Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. [Applause.]
Original passage & context
"Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.” [...] Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. [Applause.]"
The Vice President of the Confederacy states the new nation's founding principle in the plainest terms available, and the audience applauds. The "ideas" he calls fundamentally wrong are the founders' own — Stephens has just argued that Jefferson and his generation believed slavery wrong and expected it to fade. Verified against the 1866 Cleveland volume (which reprints the Savannah Republican's report) rather than a modern teaching transcript: the widely-circulated online text is modernized, printing "corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that..." where the 1866 printing reads "rests upon the great truth, that..." and sets "subordination to the superior race" in em-dashes. The "[Applause.]" is in the source. OCR fixes: "exactlj'" and the "oppo-site" line-wrap. Two contiguous paragraphs joined with [...]; "negro" is the source's word.
Read it in the original — "Corner-Stone" speech, Savannah, Mar 21, 1861 ↗