WASHINGTON – To many, including even some of his living relatives, Alexander H. Stephens, was a racist and his statue should not hold a place of honor in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall.

Stephens was the vice-president of the Confederacy. In 1861, weeks after his native Georgia had seceded from the Union, Stephens gave a speech on slavery and said the Founding Fathers had been wrong.

All men are not created equal.

The confederacy was founded on the “cornerstone belief,” Stephens said, that ”the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.”

More than 150 years later, his great-great-great grandnephews, brothers Alexander M. Stephens and Brendan Stephens, pointed to the speech in urging that “Confederate monuments need to come down.”

“Remove them from public spaces so that the descendants of enslaved people no longer walk beneath them at work and on campus,” they wrote in a letter to Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal and the state legislature and published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Aug. 25.

The brothers are the most living direct relatives of the Confederate vice president, who did not have children of his own.

Historians such as Tom Schott, who published a 583-page biography of Alexander H. Stephens in 1988 do not disagree with the repulsion over the former Confederate leader’s racial views.

But removing Confederate statues such as Stephens raises a number of questions and elicits different viewpoints at a time of heightened passions around Civil War secessionist symbols, as witnessed recently in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The Charlottesville demonstration by white supremacists over plans to remove the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from a city park has led to calls in Congress to remove other memorials from government property.

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., says he plans to introduce a bill removing a dozen monuments to Confederate figures from the U.S. Capitol – including the one of Stephens in the Statutory Hall.

Among the questions raised by historians is what does Stephens’ statue represent?

Should he be viewed by today’s standard or those of his time, when his views on white supremacy were common, even among Northerners. And even if he is viewed with revulsion, should we eliminate reminders of a dark aspect of our history?

Does it make any difference that Stephens was viewed as a moderate in his day?

Stephens was once an opponent of secession. In a speech a year before the outbreak of the Civil War, he fretted about the South risking everything. “If we can, without the loss of power, or any essential right or interest, remain in the Union, it is our duty to ourselves and to posterity to…do so,” he urged

Indeed, Schott said, Stephens was selected to be vice president to “balance the ticket,” with President Jefferson Davis, a stronger supporter of secession.

Stephens so disagreed with Davis over the trampling of Constitutional rights – such as the seizure of private property and forced conscription – that he spent the majority of the war away from the vice president’s office in the Confederate capitol and back home in Crawfordville, Georgia.

“How should Stephens be viewed? That’s the big question,” said Stan Deaton, senior historian at the Georgia Historical Society.

Some will view him for his unequivocal support of slavery. Another view of what he represents now, he said, is one that’s relevant today – “the failure of moderates” in preventing the war.

Little remembered is Georgia was divided over secession, if not over slavery. Had it not rained on the night of a vote to secede, the state may have stayed in the Union, Schott said.

Still, Stephens’ reluctance was hardly a moral stance against slavery. He predicted war would bring devastation, “which it did,” Deaton said. “He called it.”

The debate over secession can hardly be viewed as one between “good guys and bad guys,” said Schott. “Even a moderate in the south was going to be pro-slavery. They were still going to believe the black race is inferior.”

Deaton said “it’s not for me to say” what Stephens’ statue means.

Another view of its significance is what the statue says about the attitudes of Georgia to place it in the Capitol building in the early 1900s.

Each state had been asked to provide two statues for display after the Capitol was expanded in in 1857, according to the office of the architect. The House moved to a larger chamber then, and Congress decided to put statues in the old chamber, which had become the thoroughfare between the rotunda and the new chamber.

Many states didn’t provide the statues until years later. A Georgia state commission didn’t pick Stephens and Crawford Long, a 19th Century surgeon who developed the use of ether, until 1902. Long’s statue arrived at the Capitol in 1926 and the Stephens statue a year later.

To the younger Alexander Stephens, a doctoral student in history at the University of Michigan, those who picked his forebear is part of the problem.

The decision came at a time when white supremacists were returning to power in the South’s Jim Crow era and were putting up monuments to create a romanticized image of the Confederacy as a noble “Lost Cause,” and not an attempt to keep black people enslaved.

The younger Stephens said some of those involved in selecting the Stephens statue were involved in creation of a carving of Davis, Lee and Confederate General Stonewall Jackson on the side of a rock face at Stone Mountain, Georgia, where the KKK was revived in 1915. Among them, he said, was the statue’s sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, a Klan sympathizer.

Indeed, a state selection committee so wanted to celebrate the Confederacy, it reversed a previous decision to send a statue of James Oglethorpe, the founder of the British colony of Georgia, said the younger Stephens.

To Schott, the presence of the statue doesn’t mean endorsing white supremacist beliefs, but remembering that it is a part of the nation’s history, as ugly as it was. He’s troubled by what he calls “deliberate defacement and cultural cleansing that denies that those processes even took place.”

Scott added: “Giving in to the kind of pressure that wants to erase all reminders of our less than savory racial past guarantees to enervate what’s being so excoriated.”

But the great-great-great grandnephews wrote in their letter to Governor Deal the Georgia Legislature that “these statues do not preserve the truth. They conceal it.”

Alexander Stephens said he and his brother want the statue of their forebear moved to a museum “not to have it ‘wiped away’ but to have it contextualized so that someone might actually learn something from it.”

Contact Washington reporter Kery Murakami at kmurakami@cnhi.com.