Alexander H. Stephens: A Confederate Portrait

HUMAN nature is full of contradictions, which give it much of its charm. But the character and career of Alexander H. Stephens seem to involve contradictions beyond the share of most of us.

In physique he was abnormally frail, delicate, and sensitive; nervous sometimes to the point of hysteria; yet he had the spirit of a gamecock, was ready for a duel when honor required it, walked right up and struck a far bigger man who had insulted him and who nearly murdered him in consequence. Perhaps with some braggadocio, but with more truth, he said of himself: ’I am afraid of nothing on earth, or above the earth, or under the earth, but to do wrong.’

He was studious by nature, longed for quiet, and solitude, and meditation. Yet he lived in a perpetual whirl, either drawn by a thousand activities abroad, or beset by a throng of visitors at home. ’I supposed when I got this room I should be by myself, . . . but I do nothing the livelong day but jabber with each transient interloper who may be disposed to give me a call.’

He was one of the most logical, clearheaded, determined defenders of slavery and of the thorough subordination of black to white. Yet few men have been more sensitively humane, more tenderly sympathetic with suffering in either white or black. The Negroes loved him, and on one occasion after the war three thousand freedmen gathered on his lawn and serenaded him with passionate admiration and devotion.

No man was more bitterly opposed to secession and to the war than he was. No Southerner made a harder or more nearly successful fight to prevent the withdrawal of his state. Yet when Georgia went, he not only went with her, but became the vice-president of the Confederacy. He himself puts this contrast vividly in his diary written while a prisoner at Fort Warren in 1865. ‘How strange it seems to me that I should thus suffer. I who did everything in my power to prevent [the war] . . . On the fourth of September, 1848, I was near losing my life for resenting the charge of being a traitor to the South, and now I am here, a prisoner, under charge, I suppose, of being a traitor to the Union. In all, I have done nothing but what I thought was right.’

Nor does this sum up the list of Stephens’s contradictions. The second officer of the Confederacy and a devoted champion of its cause, he was yet persistently opposed to the conduct of the government from beginning to end. He opposed Davis’s financial policy, he opposed conscription, he opposed martial law, he considered that the president’s whole course was dictated either by gross misjudgment or by a belief in the necessity of dictatorial power. And here we have, I think, a rather piquant attitude for a man who held the next to the highest place in a new-born nation fighting for life and death.

These considerations make the vicepresident, if not the greatest, certainly the most curious and interesting figure in the lightning-lit panorama of Confederate history.

In analyzing Stephens’s career, the question of health, negatively important for most leaders of men, becomes enormously positive. From his birth in 1812 to his death in 1883, his life seems to have been a long disease, forever on the verge of terminating fatally. It may be that the rough experiences of pioneer farming in his childhood — the corn-dropping, the sheep-tending, exposure, hardship — injured him permanently, or saved him, who knows? So with the long, desperate battle for an education and a profession, in solitude and poverty. The battle may have weakened, may have toughened, perhaps both.

At any rate, we rarely hear of him except as suffering. All the descriptions of him emphasize some phase of physical weakness and inadequacy. His own account at twenty-one sets the note (the arithmetic is somewhat peculiar): ‘My weight is ninety-four pounds, my height sixty-seven inches, my waist twenty-seven inches in circumference, and my whole appearance that of a youth of seventeen or eighteen. When I left college, two years ago, my net weight was seventy pounds. If I continue in a proportionate increase, I shall reach one hundred pounds in about ten years more.’

Later portrayals have sometimes an unkindly touch, as the caustic diatribe of the robust Dick Taylor, no doubt in some points justified: ‘Like other ills, feeble health has its compensations, especially for those who unite restless vanity and ambition to a feminine desire for sympathy. It has been much the habit of Mr. Stephens to date controversial epistles from “a sick chamber,” as do ladies in a delicate condition. A diplomat of the last century, the Chevalier d’Eon, by usurping the privileges of the opposite sex, inspired grave doubts concerning his own.’

But most observers seem rather to be impressed with the contrast between the man’s physical deficiencies and his splendid spiritual strength. In the height of his congressional career in Washington (1855) a keen-sighted journalist noted that, with the stress of great occasions, ‘the poor, sickly, emaciated frame, which looks as if it must sink under the slightest physical exertion, at once grows instinct with a galvanic vitality which quickens every nerve with the energy of a new life, imparts to every feature a high, intellectual expression, makes the languid eyes glow like living coals, and diffuses a glow of reviving animation over the pallid countenance.’

Even more striking is another picture taken in the same place in 1872, after war and imprisonment had done their worst. ‘An immense cloak, a high hat, and peering somewhere out of the middle a thin, pale, sad face. How anything so small and sick and sorrowful could get here all the way from Georgia is a wonder. If he were laid out in his coffin, he need n’t look any different, only then the fire would have gone out in the burning eyes. Set as they are in the wax-white face, they seem to burn and blaze. That he is here at all to offer the counsels of moderation and patriotism proves how invincible is the soul that dwells in that sunken frame. He took the modified oath in his chair, and his friends picked him up and carried him off in it as if he were a feather.’

How far this fiery energy of the soul was responsible for the weary failure of the body, who shall say? But never was man, in mind and spirit, more heartily and vividly and incessantly and at every point alive than Alexander H. Stephens. From childhood he fought his way in the world, fought for education, fought for success as a lawyer, fought for political distinction. He liked fighting. ‘ I was made to figure in a storm, excited by continual collisions. Discussion and argument are my delight; and a place of life and business therefore is my proper element. . . . I long to be where I shall have an argument daily.’

In age and in prison the fire, indeed, might burn a little low. ‘Personal ambition had no part in anything I have done.’ But in the early days the man panted to get upward, to do something, to be something. ‘I believe I shall never be worth anything, and the thought is death to my soul. I am too boyish, childish, unmanful, trifling, simple in my manners and address.’ When he had become something — not enough, never enough — the record of work he did is, for an invalid, quite inexplicable; or rather, it fully explains the invalidism. ‘I rise and breakfast at eight; then commence with my mail. Frequently I do not get half through that before I am bored almost to death with calls on business of all sorts; then to the Committee at ten; then to the House at twelve; then to dinner at four; then calls before I leave the table till twelve at night. Then I take up and get through my unfinished reading of letters and newspapers of the morning; and then at one o’clock get to bed. I now have about one hundred letters before me unanswered.’

This petulance, this vivacity, this mad energy of living, in a frame half dead, remind one constantly of Voltaire, who, with his little, weak, and shattered body, went on for fifty years, making enemies and smashing them, puncturing social rottenness with his fierce wit, blasting others’ lies and telling petty lies of his own, sometimes pitiable, sometimes malignant, often fascinating, but always, always splendidly alive. Stephens made few enemies, told no lies, was neither pitiable nor malignant; but he was splendidly alive until the coffin-lid put out the torch that seemed to have exhausted its fuel long before.

But though Voltaire had plenty of physical ills, I find no indication that he ever suffered from melancholy or mental depression. Stephens did. The jar of over-tense nerves mingles curiously with his eager bursts of ambition and aspiration. ‘ My feelings and hopes seem ever to be vibrating between assurance and despondency. My soul is bent upon success in my profession, and when indulging in brightest anticipations, the most trivial circumstance is frequently sufficient to damp my whole ardor and drive me to despair.’

This tendency to depression was not merely the reaction from disappointed hopes or dreams unrealized. It was a constitutional melancholy which, not only in youth, but even in middle life, seems to have eaten like a canker into the man’s very soul. The words in which he describes it most definitely have a strange, poignant bitterness that wrings the heart: ‘Sometimes I have thought that of all men I was most miserable; that I was especially doomed to misfortune, to melancholy, to grief. . . . The misery, the deep agony of spirit I have suffered, no mortal knows, nor ever will. . . . The torture of body is severe; I have had my share of that. . . But all these are slight, when compared with the pangs of an offended or wounded spirit. The heart alone knoweth its own sorrow. I have borne it these many years. I have borne it all my life.’

To his beloved brother, Linton, he endeavors to describe his spiritual malady. ‘ It is the secret of my life. I have never told it to any one.’ But his speech, usually so lucid, is incoherent, stumbling, and obscure. It appears that his physical deficiencies wounded him, as they did Byron; he shrank and withered under the jeers and mocking looks of those who could not see his soul. Then the stung soul rebounded and strove with every ounce of will to make the mockers love him by doing good to them in strange new ways of overwhelming potency. But the explanation is neither clear nor wholly sufficient; it sounds manufactured to lit facts beyond the vision of even the explainer. All we can say is that we get dim glimpses of a spiritual hell.

What is supremely interesting about Stephens is that he neither accepts this condition of things nor submits to it. Such a wretched frame for such a fierce vitality might easily have made another Leopardi, veiling all the light of heaven in black pessimism, cursing man and nature and God with cold irony for the vile mistake of his creation. Stephens fights his ills, makes head against them, never lets himself be really prostrated by physical torture or mental agony. Worsted for the moment, he forever reámerges, with some new refuge, some new comfort, some new device of cure.

One day he tries Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, finds it excellent, on homœopathic principles, and recommends it to his brother, though Burton himself is inclined to advise all melancholy persons to shun his majestic folio.

More serious than such bookishness is the clear determination to overcome mental misery by effort of will. ‘I have in my life,’ he says, ‘been one of the most miserable beings that walked the earth. . . . Without enjoyment, without pleasure, without hope, and without sympathy with the world.’ But the unfailing remedy for those who will but try it is the absolute control of thought. ‘Never let the mind dwell upon anything disagreeable — turn it to something else. . . . Great and heroic effort was necessary at first and for a long time.’ But ‘with a proper discipline of one’s self in this way, ever keeping the passions in perfect subjection, contentment and happiness are obtainable by all.’ I do not read that he ever attained them, but others may, by following his precepts. He fought for them, at any rate.

Stoical self-control was not his only refuge. He had one higher — God. In his youth he declined to be educated for the ministry, and I do not think he was ever consistently satisfied as to speculative religion. But he seems to have had a keen and mighty sense of the divine in spiritual things, and in his hours of agony he seeks relief in this and finds it. He devotes a portion of every day to communion with God in prayer, and gets from it comfort in his anguish, light in the valley of dark shadows, and the growth of a kindlier, sweeter temper toward his fellow men. In old age, in sickness, in solitude, in prison, he sums up thus the mighty help that God has been to him: ‘That the Lord is a stronghold in the day of trouble I know. But for his sustaining grace, I should have been crushed in body and soul long ere this.’

Nevertheless, with a temperament so introspective, brooding, and sensitive, it is doubtful whether even religious contemplation would have cured Stephens of melancholy and morbidness. It might have lifted him above the pessimism and misanthropy of Leopardi only to land him in the deeper spiritual wretchedness of Amiel. Contemplation, even divine, is not always sufficient to save such a temperament from ruining itself.

A better, surer remedy, at least a needed balance-wheel, is action, constant contact with the busy, outward, stupid hurry of the world. Stephens knew this, and had the courage and the energy to force himself out of himself. He may have possessed ‘a charm against loneliness,’ as his brother writes; but he knew that in loneliness lay his danger, and he kept as much as possible in the bright current of turbulent humanity, even when all his inclinations bade him fly from it. ’It seems to me that but for an effort that no other mortal upon earth would make, I should sink into profound indifference to all things connected with men and their affairs. But with that effort that I daily exert, to the persons about me I appear, I have no doubt, to be one of the most cheerful and happy men on earth.’

As a result of this he had people near him always. His hospitality was notorious even in the hospitable South. Though he was far from wealthy, his mansion, Liberty Hall, was open to all men at all times. Rich and poor, high and low, ignorant and learned, gathered there and feasted at the owner’s spiritual table as well as at the material. ‘Distinguished visitors from everywhere sought the sage’s dwelling; so did hungry tramps, black and white.’

Like many persons of melancholy temperament, he was rich in delightful social qualities, made his guests feel thoroughly at home, studied their needs and ministered to them. And that especially frequent concomitant of melancholy, a dainty and sometimes a boisterous sense of humor, he had in a very high degree. His letters and his diary abound with good stories. What a quaint comic invention is the imaginary Finkle, through whom at irregular intervals he narrates his autobiography. His prison life at Fort Warren appears to him to be full of humorous matter. When he is not weeping over it, he is laughing at it. One of the best specimens of his dry wit, though more bitter than is usual with him, is the comment with which he closes some rather severe observations on Davis. ‘It is certainly not my object to detract from Mr. Davis, but the truth is that as a statesman he was not colossal.

. . . After the Government was organized at Montgomery, it was reported that he said it was “now a question of brains.” I thought the remark a good one.’

These social qualities — cheerfulness, kindliness, sympathy — won friends for Stephens everywhere. In college, though poor, he was generally beloved and gathered all the young men around him. During his political life in Washington it was the same. The venerable John Quincy Adams saluted him with verses more notable for feeling than for genius. Members of all parties treated him with affection and respect. When he gave up his congressional seat in 1859, he received the unusual honor of a dinner tendered by a list of members of both houses of Congress without party distinction, headed by the Speaker of the House and the Vice-President.

Stephens’s universal popularity was by no means confined to men of his own position in life, but was perhaps even greater among the working people. ‘Thank God for little Alex!’ shouted crowds assembled on his first, appearance after being wounded by a political adversary. And the Negroes, especially those in his own service, were as enthusiastic and devoted as the whites.

It will be evident that qualities like these seemed to pave the straight way to political success. In a certain sense Stephens had such success in large measure. Why that success was limited will become clearer as we go on. But in the tactful management of men for a political purpose he had few superiors. And his art was largely sincerity. He made it clear that he himself acted only from a profound and well-reasoned conviction, that he would throw over his party and even his constituents in a moment, if his conviction was against them; and the remnant of honesty that is latent in all men, politicians as well as others, responded to such straightforward uprightness. History records few finer things than Stephens’s manly stand against the rush of secession in his state. Protesting in the face of angry thousands, he almost swept the current back. And what is perhaps most impressive of all, he so far retained the confidence and affection of his opponents that they elected him a chief officer of their government when they had established it.

The same qualities that made Stephens acceptable in general social and political circles, made him deeply beloved in the more intimate relations of life. He never married. Yet children were very dear to him, and he was keenly susceptible to the charm of women’s society. Twice at least he was in love. In the first case poverty as well as health obliged him to control his passion. The second time, he was already in Congress and well-to-do in the world. The match was suitable and the lady, it seems, not unwilling. But he would not ask her to marry so frail a bit of humanity. ‘ A woman’s due,’ he thought, ‘was a husband on whom she could lean, and not an invalid whom she must nurse.’ It was, perhaps, a mistake for him and her both. At any rate, it added to his bitterness of spirit. Once again one is reminded of Leopardi.

In every way Stephens was a man to whom affection meant much. He had the deepest love for home, for Georgia, her hills and streams and forests. His outcry for her from his Northern prison is poignant in its pathos: ‘ Let my days be brought to an end in my own native land! Let my last breath be of my own native air! My native land, my country, the only one that is country to me, is Georgia. The winds that sweep over her hills are my native air. There I wish to live, and there to die.’ His home farm may be barren, may be simple. It has neither luxury nor splendor. But to him it is everything. When a young man, just beginning life, with boundless ambition, a good opening and large salary were offered him away from home. But he unhesitatingly preferred to practice in his native town, although earning only a few hundred dollars a year. And in old age and captivity, as he turned generally to Georgia, so he longed most of all for the remembered haunts of youth and happiness. ‘That old homestead and that quiet lot, Liberty Hall, in Crawfordsville, sterile and desolate as they may seem to others, are bound to me by associations tender as heart-strings and strong as hooks of steel.’

These local affections sometimes take the place of human ties, and there are men — men especially — who, if they can live where they will, care little with whom they live. It was not so with Stephens. His love for his friends was as deep as his love for home. Among the great number of these friends none was nearer than Robert Toombs, and the marked contrast between the two makes this intimate relation singularly charming. Stephens was little and frail; Toombs huge and solid. Stephens was a thinker, Toombs a liver. Toombs conquered men; Stephens charmed them. Very often the two took opposite sides and contended against each other energetically. Yet at the same time they praised, admired, and loved each other, and were never estranged save slightly in the midst of the secession fury. Even then, after Stephens’s great anti-secession speech, Toombs led the cheering for the beloved enemy, though he remarked to a friend who complimented him on it, ‘I always try to behave myself at a funeral.’

But the best of Stephens’s affection went to his family. His mother died when he was very young, but his love for his father’s memory has a depth and tenderness which is quite irresistible. Surely few sons could write, in old age, a tribute so impressive and so complete as the following: ‘Never was human anguish greater than that which I felt upon the death of my father. He was the object of my love, my admiration, my reverence. It seemed to me impossible that I could live without him; and the whole world for me was filled with the blackness of despair. . . . Whenever I was about to do something that I had never done before, the first thought that occurred to me was, what would my father think of this? . . . The principles and precepts he taught me have been my guiding-star through life.’

Even deeper and more absorbing was Stephens’s love for his young halfbrother, Linton, whom he educated, trained, and advised through boyhood and young manhood, and who afterward became his closest confidant. To Linton he poured out all his hopes and sorrows and desires, both public and private. Linton himself was a man of great ability, deservedly prominent in political life. He was also a man of singular charm, as fully appears from Waddell’s excellent life of him. To have been looked up to and worshiped by such a man is not the least of Stephens’s claims upon our interest, and the elder brother returned the devotion of the younger with all the passion of a heart keenly sensitive and not distracted from its sole object by either wife or child. The perpetual recurrence of Linton’s name in his brother’s letters and diary almost recalls Madame de Sévigné’s unlimited adoration of her daughter. ‘Oh, if I had Linton with me now, how full would be my joy notwithstanding I am a prisoner! How light is my burden compared with what it has been! The full dawn of day is certainly upon me! May the sun of my deliverance soon arise! Oh, may Linton soon come!’

The affection which could not satiate itself with humanity overflowed further in a notable tenderness for animals, especially for dogs. Stephens had always one or more of these to tend, to confide in, or to frolic with. When absent from home, he writes of them with a solicitude which is sometimes amusing, but more often pathetic. Over the blindness of one of them, Rio, he sorrows as over the affliction of a friend. He walks with Rio, to guide the dog’s steps, and he buries him with a touch as characteristic in its simple vanity as in its profound emotion. ’The world will never see another Rio. And few dogs ever had, or ever will have, such a master. Over his grave I shed a tear, as I did over him frequently as I saw nature failing.’

Perhaps it is possible to overdo this matter of sympathy with animals. It seems to some of us that the universal pity of the nineteenth century rather tended to increase the aggregate of sentient woe than to diminish it. When Uncle Toby spares the pestilent fly, we love him for it, especially as he was not aware of the huge maleficence with which later investigation was to load that domestic parasite. But when Stephens mourns over the necessary destruction of prison bedbugs, he seems to push altruism to the edge of the ludicrous — and over. ‘I have often felt sorry for what I have to do to these bloodsuckers. Most willingly would I turn them loose and let them go away, if they would go and stay, but this they will not do. Between them and me, therefore, there is an irrepressible conflict. Either I or they must be extinguished.’

In the more important field of pity for human suffering, and of attempts to relieve the wretched and to assist the struggling and down-trodden, we can have nothing but admiration for Stephens’s persistent endeavor. He does, indeed, as with regard to Rio above, indulge in very frank statement of his own merit in this kind: ’While I have been here I have with free will and of my own accord labored, I think, more for the benefit of others than I have for myself, which is more than many mortals I ever knew could say for themselves.’ But the merits require no such emphasis. They are great and indisputable.

Probably few persons of his means have done more for others than Stephens did. He was constantly educating young men, so that all those of promise in his home town appealed to him, and many from outside. During the war he was devoted in his attendance at prisons and hospitals, visiting them often with fruit and flowers, which, I think, was providing a charming function for that generally useless functionary, a vice-president. ‘Whenever I see a head at an iron grate, my heart is interested,’ he wrote before he had passed four months behind an iron grate himself. It is worth noting that one of the points in which he differed from the government was his belief that prisoners of war should be set free, since the Confederacy was not able to provide for them properly. If sometimes, with men as with animals, his heart outran his head, who will blame him? It is worth while to be fooled occasionally by vice and idleness, worth while to be ‘like a ship otherwise staunch but eaten up by barnacles that he cannot dislodge,’ for the sake of winning the slave’s simple eulogy: ‘He is kind to folks that nobody else will be kind to. Mars Alex is kinder to dogs than mos’ folks is to folks.’

It is to be observed, further, that Stephens’s charity went much back of the hand. Oftentimes the fingers are spread widely when the heart is tight shut, and some who are ready to give to a beggar are less ready to forgive an enemy. Stephens had no real enemies. In all that bitter time I meet few besides Lincoln and Lee who speak of those opposed to them with such unfailing kindliness. It is indeed interesting that one of Lincoln’s many efforts at conciliation before the struggle, should have been his well-known correspondence with Stephens, in which both men appear so much to advantage. In all the vast length of Stephens’s book on the war I do not think there is a sentence of bitterness toward the North, or even toward those Northerners who had taken most part in bringing on the conflict.

This tone of tolerance is still more marked in dealing with friends than with enemies. Coming fresh from the reading of so many volumes of reminiscences which were harsh and bitter, filled with striving to justify the author at the expense of all those who had fought side by side with him, I was especially impressed with Stephens’s gentleness and courtesy. He disagreed with many. He was estranged from none. Even of Davis, whose policy he thought absolutely wrong, he has no unkind or cruel personal criticism. They met as friends, he says, and they parted as such. ‘ I doubt not that all — the President, the Cabinet, and Congress — did the best they could from their own conviction of what was best to be done at the time.’ It does not seem a great admission, yet how few are ready to make it!

The root of this kindly and universal tolerance is to be found in a cardinal principle of Stephens’s nature which it is now time to take up and investigate. He was essentially an intellectualist, and guided his life, far more than most men do, by systematic reasoning. I have already made it quite clear that this does not mean that he was cold or insensible. Most certainly he was not. Neither does it mean that he had the calm, dispassionate, scientific spirit of the nineteenth century, which observes all facts curiously without special eagerness to relate them to preconceived theories. Stephens was a deductive thinker of an older type. He reasoned from accepted generalizations to very positive conclusions. And even in this line his thinking was neither profound nor original. In his letters he is perpetually turning over rather glaring commonplaces, and the comparison of his diary with Amiel’s, which I have already suggested, will show at once that the Southern statesman had very little power of going to the bottom of things.

Nevertheless, in a tumult of passions and preconceptions and prejudices, he strove mightily to clear his mind of cant, to get at the conclusions of calm reason as to the terrible questions put before him, and then to act on those conclusions singly, honestly, unflinchingly, with absolute disregard of party, or tradition, or convention. In a time when the still voice of thought was wellnigh drowned in the furious outcry of politicians and fanatics, surely this quality must be counted unto Stephens for righteousness.

It was this which made him so patient with those who differed from him, this which made him so genuinely humble and modest. He reasoned to his own conclusions and acted on them. But others had their own conclusions and must act on them. Oddly enough this very intellectual tendency which made him modest made him vain; as we have exactly the same tendencies exhibited in Cicero, one of the most confirmed intellectualists who ever lived, and placed in times and situations quite similar to Stephens’s. To a man like Cicero it is equally natural to admit that his opponent may be right and to feel that his opponent, and everybody else, should recognize the simple fact of Cicero’s own power and achievement. In Stephens the vanity is of course in no way so colossal as Cicero’s, but the allowance for possible error on his own part is as large and fine as ever in any man. ’It may be that if the course which I thought would or could then save it [the Confederate Government], or would or could have saved it at any time, had been adopted, it would have come as far short of success as the one which was pursued; and it may be, that the one which was taken on that occasion, as well as on all the other occasions on which I did not agree, was the very best that could have been taken.’ How refreshing that is in all the jar and clash of positive assertions and violent opinions and dogmatic assurance of a world of might-have-beens. One should read also the admirable letter in which Stephens discusses the possibilities, if the whole burden of the government, in the event of Davis’s death, should fall upon the vice-president’s shoulders. The clear appreciation of the abstract end to be attained is no finer than the full recognition of the immense difficulties and his own unfitness to encounter them.

Yet if Stephens was modest where he admitted the possibility of error, he was rocklike when he had deduced his conclusions, knew his ground, and felt that he was right. An interruption during his celebrated answer to Campbell of Ohio brought out one of those tremendous sentences in which a man strips his whole character bare all at once. ‘You are wrong in that,’ interjects Campbell. ‘No, sir,’ replies Stephens. ‘Iam never wrong upon a matter I have given as close attention to as I have given to this.’ So a god might answer.

And he would stand by these intellectual conclusions to the issue of life or death. Huge Judge Cone had called Stephens a traitor. Stephens retorted with the lie and threatened to slap the Judge’s face. They met. The Judge demanded a withdrawal. Stephens refused and struck. There was an instant collision. Cone pulled out a knife and slashed his opponent again and again, got him down, and cried, ‘Retract, or I’ll cut your damned throat.’ ‘Never!’ said Stephens, ‘cut, if you like.’ He caught the descending knife-blade in his bare hand, which was cut to pieces, and he went to the hospital, when his adversary was pulled off, with eighteen knife-thrusts in his body and arms.

The man simply could not say that he was wrong when he knew he was right. It is like the legend] of Galileo, who succumbed to the gentle persuasions of the church and yet whispered, ’E pur si muove.’

It is most interesting to follow out this intellectual tendency in the different phases of Stephens’s life. To begin with, he was a man of system and exactness. Manifold and varied as his occupations were, he yet, where possible, arranged his time according to a schedule and gave certain hours to certain pursuits. Moreover, he had a fine memory for minute details, and was always strong in dealing with figures and statistics. Art and the artistic side of literature seem to have had little interest for him. His reading, which was both careful and extensive, was mainly in history and in lines of practical thinking and morals. So with the natural world. He had, as already noted, a profound, instinctive love for the surroundings that mean home. Beyond this he was chiefly interested in minute observation of the weather, and takes just pride in having been the means of publishing the reports of the weather bureau which have since become of such immense value to the country.

As regards religion, I have already pointed out its significance to Stephens on the emotional side of his nature. He always retained a faith in the literal interpretation of the Bible which was perhaps rather old-fashioned even in his day. Yet in some quarters he had the reputation of being an atheist, and it is evident from his diary that he had a strong disposition to submit religious views to the strict intellectual tests which he applied to other matters. It seems odd at first, yet it is really characteristic, that with this tendency he should have combined a strong tincture of superstition. His diary contains numerous discussions of good and ill luck, and he takes an undeniable interest in seeing the new moon over the right shoulder. ‘ If there is anything in signs, I shall certainly have good luck this moon.’

In his own profession of the law Stephens’s fine intellectual sincerity stands out fully, and well proves that success requires neither dishonesty nor shuffling. ‘What business do you follow, Alex?’ said his uncle to him in the early days. ‘I am a lawyer.’ After an ominous silence the uncle spoke again. ‘Alex, don’t you have to tell lies?’ Alex did not have to tell lies. Hear what he says, reviewing his career in old age. ‘No advocate should ever assert as matter of fact in his client’s case what he knows is not such; any code of morals justifying him in this does not deserve the name.’ And again, more personally, ‘My rule from the time I was admitted to the bar was: first, to investigate a case submitted to me, to inquire into the facts and the law applicable to it; then, if I did not believe the party entitled to success before the court, I told him so and declined to appear or prosecute the case.’

Stephens believed that the object of law was justice, and that the lawyer’s high function was to reconcile differences and remedy evils. He detested prejudice of party, or locality, or class, or station. This feeling he carried so far that it led him into a singular tirade against what is surely a most worthy and respectable portion of the community. ‘If I am ever to be tried for anything, may Heaven deliver me from a jury of preachers! . . . Their most striking defect is a want of that charity which they, above all men, should not only preach hut practice.’ And elsewhere he speaks of ‘the usual bloodthirsty propensity’ of ‘that calling.’ Stephens’s religion was different enough from Voltaire’s. Yet here one would think Voltaire was speaking.

It was in politics, however, that Stephens’s natural characteristics came to their fullest fruition. As a speaker he was much praised, and was effective and successful. ‘All lungs and brains,’ one admirer said of him. But to me the most impressive eulogy is Lincoln’s. Think of winning these words from such a source. ‘I take up my pen to tell you that Mr. Stephens, of Georgia, a little slim pale-faced consumptive man, has just concluded the very best, speech of an hour’s length I ever heard. My old withered dry eyes are full of tears yet.’

Nevertheless, Stephens mistrusted oratory, as one who knew its dangerous power. When he had conviction with him he could give it all the graces of persuasive eloquence. But conviction was essential. Without it the rest was but as a tinkling cymbal. Where conviction led him he would go, no matter what friend deserted him or what party disclaimed him. He argued for the abolition of his own seat in Congress. He told the South that their agitators had done more than anything else to bring on the war. He fought secession with all his might. At the same time he was an ardent advocate of slavery, believing — with Lee — that slavery presented the most satisfactory solution of the difficult relation between blacks and whites, and that it was the duty of the superior race to protect and care for the inferior. On behalf of his state he resented the usurping attitude of the Richmond government. Yet when the Governor of the state began to do what the President had done, Stephens was just as hot in opposition.

All these things he did in perfect good temper and kindliness, and he could not understand why his opponents would not take it so. He was only acting from his convictions. He supposed they were acting from theirs. Why should they be angry with him? Yet they were, and too many of his compatriots sympathized with the caustic remark of General Taylor: ‘Mr. Stephens, with all the impartiality of an equity judge, marked many of the virtues of the Government north of the Potomac and all the vices of that on his own side of the river.’

First, last, and always the compass of Stephens’s political life was his belief in human liberty as expressed in the compact between sovereign states known as the Constitution. Admirably characteristic is the account of his first interview with President Jackson. Stephens expressed some doubt as to the action of the troops against the Indians in view of State jurisdiction. ‘Jurisdiction by the Eternal! When the United States Mail is robbed and citizens murdered!’ shouted the President, But Stephens was ready to be murdered himself rather than give up a principle. Why should not others be? I really believe he would have preferred being torn to pieces by a mob to having that mob repressed by troops illegally. This is fine, but is perhaps carrying intellectualism rather far.

So after the war. He was ready to accept the result and to work loyally for the future. But he could not give up the principle — never. And he wrote his immense two-volumed book, — dialogued,thoroughly Platonic, thoroughly intellectual, — in which, as in Plato, men of straw are set up to be bowled over by masterly dialectic; a learned book, an awe-inspiring book, as dead as a folio of eighteenth-century sermons.

In short, he was an idealist — an ideologue, Napoleon would have said — who would have introduced reason into this chaos of unreason, this curious and fascinating Inferno which we call life. Because life would not heed him he resented it, but in the gentlest and most affectionate fashion, returning good for evil in every way he knew.

In the political world, where he figured most, he seems to have been pitifully ineffectual. We saw in our study of Benjamin that the lack of deep and heartfelt convictions, a shallow opportunism, prevented him from making any distinguished mark on the history of his time. Curiously enough, in Stephens’s case, the same result followed from an exactly opposite cause, and the excess of conviction most nobly nullified a prominent and notable career. But I feel sure that posterity will adjust the difference, and that Stephens will grow more and more in our history as a figure of commanding purity, sincerity, distinction, and patriotism.