Duties
The Vice President's primary duty was presiding over the Confederate Senate and breaking tied votes, as the U.S. Vice President presides and breaks ties in the U.S. Senate. He was also the first person in the line of succession. If the President died, resigned or was removed from office, the Vice President would become the new president for the remainder of his term. This never happened.
During his tenure in office, Vice President Alexander Stephens grew increasingly distant from President Davis and spent less and less time in Richmond, the Confederate capital. He eventually spent much of his time trying, without success, to maintain diplomatic channels with the USA and to push for a negotiated end to the war. He was sent by Davis to represent the Confederate government at the Hampton Roads peace conference.
Read more about this topic: Vice President Of The Confederate States Of America
Famous quotes containing the word duties:
“The deadly monotony of Christian country life where there are no beggars to feed, no drunkards to credit, which are among the moral duties of Christians in cities, leads as naturally to the outvent of what Methodists call “revivals” as did the backslidings of the people in those days.”
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“Men are to be guided only by their self-interests. Good government is a good balancing of these; and, except a keen eye and appetite for self-interest, requires no virtue in any quarter. To both parties it is emphatically a machine: to the discontented, a “taxing- machine;” to the contented, a “machine for securing property.” Its duties and its faults are not those of a father, but of an active parish-constable.”
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“It is one of the signs of the times. We confess that we have risen from reading this book with enlarged ideas, and grander conceptions of our duties in this world. It did expand us a little.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)