Cornerstone Speech. IN: The Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events, with Documents, Narratives, Illustrative Incidents, Poetry, Etc.

Soon after the secession of key southern states and the inauguration of Lincoln, and mere weeks before Fort Sumter, Alexander Stephens, vice president of the newly formed Confederacy, extemporaneously delivered his infamous Cornerstone Speech in Savannah on March 21, 1861. With no official printed version known to exist, this first publication in book form relies on the transcription by a local reporter that appeared in the Savannah Republican. Stephens began his controversial speech by calling the birth of the Confederacy "one of the greatest revolutions in the annals of the world." To historian Harry Jaffa, "Stephens' speech, more than any other, is the Gettysburg Address of the Confederate south... No utterance of the time reveals more fully the inner truth about the impending conflict... According to the new enlightenment proclaimed by Stephens, Washington's supposed enlightenment, reflected in the Declaration of Independence, was itself an 'age of ignorance and superstition'.... This remarkable address conveys, more than any other contemporary document, not only the soul of the Confederacy but also of that Jim Crow South that arose from the ashes of the Confederacy" (New Birth of Freedom, 216-23). The main subject of the Cornerstone Speech was the Confederate Constitution, which, Stephens declared, 'has put to rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution, African slavery as it exists amongst us'... The national Constitution, Stephens argued, 'rested upon the assumption of the equality of races,' but it was a compact built on sand. By contrast, he asserted, the Confederacy's 'new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition'" (Grant, "Slavery Debate" in Gray & Robinson, Companion to the Literature, 76). Later, "from his Fort Warren prison cell in Boston harbor in the summer of 1865, Stephens claimed he had been misquoted... 'The reporter's notes, which were very imperfect, were hastily corrected by me,' Stephens insisted, 'and were published without further revision and with several glaring errors'... If the Savannah reporter had misquoted Stephens, so had an Atlanta journalist just eight days earlier. On March 13, 1861 the Atlanta Southern Confederacy carried a lengthy report on a speech Stephens had delivered in that city the previous evening. The climax of the vice president's address came when he affirmed that the framers of the Confederate Constitution had 'solemnly discarded the pestilent heresy of fancy politicians, that all men, of all races, were equal, and we made African inequality and subordination, and the equality of white men, the chief corner stone of the Southern republic'" (Dew, Apostles of Disunion).