Dixie Betrayed Read Online Free Page A

over the massive crowd, which perhaps numbered five thousand, he “saw troubles and thorns innumerable.” 5 The South in 1861 resembled a set of European-style nation-states, each with its own distinctive flavor and outlook on the
     world. Unity meant you were friendly with adjoining states, but you had little in the way of official relations with them—governmentally
     or politically. A shrewd politician, Davis immediately saw trouble in the diversity reflected across the sea of faces spread
     before him. A strong, unified Confederacy under the control of a central government would be necessary if the war that most
     saw as inevitable were to come. The unity of this moment, Davis worried, might be short lived.
    Waves of cheering cascaded onto the platform as Davis stood up and stretched his tall, lean form and was introduced as savior
     to the new Southern nation. The Mississippian invoked the spirit of 1776 and referred to “the American idea that governments
     rest upon the consent of the governed, and that it is the right of the people to alter or abolish governments whenever they
     become destructive of the ends for which they are established.” The crowd erupted into applause. Davis continued, saying that
     if the Northern states attempted to coerce the Confederacy back into the Union, “the suffering of millions will bear testimony
     to the folly and wickedness of our aggressors. It is joyous, in the midst of perilous times, to look around upon a people
     united in heart,” Davis shouted, “where one purpose of high resolve animates and actuates the whole—where the sacrifices to
     be made are not weighed in the balance against honor and right and liberty and equality. Obstacles may retard,” he asserted,
     “they cannot long prevent the progress of a movement sanctified by its justice, and sustained by a virtuous people.” 6
    Shouts and applause electrified the air around the State House—Davis had won his audience. Yet Davis was no one’s fool. A
     long, difficult road lay ahead if the Confederacy were to survive and prosper. What he could not yet see, however, were some
     of the specific obstacles to come, including two who were seated on the platform alongside him.
    T HE Confederacy’s new vice president couldn’t have been a worse choice—at least from the president’s point of view. Alexander
     Hamilton Stephens was a tiny, sickly man who had a “ghostly, spectral appearance.” Born in 1812, a product of Crawfordville,
     Georgia, Stephens was called “Little Aleck” by those who knew him, and despite his constant systemic ailments and chronic
     depression, he had achieved great success. Those who saw Stephens in political meetings often thought he was a visiting teenager,
     or worse—as one commentator put it, “until he occasionally blinked, he seemed to be stone dead.”
    He stood five feet seven inches tall and weighed ninety-six pounds and seemed to have aged prematurely. He was ghost white
     and stooped; at times his weight dropped to a mere eighty pounds. He was a world-class hypochondriac. But his thoughts extended
     beyond ailments real and imagined. Highly intelligent and gifted as an orator, Stephens had taught school before becoming
     a prosperous lawyer. He was a quiet intellectual who excelled at nothing more than writing thoughtfully composed letters.
     Little Aleck maneuvered into politics in 1836 and never looked back. Never married, he was always very close with his half-brother,
     Linton.
    Little Aleck’s path to the Confederacy was no less exciting than Davis’s had been. Elected to the U.S. House as a Whig in
     1843, Stephens became an independent in 1850, upon the party’s decline. In 1854 he helped to pass the Kansas-Nebraska Act
     in the House, one of the key events that propelled America toward war. This act promoted popular sovereignty, the idea that
     territorial citizens should decide themselves whether their newly formed states should permit