Alexander Hamilton Stephens was born to Andrew Baskins Stephens (12 July 1782-07 May 1826) and Margaret Grier (1787-12 May 1812) in Crawfordville, Taliaferro County, Georgia on 11 February 1812. He first studied the ministry, but turned to the law, graduating at the top of his class at Franklin College (now University of Georgia) in Athens, Clarke County, Georgia in 1832. He spent the next eighteen months teaching school before being admitted to the bar.

     He served as a member of the Georgia House of Representatives from 1836 to 1841 and then as a state senator in 1842. Elected the following year to fill a vacancy caused by the resignation of U.S. Representative Mark Anthony Cooper (20 April 1800-17 March 1885), he continued to hold the office, and for a time served as Chairman of the Committee on Territories, until his own resignation on 03 March 1859. He was in favor of the Compromise Of 1850, and with Howell Cobb (07 September 1815-09 October 1868) and Robert Augustus Toombs (11 February 1812-04 March 1883), campaigned in Georgia to have it ratified. He, Cobb and Toombs also organized the short-lived Constitutional Union Party.

     "Little Aleck", as he was known, barely weighed 100 pounds and was plagued with illness throughout his life, which accounted for his deathly appearance. A character once said of him, "he looked like the advance agent of the famine."  Another story mentions someone asking Stephens his idea of heaven. His reply was, "to be warm."  Regardless of the anecdotes, he was a well respected politician, and was frequently called a "charismatic" speaker.

     Like Jefferson Davis (03 June 1808-06 December 1889), Stephens was originally opposed to secession, voting against it in the Georgia Secession Convention in January 1861. However, when the Ordinance to withdraw from the Union passed, he supported the choice his state had made and became a deputy to the Provisional Confederate Congress. He was one of the framers of the Confederate Constitutions, was chosen by the Confederate Congress to be the nation's Vice-President on 09 February 1861, and took the oath of office on his 49^th birthday, two days later.

     A Vice-President in the truest sense, Stephens spent the majority of the war at his home, "Liberty Hall", in Crawfordville, Taliaferro County, Georgia. Politically, he was often at odds with Davis, and in general, he was disgusted by the loss of life in the war. When in Richmond, he tirelessly visited the sick and wounded in hospitals, and pushed for rapid prisoner exchanges. In February 1865, with Assistant Secretary of War John Archibald Campbell (24 June 1811-12 March 1889) and Senator Robert Mercer Taliaferro Hunter (21 April 1809-18 July 1887), Stephens headed the Confederate commission at the failed Hampton Roads Peace Conference. After the fall of Richmond, he was arrested at his home on 11 May 1865, and subsequently imprisoned with John Henninger Reagan (08 October 1818-06 March 1905) at Fort Warren, in Boston Harbor, until 11 October 1865.

     In 1866, he was elected to the United States Senate, but was barred from taking his seat because of his role in the Confederacy. He spent the next few years writing his retrospective, A Constitutional View Of The Late War Between The States, which was published in 1868. A second volume to this work was completed in 1870. Eventually, he was allowed to fill a vacancy in the U.S. House of Representatives, was Chairman of the Committee on Coinage, Weights and Measures, and served from 01 December 1873 to 04 November 1882, when he resigned to become Governor of Georgia. Stephens died in office in Atlanta, Fulton County, Georgia on 04 March 1883, and is buried at his estate which is now a state park and historic site.

"Depend upon it, there is no difference between Consolidation and Empire; no difference between Centralism and Imperialism. The consummation of either must necessarily end in the overthrow of Liberty and the establishment of Despotism. To speak of any Rights as belonging to the States, without the innate and inalienable Sovereign power to maintain them, is but to deal in the shadow of language without the substance. Nominal Rights without Securities are but Mockeries."
-Alexander Hamilton Stephens (1870)