S8 Ep342: Guest: Professor Richard Carwardine. The discussion turns to Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens' "Cornerstone Speech," which explicitly defined racial inequality as the Confederacy's foundation, a stance widely condemned in the North. Carwardin

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🗓️ 20 January 2026

⏱️ 5 minutes

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Summary

Guest: Professor Richard Carwardine. The discussion turns to Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens'"Cornerstone Speech," which explicitly defined racial inequality as the Confederacy's foundation, a stance widely condemned in the North. Carwardine notes that despite earlier tensions, Lincoln viewed his fast days as successful, utilizing them and meetings with religious delegations to gauge public sentiment and prepare the ground for eventual emancipation. Lincoln valued these interactions to influence and learn from denominational leaders.
1877

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm John Batchew with Professor Richard Cowardine, the book is Righteous Strife, the
0:21.7	pulpit's battle.
0:23.6	Alexander Stevens is not a preacher.
0:25.9	He does use a speech, though, at Savannah Athenium in March of 61 to announce how brutal
0:36.0	the Confederacy is towards the people they call slaves
0:40.7	and the people of the North say must be freed, abolition.
0:45.5	Alexander Stevens says he's the Confederate Vice President
0:49.6	that the cornerstone of his government in the first time in the history of the world is built upon, quote, 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. I stopped there because that's enough here in the
1:14.6	21st century to know who the villain is. Did the abolitionists recognize that language is
1:20.6	completely unacceptable? Did they condemn it? Did they want to know what Lincoln thought of it?
1:26.6	They did condemn it. Absolutely, of course. And not only the abolitionists, I think,
1:34.1	the radical abolitionists, I think much of northern opinion was deeply offended by that.
1:42.1	And indeed, Stephen's cornerstone speech becomes a kind of, just, if you look
1:51.6	at the sermons of the, not just of the fast days, but throughout the war, the term cornerstone is used as a means of reminding their congregations of the position that Stevens and the Confederacy has taken at the outset.
2:09.1	Of course, it's important to note that Jefferson Davis was so appalled by this speech that he saw how damaging it could be.
2:18.6	It actually was a statement of the truth as the Confederate leadership saw it.
2:24.2	Nonetheless, Davis saw how damaging this could be
2:27.2	and worked very hard to indicate that actually this would know
2:30.0	what was driving the Confederacy was a need for independence.
2:38.6	But when, and I'll just say also in passing, after the war, of course, Stevens purports to be sort of blind to what he has said
2:48.3	four years earlier when he says that the purpose of the war
2:51.5	was actually to defend state's rights and not to erect a system of slavery. However, that's,
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