Principles of the New Government Expounded

Meanwhile Mr. Stephens, the vice-president of the Confederacy, had assumed the office of expounder of the principles upon which the new government was founded. In a speech at Savannah, on the 21st of March, 1861, he declared that the immediate cause of the rebellion was African Slavery--the rock, he said, on which Mr. Jefferson declared the Union would split; but he doubted whether Mr. Jefferson understood the truth on which that rock stood. He believed the founders of the Republic held erroneous views on the subject of slavery, and that it was a false assumption of the fathers, put forth in the Declaration of Independence, that "all men are created equal." He declared that the corner-stone of the new Confederacy rested "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. It is upon this truth," he said, "on which our fabric is firmly planted; and I cannot permit myself to doubt the ultimate success of a full recognition of this principle throughout the civilized world." Then, to give strength to his declaration that slavery was the corner-stone of the new fabric, he rather irreverently quoted the words of the Apostle applied to Christ, saying: "This stone that was rejected by the first builders, 'is become the chief stone of the corner' in our new edifice."

While there were preparations in the South for destroying the Union, there were preparations in the North for preserving it. In the former section, they were chiefly material; in the latter, they were chiefly moral, for it was difficult to persuade the loyal people that the Southern politicians would really organize an armed rebellion. At the time when Jefferson Davis was moving from his home in Mississippi to be inaugurated president of the Southern Confederacy at Montgomery, and to declare "all who oppose us shall smell Southern powder and feel Southern steel," Abraham Lincoln was moving from his home in Illinois to the National capital, to be installed Chief Magistrate of the whole undivided Republic, with sublime faith in justice, and to say to the North and the South, in his inaugural address: "We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

Jefferson Davis was then about fifty-four years of age; Abraham Lincoln was fifty-two. Mr. Davis was, in person, sinewy and light, a little above the middle height, and erect in posture; Mr. Lincoln was tall, thin, large-boned, and six feet four inches in height. He was sinewy, easily lifting five hundred pounds. His legs and arms were disproportionately long, and there was no grace in his movements. The features of Davis were regular and well defined; his face was thin and much wrinkled; one eye was sightless, and the other was dark and piercing in expression. Lincoln's features were angular; his forehead was high; his eyes were dark grey and very expressive, alternately sparkling with fun and subdued into sadness.

These men were both natives of Kentucky, but in early life Davis was taken to Mississippi. Raised in ease and comparative luxury, he was educated at the West Point Military Academy. He served in the army in Mexico under his father-in-law, General Zachary Taylor; held a distinguished place in the National Congress, and was President Pierce's Secretary of War. Lincoln was born in obscurity; passed his early days in poverty, laboring with his hands on a farm, in the forest, or as a flat-boatman on the Mississippi. He had settled with his father in Illinois, where he, self-taught, studied law and rose to distinction at the bar, and in the esteem of his fellow-citizens. Davis was a keen politician; calm, reticent, audacious, polished, cold, sagacious, rich in experience in the arts of the partisan and the affairs of state-craft, possessed of great concentration of purpose, an imperious will, abounding pride, and much executive ability. Lincoln was as open as the day; loved truth supremely, and country above party; abhorred trickery and deception; possessed great firmness of will and a child-like reliance upon God; read the Bible and Shakespeare more than any other books; with extraordinary conversational powers and exuberant mirthfulness manifested in sparkling jests, stories and anecdotes, at appropriate times. He was, at one time, a representative in the National Congress; and on all occasions appeared as a representative American, illustrating by his own career, in a most conspicuous and distinguished manner, the beneficent and elevating operations of republican government and institutions. His last words, when he parted from his home at Springfield, Illinois, after alluding to Washington, whose seat he was about to occupy: "I feel that I cannot succeed without the same Divine aid which sustained him, and on the same Almighty Being I place my reliance for support; and I hope you, my friends, will all pray that I may receive that Divine assistance without which I cannot succeed, but with which success is certain."