Lew; forged speeches -- Home news -- Newton's letter -- Gifts . . . 500

CHAPTER XXVII
Free again! -- At home -- Last entry at Fort -- Partings -- In Boston -- Callers -- Visits Mr. Pierce -- People glad at his release -- Hillard's message to the President -- In Wash ington-- Private interview with the President; Stephens's views on negro suffrage; Johnson's on the negro question-- At Lynchburg; warned -- An aged traveller'-- Waste and desolation -- Liberty Hall . . . . . .531

PART III
CONCLUSION
Elected to the Senate -- Letter to President Johnson -- At Grant's Reception -- Denied his seat in the Senate -- Letters on the political situation; Reconstruction; the race question -- Literary labours -- Grant-Greeley campaign -- In Congress -- On Lincoln -- Family ties -- Linton's marriage -- Linton's death -- Letters to John Stephens -- On lobby ing -- Governor of Georgia -- His death . . . 543

RECOLLECTIONS OF ALEXANDER H. STEPHENS

INTRODUCTION
AEXANDER STEPHENS, a British lad, after fighting for Charles Stuart at Culloden, sought sanctuary from English vengeance in Pennsyl vania. Here he married Catherine, daughter of James Baskins, a wealthy gentleman, who disinherited her for her choice. But her soldier of fortune fought in the French and Indian wars under Washington, and came out of the Revolution a captain. In 1784 he moved to Georgia, and on his rented farm on historic Kettle Creek, Cath erine died and was buried. His older children scattered, and the old captain, ever a better hand at war than money-making, found his mainstay in Andrew Baskins, his youngest, a youth of unusual qualities. Andrew, with earnings made as a teacher while in his teens, bought a farm, nucleus of that "old homestead" which Mr. Stephens loved so well, settled thereon his father and sister and presently brought thither a fair wife, Margaret Grier. Margaret came of folk who had a liking for books, and a turn for law, war, and meteor ology. Her brother Aaron was an Indian fighter and general of militia; her brother Robert was founder of Grier's Almanac; her cousin Robert became Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Her father was said to have "the largest library in all that part of the country" of mid-eastern Georgia where he lived. In her son's character was a marked blending of parental traits. He was thrifty, generous, progressive; one of

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the best lawyers in the land; a reader and collector of books; a close observer of the weather, and father of the Weather Bureau of the United States. He preached against war, but was quick to resent an insult by a chal lenge to a duel, his promptness in this respect being doubtless due to a disposition to show that he could give and take, and asked no quarter of strong men.
Margaret died in 1812, leaving him a month old, and so feeble an infant that it was a miracle he lived, bereft of her bosom and her care. In 1814, Andrew married Matilda, an excellent lady, daughter of Colonel John Lindsay, or "Old Silverfist," whose arm wore a silver cap in lieu of a hand lost in the Revolution.
Making a living was pioneer work for the Stephens family; all its members ^iled, the head setting ener getic example. Little Alex's devotion to his father stimulated his naturally industrious disposition. Like David, he tended sheep; he minded cattle, hoed the garden, gathered vegetables, picked up chips; was millboy and errand-boy; handed threads for his stepmother's loom; nursed her children; at ten, was a champion corn-dropper on his father's farm; at twelve, a regular ploughhand. Of this period he has left this pastoral: *

My duty in childhood was to tend the sheep. One evening, after a snowy day, I went to call them up, fold and feed them. I found all but one -- a ewe. I called for some time but she did not come. The following evening she was still missing. Next morning, my father went with me. He did not see the ewe, and asked how long she had been missing. I told him. "Why did you say nothing of it before?" he asked sternly. I
*In several letters and in the memory of friends and relatives to whom he loved to talk of Ms childhood days. An extended statement of this and much else here given, may be found in Johnston and Brownes "Life of Stephens."

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could say nothing, for the true reason had been fear lest I be sent back in the dark and the snow. I had supposed she would come up in a day or two. We set \ out to search for the ewe, and found her dead, with a lamb she had borne dead beside her. It was a painful thought to me for a long time that "Mottle-face," as we called the ewe, had suffered and died through my neglect. No darkness, cold, or snow could have kept me from hunting her up if I had thought of her being in such a condition.

At fifteen, his schooling, a few months at a time as he could be spared irom work, made a total of about two years in "old field schools." He writes:
I studied with intense interest by the light of blazing pine knots, the only light in our house for readers in those days. My stepmother had a candle in her room by which she sewed, patched, darned, and performed other domestic tasks. By the fire I read long after the whole household was asleep, and that after a hard day's work.

Of a May day in 1826 he said, years after:
Right along here I was ploughing when I was sent for to go to the house. Father was worse. It was the day before he died. Just up there I took out my horse, not dreaming it was for the last time.

In a week his stepmother died. Her children, John, Catherine, and Linton, were sent to her kin; Margaret's, Aaron Grier and Alexander, to their mother's brother, General Aaron Grier, near Raytown, Warren County. In Mr. Stephens's letters is this silhouette of his aunt, Betsy Grier:

Uncle Grier's sister, who lived with him, was a woman

' '

of unusually strong mind, and what in those days might

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INTRODUCTION

have been called well read. She had a good library and made good use of it [his grandfather Grier's legacy].

At his Uncle Grier's, Alexander wrote his first letter.
It was, I think, the second Sunday after I went to our new home upon the breaking up of our little family circle on the death of father and ma. It was to Uncle James Stephens, of Pennsylvania, giving an account of our affliction. Uncle Aaron had gone to meeting. Brother Aaron Grier and I were both writing. We had a table in the middle of the big room. It was some time before we could get a pen apiece. At that time, no such thing as a pen of any kind but a goosequill was ever heard of, in those parts at least. Our inkstand was a little leather-covered vial Uncle Aaron used to take when he went from home; in it was some cotton that held the ink, and the pen was filled by pressing it against the cotton. I was all day at that letter. When Uncle Aaron came home, he looked over both letters, made some corrections, and then we had to write them over again. This, my first letter, was the utterance of the bitterest grief.

A Rev. Mr. Williams, wishing to start a Union Sun day School in Raytown, laid his plans before Miss Grier. Alexander helped to organize this school and taught in it. His renown as a Bible student quickly spread.
Of his first start to Sunday School by his father, he has said:
It was an epoch in my life. Then I first took a taste for reading. I was a little over twelve. All my reading had been limited to the spelling-book and the New Testament. I was put into a class beginning with Genesis. It was no task for me to get the lesson, though I had no other time for it but Sunday mornings and evenings, or at night by light of a pine-knot fire. My

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entrance into this school gave me a taste for reading, history, and chronology.

Comparing this with other epochs in his life:
One of the first that I remember was "dropping the slips" -- a frock such as girls wear -- and putting on breeches, an event giving me entirely new notions of myself. Starting to school was another. But I no more thought of this the morning my father gave me the beautiful new spelling-book with its rich blue cover, and told me to go to school and be a good boy, than I thought several years after that I -was turning another point when he started me with a Bible 'to Powder Creek meeting-house.

After the first year at their uncle's, Aaron worKe^ on
the farm for wages. Alexander, to whom the same
chance was offered, requested to continue his studies at
Locust Grove Academy, where he and Aaron had been
in faithful attendance as farmwork permitted. Of the
close of the 1827 term, he writes:
I well remember my feelings the last evening; how I gathered up all my things -- books, papers, slate-pencils and ink -- put some in my basket and some under my arm, and then bade all good-bye. I reflected, as I walked the homeward path, that this was the last time I should ever tread its beaten track, and the last day I should ever go to school. The next week I was to go to Crawfordville to seek employment in a store. Next Sunday I went to Sunday School. Mr. Mills inquired how I was coming on at the Academy. I told him my term was out, and what I was going to do. He asked how I would like to go to Washington, Ga., and study Latin. I said I would like it very well, but had not the means. He proposed to send me. I said I would consult my uncle and aunt.

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Aunt Betsy advised that the better his education the better he could repay Mr. Mills; she got his clothes ready and started him off. July 28, 1827, he was at Mr. Webster's academy and in Adam's Latin Grammar; August 18, he was reading Historic Sacra in a class of a year's standing. His grammar had been his teacher's; in it he wrote, under "Alexander Hamilton Webster," "Alexander Hamilton Stephens," paying the donor the one tribute in his power by adopting the same middle name. He was troubled when told of a desire to educate him for the ministry: "Whether I should be fit to preach when I should grow up, I could not know. I could give no answer until I had consulted my aunt, my mentor." Mr. Webster and Aunt Betsy decided that he should complete his course under the Presbyterian Education Society, leaving the question of vocation in abeyance. August 6, 1828, he writes from the State University at Athens a letter to Aaron which quaintly reflects his own character and the turmoil of the day over the Tariff:

Dear Brother and Friend: I have now an opportunity of informing you of my situation. Early this morn ing, after you left me, I left Washington for Athens in a crowded stage; but we had a delightful journey, having good company and pleasant weather. About 5, we arrived in Athens. Thursday and Friday, I was engaged in nothing particular but walking about the streets, etc. Saturday my examination came off. After all my pains in reviewing at home, I was not examined on a single thing I had reviewed, but as good luck would have it, I missed none, and was admitted to the Freshman class. [Describes Commencement, etc.] The finest crops I
have seen are between here and Washington. Athens, I discover, is a very popular retreat for great
people, especially about Commencement. To-day there

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is an innumerable number of people, horses, carriages, gigs, sulkies, wagons, cake-and-cider carts, etc. The Tariff is carried to a high degree here. It is sufficient for me to say that some of the people are so incensed against the Tariff that they wear their broadcloth every day and their homespun Sunday. Mr. McDuffie came to Athens last Sunday; he himself was dressed in home spun and his boy [Negro servant] in broadcloth. You can form an idea from the foregoing how the Tariff stands in the minds of the people here. The Colleges were illuminated last night, a candle to every pane of glass. I board at Mrs. Church's, and am much pleased both with Athens and the people. I must conclude, as I have nothing of importance and I have a very sore finger. So fare you well at the present,
And I ever remain your Friend,
A. H. STEPHENS !
To all my friends Who now do live
My compliments
I in love do give.

"Mr. McDuffie" was the Congressman who after ward became Governor of South Carolina. In 1828 the "Tariff of Abominations" was passed and the South, Carolina leading, protested violently. "Mrs. Church" was wife of Dr. Church, the later College President.
"My college days were my happiest days," Mr. Stephens has said. He was a favourite with faculty and students. His room was popular, a place of clean joviality, where wit and repartee and story-telling were cultivated, and refreshments, barring liquor and tobacco, were always on hand: "Boys met there who never met elsewhere -- the most dissipated and the most ascetically pious" -- "most were wealthy." Of his poverty he "seldom thought; no distinctions were there but of merit." In two years, deciding that the ministry was not his voca-

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tion, he repaid the Education Society's advances with funds borrowed from Aaron; and on his patrimony of about $400, completed his course. He. then taught school in Madison for "four months of misery." He missed his college associations. And an experience which should have brought him life's joy brought him but sorrow. He loved. But he kept silent because of his poverty and ill health. So sacred he held this experience that only once or twice in after life did he mention it. All that tradition preserves of the object of his attachment is that she was lovely in person and character; was his pupil, and learned rapidly; and she had "dark eyes and curls and rosy cheeks." Years after, when in Congress, he loved again; the lady, a woman of beauty and distinction, was not indifferent to him; but again he kept silent; a woman's due, he thought, was a husband on whom she could lean and not an invalid whom she must nurse. From Madison he went to Dr. Le Conte's, Liberty County, as tutor to a few select pupils, among them John and Joseph Le Conte, the later eminent scientists. He was again a valued member of a scholarly and cultured circle, and life grew brighter, but he felt that he was not ful filling his mission. Declining $1,500 for another year's stay, he began to study law at Crawfordville. Here he boarded with his stepmother's brother-in-law, the Rev. Williamson Bird, in the house which is now historic as Liberty Hall, this being the name Mr. Stephens gave to the property when he bought it, in 1845, on the death of Mr. Bird.
In his Prison Journal, he describes his admission to the bar. His first essay at "riding the circuit" was to Washington, twenty miles distant. He had no horse.

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With saddlebags on his shoulders, he set out at dusk of a hot July day, walked to his uncle Aaron's, which was halfway; and next day, rode to court, clad in a neat white suit which he had retired to the woods to don just before entering town. At this court he met Robert Toombs, and their lifelong intimacy, second only to that between himself and his brother Linton, began. A partnership in Columbus at $1,500 or more a year was offered him by Swepstpn Jefiries, a leading lawyer, but he preferred Crawfordville and no prospects because nearby was the old homestead, over which he loved to roam, and which, in fulfilment of a cherished purpose, he bought in 1838. From his diary of 1834, the following condensed excerpts are taken:

May 2. -- The other day, as I was coming from my boarding-house in a cheerful brisk walk, I was laid low in the dust by hearing the superintendent of a shoe-shop ask a workman, "Who is that little fellow that walks so fast by here every day?" with the reply in a sarcastic tone, "Why, that's a lawyer!"
May 8. -- Read Jackson's Protest to the Senate. Am pleased with it in general ... I feel interested for him . . . I see vile attempts made to fix infamy upon him. His Proclamation of December, 1832, I con demn. But for one error a man who has done much good for his country should not be abandoned. For where we find a president who will commit only one wrong, we shall find few who will not commit more.
May 12. -- My desires do not stop short of the high est places of distinction. Yet how can I effect my pur pose? Poor and without friends, time passing with
rapid flight and I effecting nothing. May 17.--Brother still with me. Had an intro
duction to a man who addressed me familiarly as "My
son." Such often happens to me. My weight is 94

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pounds, height 67 inches, and my whole appearance that of a youth of eighteen.
May 19.--Inferior Court sat; no business. Star vation to the whole race of lawyers!
May 30. -- Examined some drawings of the ancient statues. With the Gladiator and Venus I am delighted. Pity but some of our fashionable belles would take a lesson from this elegant form of true grace, the Venus; they would change their present disgusting waspish
taste. June 3.--The railroad is the topic of the day.
Railroads, it is true, are novel things. The greatest obstacle is the greatness of the enterprise. The stupen dous thought of seeing steam-engines moving over our hills at the safe and rapid flight of fifteen miles an hour, produces a greater effect in dissuasion of the undertaking than any discovered defect in arguments in its favour.
June 6. -- Read in Southern Recorder (the only paper I take, and devoted to States Rights) a chapter on cats, with which I was pleased.
June 7. -- I believe I shall never be worth anything, and the thought is death to my soul. I am too boyish, unmanful, trifling, simple in my manners and address.
June 15.--Quarterly meeting. Pretty good ser mon.
June 17. --Tried to borrow a horse to go to Uncle
Grier's on business, but was so disappointed as to fill
me with mortification and a due sense of my humble dependence. I had rather (and have often done it)
walk than ask for a horse.
June 20. -- Had a visit from Dr. Foster and prom
ised to deliver an oration on the Fourth of July.
June 25. -- Went to a party. Witnessed the new
dance [the waltz] which disgusted me very much. Oh,
the follies of man!
July 24. -- Engaged for the first time, with a con
tingent fee of $180. May Providence look propitiously
upon me!

INTRODUCTION

13

He lived on $6 a month. In a letter, in after years, he wrote:

No one can imagine how I worked, how I delved, how I laboured over books. Often I spent the whole night over a law-book, and went to bed at dawn. My business increased. My brother Aaron, who taught school in the Asbury settlement visited me often. Our excursions to the old homestead constituted most of my recreation except when I went to see him or Uncle Aaron or old Aunt Betsy.

On the Fourth of July, 1834, hejnade his first political speech, and it was on States Rights. Celebration of the Fourth was Crawfordville's great annual event, with people coming in from the country round and much feasting and barbecuing; a prominent citizen would serve as orator of the day and another as reader of the Declaration of Independence. From 1834 Stephens was in regular demand in one or the other of these capacities.
In his first important .case, he did what he was often to do in Congress on great issues -- carried a minority to victory. Isaac Battle, head of an influential clan, wished to retain possession of his grandchild, daughter of his son's widow who had married an intemperate man. A great crowd came to the trial of the case. After able counsel for the Battles had spoken, a pallid, unknown boy arose and pleaded for the mother the divine right of motherhood. A Battle reported next day: "When that little fellow began to argue and the judges fell to crying, I knew Isaac would have to give up Martha Ann." His practice grew rapidly. So much business came to him that he called Aaron Grier to his aid. When he took a Northern tour in 1838, he left his affairs in the hands of Toombs and Aaron. On this tour, he saw Fort Warren

14

INTRODUCTION

for the first time on May 25, the day on which he was to see it in 1865 as a prisoner. This was his second Northern trip; it included a visit to his father's brother James, in Pennsylvania, as had the first in 1835, of which an amusing incident has been preserved. At the family dinner, Uncle James, a worthy farmer, asked, "What business do you follow, Alex?" "I am a lawyer, Uncle." An ominous silence fell. Presently Uncle James asked huskily, "Alex, don't you have to tell lies?"
In 1835 Mr. Stephens had his first interview with a President of the United States. He found Andrew Jackson in dressing-gown and slippers, a silver pipe at his side, before a big fire in the White House. "What's the news from Georgia?" asked Old Hickory. Stephens told of the outbreak of the Creek Indians; the stage he boarded at Washington, Ga., was the only one of a train of coaches which had escaped capture with massacre of all passengers between Montgomery and Columbus. "I have a letter by the lower route telling something of this," said Jackson. "In God's name, where's Howard ?" "I don't know. As Major Howard's are Georgia forces under control of the Georgia Legislature, there may be some question of jurisdiction"--" Jurisdiction by the Eter nal! when the United States Mail is robbed and citizens murdered!" cried Old Hickory, springing to his feet. He kept Stephens for over an hour. In 1838, Mr. Stephens saw Congress in session; as he jotted down in a little note-book, he saw "Wise and Clay; a dull day; Webster, sullen, worn out, caged lion; Benton, arrogant, disgusting manner." He "walked way out on the com mons N. W., where Washington will be in days to come." Baltimore was "first city going North that is lighted with gas"; and where he saw white servants. In Phila-

.,, INTRODUCTION

15"

delphia at night in the Merchants' Hotel: "Startled in

my room by cry of fire -- mob set fire to Philadelphia

or Pennsylvania Hall for its abolitionism."

Answering inquiries from a friend, Mr. Stephens, in

1871, gave some account of his political life to 1859,

which is reproduced because of its spontaneity and

because, as his own, it is authoritative, though it is by no

means a complete statement:

\I*

I was brought up a Jeffersonian Democrat of the strictest sect -- of the Crawford and Troup school in Georgia. All Georgians belonged to that school when I was a boy. The party divisions of the State, the Troup men and Clarke men, all supported Crawford for Presi dent in 1824, though Clarke was but lukewarm because Crawford was Troup's great leader; they barely ran no opposition; they sympathized in that contest with Mr. Calhoun, then becoming prominent, and between whom and Mr. Crawford no very kind feelings existed, the two being rivals in the same party.
My first vote w'as given- in 1833, after the split on Nullification. The Troup-Crawford wing did not favour Nullification: they organized on a platform which they proclaimed as the true States Rights principles; while opposing Nullification as taught in South Carolina, they also opposed the doctrines of General Jackson's famous Proclamation; they held the right of Secession, but repudiated Nullification as a proper or peaceful remedy for a difference between a State and the United States Government. William H. Crawford was Presi dent of the organizing committee. Great numbers of the old Crawford-Troup-Jefferson party went with the Nullifiers. By these means, the old party in Georgia became demoralized. John Forsyth, then in the United States -Senate, as a Troup-Crawford man, abandoned both wings. That is, he not only repudiated Nullification but also the States Rights doctrine announced by Craw-

16

INTRODUCTION

ford and Troup with their adherents. He organized what was called the Union party of the State, and took off enough of the old Crawford-Troup men to make with the Clarke men a majority, and for several years this Union-Jackson party, so-called, governed the State. In 1833, Wilson Lumpkin was their nominee for Governor, and the States Rights nominee was Major Joel Crawford (relative of W. H.). In this election, my first vote was given, and for Crawford.
In 1836, I was elected to the Legislature as a States Rights man. My county, Taliaferro, had been under the lead of Nullifiers; though they acted with the States Rights party in preference to the Forsyth party, they did not like to support one who did not accept the doc trine of Nullification -- not even William H. Crawford and George M. Troup, their old leaders. I had bitter opposition in my first campaign because I was against Nullification. In 1836, the States Rights party in Georgia carried the electoral vote for President, casting it for Hugh L. White, of Tennessee. The Forsyth-UnionJackson party ran Van Buren and were defeated in the State. In 1839, after the Harrisburg Convention nom inated Harrison, I favoured the nomination by the States Rights party in Georgia of George M. Troup. A reso lution to that effect was passed by the December Conven tion at Milledgeville. In the summer of 1840, when the Harrison fever raged high -- when the storm was at its topmost pitch of "Tippecanoe and Tyler too!" the Georgia leaders became infected; another convention was held; Judge Berrien was the leading spirit; Troup's name was taken down and Harrison's run up.
I was young; and as it was shown that Harrison was a Jefferson Democrat, and as I felt it to be my duty to beat the corruptionists in power under Van Buren, I "went with my folks" and voted for Harrison. Whig had not then been introduced into Georgia as a party name. In 1842 the States Rights party in convention to nominate candidates for Congress, under the lead of

INTRODUCTION"

17

Richard Henry Wilde, assumed the name of Whig. Their ticket was defeated. In the Legislature of 1842 I, being in the Senate, made a long report on Federal relations; it became the Whig platform in Georgia. A vacancy, occurred in the Congressional delegation elected as Democrats so-called the year before; in the summer of 1843,1 was nominated to fill that vacancy by the Whigs, so-called on the principles of the report of 1842, and was elected by about 3,000 majc: '*",
I took my seat in the Jtiouse of Representatives, December, 1843. I stood nominally "as a Whig, yet held few sentiments in common with the national party: was opposed to the protection policy; to the policy of re ceiving abolition petitions in Congress and to the Congres sional jurisdiction in any form of the slavery question. I favoured the incorporation of Texas into the Union; not under the Tyler treaty -- that I opposed -- but under joint resolution for her admission as a State. This well-nigh severed my connection even in name with the Whig party at Washington as well as in Georgia. Judge Berrien had become thoroughly identified with Mr. Clay and the Whig party throughout the country, not only on the Protective Tariff but in opposition to Texan annexation. Indeed, he went further than Clay on the latter question.
I omitted to state at the right place that the Whig party of Georgia supported Clay for the Presidency in 1844, though differing widely with him on many questions. For instance, after Clay's Raleigh letter opposing annex ation, our State Convention passed resolutions favouring that measure. These resolutions were drawn up by me in Washington and sent down to be adopted, as they were, by the State Convention nominating electoral candidates. I, however, gave Mr. Clay a warm support. I had urged him not to publish that anti-Texas Raleigh letter; he told me, as he was passing through the State, that he intended to come out with such a letter. I urged him not to. I believe he was influenced by con-

i8

INTRODUCTION

siderations of policy. I knew from conversations with him that he was really in favour of the admission of Texas if it could be done without endangering the Union, and I believed that it would be a leading object of his administration, if elected, to bring Texas in without violent agitation. Texas was brought in as she was by my stand in the House. I got Milton Brown, of Tennes see, an old Member, and six or seven so-called Southern Whigs to stand with me. We, as the House was con stituted, held the balance of power, and compelled the Democratic side so-called to come to our terms. Mr. Polk I regarded as a mere demagogue and a very bad man. He was elected by a political fraud on the people of Pennsylvania in the matter of his views on the Tariff; to save himself on that point, he resolved to get into a war with Mexico. The Texas question afforded oppor tunity. His course in relation to that war was what threw me into the ranks of the Whigs, the opposition. I denounced the war and its inauguration. I took the lead in this method of treating it in the House.
My first conversation with Mr. Calhoun was a day or two after my first speech on the war; in May, I think, 1846. It occurred in this way. Mr. Burt, of South Carolina, Member of the House and relative by marriage of Mr. Calhoun, said Mr. Calhoun had asked him to bring me to see him if agreeable to me; that he wanted to know me. We went. Mr. Calhoun stated that he had read my speech, was pleased with it, and wished to express his gratification; then he entered into a long conversation, in his peculiar and earnest style, on the whole subject; said he concurred with me fully in every view presented, but could say nothing then in the Senate, owing to his complications with the administration on the Oregon question; that he was exceedingly anxious to get that question settled without war with England; if he should denounce the administration as it ought to be denounced for its policy in bringing on the Mexican War, he would lose his influence with them on Oregon;

INTRODUCTION

19

I

duty required silence for the present; but as soon as the

i

controversy with England was ended, he should take

j.

the same position on Mexico in the Senate that I had

taken in the House.

This I mention simply as an incident of my first acquain

tance with Calhoun. Our conversation was full and

;

free, but understood to be a matter, on his side, not to

>

be talked of. He did, afterward in the Senate, follow

!

the line he told me he'would; it was after the Oregon

'

question was settled, in February, I think, 1847. The

;;

only difference then betwe ns was that he insisted that

we ought to take a slip of country as indemnity, which

(

seemed strange, to me after his declaration in the same

|;

grand speech that "Mexico is the forbidden fruit.".

I

My position on the mode of admission of Texas con-

|

trolled that matter. This was during the second session

|

of my first Congress. My action in the next Congress

,'

controlled the course the Mexican War finally took.

j!

The Whig party, in the Congress beginning 4th March,

jj

1845, and ending 4th March, 1847, was in a minority

lj

of about 70. This was the Congress that recognized

|

the war as the act of Mexico -- a shameful lie! The

j!'

Whigs, after war began, were all at sea. Winthrop,

$

Joe Ingersoll, and the like knew not what to do; they

'j

were timid and fearful. No one, they would say, can

!

oppose the war; the fate of all who opposed the War of

i

1812 was before their eyes; Crittenden in the Senate

'

was of the same mind. Now, at this stage of the case

f'l

(when the War party, Cass at their head in the Senate,

lj

was ready to swallow all Mexico, and really intended to

|

do it, I verily believe), I drew up and submitted to

|

our old leaders in the House, especially Winthrop and

Ingersoll, a resolution which should properly present

the position of the Whigs on the war. I told them it

was essential in elections for the next Congress, to go

before the country on a well-defined policy, and that

that policy must be a true and patriotic one or we would

be utterly defeated. It was embraced, I thought, in

20

INTRODUCTION

the resolutions. Ingersoll and Winthrop, as well as every other to whom I submitted it, not even excepting my colleague, Mr. Toombs, disapproved the policy of offering it; it would put us before the people as opposed to the vindication of the rights and honour of the country. I knew there was no hope of getting it in to be acted on but upon a motion to suspend the rules for its introduction; a vote could be had on that question and in this way it could be got before the House. I determined to offer it anyway, and did. At first, several prominent, aspiring, expediency Whigs dodged it, but when they saw that Cobb, of Georgia, a leading man on the other side, voted to suspend the rules for its introduction, they crawled out, like chickens that had been hiding in a bush from a hawk, and voted the same way. I finally got every, or nearly every, Whig vote in the House and a few Demo crats, Cobb at the head. Cobb was an exceedingly quick and shrewd man; he saw the power in the resolution and foresaw its effect upon the public. The resolution became, as I intended it to be, the national Whig plat form so far as the war was concerned. Upon it a major ity was returned to the House in the face of a most brilliant war; and that majority by one vote arrested the war. It was all done on high and patriotic principles and on no base demagogical subterfuge.
The administration was greatly embarrassed by the change in the character of the House. Winthrop was Speaker, and the committees were all different from what they had been. Still, Mr. Polk attempted, by browbeating and charging us with disloyalty and with "giving aid and comfort to the enemy," to scare our weak-kneed into submission. Such treatment, I knew, had to be met with boldness and defiance. Hence, in February, 1848, while many Whigs were trembling in their shoes, the War party introduced for popular effect a resolution tendering the thanks of Congress to General Twiggs (I believe it was) for gallantry at Cerro Gordo. I joined in giving all the praise set forth to that brave

INTRODUCTION

' 21

officer and his men, but wished the. resolution amended so as to read, "in a war unconstitutionally begun." When the time for offering the amendment came, Winthrop gave the floor to Aslimun, of Massachusetts, who offered it. A great sensation ensued. The War party was elated, they looked on triumph as certain; they did not think we would dare vote for it. Our weak-kneed trembled; many got up and walked out; I rallied all I could, presented an undauir " front, urged every one I could find to stand up square to the truth. The vote at first was close; but when the hidden chickens under the brush in the outside alleys saw that their votes would carry it, enough came up and voted "Aye" to pass it.
The War men looked aghast! That vote of the House -- that expression of condemnation by a majority of the impeaching branch of the Government -- ended the war, broke its backbone. Polk saw what was coming. In a few days, Trist was dispatched to Mexico to make the best terms of peace he could. This is the real origin of the celebrated "Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo."
The resolution thus amended was passed. The War party dropped it. John Quincy Adams died while it was pending. The House adjourned and the resolution was not again taken up. But that vote had done its work, as I knew it would when the shaft was sent.
For your question about my course toward General Taylor. It was I -- no egotism in telling you the simple truth -- who made him President. Soon after the first battles of the war at Resaca and Palo Alto, I urged on the anti-War party that Taylor was our man; I got his nom ination in a Whig convention in Georgia in 1847. At the beginning of Congress in December, I was mainly instrumental in getting up a Taylor Club in Congress; it was known as the Young Indians. For months there were but seven of us: Truman Smith of Connecticut, Abra ham Lincoln of Illinois, William Ballard Preston, Thomas S. Flournoy and John S. Pendleton, of Virginia, Toombs and myself of Georgia. Others came in afterward --

22

INTRODUCTION

Cabell of Florida, Hilliard of Alabama, and some whose names I forget. It was confined to the House. Mr. Crittenden, of the Senate, fully concurred with us. While strongly attached to Mr. Clay personally, he did not think Clay could be elected. We opened an extensive correspondence and put the ball in motion. The con test between the Clay Whigs and the Taylor men for the nomination in Philadelphia was bitter and fierce. Many things I could tell which would entertain you, had I time. One incident I may mention -- how I got a Taylor battery planted in New York City.
During the winter of 1847-48, we could get no hearing in New York, though we had some zealous men co5perating with us there, General Draper and others; and we had no Taylor paper there. Colonel Humphrey Mar shall, of Buena Vista fame, had attempted to speak there for Taylor, but the roughs of the Whig party broke up all Taylor meetings. I saw that this must be changed; we must get a foothold by some means in the Metropolis. I devised a programme, choosing Toombs for speaker. Samuel J. Anderson, a clerk in the House and a very shrewd man whom I knew well, knew Isaiah Rhynders, captain among roughs and shoulder-hitters in New York -- famous as the head of the Corbin [ ? ] Club in the Clay-Polk contest of 1844; I knew he was sore at the manner in which he had been treated by the Polk admin istration and was in sympathy with the Taylor move ment.
Now I told Toombs we must have a successful hearing in New York, and that he was the man to face any sort of crowd. My plan was for him to take Anderson with him; Anderson was to hunt up Rhynders (I believe that's the spelling) and bring him to Toombs. Toombs should tell Rhynders what he wanted -- a fair and uninterrupted hearing from a New York audience in behalf of Taylor; and to ask Rhynders if he could see that he, Toombs, got it, and at what cost. I told him to pay Rhynders just what he would ask. The pro-

INTRODUCTION

23

gramme was carried out. Toombs and Anderson went on; Rhynders met Toombs atvthe A'stor House, entered cheerfully into the engagement, and said it would cost $200: it would require that to secure the necessary force. Toombs closed with him. Rhynders said it would fa cilitate,his work if Toombs would meet some of his "boyhoys" at a certain noted saloon the evening before the speech and get acquainted with them. Toombs, who was able to make himself perfV^v at home in such a crowd, went at the appointed hou- and met the captain with his subalterns, Bill Ford, Sullivan, and other noted boxers. Nothing passed but such agreeable chat as Toombs knew how- to give in his peculiar .style, and the glass to his company. Rhynders, on parting, told Toombs it was all right; but that he must not get flurried or off his feet at any outburst that might happen at first; there might be some disorder at the start, but that he, Rhynders, would down it all right.
The meeting was duly announced. The hour arrived; a large audience assembled; the hall was brilliantly lighted. The-most prominent Taylor men in the city presided; they knew nothing of Toombs's arrangement with Rhyn ders and were very uneasy. One of them introduced the orator of the evening. No sooner had Toombs with his fine and manly presence stepped forward and uttered the words, "Fellow citizens of New York--" than a yell rose from various parts of the house: "Slave-holder!" Slave-holder!" Toombs remained quiet and composed for a moment, and began again. Another yell went up: "Hurrah for Clay! Hurrah for Clay!" Toombs, in imperturbable temper, not seeming to be excited in the least, again commenced; again yells arose. Still unmoved, he began, when on repetition of the cries, "Slave-holder!" and the like, there was the greatest row you ever saw. "Put him out!" rang from one side of the hall to the other, and everywhere.a stalwart arm was seen pitching some fellow out. Rhynders's men were at work. Some who were being pitched out exclaimed: "I made no noise!"

24

INTRODUCTION

"You have chalk on your back!" was the reply; "and you've got to go."
In two minutes the hall was cleared of some forty "chalk-backs." Rhynders's plan, as he afterward told Toombs, had been to scatter his men through the audience; they were quietly to mark the backs of all who made inter ruptions; on the order, "Put them out!" they were to seize and put out by force all chalk-backs. He and they knew pretty well beforehand who were the brawlers sent to break up the meeting; but, to make certain, his plan was first to spot them. The hall was soon cleared of rowdies. The audience was quiet and orderly while Toombs gave them one of his masterly popular harangues. Before the conclusion, the wildest enthusiasm prevailed; loud shouts of applause went up; and then came "three cheers for old Zach!" given with a vim as Toombs took his seat. Our victory was complete; we had a foothold in New York; our battery in that stronghold of the enemy was well served afterward and did most effective work. Great events often turn on small ones. Now, as an active party in all these scenes, I tell you that that one little thing of getting a successful hearing in New York had powerful results.
This has taken up too much time for me to go on with other incidents. If I live to write a book, as I wish, on "Congressional Reminiscences," I may give more such incidents. Of course what I now write is only to afford you light on the points on which you question me. You will understand that in all I did, I was moved by a motive far higher than my own advantage or distinction. I have generally most cheerfully permitted others to reap the honours accruing from any line of policy I suggested.
When Taylor was elected, he sent for me immediately on his reaching Washington. Crittenden, then Gov ernor of Kentucky, had advised him to consult me. Taylor asked me and Toombs to go into his Cabinet. I advised against this, and presented the names of George W. Crawford, of Georgia, and William Ballard Preston,

INTRODUCTION

25

of Virginia. The other names for Cabinet positions were submitted to me. I did not like Clayton for Sec tary of State; Collamer for Postmaster General I approved; Meredith, of Pennsylvania, I knew nothing about; Reverdy Johnson for Attorney General, I thought well of.
Just-at this time the seed of what ruined Taylor's administration was sowed in an alliance with William H. Seward, head of the Abolition party in New York. The saddest reflection for me was that this was effected through Preston. Preston was an able and true man; I had every confidence in him. He was a bold and active "Young Indian." He was the man who carried the Virginia Whigs against Botts. Somehow, strangely enough too, Seward, by some sort of blandishment, came it over hirn. Seward gave the strongest pledges that he, in the Senate, would drop the slavery agitation and give Taylor's administration a cordial support on a broad continental basis without stirring up sectional animosities. These promises were relied on by Preston, who looked on Seward as a great leader. Seward was put virtually in possession of the power of distributing the entire Federal patronage in New York. This was the state of things when I left Washington, March, 1849. I was not pleased, for I had no confidence in Seward.
When the new Congress assembled in December, 1849, I found that Seward as a charmer had complete control of Preston. He had got Webb, through whom his pledges had been given, sent as minister abroad. He had got Preston to believe that the Northern Whigs must hold on to their doctrine of Congressional exclu sion of slavery from the Territories; that it would destroy them to abandon it; but the vexed question could be got rid of by what was known as the administration policy -- non-action. I knew he was not.sincere in this and that he only wanted Preston not to make war on the Wilmot Proviso. It was at the opening of this Congress that, as a touchstone of party principle, I insisted that the Whig or administration caucus, in nominating a candidate

26

INTRODUCTION

for Speaker, should define its position. Toombs and myself and six or seven other Southern Whigs so-called concurred in that view. The resolution (you can see more about it in Vol. II of my "War Between the States") was drawn up in my room and Toombs took charge of it. When the caucus met, he offered it. It embraced the idea that Congress ought not to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia nor prohibit it in the Territories. This resolution was laid on the table in the caucus on motion of Stanley of North Carolina. Toombs and myself and six or seven other Whigs so-called withdrew. That was the last time I ever met a Whig caucus so-called in Congress. Winthrop was again nominated for Speaker, but lost his election by defection of the Southern Whigs.
The lead I took in the adjustment measures of 1850 will be seen in Vol. II of "War Between the States." I controlled that settlement; that is, without the part I took at the time, it would never have been made. The rupture between me and Preston became open, and very painful to me. Taylor, under Preston's advice, still adhered to his non-action policy, while Seward was working with vim, just as he did long afterward with President Johnson, seeming to be with him but under mining him in all he did. I told Johnson of this, in 1866, but he no more heeded me than Taylor did. Taylor died in July, 1850, while all was at sea on the adjustment. A few days before his attack, I had a long and earnest interview with him and urged him to change his policy, which was at that time to send troops to Santa Fe, Texas, and take Federal occupation of territory against the claim of Texas -- Seward's game, as I believed. I went to see Preston, Toombs with me. Preston was not at home; we met in front of the Treasury Building; we had a long talk; Toombs said little, that little on my side. I told Preston that if troops were ordered to Santa Fe, the President would be impeached. "Who will impeach him?" asked he. "I will if nobody else does," I replied. We turned and parted. That was our last interview

INTRODUCTION

27

until many years after, when, on other questions, we met cordially; and at the time of his death, we were again warm friends. The day after our street interview, there appeared a card from me in the National Intelligencer, which created a sensation in Washington; you will find it, if you -see fit to look for it, in the issue on or about the Fourth.
With Taylor's death, Fillmore came in; a change took place in the Cabinet. Crawford had determined to resign if the order for marching the troops had been given. On 8th August, I think, I made a speech that did more than any other one speech that session, I think, to carry the famous adjustment measures; for it brought the Northern Wilmot Proviso men -- Fillmore Whigs, I mean -- to the conclusion that the Proviso must be abandoned. I was called home; I paired with a Free Soiler from Connecticut who was also called away, and I did not get back until the measure was passed. After this, I came home and stumped Georgia -- travelled 3,000 miles by actual count -- explaining the principles of the settlement and advising the people to accept them and remain in the Union under them. Our Legislature had called a Sovereign Convention of the People to assem ble in case California should be admitted. I was against secession for that cause. Toombs and Cobb were both with me in this. The Whig Convention elected in the State was largely in favour of the settlement. I was in that Convention and on the Committee that drafted the celebrated Georgia Platform of 1850; these resolutions were on all turning points my work, though I did not figure before the public in them.
After that Convention, I returned to Washington, and gave Fillmore's administration my support. Before that Convention, I had gone to Washington to be present at the opening of Congress and especially to see Fillmore's message before it was delivered. I got an opportunity of seeing it through Mr. Crittenden, then in the Cabinet. On reading the latter part -- the message was then in

28

INTRODUCTION

print; it was the Saturday night before Congress met -- I did not like the conclusion, which spoke of some modification to be made in the adjustment measures. I told Mr. Crittenden that Mr. Fillmore ought to treat the settlement as final and to use the expression Mr. Webster had applied in a published letter in which he spoke of the measures as a settlement "in principle and in substance" of the subjects embraced in them. On my urgent entreaty, Mr. Crittenden took the message to Fillmore with the phraseology I had suggested sub stituted, and the change was made. This is how that important part of his message of December, 1850, came to be as it is.
I wanted Webster to be the candidate of the Consti tutional Union party for 1852. The part I took in the Whig platform of that year, you will see in Vol. II. I did not, however, after 1849, meet a Whig caucus myself. I intended to be free of party trammels. If Scott, with whom I was on the most intimate terms of friendship, had endorsed that platform, I would have supported him. This he knew by direct message from me. When he refused to do it, I came out in a card in the National Intelligencer, signed by several others, giving my reasons for not voting for him. The result was as I expected. Pierce was elected. I acted with no party or parties organizing his administration. But on the assembling of the new Congress in 1855, I told Howell Cobb and J. Glancey Jones if they would in caucus adopt a resolu tion I would draw up, I would go in the House next day and not only vote for their nominee for Speaker but cooperate thoroughly with their party in the line of policy to be indicated in that resolution. This was in my room Sunday night; Congress was to meet next day. They asked for the resolution; I drew it up and handed it to them. They approved it; it went to the caucus and J. Glancey Jones offered it. It was passed unanimously. Upon that resolution, the party was organized. It was carried to Cincinnati and became part of the platform

INTRODUCTION

29

on which Buchanan was elected. Most of Buchanan's measures I supported; many I opposed. I deeply deplored his quarrel with Douglas. When I could not get him to abandon it, I quit Congress forever. As I told him in our last interview, if he persisted in his course a burst-up at Charleston [where the National Democratic Convention was to be held] would be inevitable; with that, war would come, the end of which I could not foresee, and as I did not care to be in at the death, I should retire. I told him in plain words that his policy would lead to disruption of the -Government: "It will
be as certain," I said, "as that you would break your neck if you should jump out of that window"; we were sitting by a window. He was inflexible. I wrote home saying I would not be a candidate for Congress again. I retired for good. Before leaving, I brought Oregon into the Union as a State. This was my last work in Congress. But for me, I am sure the bill for her admis
sion would not have passed that term. I have given -- in a brief and hurried way and as I recollect it -- the personal data you asked for. This letter may sound egotistical to those who do not know me personally. It is not intended for anybody but you.
Yours truly, ALEXANDER H. STEPHENS.

Some elaboration of the ground gone over in this fragmentary statement is essential to anything like a rounded view of Mr. Stephens's political life to 1859. Mr. Stephens mentions his minority positions on nullification and secession which his political opponents used against him in his race for the legislature in 1836. They also charged him with abolitionism because he opposed vigilance committees as proper tribunals for handling abolition agents sent South to incite Negroes to insurrection. He mentions framing the Whig platform in 1842. His legislative services extended far beyond

30

INTRODUCTION

this, and embraced matters of present-day value. His maiden speech in the legislature saved the measure for building the State Road, a project much ridi culed, railroads being then in the early experimental stage. The bill was nearly lost when he arose, in appearance an invalid boy with black eyes gleaming from an unearthly white face, and proved by indis putable data and argument the value and practic ability of the road. His support saved the charter for the Macon Female College, the first in the world to confer on women the usual college degrees, and an enter prise, like the railroad, much ridiculed. He championed the cause of his Alma Mater> the State University, then in straits, and, as Chairman of the Committee on Edu cation, advanced in many ways the cause of learning.
His first speech in Congress, against his own right to a seat, declared his lifelong creed that "the permanency of our institutions can only be preserved by confining the action of the State and Federal Governments each to its own proper sphere." He had been elected before Georgia's adoption of the district system as ordered by Congress. The right of Congress so to order being questioned, he upheld it on constitutional grounds. His political opponents at the South recited the scandal of how John Quincy Adams shook hands with him after the speech. Adams, who was not much given to listen ing to speeches, really paid the young Georgian marked attention. Till his death, Mr. Stephens preserved a poem written to him in Adams's cramped hand; the last stanza ran:
As strangers in this hall we met; But now with one united heart,
Whate'er of life awaits us yet, In cordial friendship let us part.

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From this first speech in Congress to his last before the war, his straight line of endeavour was to preserve the Union under the Constitution. His opposition to Texan annexation was not pleasing to the South, but he was unwilling to receive Texas unless her slavery limits were first defined; as they were finally, and on his own plan based on the Missouri Compromise. His Texas speech,* the first to bring him into national prominence, contained the oft-quoted sentences which revived against him at the South the charges of abolitionism while at the North he was accused of labouring for slavery extension:

My reason for wishing it [the slavery limit] settled in the beginning, I do not hesitate to make known. I fear the excitement growing out of the agitation hereafter may endanger the harmony and even existence
of our present Union. ... I am no defender of slavery in the abstract. I would rejoice to see all
the sons of Adam's family in the enjoyment of those rights set forth in the Declaration of Independence as natural and inalienable, if a stern necessity, bearing the impress of the Creator, did not in some cases prevent.

The right of the Union to "acquire territory" and the wisdom of doing so were questioned. He declared for expansion but against imperialism:

This [annexation] is an important step in settling the principle of our future extension. We are reminded of the growth of the Roman Empire which fell of its own weight; and of England, who is hardly able to keep together her extensive parts. Rome extended her dominions by conquest, she compelled provinces to bear the yoke; England extends hers upon the principle of colonization; her distant dependencies are subject to
* For the full text of the Texas speech, from which condensed excerpts are here made, see Cleveland's "Letters and Speeches oi Stephens," 280-302.

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INTRODUCTION

her laws but are deprived of the rights of representation. With us, a new system has commenced, characteristic of the age. It is the system of a Republic formed by the union of separate independent States, yielding so much of their sovereign powers as are necessary for national and foreign purposes, and retaining all others for local and domestic objects. Who shall undertake to say how far this system may not go ?

He said, speaking of Mexican territory: *
No principle is more dangerous than that of com pelling other people to adopt our form of government. It is not only wrong in itself, but contrary to the whole spirit and genius of the liberty we enjoy.

Asking if the Mexican war was waged for conquest:
If so, I protest ... I am no enemy to the extension of our domain. I trust the day is coming and is not far distant when the whole continent will be ours. That this is our ultimate destiny I believe, but it is not to be accomplished by the sword. We can only properly enlarge by voluntary accessions.

In his denunciation of Folk's abuse of power, we see the same jealous regard for the Constitution and the public rights which later inspired his arraignment of Davis and Lincoln for their usurpations:
Congress alone can constitutionally draw the sword. The President can not. The war was brought upon us while Congress was in session without our knowl edge. The new and strange doctrine is put forth that Congress has nothing to do with the conduct of the war; that the President is entitled to its uncontrolled manage-
* For full text of the Mexican War speeches from which these condensed excerpts are made, see Clevelands "Letters and Speeches of Stephens," 302-334.

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ment; that we can do nothing but vote men and money to whatever extent his folly and caprice may dictate. Neighbouring States may be subjugated, extensive terri tories annexed, provincial governments erected, the rights of conscience violated, and the oath of allegiance administered at the point of the bayonet .' . . and the Representatives of the people are to say nothing against these extraordinary outrages upon the fixed principles of their Government. For a very little further inter ference with discussion, Charles X. of France lost his crown, and for a very little greater stretch of royal pre rogative, Charles I, of England lost his head. By reflecting on these examples, our Executive, without entertaining apprehensions of a fate similar to either, may yet learn some profitable lessons.

The description in this of the treatment of a conquered
people in 1847 fits the case of the South during recon
struction with an aptness calling for remark. Empha
sizing the peril of receiving Mexican territory without
settling its slavery limits, Stephens said:
Who can sit here and listen to the debates and look unmoved on the prospect before us? . . . They show a fixed determination on the part of the North, which is now in the majority in this House and ever will be hereafter, that, if territory is acquired, the insti tutions of the South shall be forever excluded from its limits. What is to be the result? Will the South sub mit? Will the North yield? Or, shall these two great sections be arrayed against each other? If Mexico, "the forbidden fruit," is to be seized at every hazard, I fear that those who control public affairs, in their eager pursuit after the unenviable distinction of despoiling a sister republic, will have the still less enviable glory of looking back upon the shattered and broken fragments of their own confederacy.

E MERTON COULTER

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INTRODUCTION

The Mexican War resolutions, which were his master piece, offered in Congress when the war was at its height and national pride drunk with conquest, were so adroitly framed that the War party could vote neither for nor against them with safety, and refusal to vote at all placed them before the people as unable to say that the war "is not waged with a view to conquest or the dismem berment" of Mexico and that "it is the desire of the United States that hostilities should be terminated upon terms honourable to both parties." In making this issue, he relied upon the wisdom and conscience of the people; he was always ready to trust to that. His course led to the defeat of the War party at the polls and the election of a Whig President and Congress.
In his mention of making Zachary Taylor President, he neglects the "Allison Letter," the Whig platform, on which Taylor was elected. It was composed at the Rush House by Stephens, Toombs, and Crittenden, and despatched to Taylor at Baton Rouge; Taylor published it as a supplement, prepared on more mature reflection, to a letter to Captain Allison in which he had already avowed his position. Stephens's choice of Taylor was based on that great soldier's popularity. His disap pointment in Taylor's administration caused him to declare that measures, not men or party, should thence forth control his course; and he held to this when he refused to support Winfield Scott in 1852, though his friendship for Scott was as sincere and his appreci ation of Scott's public services as great as in 1847, when he lent his effective exertions to Scott's investiture with the rank of lieutenant-general.
The "Three-million Bill," appropriating the first purchase-money for Mexican territory, passed in spite

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35

of his opposition. California, Utah, and New Mexico were acquired without settlement of their slavery limits, the South, eager for domain, voting with the North when the bill was stripped of the Wilmot Proviso. , And now began the Union's death-struggle in the conflict between the sections over slavery in these lands. "It is the beginning of the end of the Union," he wrote.
For defeating the Clayton Compromise, an adjust ment measure of 1848, he received doubtful thanks from Southern associates .who clung to the belief that this measure was favourable to their section. While cam paigning Georgia that fall he nearly paid for his course with his life. He was told that his friend, Judge Cone, had denounced him therefor as a traitor. Stephens said he could not believe this of Cone, but would slap Cone if Cone admitted it. In an amicable conversation with Stephens, Cone repudiated the remark reported of him; Stephens then told Cone what he himself had said, stating it in a way- to rob the words of offense; they parted with mutual good feeling. But Cone's political foes taunted him with cowardice, until Cone, in heat and worry, wrote Stephens a demand for retrac tion. Stephens's amiable reply had not reached Cone before the two men met on the piazza of the Atlanta Hotel, and a personal encounter was precipitated by Cone's calling Stephens "traitor" and getting slapped in return. Cone, large and muscular, slashed at Stephens with a dirk-knife, bore him down, held the knife over his bare throat, shouting: "Retract! or I will cut your d--d throat!" "Never! Cut!" cried Stephens, catching the descending blade in his naked hand. As Cone was wrenching the knife away, the men were

36

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separated and Stephens was borne off with many wounds in his body, a severed artery, and his right hand so muti lated that he was never again able to write plainly. Cone's distress was deep; Stephens refused to prose cute him; and friendship was renewed. Stephens's next public appearance was at the head of a Taylor procession in a carriage drawn by men, while the people shouted, "Thank God for little Alex!" However the politicians might berate him, the people loved him from first to last.
He was Clay's coadjutor in securing the Compromise of 1850, which saved the Union then. That it carried its vital principle, non-intervention by Congress with slavery in the Territories, each Territory deciding for herself in framing her State constitution, was chiefly due to Stephens. In one of the most dramatic moments ever felt in the Senate, Webster cast his vote for non intervention. Stephens's effort to hold both sections to it thereafter was no more inspired by a desire to per petuate slavery than was Webster's vote; both desired to save the Union. The manifesto of 1851, signed by Clay and forty or more leading men from both Houses and irrespective of party, declaring for non-intervention as a final settlement of slavery agitation in Congress, was drawn up by Stephens. With Webster, he incor porated the same principle in the Whig platform of 1852. The great New Englander's "Union Speech," which. closed Faneuil Hall against him, and his speech on the same line in the streets of Boston, all inspired, as Stephens felt, by selfless desire to save the Union, enshrined him in the Georgian's regard. Webster was Stephens's ideal statesman and perfect patriot. The tragedy of Web ster's rejection by the Whigs in 1852 he felt keenly,

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and when he cast his vote for President, it was for Web ster though Webster was dead. The card which he mentions as published by himself in the National Intel ligencer, in 1852, is known in history as the card of the Whig leaders which disrupted the Whig party, defeated Scott and elected Pierce. The "Georgia Platform of 1850," his work, gave Georgia her title of "Union State oi the South," and might have given her that of "Empire State," for by it she led sister States into line.
As Douglas's coadjutor, he sustained in the KansasNebraska Bill of 1854 the settlement of 1850, to which "in principle and substance" both great parties stood pledged. He carried that bill through the House by a parliamentary manoeuvre a& brilliant and audacious as has ever been executed, and more than a match for that by which in 1850 he killed Doty's California resolution and saved the Compromise. The declaration in the bill that the Missouri restriction was void, drew from the abolitionists, the Sumner-Chase manifesto, call ing the Missouri Compromise a "sacred pledge," and "solemn compact"; 3,000 New England clergymen, "assuming to speak in the name of Almighty God," as Mr. Stephens said, "joined in the chorus." His speeches on Kansas are clear history, showing, by analysis of the votes of the House, that the North in Congress had repeatedly repudiated the Missouri Compromise and so forced a new compromise or disunion. They reflect his own views that Congressional exclusion of slavery from the Territories, purchased with the blood and money of all the States, was unconstitutional, and that it was the virtual exclusion of the white Southerner, who, to settle in the common domain, must sell or free his slaves, however contrary either course might be to his interest

38

INTRODUCTION

and conscience and to their interest and desire, Negroes, in the patriarchal system of the day, being part of the master's family. He saw in it no mercy to the blacks, as it was their exclusion, emphasized in various States by statutes forbidding free Negroes to settle in them and by other discriminations against black labour. Now, and in later Kansas legislation, he urged on the North in Congress as Webster had urged: Why needlessly irritate the South by Congressional exclusion of slavery from lands where Nature's laws of climate, soil, and popu lation prohibit it? And on the South: Why arouse fresh agitation by asking Congressional protection of slavery where Nature interdicts it? To both: As a practical issue, slavery in the Territories is a dead letter; the individuality of a State, the unity of the Nation, is a living one; and this is in your hands; stand by the Compromise of 1850.
Yet in one section he was reproached for leaning toward abolitionism and in the other condemned for advocating slavery extension. He was battling for a principle that he considered the bed-rock of the Republic's safety. The disposition of African slavery -- though he did not minimize its gravity -- was an incident as compared with the preservation of this principle, which, if adhered to, would preserve the Union, prevent war and bloodshed, and give the American people, whose wisdom and right eousness he never doubted, that security and peace of mind which is essential to sane deliberation and right enactments. He indicates in his Prison Journal his belief that but for outside agitation which prevented internal discussion, the South would have abolished or reformed the system of wardship in which she held her semisavages. Before a Southern audience in 1859 he declared

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39

that slavery, if not best for both races, ought to be abol ished. Yet he did not believe slavery wrong in itself; for the Bible, the religious and moral code of Christendom, upheld it.
A recent charge has been made that as an "emissary of the slave power," he corrupted the Supreme Court, unduly influencing its decision on the Missouri Compro mise in the Dred Scott case,* his letters giving advance opinion on the decision being cited as proof. More 'natural explanation of his forecast is found in his long and close association with the justices, whose opinions he might be expected to know by inference, as well as by entirely proper conference, had there been any great secrecy about them, which there swas not. He was not in accord with Chief Justice Taney's pronouncement on the Missouri Compromise, as his declared belief in its constitutionality before Congress, January 17, 1856, and his reference in his Prison Journal show. He did, as he stated in a letter "urge all the influences I could bring to bear" to hasten- the action of the court, hoping its effect would be for the peace and preservation of the Union in quieting Southern fears of Squatter Sover eignty and Northern threats to abrogate the Compromise of 1850 by a revival of that of 1820.
When the Constitutional Union movement of 1850 in the South was wrecked in two years on the rock of old and petty party antagonisms, Mr. Stephens's anxi ety as to the South's ability to establish separate existence under the leaders then guiding her was increased. His doubts had begun in Congress, where he had seen many

* See Dred Scott Case in Hill's " Decisive Battles ol the Law"; -- Curtis's " Life and Writings of B. R. Curtis"; -- Tyler's " Memoir of Taney"; -- Cleveland's " Letters and Speeches of Steph ens," 416-31, 489-515.

40

INTRODUCTION

vital points lost by lack of cohesion, shortness of vision and personal and party ambition in the Southern element; not that the Northern was free from these faults: but the Southern situation was more perilous and Southern need of statesmanship greater. An occasion when this lack of cohesion had profoundly impressed him was in the deadlock over the Speakership in 1849; then, had Southern Whigs and Democrats made common cause, they could, in his belief, have brought Northern asso ciates to satisfactory terms; but, in his words, "the Democrats let go, elected their Speaker, and made all the capital they could out of the divisions in the Whig party." Again, on the "Three-million Bill," had the Southerners refused to vote the purchase-money, they could have prevented the acquisition of the Mexican territory unless Congressional protection of slavery, their constitutional right in the common domain, were pledged for it on the basis of the Missouri Compromise or some other line of division. This was the one occasion when he was willing to make a stand to the point of disunion, believing that without definite settlement then, disunion would result, as it did, from continued agitation in Con gress; believing, too, that the settlement could be got and the Union preserved. After voting the money with out bargaining for protection, he thought the South had lost her opportunity of power, and would be wise to hold on to non-intervention with all possible tenacity.
As the presidential year, 1860, approached, he saw more and more clearly that non-intervention was the one possible meeting-ground for the sections -- all the North would grant, the least the South would accept; less though it was than the South's desire or her consti tutional right, it had been attained by a struggle the

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intensity of which only those who made it could know; and these knew that more could not be won. He saw in Stephen A. Douglas, with his Western and Northern following, the one candidate favourable to the South who could lead the Democrats to victory; and that if Douglas were read out of the party, so would the North and West be. He tried to make Buchanan and Cobb, Buchanan's Cabinet officer and trusted adviser, see this as he saw it. But Buchanan could not forgive Douglas's defection on Kansas and his Squatter Sovereignty here sy; Buchanan wanted Cobb to succeed himself; and further, he was openly and honestly committed to pro tection. So, Mr. Stephens, foreseeing the end, left Washington. From the steamer, he looked back upon the receding Capitol. "I suppose you are thinking of your return next year as senator," said some one jocosely. He answered with emotion: "I never expect to see Washington again unless I am brought here a prisoner." As a prisoner on parole from Fort Warren, he next saw it.
In holding this sketch closely to the guiding principle of his political course, much that is valuable and pic turesque has been omitted or but lightly touched upon. As for instance, his championship of new States. He said in his speech on the Missouri Compromise (Decem ber 14, 1854), when refuting the imputation that he was chiefly concerned to increase the number of slave States: "I have voted for the admission of every Northern State since I have occupied a seat upon this floor." His speeches for Minnesota and Oregon defended the alien suffrage clauses in their constitutions on a plea that, no matter what point was involved, called forth his utmost powers -- the plea of a State's right under the Consti tution of the United States.

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INTRODUCTION

He was an indefatigable worker; he performed official, professional, and social duties rigorously; read the papers; conducted a heavy correspondence; was the most approachable of men; people from everywhere wrote or talked to him about the "state of the country" -- always with him a live topic, and about their troubles and everything else. He tried to answer every letter, to see every caller. Petitioners, whose own representa tives would not heed them, appealed to him in their dif ficulties; and the patient, painstaking work performed by him in the Departments and elsewhere for people from all sections is almost beyond belief. The number of letters, sympathetic, information-giving, that he wrote with that maimed hand of his is almost incredible. For many of his services, charge was legitimate, but he made none.
It was his rule not to make a dollar beyond his salary when in Washington; and to accept no work at home that might conflict with his duties as a tribune of the people. When he entered Congress he was worth about $14,000; when he left, after sixteen years, about $16,000, the increase due to accumulation of interest. In 1859-61, he made $22,000 at his profession of law. At all times, his expenses were heavy. Simple in his own tastes and economical in expenditures on himself, he spent bounti fully on others. He seemed unable to refuse his time or money to any in need. An ingrate would be helped anew. "He had power to forgive as long as any had power to wrong him,'' wrote '' Dick Johnston.'' '' Brother is like a ship otherwise stanch but eaten up by barnacles that he can not dislodge," said Linton. "He is kind to folks that nobody else will be kind to. Mars Alex is kinder to dogs than mos' folks is to folks," said his Negro

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body-servant. His hospitality at his rooms in Washing ton and at Liberty Hall was unbounded. Meal hours at the Hall were timed to suit the train hours. Dis tinguished visitors from everywhere sought the sage's dwelling; so did hungry tramps, black and white. Liberty Hall and its master belonged to the people. On the lot was a Baptist church; after the war, a Methodist church -- Bird's Chapel, named in honour of the Rev, Mr. Bird -- was added; when his Catholic sister-in-law, the second Mrs. Linton Stephens, visited him, a room in his house was converted into a Catholic chapel. So broad were his religious views that he was several times reported to be an atheist! The depth and intensity of his religious character, as revealed in his Journal, will be a surprise to many who knew him well, for so opposed was he to anything savouring of cant, that he erred, perhaps, on the side of too great reserve. Even in his letters to Linton, when Linton was a boy at school, his words of advice on spiritual matters are given with great hesitation -- the hesitation of much reverence rather than of little faith.
He early began to help needy youths to an education. In Crawfordville, when a green country lad would step off the train, look timidly around, and ask: "Whar's the man that educates poor boys?" every finger would point to Liberty Hall. He was always ready to encour age struggling genius. He gave John A. Ward, the sculptor, his first paying commission, with $400 for its execution; he paid $600 to Count Sandors, the refugee artist, and through his influence with the Russian Min ister, secured the exile's return to Poland.
During his first session in Congress, he supported the measure for testing the telegraph; and at a later

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session performed like services for the Atlantic cable.
These enterprises, like the railroad and the higher
education of women which he had advocated in the
Georgia Legislature, were almost laughed out of court as
being impractical and visionary. Our present mode
of reckoning the Congressional year originated in a sug
gestion made by him in 1851 that it should begin with
noon, March 4, instead of midnight, March 3, which was
then the rule. His connection with one of our most useful
branches of Government service is not a familiar fact, yet
its nature was such that he may be justly called the Father
of the Weather Bureau. This letter by him to F. G. Arn
old, of the Treasury, written July 2,1879, relates some in
teresting circumstances in the early history of the Bureau:
Your letter of Saturday was received this morning. I had not forgotten my promise to give you some points in my memory connected with the origin of our system of Weather Reports, from which sprang the present Signal Service Bureau. In the winter of 1853-4,1 became acquainted with Mr. Espy, then styled the "Storm King." We boarded at the same house, kept by Mrs. Duncan. He was employed in the Meteorological Department of the Navy. As I took great interest in matters meteoro logical, we were soon well acquainted. His "Philosophy of Storms" was put into my hand by him, and I was informed that he had some years before submitted a paper embodying the same principles to an American association of scientists at New Haven, but it met with no favour. He submitted a similar paper to the Royal Society of London with like results, and then to the French Academy of Sciences at Paris, where it was referred to a committee consisting of MM. Arago, Pouillet, and Babinet. Their report concluded:
Mr. Espy's communication contains a great number of wellobserved and well-described facts. His theory in the present state of science alone accounts for the phenomena, and when completed,

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as he intends, by a study of the action of electricity when it in tervenes, will leave nothing to be desired. In a word, for physical geography, agriculture, navigation and meteorology, it gives us new explanations, indications useful for ulterior researches; and redresses many accredited errors. The Committee expresses then the wish that Mr. Espy should be placed by the Government of the United States in a position to continue his important investigations, and to complete his theory already so remarkable.

After this recommendation, he was placed in the office he held when I became acquainted with him. So satisfied was I with the correctness of his theory and the principles therein announced touching the formation of rainclouds, as well as great storms and tornadoes, that I urged immediate utilization. At that time the facts on which his theory rested, and, according to suggestion, on which their truth was to be established, were being collected by agents in different parts of the country, who sent monthly the result of their daily observations to him, which he embodied in an annual report to Congress. I urged the importance of daily telegraph announcements from all parts of the country. His reply was, want of money: his appropriation was only $2,000 per annum. I suggested that we go to the National Intelligencer and the Union and get them to publish short weather reports from distant points of the country as an item of news without charge. Messrs. Gales and Seaton, and Mr. Ritchie readily assented. A request to the telegraph companies to send such short messages without charge was granted. In this way, I think, the first telegraph weather reports were ever made or announced in this or any other country. The first appeared, as well as I can recollect, in the early summer of 1854. They were very meagre, simply announcing from New Orleans, Chicago, Boston, and other points, the course of the wind, state of the thermometer, and whether clear, rainy, snowing, cloudy, etc. Mr. Espy continued in his position as long as I remained in Congress. The appropriation for his salary was often assailed, but a few of us were able to save it.

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INTRODUCTION

He was a Pennsylvanian, and by profession a school master. He was an original thinker, but not a lucid speaker. Professor Henry [Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution] was one of the very few scientists of this country who entertained favourable views of his theory. The fashion was to snub him utterly with his entire system of philosophy. When we see the advantages arising from its developments and applications to com merce, navigation, and agriculture, in the saving of thousands of lives and millions of dollars' worth of prop erty, is it assuming too much to say that the humble schoolmaster, comparatively unknown in his generation, will, at no distant day, be regarded as one of the greatest benefactors of mankind ?

The force which Mr. Stephens made of his life is remark able when we consider the difficulties he overcame. It is doubtful if any other man has achieved as striking eminence against as heavy odds. In addition to early orphanage and poverty, he was handicapped by a con stitution so frail that his continued existence was a miracle. He never knew a well hour in his life. "He never looked as if he had two weeks' purchase on life," said Toombs. R. M. Johnston, a child at the time, saw him first when he was twenty-one: "His form was the most slight and slender I had ever seen; his chestnut hair was brushed away from a thin white brow and bloodless cheeks. The child looking at him felt sorry for another child." "Sonny, get up and give the gentleman a seat," his landlady at Charleston admonished him in 1839, when he was a delegate to the Southern Commercial Convention, where he crossed swords with Hayne, Ham ilton, and Preston; with his "fondness for the humorous," he rose smilingly while his companions laughed. His weight was rarely over a hundred pounds and usually less.

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In his earlier campaigns, he was often mistaken for a boy. But woe to the opponent who rated him by his size! Colquitt, judge and senator, and leading speaker and debater of the State, hearing how others had gone down before young Stephens, remarked casually that his ''hands itched to get hold of him." When Stephens, with courtesy, humour, and facts (a store of which he always kept handy) demolished this Goliath, some wag in the crowd cried: "Your hands itch to let him go, Judge, don't they?" When he swept through Georgia like a cyclone, in 1855, m m's campaign against the Knownothing or American party with its "un-American secretorder organization" and "unconstitutional proscription of Catholics and foreigners," his hearers would exclaim, "He is nothing but lungs and brain!" Slight as he was in body, so forceful and effective were his denunciations that the party, or secret order, assailed, threatened to silence him by violence if he did not moderate his tone.
The Pennsylvania?!,, in 1854, when commenting on his Kansas-Nebraska speech and on him as "considered by many the ablest member of the House," who could "hold the congregated talent of the country spellbound for hours," describes his fragile appearance, and adds: "But the whole man is charged with the electricity of intellect -- a touch would bring forth the divine spark." The Washington letter in the Charleston Courier, January 7, 1857, gives this dramatic picture of an hour in the House, with Stephens the figure dominant:

It had been rumoured throughout the city -- told in drawing rooms, private parlours, and public saloons -- that "Stephens of Georgia" was to speak on Tuesday. At an early hour the galleries filled to overflowing with the families of our distinguished statesmen, members

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of foreign legations, dashing belles, with a sprinkling here and there of our best residents. As we passed through the lobbies, we were struck with the deep and reverential quiet that pervaded the House. Where was the power that subdued the confusion of this always riotous assembly? Listening faces were turned toward a shrunken and emaciated figure, the shoulders contracted and drawn in, the face the colour of ashes. There was something grand in the spectacle of this shadowy figure binding up the very breath of the House! The speaker seemed the mere organ of some hidden power. He had little variety of gesture, and what he used seemed per fectly unstudied. He was so absorbed in his subject as to be unconscious that he had feet or hands to manage. His unearthly face seemed to brighten into fuller and ghostlier meaning; his eye shone like a sunken pit of fire suddenly disclosed; his attenuated form seemed to dilate to his dilating soul; his voice seemed exalted to a trumpet tone.

A picture by another writer:
A deathlike silence reigns over the Hall, broken only by the reverberating tones of the speaker's voice. Sena tors have deserted the other wing of the Capitol and are sitting as under a spell they cannot break. Mr. Speaker has thrown down his hammer.

But Stephens did not strive after oratory; in his belief, eloquence was a dangerous power, to be kept well in hand; it was the incident of his speeches; his first aim was to convince by fact and argument and not by a play upon the emotions. He never once made an appeal to sectional passions. It was the fashion to speak of him as "intellect incarnate" and a "bodiless brain." He could command always, it is said, the rapt attention of the House. He was an adviser of great leaders, a coun-

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seller of presidents. Yet this is the man whom the Con federate Senate so humiliated on one occasion by a refusal to hear him speak, that he asked to resign his position as its presiding officer and the Vice-President of the Confederacy. He was a consummate parliamenta rian; any one of the great games of state he played on the floor of the House would make a thrilling chapter. He was a bold and finished diplomat, an able and phil osophical statesman. It is common for those who knew him to say, "He was a seer." His faculty of foresight seemed intuitive, mystical. This prophetic quality was in part the effect of illness upon his peculiar temperament, the result of protracted periods of physical quiescence and abnormal thought activity when, with attention focussed upon the problems of public life, he read the future by the past and by his knowledge of the minds of men. He was ambitious, but ambition was so slight a force in his character when compared with the grand passion of his life -- love of country -- that its voice was not even heard when patriotism spoke.
Socially, he was a man of much charm and magnetism. We wish he had left those " Congressional Reminiscences" with full record of the "Attic nights" at Mrs. Carter's, where he foregathered with a "mess" of which Justices Taney, Story, McLean, and McKinley, of the Supreme Court, and Jacob Collamer, of the House, were members; and of evenings at the Rush House where he lived with Toombs and Crittenden; and of those Sunday dinners at Sullivan's -- Stephens objected that they were on Sunday, "but his company is generally select"--with Clay, Webster, Cobb, Hale, Stephens, Toombs, and Crittenden around the board. Among his papers are gilt-edged notes in Webster's hand ^relating to hospi-

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talities between him and "Mr. Stephens and Mr. Toombs," with such other good companies present that we would like to play eavesdropper to their table-talk.
Stephens was popular in Government circles, where his labours to produce harmony between sectional factions were appreciated with some warmth even by those who knew they were vain and who helped to make them so. On his retirement from Congress, he was tendered the extraordinary compliment of a public dinner, both House and Senate to attend, irrespective of party, and headed by their presiding officers, the VicePresident and the Speaker. He was unable to accept it, but he was none the less pleased at the evidence of kind feeling.
The Speakership was more than once within his grasp. Toombs wrote, November 18, 1857:

I see a good deal about your running for Speaker. If you would accept the offer, I would like to know. I should very much like to see you in the Chair, especially as against Orr, who has conceived that what is called the ultraism of Carolina is obnoxious to the Nation.

Stephens wrote Linton, December i, 1857:
Orr will be Speaker. I have forbidden the use of my name. I am for organizing the House with as much harmony as possible.

His reason in part for steadfast refusal when urged to stand for the Presidency was fear lest his physical strength was unequal to the canvass required and the duties which the position involved. He had some novel views of the office and its seeking. In 1858, disgusted over the mischievous scramble for the candidacy in an

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hour of imminent national peril, he exclaimed: "I had as lief be put on a list of suspected horse-thieves as in the number of those aspiring to the Presidency!" he had told a friend so to declare him. He was just back from a call on Buchanan:

Perhaps Old Buck thought I was an insidious rival, slyly worming myself into his shoes. If so, alas, poor old fellow! how his views would change did he but know how I pitied him, as I looked upon him, with all his power!

He said in 1860:

""

What amazes me in Douglas is his desire to be Presi dent. I have sometimes asked him what he desired the office for. It has never added to the reputation of a single man. You may look over the list: which made any reputation after becoming President? Four or eight years is too short a time to pursue a policy which will give this. If I had loved office, I would have con tinued in the House; I should be able to make a repu tation faster in that place than in the other.

He refused to be put in nomination at Charleston in

1860 for President of the United States. At Montgomery,

he declined to be considered for President of the Con

federacy, and advised that it was not fitting for its first

office to be conferred on him in preference to a leader

of the secession movement which had created the new

Government. The second position he accepted in the

interests of harmony between the new Government and

'

the anti-secession sentiment which he had led; and for

other reasons, fully set forth in his Prison Journal.

He was about to become President, it seemed, in the

order of succession, when, on several occasions, Mr.

Davis was so ill that death was expected. In his sane

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view of the situation as expressed in a private letter, ambition played no part:

I should regard the President's death as the greatest possible calamity. . . . The general and profound shock would of itself gender and increase that spirit of dissen sion and faction, which at all times exists in a country situated as ours is. With us, it would almost certainly manifest itself in a formidable way from the fact that a large number of prominent and active men, who would probably soon form a party for concert of action, really and honestly distrust my ability to conduct affairs suc cessfully. To what extent their demonstrations might go, I cannot conjecture; but far enough to cripple my efforts on any line of policy I might adopt, even assuming it might be for the best. The unhinging, upturning, and unsettling of things so little settled at present, the greater confounding of things even now confused, would render it one of the greatest calamities that could befall us, to say nothing of the correctness of the views of those who entertain such serious distrust of my ability to direct affairs. On that point, I assure you, I have the strongest
distrust of myself.

While many would have welcomed his rule as leading to peace, a number believed his views inimical to Con federate success, and anonymous warnings were sent him that, if Davis died, he must resign or be assassi nated. Such warnings or threats reached him on other occasions, accompanied with the charge of treachery
to the Confederacy. From this discussion of Mr. Stephens's views on office,
we revert to the thread of our story with an extract from his last speech in Congress before the war and from his "Farewell Speech" in Augusta:

The immense territory to the West has to be peopled. It is now peopling; new States are fast springing up.

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This is the sixteenth session I have been here, and within that brief space, we have added six States to the Union -- lacking but one of being more than half of the original thirteen. Upward of twelve hundred thousand square miles of territory -- a much larger area than was possessed by the whole United States at the time of the treaty of peace in 1783 -- have been added. This progress is not to be arrested. There are persons now living who will see over a hundred million human beings within the present boundaries, to say nothing of future extensions, and perhaps double the number of States. For myself, I say to you, my Southern colleagues on this floor, that I do not apprehend any danger to our constitutional rights from the bare fact of increasing the number of States with institutions dissimilar to ours. The whole governmental fabric of the United States is based upon the idea of dissimilarity in the institutions of its respec tive members. Principles, not numbers, are our pro
tection. By our system, each State, however great the number, has the absolute right to regulate all her internal affairs as she pleases, subject only to her obligations under the Constitution. Such is the theory of our machin ery of self-government by the people. This is the great novelty of our peculiar system. It is for us and those who come after us to determine whether this grand experimental problem shall be worked out, not by quar relling amongst ourselves, not by doing injustice to any, not by keeping out any particular class of States; but by each State remaining a separate and distinct organ ization within itself -- all bound together for general objects under a common Federal head; as it were, a wheel within a wheel.*

At Augusta, July 2, 1859:
I deem it my duty to repeat what I said in 1850: What ever abstract rights of expansion we may have secured
* The lull text of the speech, from which this condensed excerpt is taken, may be found in Clevelands "Letters and Speeches oi Stephens," pp. 621-37.

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in the settlement of that policy [non-intervention], you may not expect to see many of the Territories come into the Union as slave States unless we have an increase of African stock. The law of population will prevent. It is in full view of this, that I have stated that, if the present basis of settlement between the sections of the Union be adhered to, you have nothing to fear for your safety or security. For on these principles, one slave State by herself would be perfectly secure against encroachment on her domestic policy though all the rest were free.*

We catch, in these addresses, his idea of non-inter vention as a policy whereby to make safe and peaceful end of the struggle between the sections, begun with the Union, to preserve their respective balances of power in Congress by equality in numbers, a struggle lost to the South with the admission of California. His pur pose to quiet the South, to reassure her on the dangers of expansion, and at the same time to warn her as to her one path of safety, is plain; as is his intent to put the North on her Constitutional honour, now that numbers gave her power to oppress and harass her sister section who, as Thomas Jefferson described it, "had the wolf [slavery] by the ears and could neither safely hold him nor safely let him go." His Northern critics quoted his Augusta speech as proof that he advocated revival of the slave-trade with Africa; while his Southern critics began to ask anew if he was not unsound on abolition because he said this: "If slavery, as it exists with us, is not best, or cannot be made the best, for both races -- the African as well as his master -- it ought to be abol ished."
His purpose when he left Washington in 1859 was
* The full text of Mr. Stephens's "Farewell Speech," irom which this condensed excerpt is made, may be found in Cleveland's "Letters and Speeches oi Stephens," pp. 637-51.

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permanent retirement to private life. But the country's troubles drew him again into politics, and in 1860 we find him an Elector on the Douglas-Johnson ticket, campaigning Georgia for the "principles of 1850" and the Union. A letter of 1860, no day date, seems to have been hastily scrawled on the eve of his Union speech of Sept. i, 1860, in Augusta, the John Forsyth mentioned being the publicist of that name:

Dear Brother: I am about to start to Augusta, all

packed and ready to go. I feel sad, sad. I enclose a

clip from John Forsyth's pen. When he, after his denun

ciations of disunionists in the summer, takes Jus position,

what may be expected of others ? This was sent me by

Herring, of Atlanta, who has turned secessionist. We

must do -the best we can for the body politic -- that is

all. What is to be the result of the present malady or

epidemic among our people, I don't know. But I am

resolved to do the best I can for them. That is all I

can do. The balance is with them and with God.

Good-bye.

Affectionately,

ALEX.

The severity of the malady is reflected in this, written by
J. A. Hambleton, Atlanta, Ga., Oct. 25, to Mr. Stephens:
Mr. Toombs has just delivered a speech of the most abusive and inflammatory character of Judge Douglas. He spoke like a madman and acted like a fanatic. He told his hearers that Douglas is an incendiary and should not be permitted to speak here. The effect, I fear, will be that Douglas will be grossly insulted, a result that would be more than mortifying to me and to many, and hazardous to the aggressors. I sincerely hope you will be present, as, if there is a plan to insult Douglas, your presence will prevent its being carried out. I want you to introduce Douglas.

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In his Augusta speech, Mr. Stephens condemned the action of those members of the Charleston Convention who withdrew from it because they failed to carry their demand for a plank in the party platform calling for Congressional protection of slavery in the Territories; and he made that prophecy for which some called him "insane":

I do not mean to say that the Secession movement at Charleston was a disunionist movement, or intended as such by all who joined in it, but I do mean to say that the movement tends to disunion, to civil strife; may lead to it, and most probably will, unless arrested by the virtue, intelligence and patriotism of the people. The signs of the time portend evil. You need not be surprised to see these States, now so peaceful, contented, prosperous, and happy, embroiled in civil war in less than twelve months.

The split in the Democratic party at Charleston and Baltimore, which put three candidates in the field against Lincoln, elected Lincoln on a platform declaring against Government toleration, in any form, of slavery in the Territories. South Carolina promptly seceded. Several States followed her. Georgia, trembling on the brink, was held back by Stephens as long as he had power to hold her. In his speech before her Legislature, Nov. 14, 1860, he pleaded eloquently for peace and the Union:
My object is not to stir up strife but to allay it. . . . It is said Mr. Lincoln's policy and principles are against the Constitution, and that if he carries them out, it will be destructive of our rights. The President is no emperor, no dictator. He can do nothing unless he is backed by Congress. The House is largely against him. In the Senate, he will also be powerless; there will be a major ity of four against him. . . .
I am not of those who believe the Union has been a

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curse. True men, men of integrity, entertain different views. I do not question their right; I would not impugn their motive. Nor will I undertake to say that this Government of our fathers is perfect, but that this Gov ernment of our fathers, with all its defects, comes nearer the objects of all good governments than any other on the face of the earth, is my settled conviction. The influence of the Government on us is like that of the atmosphere. Its benefits are so silent and unseen that they are seldom thought of or appreciated. . . .
Northern States have violated their plighted faith. What ought we to do ? By the law of nations, you have a right to demand the carrying out of this article of agree ment [Constitutional pledge for return of fugitive slaves], and in case it be not done, we would have the right to commit acts of reprisal on these faithless governments, and seize on their property or that of their citizens whereever found. The States of the Union stand upon the same footing with each other as foreign nations in this respect. But by the law of nations, we are equally bound, before proceeding to violent measures, to set forth our grievances before the offending governments, to give them an opportunity to redress the wrong. Let your Committee on the State of the Republic make out a bill of grievances; let it be sent by the Governor to these faithless States; and if reason and argument shall be tried in vain -- if all shall fail -- I would be for retali atory measures. I advise the calling of a convention with the earnest desire to preserve peace. I am for exhausting all that patriotism demands before taking the last step.*

Toombs's speech the night before was as impassioned a plea for secession as Stephens's was an earnest argu ment against it. Yet after Stephens's speech, Toombs, who had bombarded it with interruptions, proposed
* For the full text of Mr. Stephens's "Union Speech," from which this condensed excerpt is made, see Cleveland's "Letters and Speeches of Stephens," pp. 694-713.

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"Three cheers for Stephens!" "one of the brightest intel lects and purest patriots that lives!" "That was well done," said some one to Toombs. "I always try to behave myself at a funeral," replied Toombs. A restraint grew up between the friends which was only dissipated when they met in the Confederate Congress at Mont gomery. In his battle for the Union, Stephens, with Herschel V. Johnson and Benjamin H. Hill, led a forlorn hope against Toombs, the Cobb brothers, Governor Joe Brown, and many other men of might, who headed the swelling ranks of the secessionists. An idea expressed by Tom Cobb, "We can make better terms out of the Union than in it," turned the scale of fate, as Mr. Steph ens believed. Boykin in his "Memorial" says the "voice and influence" of Howell Cobb caused Georgia to secede; and, had she declined to secede, "the other States would not have seceded." It has often been said that but for Cobb, Stephens could have kept Georgia in the Union.
Mr. Stephens's next Union speech was before the Georgia Secession Convention; in this he said:

I have looked, and do look, upon our present Gov ernment as the best in the world. I have ever believed and do now believe that it is to the best interest of all the States to remain united under the Constitution. My
judgment is against secession. We should not take this extreme step before some positive aggression upon our rights by the General Government, which may never occur; or before failure, after every effort made, to get a faithful performance on the part of those States which now stand so derelict to their plighted faith.

He received many letters from all parts of the country applauding his Union speech of November. A number of leading Northern and Western men, with whom he had

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been associated in Congress, approved his suggestion of remonstrance with the derelict States, and pledged their influence with their own States for a favourable hearing; some were already at work with their governors and legis latures. "All that the South has to do," wrote one, "is to appeal from the North drunk with fanaticism to the North sobered at the prospect of the dissolution of the Union." "All we ask of our Southern friends," wrote ex-Governor McClelland of Michigan, "is patience; and we hope they will forbear because we are truly suf fering as much if not more than they are. The Con stitutional men of the South have really more true friends in the North to-day, who understand and appreciate their grievances, than ever before, because our people did not until recently direct their attention to the subject, nor have very many of them yet had time to examine it in all its bearings." These letters gave Mr. Stephens a reasonable basis, if he had had no other, for his belief at this time, which was maintained during the war, that there was a hope for peaceful settlement through an alignment in common phalanx of the strict constructionists of the Constitution, North and South, and that Southern diplomacy should be directed toward the estab lishment of such an alignment.
Lincoln wrote to him for a copy of the Union Speech. In replying, Mr. Stephens said: "The country is in great peril, and no man ever had heavier or greater responsibilities resting upon him than you have in the present momentous crisis." This drew forth Lincoln's historic response, marked "For your eye only," an injunction observed by Stephens until after Lincoln's death and his own return from Fort Warren.

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I fully appreciate the present peril the country is in, and the weight of the responsibility on me. Do the people of the South really entertain fears that a Repub lican administration would directly or indirectly interfere with their slaves? If they do, I wish to assure you, as once a friend, and still, I hope, not an enemy, that there is no cause for such fears. The South would be in no more danger in this respect than it was in the days of Washington. I suppose, however, this does not meet the case. You think slavery right and ought to be extended; while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That, I suppose, is the rub. It certainly is the only substantial difference between us.

These sentences are from Mr. Stephens's lengthy reply,
the main ideas of which, on slavery, are reiterated in
the Journal:
Personally, I am not your enemy -- far from it; and however widely we may differ politically, yet I trust we both have an earnest desire to preserve and maintain the Union. . . . When men come under the influ ence of fanaticism, there is no telling where their impulses or passions may drive them. This is what creates our discontent and apprehensions, not unreasonable when we see . . . such reckless exhibitions of madness as the John Brown raid into Virginia, which has received so much sympathy from many, and no open condemnation from any of the leading members of the dominant party. ... In addressing you thus, I would have you under stand me as being not a personal enemy, but as one who would have you do what you can to save our common country. A word fitly spoken by you now would be like "apples of gold in pictures of silver."

After the war, when Lincoln's picture was unveiled in Congress, and Stephens spoke as the South's representa tive, he said of his early connection with Lincoln:

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I knew Mr. Lincoln well. We met in the House in December, 1847. We were together during the Thirtieth Congress. I was as intimate with him as with any other man of that Congress except perhaps one. That excep tion was my colleague, Mr. Toombs. Mr. Lincoln was warm-hearted; he was generous; he was magnanimous; he was most truly "with malice toward none, with charity
for all."

Lincoln and Stephens had much in common. The boyhood of each had been a struggle with poverty; each had conned his lessons by a pine-knot-fire. Both were lawyers. In Congress, both were Whigs and members of the same political club; they acted together on the Mexican War and in electing Taylor. Lincoln's early impression of Stephens appears in a letter to his law partner, Feb. 2, 1843: "I take up my pen to tell you that Mr. Stephens, of Georgia, a little slim pale-faced con sumptive man, has just concluded the very best speech of an hour's length I ever heard. My old withered dry eyes are full of tears yet."
In his Journal, Mr. Stephens denies the truth of the report that Lincoln invited him to a position in his Cabinet. Lincoln seems to have considered doing so. Oberholtzer says in his "Life of Lincoln": "He wished to have the various sections represented. Montgomery Blair was taken from Maryland, after seriously discussing the availability of Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia." For Mr. Stephens's opinion of Lincoln's political course in the sixties, the reader is referred to that part of his "War Between the States" in which he fully reviews it and says: "Mr. Lincoln was kind-hearted (no man I ever knew was more so) but the same was true of Julius Caesar"; "I do not think he intended to overthrow the

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Institutions of the country. I do not think he under stood them or the tendencies of his acts upon them. The Union, with him, in sentiment rose to the sublimity of a religious mysticism, while his ideas of its structure and formation, in logic, rested upon nothing but the subtleties of a sophism!" These strictures relate to Lincoln's encroachments on the Constitution.
Georgia seceded, and sent Stephens as delegate to the Provisional Congress of the Confederacy at Mont gomery, first complying with the condition he required, that she should instruct her delegates to demand that any new government formed should be modelled on the old one. His object was to preserve to the States the American principles of self-government -- the Constitu tion. He also plainly had in mind a reunion of the States under the old bond or the new. With like principles and machinery of government, the two confederacies would have no wide political chasm to cross for fusion -- to which end he doubtless meant to direct his diplomatic energies. Should the new Constitution improve on the old, so much the better would be the chances for the Confederacy to become the absorbing Government.
His industry, knowledge of government, and par liamentary experience enabled him to be of great service in organizing the new republic. "The Rules for the Government of the Congress" was his work, and so to a large degree was the framing of the Confederate Con stitution. A prohibition, in the latter instrument, of the slave-trade with Africa, is in itself refutation of the charge that he advocated revival of this trade. On February n, his forty-ninth birthday, he was sworn in as Vice-President of the Confederacy. A week later, Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as President. The

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first mention of Mr. Davis in Stephens's letters is the following, written by Stephens when Chairman of the House Committee of Conference on the Kansas Bill:

May i, 1858. -- Every Southern Senator voted for it. Jefferson Davis had himself sent for to record his vote. He is in very bad health, has been extremely ill. I took the paper to him and got his approval of it before I would agree to report it. This is the way I worked the matter with all the leading men of the South.

And it was a tremendous labour, that of getting these men "present and ready to sustain it," as is shown in his notes of that time, with their refrain: "My heart is sad -- sad. If we should separate, what is to become of us? Have we any future but miserable petty squabbles?" He and Davis were not usually in such accord as on this occasion. Davis came into Congress as a Democrat when Mr. Stephens was a Whig; Davis was for Polk, for the Mexican War, against Taylor, against the Compromise of 1850, and for Congressional protection of slavery in the Territories. The new plank in the Democrat platform which caused the "burst-up" at Charleston was, in substance, two of a series of resolu tions offered by Davis, Feb. 2,1860, in the Senate. This "plank" brought on the war, as Stephens felt. In character and temperament, the two men were as wide apart as in political views. Davis's education, of scholarly finish, had come to him without struggle; he was of aristocratic temper and bearing; a West Pointer and a stickler for military form and order. Stephens prided himself on being of the people; and as a lawyer, he was jealous for the civic power in any test between that and martial law.

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As officers of the Confederacy, their early relations were harmonious. Davis sent for Stephens and consulted him to a considerable degree. In letters to Linton, Stephens soon expresses uneasiness about the "wisdom and discretion of the appointing power"; he presently mentions that the War Department "is badly managed. The Secretary is very inefficient. There were twenty thousand stand of arms offered us for sale. He post poned it until after the fall of Sumter; then tried to get them, but it was too late." This Cabinet officer, L. P. Walker, is he who made the unfortunate remark in a public speech after the fall of Sumter, that the Confederate flag should soon fly "over the Capitol at Washington" and "over Faneuil Hall itself," a boast not warranted by the purpose of the Confederacy, and one which did much to fan unfriendly feelings at the North.
Stephens's evident desire was to be useful in economics and diplomacy, to which fields his gifts and training fitted, and his physical infirmity limited him. His letters reflect his sharp sense of secession's business side, which "calls for great patience and forbearance by the people in sus taining the inconveniences and burdens incident to a change of government -- derangement of mails and commerce, increase of taxes, and a thousand things not before thought of." "Independence will cost money as well as blood," he says, and is concerned as to how the people will meet the prosaic details of sacrifice. He promptly laid before the Government a plan by which, as he conceived, a sound basis of credit might be estab lished through judicious employment of the South's staple -- that King Cotton in whose powers her leaders had greatly confided when contemplating secession. This plan, as outlined in a speech at Crawfordville,

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Nov. i, 1862, his first on the subject which he allowed to be published, was as follows:

I was in favour of the Government's taking all the cotton that would be subscribed for eight-per-cent. bonds at ten cents a pound. Two million bales of last year's crop might have been counted on. This would have cost the Government a hundred million bonds. With this cotton in hand and pledged, any number, short of fifty, of the best ironclad steamers could have been contracted for and built in Europe -- steamers at two millions each could have been procured. Thirty millions would have got fifteen. Five might have been ready by the first of January last to open one of our blockaded ports. Three could have been left to keep the port open while two convoyed the cotton across if necessary. Thus, the debt could have been paid with cotton at a much higher price than it cost, and a channel of trade kept open until others could have been built and paid for in the same way. At less than one month's present expendi ture on our army, our coast might have been cleared. Besides this, at least two million more bales of the old crop might have been counted on; this, with the other, making a debt in round numbers to the planters of $200,000,000. But this cotton held in Europe until the price shall be fifty cents a pound [it went higher] would constitute a fund of at least one billion dollars, which would not only have kept our finances in sound condition, but the clear profit of $800,000,000 would have met the entire expenses of the war for years to come.

Dr. Craven, in his "Prison Life of Jefferson Davis," reports Mr. Davis as describing a plan like this, which was urged on Mr. Memminger, by whom is not stated, and which Mr. Davis "privately approved but had not time to study and take the responsibility of directing until too late"; Davis said it would have maintained Southern

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credit, which "in itself would have insured victory." In her "Memoir" of her husband, Mrs. Davis makes slighting allusion to some such plan, as impractical and visionary and advised by critics of the Administration.
Mr. Memminger wrote Mr. Stephens, Sept. 17, 1867:

The scheme, as I understood it, never proposed a pur chase of cotton with bonds but with money, or Confeder ate currency, which was then money. I enclose you a circular written at the time, which will put you in posses sion of the views then entertained. As for the notion since promulgated, of shipping cotton to England early in the
war and holding it there as the basis of credit, that is completely negatived, as you know, by the fact that at the early stage of the war, no one expected the blockade or the war to last more than a year.

Mr. Stephens's letters and speeches of 1860-61 show
that he feared a long war.
The circular says of the scheme:
The issue is to be paid in treasury notes, and therefore, if we put aside for the present the many and serious objections to the possession, transportation, and manage ment of the crop by the Government, it becomes simply a question of amount.

Which amount was declared too large a burden for a new government "engaged in a gigantic war." The scheme was treated as a discrimination in favour of cotton planters. By the Loan or Memminger plan, the planter bound himself to pay into the Treasury a part of the proceeds from his cotton sales in exchange for interest-bearing bonds. Had Toombs been as careful as Stephens in preserving letters, we might reproduce the documents from Stephens which drew this from Toombs, June 21, 1861, when Secretary of State:

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Dear Stephens: The Maryland Commissioners sub
mitted nothing except to urge us to cross the Potomac as soon as possible with an army in order that they may join us. There is nothing in Harper's Ferry evacuation, except Johnston got strong enough to take the field and march forward to Martinsburg to meet the enemy rather than have leisurely to concentrate on him at the Ferry.
It is impossible to overestimate the importance of your present duty in procuring the Cotton Loan. I fear Tom Cobb got weary in' well-doing too soon, and that interest may flag. Print your speeches, get the news papers in Georgia to write on the subject and send to other States, chide the Southwest (Ala., Miss, and La.) for their tardiness. If we do ryt do this, the Loan will flag, and if that flags we shall see the worst times we have seen yet. With the Loan, we can do anything in time; without it, nothing. Push it to the last extremity. We have bought arms in Europe and are daily expecting them; the purchases were wholly below our wants from lack of comprehension in the War Department. Arrangements are enlarged, but it will take time to perfect them. Davis works slowly, too slowly for the crisis.
The scheme of taking the cotton at ten cents per pound won't do. We wish to borrow cotton or its proceeds, not to buy it. If it falls, it seems planters want to put the fall on the country. What sort of financial aid is that? If it were to happen that we could not get off the cotton, we would be utterly prostrated by flooding the country with credits we could not redeem, and for a commodity we could neither sell nor consume. It would be fatal to the whole scheme. I would rather condemn it to public use. I have taken up your letters and answered them as the items presented, and this letter therefore is without continuity of thought or subject.
I heard from England and France the twenty-first May. Both are very friendly, assure us they will buy our cotton this fall at all hazards, will observe strict neutrality for the present and acknowledge us formally as soon as

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either time or our decided success gives assurance of our power to maintain ourselves.
I think there will be very important developments in a few days at Philippi, Harper's Ferry, and Manassas Junction. It is impossible not to have a fight at one or all in a week. Virginia unanimously accepted the per manent Constitution yesterday, and is now in good.
Yours, R. TOOMBS.

The Stephens plan seems to have received less attention from the Confederate Government than was its due by reason of authorship and merit. The rush and confusion of the times may have been partly responsible. Latterday historians incline to treat it as lightly as Mrs. Davis does, yet Mr. Davis, according to Dr. Craven, believed it practical and that it would have "insured victory."
Mr. Stephens's views on other concurrent matters, as on this and on a somewhat similar use of tobacco which he suggested, are not those of the mere theorist and malcontent which he is often carelessly asserted to have been. As an example of the hard common sense he applied to business details of war, the following extract is made from a friendly letter, written by him, April 29, 1864, to Seddon, Confederate Secretary of War, on the conditions resulting from loss of public confidence in Confederate credit, and the consequent imperative neces sity for honest and intelligent handling of the tithes, the army's one source of supply:

The greatest danger ahead is ultimate failure of subsistance. Our present reliance is upon our agricultural productions and not upon the credit of the Government. The tax in kind is the surest hope; that is abundant if properly managed. But under present management, it is wasting the substance of the country without supplying

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the army. In this country, small and poor as it is, thousands of bushels of tithe corn and a great amount of forage have been fed to poor cattle bought up in February and March for beef, while the tithe pork and bacon were uncollected. Had this pork and bacon been used now, the grasses of summer would fatten beef to be used then. This is a small matter, but what is being done here is doubtless being done elsewhere. Five thousand bushels of tithe corn just above me have been turned over to a party to distil into whisky, right on the railroad and in two days' transportation of Johnston's army. For this corn, he was to deliver five thousand gallons of whisky! One bushel, it is said, will make two gallons in winter, and the slops from the stills will fatten as much pork as the corn would. This contract is a small affair compared with others on the same prin ciples. It is to all such contracts I call your attention. The army can do better without whiskey than bread; and if we have corn enough to put any into whiskey it ought to-be in sections remote from railroads. So with all corn or forage fed to cattle and hogs for the army. The provision crop last year was abundant for the army and people at home this year if economically used. But I fear it will not be next year. The policy of impressing provisions without paying market price will greatly lessen production. Production will be greatly lessened by another cause -- the general disarrangement of labour under the last military act.*

Under the uncertainty created by this act, which virtually conscripted the whole white male population and necessitated details from the army for agricultural and other domestic avocations, Mr. Stephens said, many persons were failing to plant usual crops; many planta tions were being abandoned to Negroes with no white manager in charge; and the bare journeyings of men
For full text ot letter irom which this condensed excerpt is taken, see Clevelands "Letters and Speeches of Stephens," pp. 786-90.

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back and forth between home and camp to get papers made out or visaed would entail neglect of farm work. At the date of this letter, more men were in the army than the Government could arm or support. "The tithe," Mr. Stephens urges, "should be husbanded and guarded as gold; not a grain of corn or blade of grass should be wasted, lost, or misapplied." These are the reflections of an economist troubled by evil conditions and anxious for their remedy. In that awful time of starvation, war, and death, graft took as little heed as now of public peril and privation if only it might make profit for itself; among appointees who collected and distributed the tithes, some handled the precious grain and meat dishonestly, and some used it wastefully. In his address of March 16, 1864, before the Georgia Legis lature, Mr. Stephens said:

Upon a moderate estimate, one within reasonable bounds, the tithes of wheat and corn for last year were not less, in the States east of the Mississippi (to say nothing of the other side), than eighteen million bushels. Ken tucky and Tennessee are not included in this estimate. This would bread an army of five hundred thousand men and one hundred thousand horses for twelve months, and leave a considerable margin for waste or loss. This we have without buying or impressing a bushel or pound. Nor need a bushel be lost for want of transportation from points distant from railroads; it could be fed to animals, put into beef and pork. The tithe of meat for the last year will supply the army for at least six months. All that is wanting is men of business capacity, honesty, economy and industry in the management and control of that department.

Mr. Stephens's vital disagreement with the adminis tration was based on a principle that was the "lode-star,"

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as lie says, of his political life. He condemned the con script laws, martial law, impressments and suspension of habeas corpus not only as inexpedient but as infringing upon the constitutional rights of the people and not to be justified on the plea of "exigency of war," that ancient cry to which republics make their first strides to monarchy. He was not free from the fear, which has haunted our statesmen from Washington's presidency to Grant's, that a republic here might follow the fate of foreign predecessors; might, in time of revolution, become subject to its own military power and pass by the usual stages into empire.with' a Cassar or Napoleon at the head. His public protests were not, as he declared at the time, to hamper or harass the administration or to lead a party opposition to it -- this, he repeatedly refused to do-- but to inspire the people to "guide and instruct their rulers aright." He had condemned like measures in Lincoln's government; and in his speech before the Georgia Legislature,* we hear the same voice, though in milder tone, that arraigned Polk in the Congress of the United States:

The suspension of the habeas corpus is the most important question. The first act on the subject was assented to on the twenty-seventh of February, 1862. This attempted to confer on the President the power not only to suspend the writ, but to declare martial law, etc. This was soon after amended. But no one can say that during the progress of these events I was silent. Conscription has been extended to embrace all between seventeen and fifty years of age. It cannot be possible that the object is to keep in the field all between these

* Full text of Mr. Stephenss speech from which condensed excerpts are here made, may be found in Clevelands "Letters and Speeches of Stephens," pp. 761-86. For Linton Stephenss Habeas Corpus and Peace Resolutions, in support of which this speech was, made, see War Between the States," II, 788-90,532-36.

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ages. The ruinous consequence is too apparent. Details are to be made [to perform the civil industries]. The effect is to put much the larger portion of the labour of the country, white and slave, under the control of the Presi dent. In this connection, take this habeas corpus sus pension act by which attempt is made to confer upon him power to order the arrest and imprisonment of any man, woman, or child on bare charge unsupported by oath, of any of the acts for which arrests are allowed. Could the whole country be more completely under the control of one man? Could dictatorial powers be more complete ? In this connection, consider the strong appeals made for some time past by leading journals for a dictator. In such times the most dangerous words that can be uttered are: Can you not trust the President? My answer is, Without any reflection or imputation against our Chief Magistrate, the measure of my confidence in him and all other public officers is the Constitution. My answer is the same I gave to one who submitted a plan for a dictatorship to me some months ago: "I am utterly opposed to everything looking to a dictator ship in this country. There is no man living, and not one of the illustrious dead, whom, if now living, I would so trust!"
You have been asked, What can you do? What did Virginia and Kentucky do in 1798-99? Though war was then threatening with France, though it was said then as now that all discussion of even obnoxious meas ures of Congress would be hurtful to the public cause, they did not hesitate by solemn resolves to declare the alien and sedition laws unconstitutional. Those acts of Congress were not more unconstitutional or dangerous to public liberty than this act. You can invoke its repeal.

In the "plan" submitted was this: "Let the Presi dent be proclaimed Dictator for a specified length of time and the Vice-President his successor." Referring to it in a letter of Nov. 6, 1863, Mr. Stephens says:

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As this man's mind is running, other men's minds are running. I have heard such sentiments in so many quarters that I feel deep concern. Some of the news papers -- the Richmond Enquirer, for instance -- have openly proclaimed sentiments of like character.

The Editor of the Enquirer, believed to be the organ
of the administration, was John Mitchel, the Irish exile.
Nat Tyler, Mitchel's associate, remarked in a letter to
Mr. Davis, Jan. 15, 1885:
I remember Mr. Stephens coming to the office and lecturing the editors on their support of the measures for the public defense. . . . We gave to his person all respect and to his advice the least attention that was possible. I have always believed if you had assumed "absolute power," shot deserters and hung traitors, seized supplies and brought to the front every man capable of bearing arms, a different result of the war might have been obtained.

Thus contrary were the influences bearing upon the Confederate President. Tyler's letter throws a side light upon Mr. Stephens's criticized absenteeism from Richmond and his stated reason that he could do no good there, but rather feared that his efforts to serve did harm by increasing dissension and division.
In his speech of March 16, he was supporting the Habeas Corpus and Peace Resolutions offered by Judge Stephens. Referring to what he believed to be the South's one hold on the world's sympathy, he said:
European governments have no sympathy with either side in this struggle. They are rejoiced to see professed Republicans cutting each other's throats. But we have friends there. No argument used by them heretofore has been more effectual than the contrast between the

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Federals and Confederates on the subject of the writ of habeas corpus. Here, notwithstanding our dangers and perils, the military has always been kept subordinate to the civil authorities. Here, all the landmarks of English liberty have been preserved and maintained, while at the North scarcely a vestige is left. There, instead of courts of justice with open doors, the country is dotted over with bastiles.

The Resolutions contained this:

As constitutional liberty is the sole object which our people and our noble army have in our present terrible struggle with the Government of Mr. Lincoln, so also is a faithful adherence to it on the part of our Govern ment through good fortunes in arms and through bad, one of the great elements of our final success: because the constant contrast of constitutional government on our part with the usurpations and tyrannies which char acterize the government of our enemy under the everrecurring and ever false plea of the necessities of war, will have the double effect of animating our people with an unconquerable zeal and of inspiring the people of the North more and more with a desire and determina tion to put an end to a contest which is waged by their Government openly against our liberty, but secretly and more covertly against their own. . . .
We earnestly recommend that our Government, imme diately after signal successes of arms, and on other occasions when none can impute its action to alarm instead of a sincere desire for peace, shall make to the Government of our enemy an official offer of peace on the basis of the great principles declared by our common fathers in 1776.

He wrote of Lincoln's administration:
1861, April i.-- [Day blockade of Southern ports was declared.] The worst feature is the possibility that he has no real design, no settled policy; that he

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is^ like the fool, scattering fire without any definite purpose. May 30. -- [After suspension of habeas corpus in certain localities.] All Lincoln's Cabinet, except Blair, were opposed to the war at first, I think. The North, I believe, will go into anarchy. The Admin istration cannot stop the war. 1862, August 7. -- The North is already a despotism. Blood will soon flow there as it did in France under the Directory. Win ter of 1862. --If the South had not seceded, Lincoln's administration would have broken down in sixty days. 1863. March -- Lincoln is no more a dictator now than he has been all the time. My opinion was, and still is, that it was better for all the States to remain in the Union under the Constitution. If the Northern Govern ment would now acknowledge the Sovereignty of the States, war would instantly cease, and the great law of nature governing the proper union of States would work its results. But you might as well sing hymns to a dead horse as preach such doctrines to Mr. Lincoln and those who control his Government at this time. If we ever have peace on this line, it will be when other men are brought into power there. There are such men there -- States Rights and State Sovereignty men of the Jefferson school.

The organization of the Peace party at the North "may justly be claimed as part of the fruits" of the Georgia resolutions, Mr. Stephens says in a letter of Sept. 22, 1864; the movement in the Chicago Convention, which nominated McClellan, for a peace convocation of all the States, he hails as "the first ray of real light from the North." He listened eagerly for some expression of sympathy with this movement from Mr. Davis. Their difference of opinion at this time led to a painful cor respondence, initiated by a note from Davis, December, 1864. calling on Stephens to explain this passage in his published letter to Senator Semmes:

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I know there are many persons amongst us whose opinions are entitled to high consideration who do not agree with me on the question of McClellan's election. They prefer Lincoln to McClellan. Perhaps the Presi dent belongs to that class. Judging from his acts, I should think that he did.

Mr. Stephens, in his explanations, said:
The Peace party at the North had planted themselves at Chicago on a States Rights platform. McClellan was their candidate. They announced, as their pur pose, if brought into power, to propose a convention of all the States. This proposition, in your Columbia speech, you opposed. How could their leading men urge their people to rally with any prospect of success, in opposition to the potent argument of their adver saries that the Chief Magistrate of the Confederate States had declared in advance that he would not entertain any such proposition? The rejection was accompanied by words that must have grated very harshly, that there was no prospect of peace but by the sword, that the "only way to make spaniels civil is to whip them." The natural tendency was not only to dampen the ardour of the peace men but to excite bitterness. Who would be willing to subject himself to the taunts of the war champions that he had been "whipped" into his con ciliatory mood, and, in the estimate of our Chief was no better than a spaniel, and a whipped spaniel at that?

Mr. Davis replied
My speech was not such as you represent it, and I now quote the passage from which you have torn a few words. I said, "Does any one believe that the Yankees are to be conciliated by retreating before them, or do you not all know that the way to make spaniels civil is to whip them?" I plainly intimated my desire for the success of the Peace party in the words, "Let fresh

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victories crown our arms, and the Peace party, if there be such at the North, can elect its candidate." The speech is an appeal to the people to trust to their own courage and fortitude for the maintenance of their rights. It was delivered after the publication of McClellan's letter avowing his purpose to force reunion by war if we declined reconstruction when offered.

Mr. Stephens explains further the Semmes letter:
There was nothing in it intended to be offensive to you, or to any one who differed from me, no desire to impeach their motives, integrity, or patriotism. Very few of our public men or presses agreed with me. I stood almost solitary and alone. I had been grossly assailed; my objects were misunderstood by some, mis represented by others, while my motives were openly impugned by many. It was in vindication of myself that I gave these views.

He had been called a traitor. He said in the Semmes letter:
I know that many of our people think that any allu sion to peace on our side is injurious to our cause. Some maintain that we cannot entertain any propositions unless they be based upon our Independence. I concur in none of this reasoning. Nothing would give us more strength at home or abroad, with our armies and the world, than to keep constantly before the public what we are fighting for, and the terms upon which the con test forced upon us may be ended.

In January, 1865, resolutions by Stephens, encourag ing the idea of a convention of the States and of peace measures based on "the principles of 1776," had nearly passed the Confederate Congress when Francis P. Blair's visits to Richmond created a diversion that led to the Hampton Roads Peace Conference.

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Mr. Stephens's first connection with a peace conference was in 1863. Lee's victory at Chancellorsville and Grant's repulses at Vicksburg had discouraged the North, where large peace meetings were held and the papers preached peace. Indications that exchange of prisoners was to be suspended gave Stephens his open ing. He wrote Davis, June 12, offering to go to Wash ington to treat on exchange; if an interview could be had with authorities there, he ho