here we have, I think, a rather piquant attitude for a man who held the next to the highest place in a new-born nation fighting for life and death.
These considerations make the vice-president, if not the greatest, certainly the most curious and interesting, figure in the lightning-lit panorama of Confederate history.
In analyzing Stephens's career, the question of health, negatively important for most leaders of men, becomes enormously positive. From his birth in 1812 to his death in 1883, his life seems to have been a long disease, forever on the verge of terminating fatally. It may be that the rough experiences of pioneer farming in his childhood—the corn-dropping, the sheep-tending, exposure, hardship—injured him permanently, or saved him, who knows? So with the long, desperate battle for an education and a profession, in solitude and poverty. The battle may have weakened, may have toughened, perhaps both.
At any rate, we rarely hear of him, except suffering. All the descriptions of him emphasize some phase of physical weakness and inadequacy. His own account at twenty-one sets the note: "My weight is ninety-four pounds, my height sixty-seven inches, my waist twentyseven inches in circumference, and my whole appearance that of a youth of seventeen or eighteen. When I left college, two years ago, my net weight was seventy pounds. If I continue in a proportionate increase, I shall reach one hundred pounds in about two years more."
