Crittenden Compromise And Alexander H. Stephens's Corner Stone Speech

The Crittenden Compromise and Alexander H. Stephens’s “Corner Stone” speech are two significant pre-Civil War sources that serve to give students of history insight about the ultimate cause of secession and the War: slavery. Both documents discuss the issue but from different angles.
The first document, The Crittenden Compromise, was a midnight hour attempt to prevent the Union from splitting in two. It presented six articles for amending the Constitution and four resolutions for Congress. These, in an attempt to reconcile the South with the rest of the country, proposed significant protections for slavery. Reinstating the 36°30’ line rules and revoking the federal government’s power to abolish slavery were both part of the proposal as was

He explained that, while some vital parts of the new country’s constitution were the same as the American Constitution, differences abounded. These differences included changes in Congress’s power to regulate commerce and a move towards a Congress modeled closer to British Parliament. The most important change, however, was that the Confederate Constitution clearly settled the question over slavery. Moreover, Stephens explained why the South views slavery as essential and appropriate: blacks are here to serve whites. He declares that blacks are, by the laws of nature and God, inferior beings that are meant to be the eponymous corner stone for society. From the two documents, I see this oration as having the bigger historical significance. The ideas of blacks being the inferior and subordinate foundation of American society spoken in this speech shaped what the War was about but, more importantly, continued to perpetuate themselves throughout the decades after they were uttered. These same ideas led to the segregation seen well into the twentieth century. Of course, Stephens was not the originator of these ideas, but he left them deeply attached to the South by making them such an integral part of the Confederacy’s

Nonetheless, the legacies they left do continue to resonate today. With a constantly gridlocked Congress, we can see the problems caused by sectionalism and extreme party loyalty. Like the Southern Democrats in the 1860s that the Crittenden Compromise attempted to appease, today’s Tea Partiers are a minority in Congress but hold impressive sway despite that with constant shutdowns. The Compromise reminds us that trying to bend to demands of these groups does not always work and has a strong potential to fail. It shows that giving one side everything is not the way to compromise particularly when the debate is over something so morally divisive. Somewhat differently, the “Corner Stone” speech resonates today because some people in the South continue to hold similar ideas to those Stephens described in the speech. While it is dying it out slowly, the notion that African Americans are inferior to their white brethren endures. Instead of simply claiming they are less evolved and inherently unequal, today’s racism takes the approach of saying they are more violent and prone to criminality. In effect, Stephens’s ideas about race stand but have taken a new guise. Supremacist sentiments, however, are not the only legacy left from his speech. One of the pillars of the modern Republican Party, which has a large Southern membership, is the deregulation of business. Similar