During the American Civil War, the United States was more fractured than the partition between the Union and the Confederacy showed. In the North, Abraham Lincoln governed a divided nation through a brutal war and, in the South, the discordance at the heart of the breakaway American state would, in time, be its undoing.

The relationship between Alexander Hamilton Stephens and Jefferson Davis, two central figures of the Confederate States during the American Civil War, began as a respectful dialogue between two apparent gentlemen, but it would end in accusations of tyranny, malice, and treason, with Stephens regarding his former friend as an aspiring dictator.

The secessionist cause was driven by support for the institution of slavery, and the two men agreed on that. They differed in virtually every other aspect of public and political life, however. One was combative, the other docile; one an arch-Whig, the other a Southern Democrat; one a vehement opponent of secession while the other was happily swept up in the cause; one opposed the Mexican-American War in which the other had heroically served; one thought that the other was a tyrant while the other thought them a fool. It was a dynamic that would drive – and destroy – the internal dynamics of the Confederacy.

Jefferson Davis was a romantic hero of the bygone days. He had served under the future president Zachary Taylor in the Black Hawk War, during which he captured and befriended Chief Black Hawk. After marrying the daughter of President Taylor, Davis settled down on a cotton plantation in the South and made himself a wealthy man. In 1845, he was elected to Congress before resigning to fight in the Mexican-American War. By 1853, he was secretary for war.

Alexander Stephens, on the other hand, was a runtish lawyer and politician from Georgia. He was unable to fight, but he knew how to think. Stephens had served in the House of Representatives and he was staunchly defensive of the South but sceptical of pro-secession arguments.

Physically, Stephens was almost absurdly frail; he spent much of his childhood and adulthood suffering acutely. At twenty-one, he was five foot five and weighed just over six and a half stone. His nerves were similarly unrobust: neither depression nor a severe, existential anxiety ever seemed to leave him. But just as his mental sufferings did not impede the intellectual robustness that in turn led to an explosive temper, physical maladies did not hinder a cockiness that verged on braggadocio – in 1848, he struck a critic with his walking stick, who promptly slashed him with a knife. Stephens barely survived.

The two men first met as Congressional colleagues in 1845, and resumed their acquaintance upon Davis’ return to Congress in 1857. Kansas was seeking admission into the Union as a slave-owning state, and the delicate game of tactical diplomacy that the endeavour involved required the twin minds of Davis and Stephens to work together. A distant respect grew between them.

As new territories sought to join the United States as either free or slave-owning states, pro- and anti-slavery campaigning became more and more extreme – while moderate voices were marginalised. Stephens was one such moderate. Fearful that a total alienation of the North could be highly damaging to the South, however, Davis was more willing to embrace radical action. The slight divergence in strategy would lay the groundwork for a devastating split during the course of the war to follow.

By 1861, decades of tensions over slavery, states’ rights, and economic differences had fractured the United States. The election of Abraham Lincoln, America’s first Republican president – and a known opponent of slavery – was the final catalyst for Southern secession.

Alexander Stephens argued that Southern states should remain within the Union, believing that the South should seek to change minds through Congress rather than secede from the North. In 1860, Stephens compared the South’s temptation to leave the Union to Adam and Eve’s temptation to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. ‘They in an evil hour yielded – instead of becoming gods, they only saw their own nakedness. I look upon this country, with our institutions, as the Eden of the world, the paradise of the universe.’ In 1861, he warned the Georgia State Convention that ‘this step, once taken, can never be recalled; and all the baleful and withering consequences that must follow, will rest on the convention for all coming time’

In February 1861, the Southern convention that assembled in Montgomery, Alabama, elected Jefferson Davis as the first president of the Confederate States of America. Despite his reticence about secession, Alexander Stephens was selected as vice president. The South was desperate to show the North that it possessed both strength and intelligence for the coming battle. Davis and Stephens seemed a solid, factionless partnership.

The men shared some quirks of personality. Both came from industrious backgrounds, both had a serious – perhaps even humourless – opinion of themselves. Both were stern, and both made themselves ill in times of acute stress. They were sensitive to criticism, hard-headed, uncompromising, and prone to bitterness.

Stephens may have advised against secession, but once it occurred he decided to take advantage of the fact and establish the new nation on a footing that he considered more intellectually and constitutionally sound than that of the United States. He was a firm critic of the US Constitution, claiming that the Founding Fathers’ ideas about equality were ‘fundamentally wrong,’ and arguing that the Confederacy would correct said ‘errors’ by explicitly enshrining slavery in its constitution, and white supremacy as the ‘cornerstone’ of the country. By establishing the formalised subordination of African-Americans, he would rectify what he saw as an existential error in the original Constitution.

1861 was the brief honeymoon period for the secessionist South, and the sharper edges of individuals were temporarily rounded by the general goodwill and cheer that surrounded them. Davis was impressed by Stephens’ intellectual capabilities and work ethic, and so involved him heavily in consequential matters of the state, such as the appointment of generals and the selection of cabinet members. Despite its disadvantage in resources and manpower, the South achieved rapid and invigorating victories in battle that boosted Southern morale and crushed Union expectations of a quick end to the Civil War.

In the initial phase, spirits ran high. Stephens told a crowd assembled in Georgia that they should not ‘let anyone timidly doubt of success. The people of the South can never be conquered. Our enemies rely upon their numbers – we rely upon the valour of freemen, battling for country, for home, and for everything dear as well as sacred.’

‘Of all the virtues,’ Stephens believed, ‘none is purer, holier, loftier, or so Godlike as that which prompts a man to offer up himself, his life, his home, and his all as a sacrifice upon his country’s altar.’ Above all, ‘The country must be sustained. Every one agrees to this. Our all depends upon it… The hopes of mankind and the world depend upon it.’

Bombastic though these speeches were, in 1861 they were unnecessary. All of the South was unified by the goal of independence and aligned on how to get there. It was only in the following years that doubt and disharmony would set in.

Over time, discontent among the Confederate politicians began to arise as precarious resources impeded the war effort, military defeats caused panic and rage, and rival factions and personalities began to clash. It was not easy to build a nation and fight a war to preserve it at the same time. Bit by bit, every element of society became something to be criticised or defended – where the capital was based, what the grand strategy of the Confederacy should look like, who should fight, how resources were to be dispersed, and who should be taxed. As the South fell into greater disarray, these two figures of the executive branch began to symbolise the disorganisation and disunity of the Confederacy.

In the early days of the war, Stephens kept busy, writing, planning and drafting away from the capital, Richmond. Davis, meanwhile, swiftly became used to consulting others in lieu of his own vice president.

The combination of Davis and Stephens was meant, like any ticket with a president and vice president, to appeal to a range of voters. Davis was a rigid, hardline secessionist, a military-minded leader who firmly believed in a centralised war effort, while Stephens was a man of letters, known for his advocacy of limited central government. Rather than unifying different wings of the Confederacy, the two men began instead to represent distinct goals and political philosophies.

As the war progressed, mistake after military mistake exacerbated the cracks in the relationship between Davis and Stephens. The Union’s naval blockades crippled Southern trade. The tide turned on the South’s initial military victories, and shortages of food, weapons, and goods increasingly led to inflation and riots.

In 1862, Davis implemented measures that precipitated a total destruction of his relationship with his vice president: the Confederate conscription law and the act authorising the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus.

For Stephens, conscription represented the very worst subjugation to the state. He wrote a public letter to the Augusta Constitutionalist, arguing that the implementation of conscription cast doubt upon the fervour of patriotism, and represented a terrible infringement upon personal liberty – both, he argued, would lessen people’s enthusiasm to sign up and fight. Davis, Stephens was happy to state, was reducing the amount of volunteers that the Confederacy was receiving. Davis, he went on, did not want to reveal the numbers that were signing up – indeed, he did not even want volunteers at all.

To Stephens, volunteers represented all that was good and free, conscription all that was authoritarian and dictatorial. Conscription could lead to a Bonapartist-style tyranny of the one who sat atop of the organisation of the army. If only, Stephens argued, the Southern Congress would ban conscription – then, and only then, would men sign up, buoyed by the fact that the country they were fighting for was not the sort of tyrannical state that would force them to fight. It did not matter that Generals Lee and Johnston had requested the Conscription Act be passed, Stephens saw it only as a means to further Davis’ power.

Many in the South considered Stephens’ opinion – and the publication of it – ludicrous. The Richmond Examiner declared Stephens’ actions, ‘audacious nonsense and self-stultification.’ Stephens had jumped far ahead with near-hysterical public denunciations of his own president so early in the war. Stephens was, for now, at odds with public opinion.

For Davis, however, an effective government needed an effective military. Both were necessary to establish the Confederate South as a legitimate and successful state.

Yet, as the months passed – bringing with them horror stories about conscription – some of those who had supported Davis as president drew away from him as they became increasingly concerned about how he wielded power. Davis was not yet being denounced as a Robespierre, but the rumours swirling of his tyranny were feeding opposition.

In February 1862, the Confederacy suspended the writ of habeas corpus, the prevention of imprisonment without trial. The suspension was renewed twice more over the next 18 months. As each was ratified, Stephens became more aghast: liberty for white, Confederate citizens was imperilled, even more so than through conscription.

Davis attempted to calm the criticism by confining it to areas his generals deemed most likely to come under attack. His subordinates were not nearly so restrained, however. By the summer of 1862, martial law had been imposed across the entirety of Texas, a large part of Arkansas, and the majority of Louisiana.

Stephens was incandescent. Perhaps Congress could suspend habeas corpus at times of urgent threat. But nothing and no one – neither a general nor a President – could declare martial law over the Confederate States of America.

Stephens began to despair of the general lack of alarm. Davis, unlike Lincoln, had waited for his Congress to approve each suspension before implementing it. This was of little solace to Stephens, for whom Congress was ‘ignorant of principles, lamentably ignorant.’

Impotent in the face of such ignorance, Stephens – who had barely been in Richmond at the best of times – disappeared almost entirely from the Confederate capital. There was little he could do, he explained to supporters. In one letter to a woman in Mississippi written in March of 1863, he conceded that ‘no equal number of people on earth ever had more of the essential elements of war at their command then we have,’ but confided in her that ‘all that is wanting […] is the brains to manage and mould our resources.’ The letter was published. Relations between the President and Vice president became frostier.

The final two years of the war did not proceed in the Confederate South’s favour. An strategy of attrition implemented by the Union army devastated the Confederate forces further, while General Sherman’s ‘March to the Sea’ destroyed infrastructure and morale as the Northern army forces cut a swath of destruction from Atlanta to Savannah. As the war dragged on, desertion increased and civilian support declined.

As Davis desperately grasped for a victory that would never come, Stephens began his own mad dash for peace. He firstly offered to be sent to Washington in order to participate in a negotiation of a prisoner-of-war exchange. While in the North, he suggested, he might be able to gauge the desire for peace and embark on an agreement that could result in an independent South. The Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863 meant that Stephens did not get a chance to discuss a truce with Lincoln and his men; he was turned away.

Returning to Georgia, where he would remain for the next 18 months, Stephens stewed. Davis, he had come to believe, had intentionally sabotaged his attempts to make peace. His endorsement of General Robert E. Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania had ended in acute failure for the South at Gettysburg and rallied the North. Furthermore, Davis had sent a letter to Lee informing him of Stephens’ visit to the North which fell into the hands of the enemy when its courier was captured. Stephens believed that this had been no accident. Davis had clearly sent the courier down a route that ensured his capture.

For Stephens, liberty from the power of the government was more important than independence. In one letter to a friend, he insisted that it would be far better for the South to be ‘overrun by the enemy, our cities sacked and burned, and our land laid desolate, than that the people should thus suffer the citadel of their liberties to be entered and taken by professed friends.’

In 1864, Stephens spent three hours in Congress lambasting his own President and those who supported the suspension of habeas corpus. He was frantic: ‘Tell me not to put confidence in the President,’ he cried, ‘Who is safe under such a law?… Could the whole country be more completely under the power and control of one man?’ he asked. ‘Could dictatorial powers be more complete?’ Fearful of the direction of the country and despairing at his ability to change its course, Stephens once again retreated to the world of letters.

By the end of 1864, even those not outright hostile to Davis’ supposed anti-democratic policies were growing increasingly sceptical of his ability to win the war. The Montgomery Mail published an opinion piece arguing that every step the Confederate South had taken over the preceding four years had been ‘in the direction of military despotism,’ and that ‘half our laws are unconstitutional.’

Davis remained remarkably unmoved in the face of such criticism. He admitted to one guest that he was ‘sorry’ that his vice president had addressed the legislature in the manner in which he had. He insisted that he did not believe Stephens to be unpatriotic, but rather that he simply hoped that he could be persuaded to work together in a more harmonious manner.

Stephens did not reciprocate Davis’ delicate tone. ‘Since his inauguration his every act is consistent with the course of a weak timid sly unprincipled arch-aspirant after absolute power by usurpation a la mode Louis Napoleon,’ he wrote. Davis had practically ‘been doing all intentionally I think he could to reelect Lincoln.’

It was this very re-election that was to drive an even greater wedge between the two men. Democrats in the North were making explicit overtures for peace. Stephens hoped that, ‘if our officials and military make no blunders and only hold our own for ten weeks… Lincoln may be beaten, a Peace man elected in his stead… and with that result sooner or later Peace will come.’

Returning to Richmond, Stephens decided to visit the president’s house but was left furiously ringing at the door. He believed that Davis was at home, hiding from him, and had instructed his staff not to answer the door to him. The relationship between the two men had deteriorated from tragedy to farce.

To the surprise of many – most of all Alexander Stephens – in January of 1865, Davis requested that his vice president meet Lincoln for peace talks. The next month, Stephens met with Lincoln and General Ulysses S. Grant. Sickly, small, and unused to the chill of the north, Stephens wore a coat so large that his already diminutive body was dwarfed even further. Grant’s memoirs recalled this meeting:

‘After a little conversation, [Abraham Lincoln] asked me if I had seen the overcoat of Stephens’s. I replied that I had.

‘“Well,” said he, “did you see him take it off?”  I said yes.

‘“Well,” said he, “didn’t you think it was the biggest shuck and the littlest ear [of corn] that you ever did see?”’

Lincoln was insistent that he would settle for nothing less than the restoration of the full United States and the emancipation of slaves. Davis would settle for nothing less than slavery and secession, however. Peace was not forthcoming.

Things were no better on the economic front. Fearful of the reaction, Southern Congress had long ignored the need to tax the property of plantation owners, instead hoping that a low tax on exported cotton would raise revenue, but this had been stymied by the North’s blockade. Taxation revenue was so low that it made up only one-fourteenth of the Confederate government’s income, and inflation soared as the government desperately printed money in response. Confederate citizens hoarded goods and used other forms of currency, and businesses ceased operations.

On 6 February 1865, Jefferson Davis gave his final speech as president of the Confederacy. ‘Let us then unite our hands and our hearts,’ he stated, ‘lock our shields together, and we may well believe that before another summer solstice falls upon us, it will be the enemy that will be asking us for conferences and occasions in which to make known our demands.’

The intoxicating and delusional quality of the speech enraptured the audience, and the war-weary Davis, for a moment, was once again the confident, convincing leader of before. ‘Brilliant though it was,’ Stephens came to recall, ‘I looked upon it as not much short of dementation.’ Davis tried to get Stephens up on stage, but his vice president declined. When asked what he was going to do, Stephens was frank: ‘Go home and stay there.’

When Robert E. Lee surrendered to Grant on 9 April without the approval of Davis, the Confederate president moved south, intending to evade complete defeat long enough for better terms to be agreed. Lincoln’s assassination five days later cast suspicion on Davis’ involvement, and a $100,000 bounty was placed on his head. Just a month later, he was captured by Northern soldiers, attempting to evade capture by disguising himself in a cloak and shawl. Two days later, Stephens was arrested on charges of treason at his home in Georgia.

Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens met for the final time when they found themselves prisoners heading on one boat to two different prisons. Davis would serve his time in Fort Monroe, Virginia, with fetters on his ankles, under constant supervision by guards within his room and given only a Bible and prayer book to read. Stephens was sent to Fort Warren in Boston Harbor for five months. Each wrote their own history of the Confederacy.

Writing in his prison diary, Stephens charged the disastrous conduct of the Civil War to President Davis: ‘the truth is in point of ability he is not above a third class man in his own section if he be entitled justly to a rank so high as that.’

In his Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, Davis tried to vindicate and defend his wartime actions while downplaying slavery as the justification. He did not seem to regret his time as President. Did Stephens come to regret his time as vice president?

No Southerner had opposed secession as vehemently as Alexander Stephens had. Few had fought as tirelessly as he did to prevent his state from withdrawing from the Union or from precipitating war. But by taking up the mantle of office, he became responsible for both. ‘How strange it seems to me that I should thus suffer,’ he would write from prison in 1865. ‘I who did everything in my power to prevent [the Civil War]… On the fourth of September, 1848, I was near losing my life for resenting the charge of being a traitor to the South, and now I am here, a prisoner, under charge, I suppose, of being a traitor to the Union. In all, I have done nothing but what I thought was right.’

If one may wonder why he allowed himself to become vice president, one must also consider why he remained in that position until the bloody end.

Stephens had openly and virulently opposed conscription, martial law, the financial policy of the Confederacy, military tactics and strategy. He believed that Davis was, at best, unforgivably misguided and, at worst, a tyrant in the making. His decision to remain as vice president of the fledgling, secessionist state was a palpably bizarre decision that cannot be understood outside of the lens of Stephens’ own bizarre character, defects, and personal ambitions.

Stephens found the indignity of his imprisonment almost too difficult to bear – at times, laughing and joking in letters and diaries, at others, weeping openly. The experience, however, allowed Stephens to collect his thoughts in a calm, logical manner for the first time in years, and he set about writing a history of the Confederacy. His remarks were more collected than they had been in previous years. After years of detraction, he came to the conclusion that whilst it was ‘certainly not [his] object to detract from Mr. Davis… the truth is that as a statesman he was not colossal.’

The same could be said of himself. Rather than resign as a critic and oppose the direction of war, Stephens remained a reproving figure in the executive. Rather than change policy, he publicly chastised the president. Rather than show unity, he denounced. Rather than become a man of letters, he leaked his own.

In later years, Confederate sympathisers would come to revise the raison d’etre for the decision to secede, diminishing the importance of slavery within the myth of the ‘Lost Cause.’ Stephens was no different – though it would be his own speech that served as a nail in the coffin of such claims. ‘Our new government… 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. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.’

Stephens’ fractious relationship with Davis would become emblematic of the dual identity at the heart of Confederate philosophy. Jefferson Davis’ belief in the necessity of a unified and centralised, executive power during wartime was bitterly opposed by Alexander Stephens’ advocacy for a state-led government by consent and the civil liberty of the (white) individual. The collapse of their relationship was entwined with that of the wider Confederate cause of secession and slavery.