Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia: A Biography (review)

348CIVIL WAR HISTORY Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia: A Biography. By Thomas E. Schott. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. Pp. xx, 552. $37.50.) An important and long-standing gap in Southern history is now filled by this comprehensive and critical biography of Alexander H. Stephens. Thomas Schott, chief of the office ofhistory at TinkerAir Force Base in Oklahoma, not only has done his research covering a long period in a first rate manner, but he writes well and with a nice mixture of sympathy for and detachment from his subject. If there weresuch a study available about Jefferson Davis, Southern and especially Confederate history would be fortunate indeed. Born frail and sickly, as he remained all his life, Stephens was the son of a yeoman farmer who was also a stern school teacher. Schott speculates in an enlightening but restrained fashion about the fact that the mother of "Little Aleck" died when he was only a few months old, and he had a cool, unhappy relationship with his stepmother. Never marrying , he was passionate only about politics and his beloved, younger half brother, Linton. Through the aid of generous patrons who recognized his great seriousness and abilities, Stephens attended a classical academy in Washington, Georgia, and then Franklin College (later the University of Georgia) in Athens. Graduating first in his class at age twenty in 1832, he hungered for recognition—which he soon found by reading law and then entering into a successful practice and an apprenticeship in the Georgia legislature. Though Stephens's role as a United States congressman and leading Georgia Whig in the 1840s and 1850s is meticulously charted, that portion of the study is perhaps not as important as the section dealing with the secession crisis, the formation of the Confederacy, and the war years. Loving order and the Constitution (as he understood it) above all, Stephens and his conservative Unionist allies in Georgia are portrayed as thoroughly cowed and disorganized during the secession crisis, with Stephens finally allowing the despair with which he always flirted to conquer him. Yet he soon played a key role in drafting the Confederate constitution and became vice-president partly because he lost the scattered support he had for the presidency, according to Schott's account, when he "refused to commit himself to striking the first blow against the Union" (p. 328). Thus a self-righteous vice-presidentbecame linked to an equally selfrighteous president, and Schott blames Davis about as much as Stephens for the rift that eventually developed between them. While mentioning at several points Stephens's profound belief in the innate inferiority of blacks, Schott does not harp on the obvious and only mentions Stephens 's famed "cornerstone speech" at Savannah in March 1861, in a brief yet illuminating section. BOOK REVIEWS349 Stephens, in openly opposing certain policies of the Richmond government after 1862, is portrayed as a true lover of liberty (for whites) who "did not harbor a traitor's heart" (p. 367). Schott concedes that Davis understood the nature of the Civil War far better than did Stephens, but faults the president for believing that Southern hearts could be won for the cause "by increasingly burdensome laws ever more capriciously executed" (p. 396), and for the foolishness of treating the politically influential Stephens like a cipher. Yet in the last analysis, Schott argues that Stephens put himself in an indefensible position by 1864: "Somehow in his excursions through the ethereal realms of truth Stephens had failed to understand what a shambles war always makes of morality, what an unreasoning activity it is, and what a pitiful weapon philosophy is to oppose the minions of Mars" (p. 414). Still hungry for vindication through political recognition and office after the war, Stephens eventually served again in the House of Representatives and finally, at the time ofhis death in 1882, as a governor ofhis state—one who was by then addled by alcohol and morphine. One might wish for some final conclusions concerning the long, important career of this strangely fascinating man, but they have to be found in the author's preface and scattered throughout the volume. "He was always trying to prove his manhood...