Stephen Fowler Hale | |
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Deputy to the Provisional C.S. Congress from Alabama | |
In office February 8, 1861 – February 17, 1862 |
|
Preceded by | Position established |
Succeeded by | Position abolished |
Personal details | |
Born |
Stephen Fowler Hale January 31, 1816 Crittenden County, Kentucky, U.S. |
Died | July 18, 1862 Richmond, Virginia |
(aged 46)
Resting place | Mesopotamia Cemetery Eutaw, Alabama |
Nationality | Confederate |
Spouse(s) | Mary Kirksey |
Children |
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Military service | |
Allegiance | Confederate States |
Service/branch | Provisional Army of the Confederate States |
Years of service | 1861–1862 |
Rank | Lieutenant-Colonel |
Unit | 11th Alabama Regiment |
Battles/wars |
Stephen Fowler Hale (January 1816 – July 1862) was an Alabaman politician and later a Confederate soldier. Stephen Fowler Hale, lawyer, was born January 31, 1816 in Crittenden County, Kentucky, and died July 18, 1862 in Richmond, Virginia as a result of wounds received in the battle of Gaines Mill, Virginia. His father was a Baptist minister, a South Carolinian, who married a Miss Manahan, of the same state.
Hale was a graduate of Cumberland University, came to Alabama about 1837, and taught school in Greene County for a year. He read law while teaching school, and in 1839 graduated from the law school at Lexington, Kentucky. Locating in Eutaw, he practiced at different times in association with Alexander Graham and T.C. Clarke.
In 1843 he was elected to the State legislature from Greene County. After serving his term in the house, he met and married Mary Kirksey on June 12, 1844 and retired to private life until the outbreak of the Mexican War in 1846, when he volunteered and was elected lieutenant of a company. He served in Mexico until the conclusion of peace in 1848, he then returned to Eutaw to his law practice. He was the nominee of his party for congress in 1853, but was defeated; was elected to the legislature again in 1857; was re-elected in 1859; and was Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Alabama in 1859.
In December 1860, Hale, who was Alabama's commissioner to State of Kentucky at the time, wrote to that state's governor of Alabama's justification for secession. In it, he voiced support for the Dred Scott decision, condemned the Republican Party, and stated that the state's secession, which would perpetuate slavery, was the only way to prevent prospective freedmen, whom Hale referred to as "half-civilized Africans", from raping southern "wives and daughters":
[I]n the South, where in many places the African race largely predominates, and, as a consequence, the two races would be continually pressing together, amalgamation, or the extermination of the one or the other, would be inevitable. Can Southern men submit to such degradation and ruin? God forbid that they should. [...] [T]he election of Mr. Lincoln cannot be regarded otherwise than a solemn declaration, on the part of a great majority of the Northern people, of hostility to the South, her property and her institutions - nothing less than an open declaration of war - for the triumph of this new theory of Government destroys the property of the South, lays waste her fields, and inaugurates all the horrors of a San Domingo servile insurrection, consigning her citizens to assassinations, and her wives and daughters to pollution and violation, to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans.