Thaddeus Stevens

Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice

Bruce Levine

• Editorial: Simon & Schuster
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781476793399
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: American Civil War History

A "powerful" ( The Wall Street Journal ) biography of one of the 19th century's greatest statesmen, encompassing his decades-long fight against slavery and his postwar struggle to bring racial justice to America. Thaddeus Stevens was among the first to see the Civil War as an opportunity for a second American revolution—a chance to remake the country as a genuine multiracial democracy. As one of the foremost abolitionists in Congress in the years leading up to the war, he was a leader of the young Republican Party's radical wing, fighting for anti-slavery and anti-racist policies long before party colleagues like Abraham Lincoln endorsed them. These policies—including welcoming black men into the Union's armies—would prove crucial to the Union war effort.During the Reconstruction era that followed, Stevens demanded equal civil and political rights for Black Americans—rights eventually embodied in the 14th and 15th amendments. But while Stevens in many ways pushed his party—and America—towards equality, he also championed ideas too radical for his fellow Congressmen ever to support, such as confiscating large slaveholders' estates and dividing the land among those who had been enslaved.In Thaddeus Stevens, acclaimed historian Bruce Levine has written a "vital" ( The Guardian ), "compelling" (James McPherson) biography of one of the most visionary statesmen of the 19th century and a forgotten champion for racial justice in America.

CHAPTER ONE A Son of Vermont

Shortly after noon on Thursday, December 17, 1868, the U.S. House of Representatives put aside pressing business to pay tribute to one of its most influential members and surely its most colorful one. Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania had died late in the previous summer, and on this day one man after another took the floor to honor his courage, integrity, eloquence, slashing wit, and especially his dedication to and achievements on behalf of human freedom. Stevens was born and raised in Vermont, and one of its congressmen read aloud a resolution from its legislature that claimed the deceased as “a son of Vermont.” Another congressman from that state explained that its people had always held “that the strong love of freedom and independence for all men” that the mature Stevens displayed—“his hatred of all forms of oppression, and his efforts to elevate and benefit the masses”—that these qualities and others “were, to some extent, due to his being born in Vermont.”¹

Stevens had indeed grown up in a state proud of its recent struggle to protect its small farms and achieve a democratic form of government. His family’s strong Baptist faith stressed individual rights, egalitarianism, and mutuality. Schooling exposed him to the classics of the ancient world, an Enlightenment-influenced Protestantism, and liberal capitalist principles. These and other early influences contributed to the young man’s evolving personality, values, and view of the world.

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Stevens’s parents had moved to Vermont from Methuen, Massachusetts, in 1786, just three years after the Revolutionary War ended. Along with some other families, Joshua Stevens and Sarah Morrill Stevens left their homes in hopes of escaping the economic hardships then afflicting Bay State farmers by resettling in a place whose soil was both cheaper and more fertile. Traveling 150 miles northward, they reached Danville, a small Vermont hill town set near a tributary of the Connecticut River. A few years later, Joshua managed to obtain a mortgage with which to purchase a farm there, and Sarah before long gave birth to four sons—Joshua Jr. in 1790; Thaddeus in 1792; Abner in 1794; and Alanson in 1797.²

Even in their new home, the Stevenses continued to struggle against poverty. The first two sons, Joshua Jr. and Thaddeus, were born with club feet—Joshua with two, Thaddeus with one. That left the boys unable to perform all the heavy labor that farming required. It also exposed them to ridicule. Someone who knew Stevens in his youth recalled that other youngsters would “sometimes… laugh at him, boy-like, and mimic his limping walk.” Thaddeus, that neighbor added, “was a sensitive little fellow, and it rankled.”³

The Stevens family’s difficulties deepened when Thaddeus’s father disappeared around 1804. The cause of that disappearance is unclear. Some suggest that Joshua Sr. simply fled his family’s woes. Some say that after abandoning his family, he died in the War of 1812. After trying for three years to manage the Danville farm without a mate or sufficient aid from her children, Sarah moved herself and her sons to nearby Peacham to live with her brother. Thaddeus then remained in Vermont another seven years, until 1811, when he was nineteen.⁴

Vermont’s political atmosphere in those years encouraged commitment to equality and democratic government. As Congressman Luke Poland noted in a eulogy for Stevens, that state was born in a fierce and protracted fight against what its residents viewed as “unlawful and unjust” attempts to oppress them. At stake in that fight were access to land and the right of democratic self-government. Although that struggle preceded Thaddeus’s birth, Poland also noted, “the heroes and statesmen who were her leaders in those trying days were still alive” during Stevens’s youth, and they continued to give “tone and temper to public sentiment and opinion for many years” afterward.⁵

Both before, during, and after the American Revolution, the region eventually known as Vermont—then commonly called the New Hampshire Grants—was claimed by both New Hampshire and New York. New Hampshire usually provided would-be settlers from New England with comparatively inexpensive land titles. But the colonial province of New York pronounced those claims invalid and during the 1760s bestowed titles of its own upon Yorker landlords and businessmen; some of those titles covered thousands of acres that overlapped with claims that Yankee farmers and speculators had previously staked.⁶

Even Yankee farmers whose deeds Yorkers did not challenge had good reason to oppose New York’s claim to govern the region. The colonial province of New York contained huge manors, especially along the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers, where many hundreds of poor, landless tenants worked land owned by wealthy families who wielded great power in provincial government. That power enabled the province’s elite to enforce payment of the often heavy debts of the region’s hard-pressed small farmers.⁷

When Yorkers, most of them absentee owners, tried to supplant Yankee farmers in the Hampshire Grants, the Yankees resisted, often violently. They rioted when Yorker-created courts tried to enforce the small farmers’ debts. They attacked, kidnapped, and even jailed officials attempting to evict them; freed neighbors arrested by such officials; destroyed the fences, crops, homes, and other property of Yorker newcomers; and forced the closing of local courts.⁸

In 1775, the Grants declared themselves a self-governing republic, eventually adopting the name of Vermont (from the French les Verts Monts, after the Green Mountain range that runs from north to south down the middle of the region).⁹ Although the small Vermont republic remained independent until admitted to the United States as a state in 1791, Vermont troops fought alongside the other insurgent colonies against Britain early in the war. That struggle further fanned the flames of social conflict at home. In the summer of 1777, revolutionary Vermont moved to finance the war’s costs by seizing property belonging to imperial Loyalists and selling it at public auction. Such land seizures, when added to acreage forfeited by Yorkers and Loyalists who fled Vermont, represented a major transfer of property from one group of people to another. While speculators took advantage of the situation, this agrarian upheaval enabled many poor settlers—those already in Vermont as well as others who arrived from elsewhere in New England after the revolution—to obtain farms at low prices.¹⁰

Thaddeus Stevens was thus born in a state that owed its very existence to struggle by small farmers for land. In waging that struggle, Vermont’s Yankee settlers drew strength from and reinforced a code of cultural, economic, and political values deeply rooted in New England. Those included belief in democratic government based on a broad-based suffrage and a conviction that the best society was one whose members owned their own small farms and whose mutual assistance helped to prevent creation of great extremes of wealth and poverty. Individual rights were prized, but personal interest must not threaten the welfare of the community.¹¹

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As colonists in North America waged their war for home rule against the British Empire, a second conflict broke out over who would rule at home. What kind of constitutions should newly born states adopt, and what kinds of state governments should those constitutions create? Some states, like New York, adopted constitutions structured to protect the interests of the social and economic elite against the dangers of too much democracy. They created weak and unwieldy bicameral legislatures in which effective veto power lay with upper houses elected solely by citizens with considerable property. They often placed more power in the hands of state governors whose lengthier terms of office placed them further above the reach of voters.¹²

Vermonters rejected that government model in favor of a more democratic one. The constitution they adopted in 1777 created a unicameral legislature that was stronger than the governor. Its members would be elected annually, with nearly all adult males enfranchised. (The one striking exception to this inclusive approach was a religious one. Vermont’s constitution guaranteed full religious freedom only to Protestants and limited membership in the legislature to them.)¹³

The generally democratic spirit that suffused Vermont politics and structured its government did something else of historic importance. Vermont’s constitution was the first in North America to condemn the enslavement of human beings. Echoing and elaborating upon the Declaration of Independence, its preamble announced that “all persons are born equally free and independent, and have certain natural, inherent, and unalienable rights, amongst which are the enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” From that premise Vermonters drew at least one conclusion absent from the U.S. Constitution, adopted a decade later. “No person born in this country, or brought from over sea,” Vermont’s constitution held, “ought to be holden by law, to serve any person as a servant, slave or apprentice, after arriving to the age of twenty-one years.” To be sure, that passage was ambiguous and incomplete. It rejected the enslavement of adults more clearly than it actually outlawed it. And it said nothing about the enslavement of children. Still, it expressed greater hostility to slavery than did any U.S. state (or the British Empire) at that time.¹⁴

Of course, Vermont’s population was not homogeneous politically, and being born and raised there did not guarantee growing up to be Thaddeus Stevens. Stephen A. Douglas, whose political principles the adult Stevens despised, also spent his youth in that state. But Stevens’s family displayed a marked attachment to Vermont’s democratic and egalitarian traditions. Joshua and Sarah apparently named their second son after Tadeusz KoŚciuszko, the Polish-Lithuanian soldier who had joined the American fight for independence. More tellingly, Thaddeus long remembered his family’s regard for the revolution’s most egalitarian document, the Declaration of Independence. From his “earliest youth,” he would later recall, he was taught to read it and “to revere its sublime principles.”¹⁵

The Stevens family’s Baptist faith echoed and reinforced those principles. Sarah Morrill Stevens was very devout and saw to it, as she later recalled, that her son was “taught the scriptures” at an early age. The town of Danville’s first Baptist congregation formed in the year of Thaddeus’s birth, and his family duly joined it.¹⁶

The Baptist denomination had arisen in England within seventeenth-century Puritanism, which prized simplicity of doctrine and ritual and the active involvement of church members. Puritans were also Calvinists and held to the doctrine of predestination, believing that God decided the spiritual fate of all humans before their births and that the great mass of humanity would be damned. Only the few, the “elect,” would be saved, and God would stand by them, strengthen their arms, and relieve them of any conflicting obligations to earthly powers, including kings.¹⁷

Baptists subscribed to much of that general Puritan outlook, in some ways further emphasizing personal choice and responsibility. Their name reflected insistence that the full church membership conveyed in the ceremony of baptism should occur not routinely at birth but only once a person reached adulthood and made a conscious decision to accept the church’s doctrines and responsibilities. The same stress on individual choice led Baptist congregations to permit, even to encourage, their members to amend or challenge the sermons of their ministers.¹⁸

Complementing and somewhat qualifying this stress on personal choice and responsibility, Baptists prized membership in a community bound together by ties of mutual respect and mutual assistance, helping one another both spiritually and practically.¹⁹ Thaddeus’s mother personified that commitment. When spotted fever struck the county in 1805, she threw herself into the work of nursing the afflicted back to health. Her son accompanied her as she did so, and his mother’s selfless conduct reinforced his sense of responsibility to the unfortunate and fostered an open-handed generosity toward them.²⁰

The Baptists of Vermont were strongly egalitarian and democratic in their political inclinations. They remained acutely conscious that they had suffered persecution in England, and in both Massachusetts and Vermont they found themselves taxed to support another (the Congregational) church. In reaction, they favored separation of church and state, an expansive freedom of religion, and a democratic form of government, expecting that greater democracy would better protect their liberties. The same concerns led them to demand transparency in government and to oppose secretive fraternal associations, fearing that secrecy could cloak authoritarian and repressive plotting against their rights.²¹

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The next stage of Stevens’s early shaping took place in schools. Sarah Stevens doted upon this son and made him (as a close colleague of his later put it) “the Joseph of the family.” She determined early that he must obtain a good education and prepare himself for one of the professions. Thaddeus himself recalled that this “very extraordinary woman” had “worked night and day to educate me.” She taught him to read, helped kindle in him a love of reading and a hunger for reading matter, and enrolled him in the state’s public (“common”) schools. Finding books scarce in rural Vermont, Thaddeus tried at age fifteen to establish a library in his community. In 1807 he began attending the Peacham Academy, a tuition-based high school, to prepare himself for college.²²

Four years later, Stevens enrolled in Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. For reasons that are unclear, he passed all or part of his junior year at the University of Vermont, returning to Dartmouth for his senior year and graduation. Like many others with few means, he helped to finance his higher education by working as a teacher in a nearby school. He also skipped the freshman year at Dartmouth, enrolling instead as a sophomore. This was another stratagem that indigent students commonly used to reduce the cost of their education. In order to do that, Stevens would have had to perform well on the entrance examination by demonstrating an acquainta...