STEPHENS, ALEXANDER HAMILTON (1812-1883), American statesman, vice president of the Confederate States during the Civil War, was born in Wilkes (now Taliaferro) county, Georgia, on Feb. II, 1812. He was a weak and sickly child of poor parents, and from his sixth to his 15th year, when he was left an orphan, he worked on a farm. After his father's death he went to live with an uncle in Warren county. The superintendent of the local Sunday school sent him to an academy at Washington, Wilkes county, for one year and in the following year (1828) he was sent by the Georgia Educational society to Franklin college (University of Georgia), where he graduated in 1832. Deciding not to enter the ministry, he paid back the money advanced by the society. He was a schoolmaster for about two years, and then was admitted to the bar in In 1836 he was elected to the Georgia house of representatives after a campaign in which he was vigorously opposed because he had attacked the doctrine of nullification, and because he had opposed all extra-legal steps against the abolitionists. He was annually re-elected until 1841; in 1842 he was elected to the State senate, and in the following year, on the Whig ticket, to the national House of Representatives. In this last body he urged the annexation of Texas, chiefly as a means of achieving more power for the South in Congress. He was denounced as a traitor to his party because of his support of annexation, but he later became the leader of the Whig opposition to the war with Mexico. He' vigorously supported the Compromise Measures in 185o, and continued to act with the Whigs of the North until they, in 1852, nominated Gen. Winfield Scott for the presidency without Scott's endorsement of the Compromise. Stephens and other Whigs of the South then chose Daniel Webster, but a little later they joined the Democrats. In 1854 Stephens helped to secure the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. Before the Georgia legislature in Nov. 186o, and again in that State's secession convention in Jan. 1861, he strongly opposed secession, but when Georgia seceded he "followed his state," assisted in forming the new government, and was elected vice president of the Confederacy. Throughout the
war, he was so concerned about States' rights and civil liberty that he opposed the exercise of extra-constitutional war powers by President Jefferson Davis lest the freedom for which the South was fighting should be destroyed. His policy was to preserve constitutional government in the South and strengthen the anti war party in the North by convincing it that the Lincoln admin istration had abandoned such government ; to the same end he urged, in 1864, the unconditional discharge of Federal prisoners in the South. Stephens headed the Confederate commission to the peace conference at Hampton Roads in Feb. 1865. In the follow ing May, after the fall of the Confederacy, he was arrested at his home and taken to Fort Warren, in Boston harbour, where he was confined until Oct. 12. In 1866 he was elected to the United States Senate, but was not permitted to take his seat. He was a repre sentative in Congress, however, from 1873 to 1882, and was governor of Georgia in 1882-83, dying in office, at Atlanta, on March 4, 1883.
From 1871 to 1873 he edited the Atlanta Daily Sun, and he published A Constitutional View of the Late War between the States (1868-7o), perhaps the best statement of the Southern position with reference to state sovereignty and secession; The Reviewers Reviewed (1872), a supplement to the preceding work; and A Compendium of the History of the United States (1875; new ed., 1883).
See Louis Pendleton, Alexander H. Stephens (Philadelphia, 2908) ; R. M. Johnston and W. H. Browne, Life of Alexander H. Stephens (Philadelphia, 1878; new ed., 1883) ; Henry Cleveland, Alexander H. Stephens in Public and Private, with Letters and Speeches (Phila delphia, 1866) ; M. L. Avary (ed.), Recollections of A. H. Stephens, with a biographical study (1910) ; U. B. Phillips (ed.), "The Corre spondence of Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens and Howell Cobb," in American History Association, Annual Report, vol. ii. (I 91I) ; and Gamaliel Bradford, Confederate Portraits (1914).