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OPELIKA — Author Keith Hébert, the Draughon Professor of Southern History at Auburn University, will speak on his book, Cornerstone of the Confederacy: Alexander Stephens and the Speech that Defined the Lost Cause, on Monday, July 15, at 3 p.m. at the Museum of East Alabama. The program is open to the public and free of charge.
In 2023, Cornerstone of the Confederacy won the Georgia Historical Society’s Bell Book Award in recognition of that year’s best work on the history of Georgia. Hébert received a Ph.D. in history from Auburn University and is the author of several books. He is a Georgia native who currently lives in Prattville.
The Bell Book Award, established in 1992, is the highest publication award given by the Georgia Historical Society. It recognizes the best book on Georgia history published in the previous year. The award is named in honor of Malcolm Bell Jr. and Muriel Barrow Bell in recognition of their contributions to the recording of Georgia’s history.
In Cornerstone of the Confederacy, Hébert examines how Alexander Stephens originally constructed, and then reinterpreted his well-known Cornerstone Speech. Born in early 1812 in Crawfordville, Georgia, Alexander Stephens grew up in an antebellum South that would one day inform the themes of his famous Cornerstone Speech.
While Stephens made many speeches throughout his lifetime, the Cornerstone Speech is the discourse for which he is best remembered. Stephens delivered it on March 21, 1861, one month after his appointment as vice president of the Confederacy, asserting that slavery and white supremacy comprised the cornerstone of the Confederate States of America.
Following the war and the defeat of the Confederacy, Stephens claimed that his assertions in the Cornerstone Speech had been misrepresented and his meaning misunderstood. He sought to breathe new and different life into an oration that may have otherwise been forgotten.
Stephens intentionally ambiguous rhetoric throughout the postwar years obscured his true antebellum position on slavery and its centrality to the Confederate Nation and lent itself to early constructions of Lost Cause mythology. Hébert illustrates the complexity of Stephens’s legacy across eight chronological chapters.
The Museum of East Alabama is located at 121 S. 9th Street in downtown Opelika.
