Thaddeus Stevens (1792 to 1868) was a US politician and abolitionist, who rose to prominence in the 1860s during the American Civil War and Reconstruction eras. A leader of the abolitionist wing of the Republican Party - known as the Radical Republicans - Stevens vigorously pushed for an end to slavery, using his forceful personality and scathing oratory to further his egalitarian agenda.

After the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery, he worked just as tirelessly to secure the rights and liberties of freedmen, while also insisting on strict requirements for the former Confederate States to reenter the Union. He remained politically active even in the twilight of his life, helping spearhead the push for the impeachment of Andrew Johnson just a few months before his death in August 1868.

Thaddeus Stevens was born on 4 April 1792 in Danville, Vermont. He was the second of four sons born to Joshua Stevens, a farmer and a cobbler who “had a local reputation as a wrestler and little else but a special talent for staying poor”, and his wife Sarah Morrill Stevens (Brodie, 23). Two years earlier, Thaddeus’s older brother had been born with two clubfeet - the neighbors, devout Baptists all, interpreted this as divine punishment for some secret sin committed by the parents. When Thaddeus was also born with a clubfoot, it must have seemed to the superstitious New England neighbors that the Stevens family was indeed cursed.

Around the same time, Joshua Stevens’ farm began to fail. Unable to handle his own failure, he ran away, returning periodically to father two more sons with Sarah before abandoning the family for good. Thaddeus Stevens never saw his father again, although he would later hear rumors that Joshua had been killed in the War of 1812. “All his life,” writes biographer Fawn McKay Brodie, “Thaddeus Stevens was aggressive and implacable in his hatreds. It is easy to speculate that he hated his father first, and all his subsequent dislikes stemmed from the corroding hostility of his childhood” (24).

If Thaddeus did indeed hate his father, he certainly did not feel the same way toward his mother. A devout Baptist, Sarah Stevens doted on her son, and fostered in him a Calvinist sense of hard work and duty, teaching him how to read the Bible. A woman of “great energy, strong will, and deep piety,” she was determined to put her sons through school at any cost; in 1807, she moved her family to Peacham, Vermont, and enrolled her boys at the Caledonia Grammar School, which she paid for by working various nursing and domestic jobs (ibid).

Her sacrifices paid off, as young Thaddeus proved to be a diligent student who devoured books “thirstily”. After grammar school, he briefly attended the University of Vermont - leaving after the federal government requisitioned campus buildings for use during the War of 1812 - and graduated from Dartmouth University in 1814, delivering the commencement speech.

The next year, Stevens travelled to York, Pennsylvania, where he worked as a schoolteacher and studied law in his spare time. In August 1816, he passed the bar examination, buttering up the board by presenting them with four bottles of Madeira wine. The next month, he opened up his own law office in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Initially, Stevens had no connections in Gettysburg, and had trouble attracting business.

However, he had his breakthrough case in the summer of 1817, when he defended a man named James Hunter at trial. Hunter was a farmer who, after being jailed for debt, attacked and killed the constable who had arrested him. Stevens eloquently defended Hunter by entering an insanity plea, which was unusual at the time. Although he lost the case and Hunter was hanged, Stevens’ performance left a strong impression, and he never again had trouble attracting clients.

By 1822, though he had only been practicing law for six years, Stevens had already become one of the foremost lawyers in Pennsylvania, and had even argued before the state Supreme Court. He was quite well off financially - he owned his own house in Gettysburg as well as several other properties, had invested heavily in the ironworks just outside of town, and had even saved enough to buy his mother a cozy plot of land in Vermont.

It made sense, therefore, that the next step in Stevens’s career was his entry into politics. He served six one-year terms on the Gettysburg borough council between 1822 to 31, and even served as its president. Though his star was undoubtedly rising, Stevens was not free from scandal. Beginning in the mid-1820s, anonymous letters began to circulate, implicating him in the murder of a free Black servant girl. Stevens, of course, denied the accusations, and successfully sued the printer of one of the letters for criminal libel.

In September 1833, Stevens won election to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. He had run as a candidate of the Anti-Masonic Party. At the time, Freemasonry had come under suspicion in the United States for being an elitist, secretive society; it had also become associated with then-President Andrew Jackson and his Democratic Party, leading many of Jackson’s opponents to seek common cause with the Anti-Masons.

Stevens vigorously took up the Anti-Masonic cause, determined to hound the Masons out of Pennsylvania. Indeed, out of the 116 Masonic lodges that had existed in the commonwealth when he took office, only 46 were left by 1838. Stevens’s devotion to the cause won him the admiration of John Quincy Adams, who referred to him as “the great anti-Masonic leader in Pennsylvania” (quoted in Brodie, 57). So too did it win him the love and support of the Mennonites, Moravians, and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians of rural Pennsylvania, all of whom deplored the elitist Masons.

The other cause that Stevens devoted himself to during this time was that of free public education. In the 1830s, there were no free schools in the United States except for in New England and in some larger cities; everywhere else, parents who could not afford tuition fees simply kept their children at home. Stevens emphatically supported a free public educational system in Pennsylvania, even though it meant higher taxes. “May the film be removed from the eye of Pennsylvania,” he said, “and she learn to dread ignorance more than taxation” (quoted in Brodie, 59).

In April 1834 he worked with Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor to push a free education bill through the state legislature, which would allow individual districts to choose whether they wanted public schools paid for by taxpayers.

This caused an uproar amongst taxpayers, some of whom signed a petition demanding the bill be repealed. Stevens defended the new educational system in a brilliant speech on 11 April 1835, in which he demonstrated that it would actually save money, and accused the wealthy of trying to widen the divide between rich and poor by hoarding all the educational privileges for themselves. “Build not your monuments of brass or marble,” he implored, “but make them of everliving mind” (quoted in Brodie, 61). Thanks to his speech, the educational bill was not repealed.

By championing the causes of Anti-Masonry and free public education, Stevens had taken on the mantle of defender of the underprivileged and marginalized. By 1837, he had also come to identify with the antislavery clause. That year, Stevens was serving as a delegate at a convention to draft a new state constitution for Pennsylvania. He refused to sign the finished constitution, however, because it only offered suffrage to “white freemen”, and denied the vote to free African Americans.

Starting from this moment, Stevens would be a fierce opponent of slavery for the rest of his life. Scholars and historians have long debated exactly why Stevens pivoted so hard into the antislavery cause - some cynically accuse him of taking up the cause to further his own political ambitions, while others (like Brodie) believe that his clubfoot left him more predisposed to sympathize with the downtrodden.

In any case, Stevens left state politics in 1838, when the Democrats took control of the state legislature after a dirty political campaign known as the ‘Buckshot War’. Deeply in debt - Stevens had lost over $200,000 in his ironworks investments - he moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1842, where he opened a new law practice and tirelessly worked to recoup his financial losses.

During this time, he hired Lydia Hamilton Smith, a widowed African American woman, as his housekeeper. Smith would work for Stevens for the remainder of his life. The two became quite close, and Stevens even helped raise Smith’s two sons. It is unknown whether their relationship had a romantic or sexual component - it is worth noting here that Stevens never married - and rumors of an affair between them certainly circulated at the time.

While living in Lancaster, Stevens became more fervent in his antislavery views. Indeed, his house became a stop on the Underground Railroad, where he gave shelter and aid to fugitive slaves who were in the process of escaping north to freedom.

In 1848, Stevens won election to the US House of Representatives as a member of the Whig Party. By the time he entered national politics, the United States was divided along sectional lines over the issue of slavery - the slaveocracies of the Southern states wished to see their ‘peculiar institution’ expand into the West, while the ‘free soil’ Northern states desired to stop the spread of slavery.

Though Stevens did not yet favor full-fledged emancipation, he wanted to contain slavery to the places where it already existed, hoping that in doing so, the institution would wither and die on its own. He opposed the Compromise of 1850, which allowed California to enter the Union as a ‘free state’ in exchange for stricter slave laws such as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

Speaking against the legislation, Stevens famously said that “this word ‘compromise’ when applied to human rights and constitutional rights I abhor” (quoted in Trefousse, 87). Due to his unyielding principles, Stevens often butted heads with Whig Party leadership, causing him to lose his bid for renomination in 1852.

Upon leaving Congress at the end of his term in 1853, Stevens returned to Lancaster to resume his law practice. He refused to give up his antislavery beliefs, however, and, in 1855, he joined the new Republican Party, which had been founded on antislavery principles. In 1858, with the Democratic Party unpopular in the North after the Dred Scott decision, Stevens saw an opportunity to return to national politics, and won election to the US House of Representatives as a Republican.

By this point, the sectional crisis had only worsened, and the nation was on the brink of civil war. Indeed, only two years after Stevens’ election, the crisis that had been looming for over a decade finally arrived - the victory of Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln in the US Presidential Election of 1860 triggered eleven slaveholding Southern states to secede from the Union and form the Confederate States of America. In April 1861, hostilities opened at the Battle of Fort Sumter; the American Civil War had begun.

Stevens, by this point, was nearly 70 years old and constantly ill. Few could have predicted that, over the course of the next few years, he would become one of the most prominent and energetic politicians in Congress. He wasted no time making his opinions known - shortly after the fall of Fort Sumter, Stevens announced that the rebellious Confederates had placed themselves outside the protection of the United States, and deserved to be mercilessly crushed.

He was among the first to realize that the US could not win the war unless it was willing to abolish slavery entirely, and worked tirelessly to make that happen. In July 1861, he introduced an act that would confiscate the property of Confederate sympathizers, including slaves. When that passed, he took the next bold step of introducing legislation that would emancipate all slaves. At this early stage in the war, however, this was still a step too far, and the legislation was defeated.

Stevens refused to give up. In the first years of the war, the main objective of mainstream Republicans was simply to preserve the Union; though many Republicans held antislavery views, few were willing to abolish the institution entirely, believing that compromises would have to be made. Stevens - who had already proclaimed his unwillingness to compromise on human rights - quickly established himself as a leader of the Radical Republicans, the far-left wing of the Republican Party which sought to push the party platform toward abolition.

He constantly lobbied President Lincoln, arguing that the Confederate war machine could never be stymied as long as slavery remained intact. Lincoln eventually listened, issuing the Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January 1863, which freed every slave in the Confederacy. For Stevens, this did not go far enough, and he spent the next few months campaigning for the Thirteenth Amendment, which would end slavery throughout the entire country. With the support of Lincoln - who had become more radical in his own antislavery views as the war progressed - the amendment was passed by Congress on 31 January 1865.

Although Stevens’ main focus was to advance the antislavery cause, he was also indispensable in securing funding for the Union’s war effort. As chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, he secured war loans and ushered in legislation to pay federal soldiers. He was instrumental in the passage of the Legal Tender Act of 1862, which authorized the issuance of $150,000,000 US bank notes - popularly known as ‘greenbacks’ - currency that was backed by US credit rather than gold or silver.

Stevens vigorously pursued his goals, utilizing the full force of his dynamic personality; his fiery speeches, famous for their sharp wit and venomous sarcasm, were weaponized against his foes. Due to his forceful leadership style, Stevens became known as the ‘Dictator of the House’; his inflammatory rhetoric and tireless radicalism earned him comparisons to the Jacobin leaders of the French Revolution, and indeed, he was once referred to as “the Robespierre, Danton, and Marat of America, all rolled into one” (quoted in Foner, 331).

What Lincoln and other Republicans initially saw as a civil war to save the Union, Stevens saw as a revolutionary struggle - his vision undoubtedly helped swing the minds and hearts of Unionists towards total emancipation.

On 9 April 1865, Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox effectively brought the Civil War to an end. Yet for Stevens and other Radical Republicans, the job was far from finished - now that the war had been won, the former slaves needed to be aided in their transition to freedom, and the former Confederate States needed to be punished.

At first, it seemed that things were trending in the right direction. The Freedmen’s Bureau was established to help the formerly enslaved access food and education, and plans were being put into motion to supply each freedman with 40 acres of land confiscated from ex-Confederates. Yet this vision of Reconstruction was complicated by the rise of Andrew Johnson, who abruptly became president after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln on 15 April 1865.

A Southern Democrat from Tennessee, Johnson did not share the Radical Republicans’ vision of an equanimous reconstructed America. Indeed, he believed that in order to heal, the nation needed to finish the process of Reconstruction as quickly as possible. In the summer of 1865, while the Republican-controlled Congress was in recess, Johnson counteracted the Freedmen’s Bureau’s land reform policies and offered amnesty to many ex-Confederates.

Stevens and other Radical Republicans were outraged, believing that Johnson was betraying the spirit of Reconstruction and costing them the gains they had just so painstakingly won in the war. When Congress reconvened in December 1865, they pushed back. Stevens was made co-chair of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, and was instrumental in the passage of both the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Johnson vetoed both these measures, but was overridden by Congress.

In January 1867, Stevens introduced legislation to bring martial law to the South - the former Confederate States would be divided into five military districts, each overseen by a general, until the conditions for reentry into the Union had been met. Though this was seen as excessive by many moderates and Democrats, Congress passed this legislation, which became known as the Reconstruction Acts.

In February 1868, the conflict between the president and Congress reached its climax, when Johnson was impeached for committing “high crimes and misdemeanors”. Stevens helped spearhead the charges against the president, drawing up eleven articles of impeachment. Officially, Johnson was being accused of violating the Tenure Office Act, which prevented him from firing cabinet members without congressional approval. Yet everyone knew that the impeachment was really an indictment on Johnson’s actions during Reconstruction. The House voted 126 to 47 to impeach, and the case was prepared to be brought before the Senate for trial.

Though Stevens had been chosen as one of the prosecutors, his health was quickly failing, and he had to be carried to the Senate chamber in a chair. The New York Herald noted his sickly appearance, describing his “face of corpselike color…a strange and unearthly apparition - a reclused remonstrance from the tomb” (quoted in Trefousse, 228). Due to his condition, Stevens was unable to take much of an active part in the trial. When Johnson was acquitted, the old radical blamed himself, and judged that the episode had marked a disappointing end to his career. “I have no history,” he lamented. “My life-long regret is that I have lived so long and so uselessly” (quoted in Brodie, 22).

Stevens died a few months later, on 11 August 1868, at the age of 76, with his housekeeper Lydia Hamilton Smith at his bedside. His funeral, held at the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., was attended by thousands of mourners, and his honor guard was comprised of Black soldiers. On his deathbed, Stevens had refused to be buried in an all-white cemetery, and was instead buried in one of the few interracial cemeteries in Lancaster.