'The Cornerstone Speech' really is an awful document isn't it? All the fabricated religious justifications for slavery were deliberate misinterpretations that had been going on for centuries. Frederick Douglass mentions that in his autobiography. Actually, having read Stephens, you should go and read 'Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass' otherwise you'll come away with a wrong impression of the thinkers of that age. The scariest part of all this is that the type of lazy intellectual arguments Stephens uses are still much in use to this day.