Alexander Hamilton Stephens

@ National Portrait Gallery

Description

One of the most agile minds of the Confederacy was encased in the gaunt and consumptive frame of Alexander Hamilton Stephens. No other southern statesman better embodied the paradoxical elements inherent in the new nation itself. During his long tenure in Congress, Stephens had been a staunch Unionist, a devotee of the nationalist ideology of Daniel Webster over the sectionalism of John Calhoun, and a friend and supporter of his Whig colleague Abraham Lincoln. When secession came, however, he cast his destiny with his native Georgia and accepted the Confederate vice presidency. In one of the most notable speeches of the hour, he proclaimed that slave ownership and its underlying assumption of racial inferiority was the "corner-stone" on which the new republic rested.

Type:

Image

Format:

Salted Paper Print

Rights:

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; transfer from the Smithsonian Institution Libraries; gift of Roger F. Shultis, 1986

View Original At:

http://collections.si.edu/search/results.htm?q=record_ID=npg_NPG.87.42.47&repo=DPLA