Alexander Hamilton Stephens (February 11, 1812 – March 4, 1883) was an American politician who served as the only vice president of the Confederate States of America from 1861 to 1865, and later as the 50th governor of the state of Georgia from 1882 until his death in 1883. Previously, he had represented Georgia in the United States House of Representatives.
After serving in both houses of the Georgia General Assembly, he won election to Congress, taking his seat in 1843. He became a leading Southern Whig and strongly opposed the Mexican-American War. After the war, Stephens was a prominent supporter of the Compromise of 1850 and helped draft the Georgia Platform, which opposed secession. A proponent of the expansion of slavery into the territories, Stephens also helped pass the Kansas–Nebraska Act. After the Whig Party collapsed in the 1850s, Stephens joined the Democratic Party and worked with President James Buchanan to admit Kansas as a state under the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution (which was overwhelmingly rejected by voters in a referendum in that state).
Stephens declined to seek re-election to the House in 1858, but continued to publicly advocate against secession. However, after Georgia and other Southern states seceded and formed the Confederate States of America, Stephens was elected as the Confederate Vice President. Stephens's Cornerstone Speech of March 1861 would go down in history for its defense of slavery and has been named as proof that slavery was the main cause for the war, being named as such for stating, in regards of the Confederacy, that "its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests" upon the belief that Blacks were not equal to Whites and that slavery was the former's natural and normal condition. In the course of the war, Stephens became increasingly critical of Confederate President Jefferson Davis's policies, especially Confederate conscription, the suspension of habeas corpus, and Davis's military strategy; things got so bad between the two that Stephens left Richmond and spent most of the rest of the war at home in Georgia. In February 1865, he was one of the commissioners who met with Abraham Lincoln at the abortive Hampton Roads Conference to discuss peace terms.
During the downfall of the Confederacy, Stephens was arrested on May 1865, and was imprisoned until October of that year. The following year, the Georgia legislature elected Stephens to the United States Senate, but the Senate declined to seat him due to his role in the Civil War. He won election to the House of Representatives in 1873 and held that office until 1882, when he resigned from Congress to become governor of Georgia. Stephens served as governor only for four months until his death in March 1883.
In Media:
Literature- In the Alternate History story The Union Forever, George McClellan experiences an accident which paralyzes him from the waist down, leading to his replacement defeating Robert E. Lee and forces an earlier end to the war. After the fall of Greensboro (the second Confederate Capital), Alexander Stephens tells Jefferson Davis that the war is already lost, and that if he cared about the South, he'd either step down or sue for peace, leading to Stephens becoming the Second Confederate president.
Live-Action Film
- He makes a brief but important appearance in Lincoln, which depicts the Hampton Roads Conference. He is also the highest-ranking Confederate official to appear in the film, since Jefferson Davis is The Ghost. He is played by Jackie Earle Haley.
