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On March 21, 1861, former U.S. senator Alexander Stephens of Georgia delivered what history has come to know as the Cornerstone Speech, explaining how the ideology and power of elite enslavers in the American South were about to usher in a new era in world history.
Speaking in Savannah, Georgia, just before he became the vice president of the Confederate States of America, Stephens set out to explain once and for all the difference between the United States and the Confederacy. That difference, he said, was human enslavement. The American Constitution had a crucial defect at its heart, he said: it based the government on the principle that humans were inherently equal. Confederate leaders had fixed that problem. They had constructed a perfect government because they had corrected the Founding Fathers’ error. The “cornerstone” on which the Confederate government rested was racial enslavement.
In contrast to the government the Founding Fathers had created, the Confederacy rested on the “great truth” that some people were better than others. Black Americans were “not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
Stephens believed that the new doctrine of the Confederacy would spread around the world until southerners had the gratification of seeing “the ultimate universal acknowledgment of the truths upon which our system rests.” Stephens expected the old Union to dissolve and the Confederacy to be “the nucleus of a growing power which, if we are true to ourselves, our destiny, and high mission, will become the controlling power on this continent.”
And yet, when we remember the era that elite southern enslavers thought would see their ideology spreading around the globe and ushering in a new era in human history, we do not remember it as the “Stephens Era.” It is the Era of Lincoln, the man who came to represent those who stood against Stephens and his ilk.
Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln, who had been born into poverty and worked his way up to prosperity, rejected the idea that some men were better than others by the circumstances of their birth. He insisted on basing the nation on the idea that “all men are created equal,” as the Founders stated—however hypocritically—in the Declaration of Independence. I should like to know,” Lincoln said in July 1858, “if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where will it stop…. If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out! Who is so bold as to do it!”
Less than a month after Stephens gave the Cornerstone Speech, the Confederates fired on a federal fort in Charleston Harbor, and the Civil War began.In 1863, using his authority under the war powers, Abraham Lincoln— now president of the United States— declared enslaved Americans free in the areas still controlled by the Confederates. In 1865, Congress passed and sent off to the states for ratification the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting human enslavement except as punishment for crime and giving Congress the power to enforce the amendment. The states approved the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865.
Still, southern state legislatures tried to circumscribe the lives of the Black Americans who lived within their state lines after the war. The 1865 Black Codes said that Black people couldn’t own firearms, for example, or congregate, had to treat their white neighbors with deference, and were required to sign yearlong work contracts every January or be judged vagrants subject to arrest and imprisonment. White employers could get them out of jail by paying their fines, but then they would have to work off their debt in a system that looked much like enslavement.
In response, Congress reiterated that the law must treat all men equally. It passed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution and sent it off to the states for ratification. The states added it to the Constitution in 1868. The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed that “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
That sentence—one of the most important in American history—guarantees that no state can discriminate against any citizen or deprive any person within its boundaries of due process and the equal protection of the law. And then the amendment goes on to say that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”
When white former Confederates in Georgia nonetheless tried to keep Black Americans from holding office, expelling Black legislators from the legislature after the 1868 election, Congress continued to insist on equality. It refused to seat the elected lawmakers from Georgia in the U.S. Congress and wrote the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution to specify that equal rights included having a say in government. The Fifteenth Amendment said: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Once again, it gave power to Congress to enforce the amendment.
Rejecting the worldview Stephens thought would come to dominate the globe, Americans used the moment in which men like Stephens reached for supremacy to enshrine the principles of the Declaration of Independence into the American Constitution. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments ushered in a very different sort of new era than Stephens imagined. It was, in large part, the tearing apart of old political systems under those like Stephens that permitted the rise of new ones that redefined the United States. Stephens thought he was heralding a new world, but in fact he marked the end of an era.
The shaping of the next era belonged not to him, but to others with a clearer view of both the meaning of the United States of America, and of humanity.
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Notes:
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornerstone-speech
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