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Alexander Stephens Cornerstone Speech

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Alexander Stephens’ Cornerstone Speech in Savannah is unquestionably the most famous speech associated with the Confederacy. Stephens was speaking extemporaneously and later complained that his views had been distorted and taken out of context by Northern abolitionists. We have already seen that Alexander Stephens gave another version of the Cornerstone Speech a month later at the Virginia Convention. The fundamental racialist worldview articulated in both speeches is more or less the same: The status of the African negro in the Southern states was “the immediate cause” of secession. It was the “occasion” or “incident” of secession, which is to say, the spark that ignited the blaze. The ultimate cause of secession was sectional conflict generated by clashing economic interests within the Union and rival constitutional theories about the nature of republican government.
The Union fractured between slave states and free states. The fracture was caused by the so-called “great truth” of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” It had since …show more content…

Stephens, who had been a friend of then-Congressman Abraham Lincoln in the late 1840s, delivers “Cornerstone Speech” in Georgia in which he states that the cornerstone of secession is “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery…is his natural and moral condition.” Secretary of State William H. Seward meets with U.S. Supreme Court Justice John A. Campbell as a conduit to Confederate commissioners, whom President Lincoln has ordered him not to meet with. Seward tries to reassure the Confederates that a compromise can be reached — even as the Lincoln Administration seems to be hardening on Fort Sumter. Gustavus V. Fox is in Charleston visiting Fort Sumter as a confidential agent of President Lincoln. Another Lincoln agent, Illinois politician Stephen A. Hurlbut, is dispatched from Washington to visit Charleston and report to the

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