Dixie Betrayed Read Online Free Page B

slavery.
    Exhausted by unsuccessful attempts to promote slavery in the territories and statehood bills, Stephens resigned from Congress
     in 1859. A political supporter of Stephen A. Douglas in the Democratic Party’s race for the 1860 nomination, Little Aleck
     was a powerful state rightist who, nevertheless, opposed secession; still, he came to Montgomery in 1861, when asked by Georgia’s
     political leaders. Once there he played a leading role in scripting the Confederate Constitution.
    To appease politicians in the Deep South (some of whom were anti-secession) and present a united front to the world, Stephens
     was chosen to be vice president beside Davis in the provisional slate of officers of the new Confederacy. Davis was a more
     astute politician, and the differences in political savvy emerged quickly. A month after the Montgomery inauguration, Stephens
     made a speech in Savannah, Georgia, to his friends in the Georgia convention. Given the chance for limelight and the fresh
     opportunity to summarize the meaning of the new Confederacy, Stephens took full advantage. Having cited the abolitionists’
     shocking assertions about equality of the races, Stephens proclaimed, “Our 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.” 7 Davis was understandably upset at Stephens’s public remarks—not the remarks, but their public nature. It didn’t help that
     Davis was a simplistic analyst; in his mind, you were either for him or against him. Everything was black or white. Although
     Davis may have agreed privately, he would not do so publicly—to him, the issue of slavery would be covered under the mantle
     of state rights versus central government.
    For the first weeks of his vice presidency, Little Aleck tried to make the case to the public that the South had attempted
     to thwart war, that it was Lincoln’s government that had brought it about. “No one can more deeply regret the threatening
     prospect of a general war between the United States and the Confederate States than I do,” he said. “Such an unfortunate result,
     if it should occur, cannot be charged to the seeking or desire of the Confederate States government. On the contrary, I feel
     assured in saying that every honorable means has been resorted to by the government to avoid it.” 8 Privately, Stephens was more candid. “Revolutions are much easier started than controlled,” he wrote a friend in late 1860,
     “and the men who begin them, even for the best purposes and objects, seldom end them. . . . The selfish, the ambitious, and
     the bad will generally take the lead.” 9 Stephens had little idea how prescient he was.
    Among the Georgia circle that would congregate around the vice president was one Howell Cobb—a longtime rival of Stephens’s.
     Born on a plantation in Jefferson County in 1815, Cobb rose through the political ranks to become president of the First Confederate
     Provisional Congress, in Montgomery, where the obese, bearded politician presided over the formation of the South’s new government.
    Two weeks before Davis’s inauguration, delegates from the seven original states that seceded flocked to the new capital to
     define the Confederacy and how it would work. Trains unloaded parties from South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi,
     Louisiana, and Texas as—one by one—the men who would make a new government checked into dusty hotel rooms and into history.
    These men were the seedlings of the Confederacy, each selected at secession meetings held in the individual states beginning
     in December 1860. The forty-three chosen ones represented their home states with the same relative force as representation
     in the old U.S. Congress, though when it came to voting, each state had only one