Thaddeus Stevens (April 4, 1792August 11, 1868) was an American politician and lawyer who served as a member of the United States House of Representatives from Pennsylvania, being one of the leaders of the Radical Republican faction of the Republican Party during the 1860s. A fierce opponent of slavery and discrimination against Black Americans, Stevens sought to secure their rights during Reconstruction, leading the opposition to U.S. President Andrew Johnson. As chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee during the American Civil War, he played a leading role, focusing his attention on defeating the Confederacy, financing the war with new taxes and borrowing, crushing the power of slave owners, ending slavery, and securing equal rights for the freedmen.
Stevens was born in rural Vermont, in poverty, and with a club foot, which left him with a permanent limp. He moved to Pennsylvania as a young man and quickly became a successful lawyer in Gettysburg. He interested himself in municipal affairs and then in politics. He was an active leader of the Anti-Masonic Party, as a fervent believer that Freemasonry in the United States was an evil conspiracy to secretly control the republican system of government. He was elected to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, where he became a strong advocate of free public education. Financial setbacks in 1842 caused him to move his home and practice to the larger city of Lancaster. There, he joined the Whig Party and was elected to Congress in 1848. His activities as a lawyer and politician in opposition to slavery cost him votes, and he did not seek reelection in 1852. After a brief flirtation with the Know-Nothing Party, Stevens joined the newly formed Republican Party and was elected to Congress again in 1858. There, with fellow radicals such as Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, he opposed the expansion of slavery and concessions to the South as the war came.
Stevens argued that slavery should not survive the war and was frustrated by the slowness of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln to support his position. He guided the government's financial legislation through the House as Ways and Means chairman. As the war progressed towards a Northern victory, Stevens came to believe that not only should slavery be abolished, but that black Americans should be given a stake in the South's future through the confiscation of land from planters to be distributed to the freedmen. His plans went too far for the Moderate Republicans and were not enacted. After the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in April 1865, Stevens came into conflict with the new president, Johnson, who sought rapid restoration of the seceded states without guarantees for freedmen. The difference in views caused an ongoing battle between Johnson and Congress, with Stevens leading the Radical Republicans. After gains in the 1866 election, the radicals took control of Reconstruction away from Johnson. Stevens's last great battle was to secure in the House articles of impeachment against Johnson, acting as a House manager in the impeachment trial, though the Senate did not convict the president.
Historians' views of Stevens have dramatically shifted. During the early 20th century, he was viewed as reckless and motivated by hatred of the white South. Since the 1950s, neoabolitionists have lauded his commitment to equality.
Early life and education
Stevens was born in Danville, Vermont, on April 4, 1792. He was the second of four children, all boys, and was named to honor the Polish general who served in the American Revolutionary War, Tadeusz "Thaddeus" Kościuszko. His parents were Baptists who had moved from Massachusetts around 1786. Thaddeus was born with a club foot, which was seen by some at the time as Divine judgment for secret parental sin. His older brother was born with the same condition in both feet. The boys' father, Joshua Stevens, was a farmer and cobbler who struggled to make a living in Vermont. After fathering two more sons (born without disabilities), Joshua abandoned the children and his wife Sarah ( Morrill). The circumstances of his departure and his subsequent fate are uncertain; he may have died at the Battle of Oswego during the War of 1812.
Sarah Stevens struggled, even with the increasing aid of her sons, to make a living from the farm. Determined that her sons improve themselves, in 1807 she moved the family to the neighboring town of Peacham, Vermont, where she enrolled young Thaddeus in the Caledonia Grammar School (often called the Peacham Academy). He suffered much from the taunts of his classmates for his disability. Later accounts describe him as "wilful, headstrong" with "an overwhelming burning desire to secure an education."Brodie, pp. 26–27
After graduation, he enrolled at the University of Vermont, but he suspended his studies because the federal government appropriated campus buildings during the War of 1812. Stevens then enrolled in the sophomore class at Dartmouth College. At Dartmouth, despite a stellar academic career, he was not elected to Phi Beta Kappa; this was reportedly a scarring experience for him.Brodie, pp. 27–29
Stevens graduated from Dartmouth in 1814 and spoke at the commencement ceremony. Afterward, he returned to Peacham, where he briefly taught. Stevens also began to read law in the office of John Mattocks. In early 1815, correspondence with a friend, Samuel Merrill, a fellow Vermonter who had moved to York, Pennsylvania to become preceptor of the York Academy, led to an offer to Stevens to join the academy faculty. He moved to York to teach and continued to study law in the offices of David Cossett.
Pennsylvania attorney and politician Gettysburg lawyer
In Pennsylvania, Stevens taught at York Academy and continued to study for the bar. Local lawyers passed a resolution barring from membership anyone who had "followed any other profession while preparing for admission,"Franklin Ellis; Samuel Evans; Everts & Peck. (1993). History of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, with Biographical Sketches of Many of its Pioneers and Prominent Men: ChapterXXI. Salem, Massachusetts: The Bench and Bar of Lancaster County, a restriction likely aimed at Stevens. Undaunted, he reportedly (according to a story he often retold) presented himself and four bottles of Madeira wine to the examining board in nearby Harford County, Maryland. Few questions were asked, but much wine was drunk. He left Bel Air the next morning with a certificate allowing him, through reciprocity, to practice law anywhere. Stevens then went to Gettysburg, the seat of Adams County, where he opened an office in September 1816.Brodie, p. 32
Stevens knew no one in Gettysburg and initially had little success as a lawyer. His breakthrough, in mid-1817, was a case in which a farmer who had been jailed for debt later killed one of the constables who had arrested him. His defense, although unsuccessful, impressed the local people, and he never lacked for business thereafter. In his legal career, he demonstrated the propensity for sarcasm that would later mark him as a politician, once telling a judge who accused him of manifesting contempt of court, "Sir, I am doing my best to conceal it."
Many who memorialized Stevens after his death in 1868 agreed on his talent as a lawyer. He was involved in the first ten cases to reach the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania from Adams County after he began his practice, and he won nine. One case he apparently wished he had not won was Butler v. Delaplaine, in which he represented a slave owner in a lawsuit brought by a slave woman who claimed that she and her two daughters were legally entitled to their freedom, because their owner had leased her to a man who had taken her and her daughters into a free state.Butler v. Delaplaine, 7 Serg. & Rawle 378 (Pa. 1821). Free State Slavery & Bound Labor Hans L. Trefousse writes:
In Gettysburg, Stevens also began his involvement in politics, serving six one-year terms on the borough council between 1822 and 1831 and becoming its president.Glatfelter, p. 163 He took the profits from his practice and invested them in Gettysburg real estate, becoming the largest landowner in the community by 1825, and had an interest in several iron furnaces outside town. In addition to assets, he acquired enemies; after the death of a pregnant black woman in Gettysburg, anonymous letters to newspapers hinted that Stevens was culpable. The rumors dogged him for years; when one newspaper opposed to Stevens printed a letter in 1831 naming him as the killer, he successfully sued for libel.Brodie, pp. 42–45
Anti-Masonry
Stevens's first political cause was Anti-Masonry, which became widespread in 1826 after the disappearance and death of William Morgan, a Mason in upstate New York; fellow Masons were presumed to have killed Morgan because they disapproved of his book revealing the order's secret rites. Since the leading candidate opposing President John Quincy Adams was General Andrew Jackson, a Mason who mocked opponents of the order, Anti-Masonry became closely associated with opposition to Jackson and his Jacksonian democracy policies once he was elected president in 1828.Brodie, pp. 38–39
Jackson's adherents were from the old Democratic–Republican Party and eventually became known as the Democrats. Stevens had been told by a fellow attorney (and future president) James Buchanan that he could advance politically if he joined them. However, Stevens could not support Jackson, out of principle. For Stevens, Anti-Masonry became one means of opposing Jackson; he may also have had personal reasons as the Masons barred "cripples" from joining. Stevens took to Anti-Masonry with enthusiasm and remained loyal to it after most Pennsylvanians had dropped the cause. His biographer, Hans Trefousse, suggested that another reason for Stevens's virulence was a disease in the late 1820s that cost him his hair (he thereafter wore wigs, often ill-fitting), and "the unwelcome illness may well have contributed to his unreasonable fanaticism concerning the Masons."
By 1829, Anti-Masonry had evolved into a political party, the Anti-Masonic Party, that proved popular in rural central Pennsylvania. Stevens quickly became prominent in the movement, attending the party's first two national conventions in 1830 and 1831. At the latter, he promoted the candidacy of Supreme Court Justice John McLean as the party's presidential candidate, but in vain, as the nomination fell to former Attorney General William Wirt. Jackson was easily reelected; the crushing defeat (Wirt won only Vermont) caused the party to disappear in most places, though it remained powerful in Pennsylvania for several years.
In September 1833, Stevens was elected to a one-year term in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives as an Anti-Mason. Once in the capital Harrisburg, he sought to have the body establish a committee to investigate Masonry. Stevens gained attention far beyond Pennsylvania for his oratory against Masonry and quickly became an expert in legislative maneuvers. In 1835, a split among the Democrats put the Anti-Masons in control of the Pennsylvania General Assembly, the legislature. Granted subpoena powers, Stevens summoned leading state politicians who were Masons, including Governor George Wolf. The witnesses invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, and when Stevens verbally abused one of them, it created a backlash that caused his own party to end the investigation. The fracas cost Stevens reelection in 1836, and the issue of Anti-Masonry died in Pennsylvania. Nevertheless, Stevens remained an opponent of the order for the rest of his life.Brodie, pp. 57–59
Crusader for education