Bruce Levine - Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice

ALSO BY BRUCE LEVINE

The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South

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Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of Civil War

The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil War

Simon & Schuster

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Copyright 2021 by Bruce Levine

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition March 2021

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Interior design by Paul Dippolito

Jacket photograph of Thaddeus Stevens Courtesy of Everett Collection/Shutterstock; Battle artwork by Currier & Ives, The Gallant Charge of The Fifty Fourth Massachusetts (Colored) Regiment, 1863. (The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Glc02881.23); Cloud artwork by James Kidder/Bridgeman Images

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-1-4767-9337-5

ISBN 978-1-4767-9339-9 (ebook)

To longtime and long-suffering pals Josh Brown, Scott Ware, and Elliott Gorn

I n the summer of 1863, the third year of the Civil War, Confederate general Robert E. Lee launched a raid into Pennsylvania that culminated in the epic battle of Gettysburg. During that raid, one of Lees division commanders, General Jubal A. Early, looted and demolished the Caledonia Iron Works, located outside of town. The ironworks owner and the attacks personal target was Republican congressman Thaddeus Stevens. Jubal Early regretted only that he hadnt encountered Stevens on the premises. If he had, the general swore, he would have moved then and there to hang him, divide his bones and send them to the several States as curiosities. Early had destroyed the ironworks to make an example of the man who, he said, had inflicted more harm on the Confederacy than any other in the U.S. Congress. Frederick Douglass, the former slave and abolitionist leader, agreed with Jubal Early about almost nothing. But he did second the generals appraisal of Stevenss importance. There was in him, Douglass said, the power of conviction, the power of will, the power of knowledge, and the power of conscious ability, qualities that at last made him more potent in Congress and in the country than even the president and cabinet combined.

As chairman of the House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee, Stevens ensured that the Union war machine received the funding it needed. Perhaps even more important, he fought eloquently and doggedly in Congress for the strong antislavery and antiracist war policies to which other Republicans would come around only later. Stevens was always in advance of public opinion, one associate recalled, and constantly antagonized it with a valor and boldness unequalled. Usually political leaders ascertain the current and drift of public sentiment and accommodate themselves to it. But Stevens created public opinion and moulded public sentiment. Although he did, in fact, on occasion hesitate in the face of public disapproval, he far more often defied such opposition in order to champion causes close to his heart, especially the destruction of slavery and the fight against racial discrimination in general.

Over the course of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln grew impressively into the role of leader of the Second American Revolution, moving to confiscate and then emancipate Confederate slaves and to bring black men into Union armies. But at each stage of Lincolns evolution, he found Thaddeus Stevens marching ahead of him, pushing for further advances. Stevens also demanded a constitutional amendment outlawing slavery throughout the United States a year before Lincoln endorsed the idea. In arguing for these and other measures, Stevens helped to educate and reshape public opinion in the North, thereby permitting or inducing other political figures to move eventually in the same direction.

Stevenss pioneering role did not end with the Confederacys defeat and Lincolns death. In the first years of postwar Reconstruction, he demanded equal civil rights for African Americans. Before long he was fighting as well to grant them political rights, the rights to vote and hold office, doing that before most of his Republican colleagues endorsed the constitutional amendments that enshrined those advances, amendments that paved the legal way for the civil rights movement of the twentieth century. Reflecting on this record of determined and militant struggle for black equality, Republican congressman Ignatius L. Donnelly observed that Stevens brought the spirit of John Brown into the work of the statesman.

Stevenss opposition to slavery began early. The same was true of Abraham Lincoln. But Stevenss hostility was more passionate and deeply rooted. Although opposing bondage since boyhood, Lincoln said and did relatively little about it until the middle of the 1850s. Stevens became a full-bore abolitionist decades earlier, at a time when white people calling for slaverys destruction constituted only a widely despised handful. And he stood even then not only for the prompt abolition of slavery but for equal rights for African Americans, north and south. At a convention revising Pennsylvanias state constitution in 1837, thus, Stevens rejected the finished document because it denied black men the right to vote. In the 1840s, Abraham Lincoln opposed the war with Mexico and the seizure of Mexican land. When the United States nonetheless absorbed half of that country, a political crisis blew up over slaverys status in the newly acquired region. Lincoln embraced the famous Compromise of 1850 that ended the crisis, while Stevens repudiated it for allowing slavery to spread and for including a law that facilitated the enslavement of people accused of fleeing bondage.

Thaddeus Stevens joined the newborn Republican Party in 1855, the party that put Lincoln in the White House six years later. When slaveholders rose in armed revolt against Lincolns election, an associate recalled, Stevens was the one man who never faltered, who never hesitated, who never temporized, but who was ready to meet aggressive treason with the most aggressive assaults. And while he and Lincoln worked substantially on the same lines, earnestly striving to attain the same ends, it was Stevens who pointed the way forward. While Lincoln ever halted until assured that the considerate judgment of the nation would sustain him, Stevens was the pioneer who was ever in advance of the government. A northern newspaper that often opposed Stevenss initiatives had to agree in retrospect. He comprehended the magnitude of the crisis, it acknowledged, while the majority about him saw but dimly its proportions. Stevens, it conceded, realized the necessity of bold, strong measures, while others clung to hopes of pacification and compromise. He was one of the few who are not afraid to grasp first principles and lay hold of great truths, or to push them to their remotest logical result.