Alexander Hamilton Stephens was a U. S. congressman, vice president of the Confederacy, and briefly governor of Georgia.
Background
Stephens was born on February 11, 1812 in Crawfordville, Georgia. His parents were Andrew Baskins Stephens and Margaret Grier. His father, a native of Pennsylvania, came to Georgia at 12 years of age, in 1795. His mother, a Georgia native and sister of Grier's Almanac founder Robert Grier, died in 1812 at the age of 26; Alexander Stephens was only three months old. In 1814, Andrew B. Stephens married Matilda Lindsay, daughter of Revolutionary War Colonel John Lindsay. In 1826, when Alexander Stephens was 14 years old, his father, Andrew, and stepmother, Matilda, died only days apart in May of that year. Their deaths caused him and several siblings to be scattered among relatives. He grew up poor and in difficult circumstances. Not long after the deaths of his father and his stepmother, Alexander Stephens was sent to live with his mother's other brother, General Aaron W. Grier, near Raytown (Taliaferro County), Georgia. General Grier had inherited his own father's library, said to be "the largest library in all that part of the country. "
Education
Young Stephens acquired his continued education through the generosity of several benefactors. Stephens attended the Franklin College (later the University of Georgia) in Athens, where he was roommates with Crawford W. Long and a member of the Phi Kappa Literary Society. He raised funds for Phi Kappa Hall, located on the university campus. Stephens graduated at the top of his class in 1832. After several unhappy years teaching school, he took up legal studies, passed the bar in 1834, and began a successful career as a lawyer in Crawfordville.
Career
Though plagued by infirmities, Stephens rose steadily in politics, serving in the Georgia House of Representatives (1837-1841), the state Senate (1842-1843), and the U. S. House of Representatives (1843-1859). A Whig, he urged the annexation of Texas and supported the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), both of which attempted to establish criteria for the extension of slavery to U. S. territories. He defended slavery but opposed the dissolution of the Union. When Georgia seceded, however (1861), he followed his state and was shortly elected vice president of the Confederacy.
Throughout the war Stephens opposed the exercise of extraconstitutional war powers by Confederate President Jefferson Davis lest the freedom for which the South was ostensibly fighting should be destroyed. The policy he advocated was to preserve constitutional government in the South and to strengthen the antiwar party in the North by convincing it that the Lincoln administration had abandoned such government; to the same end he urged, in 1864, the unconditional discharge of Federal prisoners. Stephens headed the Confederate commission to the abortive peace conference at Hampton Roads, Virginia, in February 1865.
After the fall of the Confederacy (May 1865), Stephens was confined for five months at Fort Warren, Boston. In 1866 he was elected to the U. S. Senate but was denied his seat because his state had not been properly reconstructed according to the congressional guidelines. He did serve again in the U. S. House of Representatives (1873-1882), however, and as governor of Georgia (1882-1883). His book A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States, 2 vol. (1868-1870), is perhaps the best statement of the Southern position on state sovereignty and secession.
Membership
Member of the U. S. House of Representatives from Georgia's 8th district, member of the U. S. House of Representatives from Georgia's 7th district, member of the U. S. House of Representatives from Georgia's At-large district, member of the Georgia Senate
