The Cornerstone Speech, also known as the Cornerstone Address, was delivered extemporaneously by Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens at the Athenaeum in Savannah, Georgia on March 21, 1861.
The speech explained what the fundamental differences were between the constitutions of the Confederacy and that of the United States, laid out the Confederate causes for the American Civil War, and defended slavery. The Cornerstone Speech became so known for Stephens’ asserting:
“Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.”
http://legacy.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1861stephens.asp
You won’t get an argument from me on that point. My family was Republican in a border slave State and fought on the Union side during the war. These threads become tedious because some see the Confederacy solely in the light of slavery while others deny that the dispute over its spread to the territories and revulsion over the irony of human bondage in any part of a Republic with pretensions of human freedom had anything to do with it. Both sides passionately talk past each other to no effect. General Lee was probably the closest thing to real chivalry in arms that this country ever produced and if not for his genius and honor the war on an open and vast armies’ size scale would have likely not lasted as long as it did, but also have turned into a long guerilla struggle afterwards. If he could be deeply respected by men like Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman who are we to question?