Constitutional Voices: Thaddeus Stevens
Thaddeus Stevens was one of the most consequential and uncompromising figures of nineteenth-century American politics. Writing in 1993, historian Eric Foner argued that Stevens’ “unusual complexity of motivations and unique blend of idealism with political pragmatism” defied easy categorization.[1] As a Radical Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, he was the driving force behind the abolition of slavery and the attempt to remake the postwar South into a racially egalitarian society.
Stevens was born in Danville, Vermont on April 4, 1792 to Baptist parents from Massachusetts. He was named for Tadeusz “Thaddeus” Kościuszko, a Polish general who had moved to North America to serve in the Continental Army in 1776. When Stevens’ father abandoned the family under mysterious circumstances, his mother moved the family to a neighboring town and enrolled Stevens in the Caledonia Grammar School.
Stevens’ early career
After graduation, Stevens moved to western Vermont to study at Burlington College. His time there was cut short by the arrival of Army troops during the War of 1812, who seized the college’s main building to defend against a potential invasion from British Canada.[2] He transferred to Dartmouth College for his sophomore year, where he participated in a conference on the subject: “Which has been more deleterious to society—war, luxury, or party spirit?” A roommate there recalled that he “was then inordinately ambitious, bitterly envious of all who outranked him as scholars, and utterly unprincipled,” though he admitted that Stevens showed unusual promise as an extemporaneous debater.[3]
Stevens studied law in Vermont; once he passed the bar exam, he opened a law practice in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in 1816. Of the first 10 local cases to reach the state supreme court after he had begun his practice, Stevens was involved in all 10 and won nine.
Stevens came to regret his participation in Butler v. Delaplaine, an 1821 case in which he helped Maryland enslaver John Delaplaine reclaim Charity Butler and her daughters. According to biographer Hans L. Trefousse, he had not taken a stand on “the slavery question” until the case, but “shortly afterward, he denounced the ‘peculiar institution’” and offered his services to those escaping from slavery.[4] His toast at an Independence Day celebration on July 4, 1823 made his conversion clear: “The next President—May he be a freeman, who never riveted fetters on a human slave.”[5]
Stevens’ first major political crusade was not slavery, but anti-Freemasonry, a populist movement against the Masons—an exclusive fraternal order—that had coalesced into an organized political party by the mid-1820s. His prominence in the movement helped him gain election to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in 1833, where Stevens was the champion of a plan to introduce free public schooling to Pennsylvania. But his aggressive 1835 investigation of high-ranking Masons in the state helped cost him reelection to the House the following year.
His involvement with the abolition of slavery
The abolitionist movement was young but steadily growing in the mid-1830s, and Stevens became an increasingly vocal opponent of the “peculiar institution” he had defended as a young lawyer. In 1837, he refused to endorse the new Pennsylvania constitution because it would disenfranchise Black men. And in 1842, after moving from Gettysburg to Lancaster, he turned a hidden cistern outside his house into a station on the Underground Railroad. Yet Stevens would not call for the immediate and universal abolition of slavery until the outbreak of the Civil War, as he argued that the Constitution still protected slave states’ internal affairs from federal interference.
In 1848, Stevens was elected to the U. S. House of Representatives from Pennsylvania’s 8th congressional district. He actively opposed the Compromise of 1850, a package of federal laws that would admit California as a free state in exchange for permitting the residents of new states Utah and New Mexico to decide whether to permit slavery. It would also settle a Texas boundary dispute, abolish the slave trade in Washington, D.C., and provide for passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. While the Compromise’s supporters hoped that it would avert a sectional crisis over slavery’s expansion, Stevens warned it would be “the fruitful mother of future rebellion, disunion, and civil war.”[6]
Stevens refocused on his law practice in Lancaster when he was not reelected for the 1852 term. Upon his return to Congress in December 1859, this time as a Radical Republican, he leapt quickly into the “rapid-fire exchange of insults and general acrimony between Southern representatives and House Republicans.”[7]
Stevens entered the Civil War convinced that the Confederacy had forfeited any constitutional protections by taking up arms. As chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, he introduced a bill for a war loan within a day of his appointment. In July 1861, Stevens secured passage of an act to confiscate rebel property, including the enslaved, and in November he introduced an unsuccessful resolution to free all enslaved persons outright. “Abolition—Yes! abolish everything on the face of the earth, but this Union,” he declared in 1862. “Free every slave—slay every traitor—burn every rebel mansion if these things are necessary to preserve this temple of freedom.”[8]
Stevens and other Radicals grew frustrated with Lincoln’s pace. As late as March 1862, the most that Lincoln had publicly supported was gradual emancipation in the border states, with slave owners compensated for the loss of their property by the federal government. Stevens wrote privately in April, “As for future hopes, they are poor as Lincoln is nobody.”[9] Lincoln, for his part, called Stevens and fellow Radical Republicans Charles Sumner and Henry Wilson “the unhandiest devils in the world to deal with – but after all their faces are set Zion-wards.”[10]
The Reconstruction Era (1863-1877) brought Stevens to the fore of public life. He proposed confiscating the estates of the largest 70,000 southern landholders and distributing plots of 40 acres to freed families, warning that without such measures the southern states would send former rebels to Congress who would undo emancipation. When President Andrew Johnson moved to block land reform and restore former Confederates to power, Stevens organized resistance in Congress, arranging for southern electees to be excluded from the roll call when the House convened in December 1865. He also co-chaired the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, which investigated widespread violence against African Americans and Union loyalists across the South, and steered through the legislation that divided the South into five military districts. “This is not a ‘white man’s Government,’” he thundered.[11]
Stevens died on August 11, 1868, having never seen the full promise of Reconstruction realized. He chose to be buried in a Lancaster cemetery that admitted people of all races because, as he wrote, he wished to “illustrate in my death the principles which I advocated through a long life, equality of man before his Creator.”[12]
Anna Salvatore is a Content Fellow at the National Constitution Center and a graduate of Princeton University.
Notes
[1] Eric Foner, "Thaddeus Stevens and the Imperfect Republic," Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 60, no. 2 (1993): 140, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27773614.
[2] "Propaganda and Pestilence," Vermont History 64 (1996), https://vermonthistory.org/journal/misc/Propoganda_pestilence_vol64.pdf
[3]"Thaddeus Stevens: School Years Shaped by Peacham Education," North Star Monthly, https://www.northstarmonthly.com/profiles/thaddeus-stevens-school-years-shaped-by-peacham-education/article_12277c70-bf1e-11e6-9bca-1fbe729c2188.html.
[4]Hans L. Trefousse, Thaddeus Stevens: Nineteenth-Century Egalitarian (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
[5] "Thaddeus Stevens in the Limelight: Public Life in Pennsylvania," Danville Vermont Historical Society, https://danvillevthistorical.org/thaddeus-stevens-in-the-limelight-public-life-in-pennsylvania/.
[6] Foner, "Thaddeus Stevens and the Imperfect Republic," 143.
[7] "A Remarkable Radical: Thaddeus Stevens," Humanities 33, no. 6 (November/December 2012), https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2012/novemberdecember/feature/remarkable-radical-thaddeus-stevens.
[8] Michael Birkner, "Thaddeus Stevens at Gettysburg," Civil War Faculty (Gettysburg College), https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=cwfac.
[9] Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, vol. 2, chap. 27, https://www.knox.edu/documents/LincolnStudies/BurlingameVol2Chap27.pdf.
[10] "Lincoln on Radicalism," The Atlantic, May 2011, https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/05/lincoln-on-radicalism/238377/.
[11] "On Juneteenth, This Moment Rings a Bell," Herald-Tribune, June 19, 2020, https://www.heraldtribune.com/story/opinion/columns/2020/06/19/on-juneteenth-this-moment-rings-bell/112608184/.
[12] Foner, "Thaddeus Stevens and the Imperfect Republic," 152.