This is interesting reading. It seems like Baldwin's "corner stone" comment had become somewhat commonplace in political discourse in the decades after he issued the decision, to the point that I'm not sure it's fair to associate the term mainly with Stephens, who was just repeating the same words that many others had used.
Certainly. Some seem to consider Stephens' 1861 speech as if a declaration of independence for the Confederacy, but there wasn't anything in it particularly new, and he regards the points made as philosophical. What was new was the Southern Confederacy itself.
Regarding Baldwin, a few years after his 1833 "corner stones" comment in Johnson v. Tompkins, Justice Baldwin, in 1837, published a "general view" of the origin of the Constitution, which promoted another States rights theory of ultimate State sovereignty, and suggested slavery in part proved it; as the States had the power to enslave.
Judge Baldwin was educated at the Law school at Litchfield, Connecticut. A fellow alum of the same institution was John C. Calhoun.
And it was said long after the school's closing in 1833 that it emphasized laying "Corner stones"...
Anyways, both also went to Yale. Baldwin graduated Yale in 1797, and Calhoun in 1804. Both were members of the "Brothers in Unity" fraternal and debating society. They differed on many major points in their subsequent politics. But agreed in some others perhaps.
Andrew Jackson had Calhoun as his vice president 1829-32, and appointed Baldwin to the Supreme Court in 1830. By 1833 he was dissatisfied with both. Calhoun resigned the vice presidency and Baldwin openly criticized Jackson's policies in some of his subsequent court decisions.
In May, 1833, less than a month after Justice Baldwin's "corner stones" comments in the circuit court, and five months after Calhoun left the vice-presidency, President Jackson observed to a Georgian that tariffs, and increasingly slavery, were mere
pretexts for forming a Southern Confederacy.
Enter the next decades of political rhetoric on sectional affairs in and out of Congress, in which most of the ideas referenced by Stephens in 1861 were variously promoted or opposed by others.
In the mid-1800s, political rhetoric of a philosophical nature, especially that intended for publication, was often called "Bunkum"
The important point being, in the rule of bunkum; that his philosophical statements were printed in the papers for local consumption.
And it was perhaps commonly indulged by the 1860s.
So it appears Stephens' 1861 cornerstones speech was an attempt to harmonize a body of pre-existing political bunkum with the new Confederacy. For example, his suggestion the Declaration of Independence had been accepted as false by modern politics, science, etc. had been around a while. John C. Calhoun made that claim in his speech in the Senate in 1848:
An 1857 pro-slavery article published in England, William Chambers, of Chamber's Literary Journal:
But in the pre-secession era, in the battle of ideas, others claimed such philosophy of the Declaration of Independence's clause was itself metaphysical
bunkum... Like Oliver C. Gardiner of New York:
....
Another example perhaps. Stephens in the 1861 cornerstone speech suggested that black people were only fitted by nature for slavery. This wasn't a new argument either. He himself made similar remarks as a US Congressman on the floor of the House of Representatives in Washington on June 28, 1856 in debating on the Kanas bills:
And on that occasion he was opposed openly by others who disagreed.
Stephens there, and in his 1861 cornerstone speech is likely referencing the "scientific" theories of Dr. Nott and others since the 1840s. Dr. Josiah Nott did some breakthrough medical work relative to insect borne disease vectors; but he made no money from it. Instead, he embarked on a program of claiming negroes were scientifically inferior, as proven by Southern slavery. This proved lucrative and somewhat popular. For example, he was paid to testify of his "scientific" findings to the Louisiana General Assembly in 1848, etc.
His inspiration being Politicians needed some philosophical points of such scientific bent to employ against the abolitionists ideas:
Stephens claimed he was speaking in his cornerstone speech the ideals of the "statesmen, philosophers and philanthropists" of the Southern democracy of the time. And being fresh from Montgomery, he suggested the new Southern Confederacy was a "Bloodless" philosophical revolution in which northern, republican or abolitionist debate against the same ideas was silenced...
And that the Confederacy offered then a chance to prove these ideas true...
At the time Stephens made the speech there was great concern in the South that the effect of secession and the Southern Confederacy would further reduce the value of property in slaves, and possibly destroy the institution. And should there be war, sever the planters from the credit extended to them by northern and foreign banks, businesses, etc., if not lead to worse:
So Stephens countered with the party line that war was not certain in his cornerstone speech.
Not long afterward he went to Richmond to promote Virginia's secession, etc.
Finally, I think it may have been doubly important for the Confederacy to have all these comments come from Stephens, to counteract
his own widely publicized opposition to them in the previous months. For example from November 14, 1860, Stephens had made a pro-Union speech which bolstered many Southern Union men:
He wrote the next month, in December, 1860:
...
During the Secession Convention in Georgia during January, 1861, Stephens was elected as a Union delegate, and publicly argued against secession even more staunchly:
After the secession of the State of Georgia on January 21, 1861, in which he voted in the negative, Stephens abided that decision, and then accepted the vice-presidency of the Confederacy. So shortly afterward, in his corner stone speech in March, 1861, he openly abandons his prior remarks, and extolls the alternative philosophical points. From an 1872 news clipping, paraphrasing a reported conversation with Joseph E. Johnston:
After Stephen's cornerstone speech further debate within the South was overthrown by the outbreak of war in April. Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, North Carolina then joined the Confederacy.
During the war many lamented the Confederacy's leaders had perhaps a surplus of bunkum, while lacking other important necessities.
Lt. Henry S. Wise noted after the war that the bunkum was increasingly unpopular during its course.
Wise himself jocularly notes of dusting off the bunkum of the Southern sectional politicking after Appomattox.
As for former Confederate Vice President Stephens, he was elected to Congress in 1872 to 1880, and in 1882 became Governor of Georgia. He died in office in March, 1883.
Bringing the