Books: Little Aleck

ALEXANDER H. STEPHENS (337 pp.)—Rudolph von Abele—Knopf ($4).

His weight, full grown, was 96 lbs. A confirmed invalid, he suffered from coughs, sweats, neuralgia, nausea, diarrhea. He dosed himself with quinine, nitric acid, extract of liverwort. He walked about with a cane, muffled himself in scarves and flannels, later (after an iron gate fell on him) rode in a wheelchair. He never married. Until he died at 71, he had a gnome-like, boyish face—beardless, wrinkled, blotched.

The people of the North, from Abraham Lincoln down, knew him as Little Aleck, devoted champion of states’ rights and the constitutional liberties of all men—except Negroes. To the South he was Alexander Hamilton Stephens of Georgia, Vice President and chief enigma of the Confederacy.

The latest to try to take his measure is young (24), New Jersey-born, Columbia-trained Rudolph von Abele. The result is not notably successful as a portrait (Stephens has chestnut hair on one page, black hair on another), but it is a generally scholarly study, based on primary sources, of an extraordinary political career. Not the least extraordinary fact in Stephens’ life is that, having accepted the post of Confederate Vice President, he gave only lukewarm support to the Government. When his own ideas of states’ rights and constitutional liberty were infringed by the Confederate Congress, he sulked in Georgia, refused even to go to Richmond. By 1864 he had become so embittered that he began to talk outright treason: a separate peace with the North.

Jefferson Davis made many mistakes, Von Abele explains, but his intense, opinionated, neurotic little Vice President made still greater ones. Whatever Stephens’ achievements before the Civil War or after, “there can be no palliation of his role in the collapse of the Confederacy. … He comforted deserters and disloyal men. His incessant criticism embarrassed the government; his personal quarrels with Davis weakened [its] unity. . . .

“He could not utterly desert and become a Unionist; he could not remain with Davis. … He was neither here nor there, a lonely and bewildered figure, wandering through the twilight of the Confederacy with a copy of its Constitution in his hands.”