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Alexander H. Stephens Quotes
1812–1883 United States
Alexander Hamilton Stephens (February 11, 1812 – March 4, 1883) was a Democratic politician and lawyer from the U.S. state of Georgia, and the Confederate vice president throughout the American Civil War. His "Cornerstone Speech" of March 1861 defended slavery as the Confederacy's cause in the most uncompromising terms, though after the war ended in a Confederate defeat, he tried to retract those statements and distance himself from his earlier sentiments.
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I never would submit to any Black Republican.
African slavery as it exists amongst us; the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.
The Cornerstone Speech (1861)
The process of disintegration in the old Union may be expected to go on with almost absolute certainty if we pursue the right course.
The Cornerstone Speech (1861)
We have intelligence, and virtue, and patriotism. All that is required is to cultivate and perpetuate these.
The Cornerstone Speech (1861)
With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place.
The Cornerstone Speech (1861)
The leading public men of the South, in our early history, were almost all against it. Jefferson was against it. This I freely admit, when the authority of their names is cited. It was a question which they did not, and perhaps could not, thoroughly understand at that time.
So, taking the whole new constitution, I have no hesitancy in giving it as my judgment that it is decidedly better than the old.
The Cornerstone Speech (1861)
But to return to the question of the future. What is to be the result of this revolution? Will every thing, commenced so well, continue as it has begun? In reply to this anxious inquiry, I can only say it all depends upon ourselves.
The Cornerstone Speech (1861)
These ceremonies and the National Statuary Hall will teach the youth of the land in succeeding generations as they come and go that the chief end of human effort in a sublunary view should be usefulness to mankind, and that all true fame which should be perpetuated by public pictures, statues, and monuments, is to be acquired only by noble deeds and high achievements and the establishment of a character founded upon the principles of truth, uprightness, and inflexible integrity.
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