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154 more sensitively humane, more tenderly sympathetic with suffering in either white or black. The negroes loved him, and on one occasion after the war three thousand freedmen gathered on his lawn and serenaded him with passionate admiration and devotion.

No man was more bitterly opposed to secession and to the war than he was. No Southerner made a harder or more nearly successful fight to prevent the withdrawal of his State. Yet when Georgia went, he not only went with her, but became the vice-president of the Confederacy. He himself puts this contrast vividly in his diary, written while a prisoner at Fort Warren, in 1865. "How strange it seems to me that I should thus suffer, I who did everything in my power to prevent [the 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." 3

Nor is the list of Stephens's contradictions yet summed up—not nearly. The second officer of the Confederacy and a devoted champion of its cause, he was persistently opposed to the conduct of the Government from beginning to end. He opposed Davis radically as to the finances and as to cotton, he opposed conscription, he opposed martial law, he considered that the president's whole course was dictated either by gross misjudgment or by a belief in the necessity of dictatorial power. And