'Cornerstone Speech By Alexander Stephens Undoubtedly'

In 18th century the United States started facing many difficult problems. As the newer generations came into place the traditions of the older generations began to be questioned. What was once considered the norm on race, gender, and cultural differences, slowly transformed into the controversial topic on what was right and what was wrong. Slavery, once considered a necessary evil, was now thought of an inhuman act. These issues began to cause an even bigger divide between the southern slave owners and the northern abolitionists. There were many opinions concerning these topics and many of them were voiced out by people in many different forms. The Cornerstone Speech by Alexander Stephens is an example of such opinions. As was Thomas Nast’s

In this silver-tongued speech, Stephens wholly rejects the Constitution’s principle that “all men are created equal”. He argues this so-called fact that the Negro man being a slave is simply the way nature has been set to be. Whether things evolved to that or they simple were always like that, the result is the same thing nonetheless. “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

In the above excerpt from Stephens’ speech he bluntly says that blacks will never be equal or even close to the white man. In his mind that principle is set in stone and there’s no changing that. It is the Negroes natural and unchanging condition to be under the white man’s authority. That statement would eventually be proven wrong by the black Union soldiers on the front of the battlefield in the Civil

Even Thomas Jefferson predicted that slavery would be the “rock upon which the old Union would split”. The one thing that Stephen didn’t seem to put much thought into was whether his speech would benefit the Confederacy or not. The South was leaning towards a complete independence from the North, while the North was trying to devise a compromise to keep the secession from completely taking over the South. The North had a more modernized way of life, while the South had created a more barbaric slave based system. If the North had let the south leave and create its own government the United States of America would have probably ceased to exist. Eventually the North’s government would’ve been engulfed into the South’s white supremacist form of