f-made man, inured in childhood to hardship, and made
sympathetic through his own struggles. Orphaned at fifteen, he worked
his way through college; admitted to the bar at twenty-two, he achieved
fame as a lawyer; elected to Congress, he was one of the noted figures
in the House of Representatives for sixteen years. His slight physique
and his frail health were sad handicaps. He was dyspeptic, sleepless, a
nervous wreck. He ordinarily weighed seventy-two pounds, and during the
best years of his life only ninety-two. When in February, 1865, Lincoln
met Stephens for a peace conference, he saw the commissioner take off a
great outer coat, and unwrap layer after layer of tippet from his
throat, peeling down and down, until finally there stood this tiny man.
Lincoln whispered to his friend, "Did you ever see so small a nubbin
that had so much husk on it?"

Within ten days after the election of Lincoln, Stephens began his
campaign against secession. He urged that Lincoln was friendly to the
South; that he had neither the desire nor the power to destroy slavery;
that John Brown's attack represented the individual and not the millions
of the North; that nothing could be gained by haste nor lost by delay,
and that the Southern people should heed Lincoln's inaugural. Finally,
he despaired; he wrote Toombs that "the South was wild with frenzy and
passion--that whom the gods would destroy they first make mad." He
afterwards explained his later acquiescence with secession by the
statement that when two trains were running under full steam towards a
head-on collision, he got off at the first station.

As vice-president of the Confederacy, Stephens was not always in
sympathy with Jefferson Davis; he was very frank in his criticism of the
Confederate leader. "While I never have regarded Davis as a great man,
or statesman on a large scale, or a man of any marked genius, yet I have
regarded him as a man of good intentions; weak and vacillating, timid,
petulant, peevish, obstinate, but not firm."

To understand Jefferson Davis, however, we must take a broader outlook.

Rhodes ventures the judgment that if the Pilgrim Fathers had settled in
South Carolina they might have held slaves by 1850, and might have
fought to maintain slavery; while if the cavalier had settled in Boston,
where the snow and the winter are unfriendly to the coloured man, the
cavalier would have founded abolition societies. If all scholars do not
see their way clear