Alexander h stephens biography
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Nevertheless, he was reelected to his post in February 1862 after his one-year provisional appointment expired.
Starting in 1862 Stephens began the first of many arguments with President Jefferson Davis over the management of the war effort. He won the 1882 Democratic gubernatorial nomination and was elected governor of Georgia. In general, then, Stephens’s tenure as the Confederate vice president may be characterized as a rarely broken string of frustrations and disappointments.
Postwar Career
After the war Stephens was imprisoned for five months at Boston’s Fort Warren.
“Little Aleck” was no military man, and Davis found little time for him after hostilities began in earnest. Upon his release, Georgia’s citizens elected him in 1866 to the U.S. Senate under President Andrew Johnson’s forgiving Reconstruction scheme. In the early 1850s, Stephens and Toombs seized leadership of the state party from the less politically skilled John Macpherson Berrien.
In 1848 he was attacked and stabbed multiple times by Francis H. Cone, a Democratic judge who was enraged by Stephens’ opposition to the Clayton Compromise, a bill that addressed the legality of slavery in territories won in the Mexican-American War (1846-48). Biographical Directory of the Governors of the United States, 1789-1978, Vol.
1, Westport, Conn.; Meckler Books, 1978. In 1866, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, but was refused his seat because the state had not been readmitted to representation. Like most southern Whigs, Stephens maintained a delicate balance between supporting states’ rights and backing the party’s nationalist program. Born near Crawfordville, in Taliaferro County, on February 11, 1812, to Margaret Grier and Andrew Baskins Stephens, the young Stephens was orphaned at fourteen, which intensified his already melancholic disposition.
Alexander Stephens
Most famous for serving as the vice president of the Confederacy during the Civil War (1861-65), Alexander Hamilton Stephens was a near-constant force in state and national politics for a half century. That same year he was elected governor of the state but died in office on March 4, 1883. Stephens entered politics in 1836, as a member of the Georgia House of Representatives, a position he held until 1841.
Stephens was sworn into office on November 4, 1882. At the same time, Stephens worked to maintain a balance between free and slave states as new territories were introduced into the Union. During his political apprenticeship Stephens made a lifelong friend and ally in a man who was in many ways his opposite, the robust and blustery Robert Toombs.
He would later clash with Davis over both impressment and the Confederate combat strategy. He graduated from Franklin College (later the University of Georgia) in 1832 and gained admittance to the bar two years later. He used the resulting hiatus from public life to pen A Constitutional View of the Late War between the States (1868-70), his two-volume apology for the Confederacy.
Although not a member of the Bourbon Triumvirate that ruled over a “redeemed” Georgia, Stephens rose once more to political prominence after Reconstruction.
In what became known as the “Cornerstone Speech,” Stephens argued that the new Confederate government was based upon “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.”
After the beginning of the Civil War in April 1861, Stephens moved to the new Confederate capital in Richmond, Virginia, and took part in administrative preparations for the war effort.
Stephens was reelected to the U.S. House of Representatives and served from 1873 until 1882, when he resigned.