The Steven Spielberg movie “Lincoln,” which is liable to win multiple prizes during Sunday’s Academy Awards telecast, has a local fan with a special connection to the film.
A well-crafted example of history made personal, the film includes a scene from the Feb. 3, 1865, meeting when Lincoln and Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia held peace negotiations aboard a river craft in Hampton Roads, Va., and accomplished nothing.
Athens resident and Superior Court Judge Lawton Stephens watched that scene very carefully. He notes that though the Civil War politicians didn’t negotiate an end to the violence, they did get something else done:
They ensured his existence.
This came about because of a gentleman’s agreement between Lincoln and Stephens — two former colleagues in the U.S. Congress — and a token of that agreement, a letter from Lincoln, is on display today at a University of Georgia library.
“I always tell people if it hadn’t been for Lincoln I wouldn’t be standing here,” the judge said recently.
The movie shows how the Civil War diplomacy failed. Unwilling to make the concessions demanded by the rebels, Lincoln called the Hampton Roads meeting to an end. But the movie leaves out another historic tidbit. Before dismissing his visitors, Lincoln asked Stephens whether there was anything else he could do for him.
Stephens said yes, in fact, there was. His nephew, John Stephens, had been captured by the Union and imprisoned at Johnson’s Island, on the frigid shore of Lake Erie, and there had been no word from him. Lincoln told the Confederate leader he would release the young man if the Confederacy would release a Union soldier of equivalent rank.
Young John Stephens was taken from his Ohio prison and sent to Washington, wrapped in buffalo robes against the bitter cold. Ushered into the White House, he entered the crowded quarters to find Lincoln lying on a table, apparently to relieve some back problems.
“Then there uncoiled the tallest man I’ve ever seen,” John Stephens wrote. The president gave him a letter to take to his uncle in the South, and the trade was consummated.
The letter read: “According to our agreement your nephew, Lieut. Stephens, goes to you bearing this note. Please, in return, to select and send to me, that officer of the same rank imprisoned at Richmond whose physical condition most urgently requires his release.” It is signed “A. Lincoln.”
Lincoln also signed a “carte de visite,” a tiny photograph of himself, telling the young Stephens he would wager there were very few such photographs down South.
“That letter was handed down through John Stephens to my grandfather, Rob Stephens, to my father, Robert Stephens,” said Lawton Stephens, 58. “It was in a frame, hanging on a wall in Athens for years” before the University of Georgia acquired it.
In his haste, Lincoln failed to blot the letter, and the ink smeared. But the letter is still legible today and can be seen at the university’s Hargrett Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
Of the movie “Lincoln,” the judge said: “I thought the actor (Jackie Earle Haley) looked remarkably like Alexander Stephens, his hair, his face. He was a little heavier, perhaps. Alexander Stephens never weighed more than 120 pounds.”
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