Thaddeus Stevens

Joshua Stevens was a farmer and cobbler who could not make a living in Vermont, and after fathering two more sons he walked out on his wife and children. He may have died at the Battle of Oswego in the War of 1812 — nobody ever established it. Sarah Stevens held the farm and in 1807 moved the family to Peacham so that Thaddeus, born with a club foot and taunted for it, could attend the grammar school. He reached Dartmouth, did well, and was passed over for Phi Beta Kappa, which reportedly wounded him for years. He liked to tell how he won admission to the Maryland bar in 1816 by handing the examiners four bottles of Madeira. He opened an office in Gettysburg that September knowing nobody there.

Congress had him from 1849 to 1853 and again from 1859 until the day he died. As chairman of Ways and Means he financed the war with taxes, bonds and paper money. He drafted early versions of the Fourteenth Amendment in December 1865, before the Joint Committee on Reconstruction even existed, wrote the 1867 statute that put the former Confederacy under five military commanders, and steered the impeachment of Andrew Johnson through the House. BriefHistory carries that record and what Reconstruction did with it. What follows is the part the statute books do not hold.

In 1821 he took a slaveholder's fee and argued Butler v. Delaplaine against an enslaved woman who claimed her owner had forfeited title by sending her into a free state. He won. His biographer Hans Trefousse thought this was the case Stevens regretted, and that remorse over it helped push him into the antislavery cause he never afterward left. The rest of him was harder. An illness in the late 1820s took his hair, and he spent 40 years in wigs that did not fit. He hunted the Freemasons, who barred cripples from membership, with a zeal his own biographers call unreasonable. In 1831 a hostile newspaper printed a letter naming him as the killer of a pregnant Black woman in Gettysburg. He sued for libel and won, and the rumor followed him for the rest of his life.

His casket lay in the Capitol rotunda under a guard of honor of Black soldiers, the third man after Henry Clay and Lincoln given that room. Then the reputation fell apart. Dunning-school historians called him truculent and vindictive. D. W. Griffith put a version of him into The Birth of a Nation in 1915 — Austin Stoneman, with the wig, the limp and a Black mistress — and fixed the caricature for two generations. Eric Foner observed that as the textbooks grew generous toward Lincoln and Johnson, Stevens came to stand for Northern malice. A fight over his will ended in 1894 with 50,000 dollars founding a Lancaster orphanage open to every race, now Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology.

Thaddeus Stevens's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Speech in defense of free public schools speech
  Delivered April 11, 1835, against repeal of Pennsylvania's free school law 1835
• Thirteenth Amendment law
  He closed House debate on January 13, 1865 1865
• Fourteenth Amendment law
  He drafted early versions in December 1865 — the ratified text was weaker 1868
• Reconstruction Act of 1867 law
  Five military districts, each under an army general who could override civil authority 1867
• Impeachment of Andrew Johnson other
  He managed the House case 1868
• Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology company
  Endowed by his will after a court fight — an orphanage open to all races 1894

• 1807 aged ~15 His mother moves the family to Peacham so he can attend school Classmates taunted him over the club foot.
• 1814 aged ~22 Graduates from Dartmouth and speaks at commencement
• September 1816 aged 24 Opens a law office in Gettysburg He knew nobody there and had almost no business for a year.
• 1821 aged ~29 Wins Butler v. Delaplaine for a slaveholder He denounced slavery soon afterward and never stopped.
• April 11, 1835 aged 43 Saves Pennsylvania's free school law from repeal
• 1837 aged ~45 Refuses to sign the Pennsylvania constitution over Black disenfranchisement
• March 4, 1861 aged 68 Takes the chair of House Ways and Means He held it through the war and then chaired Appropriations.
• 1863 aged ~71 Jubal Early loots and burns his Caledonia Forge About 80,000 dollars of loss. Early later said he would have hanged Stevens.
• August 11, 1868 aged 76 Dies in Washington of stomach illness and dropsy His last words were a request for more ice.

• Andrew Johnson 1808–1875
  17th president whose obstruction of Reconstruction weakened protections for formerly enslaved people and led to impeachment. impeached
• Abraham Lincoln 1809–1865
  16th President who preserved the Union during the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. pushed from the left
• James Buchanan 1791–1868
  Fifteenth president who failed to halt Southern secession in the months before the Civil War. declined his advice
• W.E.B. Du Bois 1868–1963
  Sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist who was the first African American to earn a Harvard doctorate. defended his record
• Ulysses S. Grant 1822–1885
  18th President and Union Army general whose leadership was decisive in winning the Civil War. inherited the unfinished work