Alexander H. Stephens and Jefferson Davis

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OF the men prominent in the great American war of i86I-65, there were none whose relationship provided more interesting and more instructive lessons in the anatomy of abortive revolutions than the two topmost Confederates, Alexander Stephens and Jefferson Davis. Aptly these two symbolized the cross-purposes, the internal conflicts that divided the people of the Confederacy and weakened their cause. It is no accident that Stephens' name here appears first; for though he occupied the second office, it is upon him that attention must be focused. It was in I845 that the two men first became acquainted. For one session they served together in the United States House of Representatives, before Davis resigned his seat to go off to fight in the war with Mexico. Yet neither then nor later, after Davis returned to Washington as a senator, did the two progress beyond the stage of mere acquaintance. For in his early career Stephens was a wholehearted Whig, and he made little secret of his opinion that all Democrats were fools or knaves. If Davis as a Democrat placed a similar estimate upon Whigs, at least he was more discreet in expressing it. After the Whig party went to pieces in the I850's and Stephens reluctantly went over to the Democrats, he encountered Davis only once in a situation that required more than mere formalities. That was in 1858, at a time when Southerners were fighting a fierce congressional battle to get Kansas admitted into the Union as a slaveholding state, and the tactics of the situation required Stephens, as the foremost Southerner in the House, and Davis, as one of the ranking Southerners in the Senate, to confer with each other. Davis actually knew William H. Seward better than he knew Stephens; and on his side, Stephens was better acquainted with John Quincy Adams and Joshua Giddings than with Davis. Yet, however formal and featureless may have been the relationships between these two in Washington, it is scarcely likely that Stephens forgot an altercation that his great and good friend, Robert Toombs, had with Davis in I853. Whatever affected Toombs was bound to influence Stephens. That unpleasantness of i853 arose from the malice of a Georgia mischiefmaker who sent Davis, then Secretary of War, a garbled report of criticisms upon Franklin Pierce's cabinet that Toombs had voiced in a speech in