Thaddeus Stevens and James Buchanan:

How their Historic Rivalry Shaped America

By Fergus M. Bordewich. This article originally appeared as “Was James Buchanan Our Worst President? Digging into a Historic Rivalry” in Smithsonian Magazine, February 2004.

 

WHEN JIM DELLE’S crew of student archaeologists broke through the roof of an old cistern in Lancaster, Pennsylvania last December, they discovered something totally unexpected: a secret hiding place for fugitive slaves in the backyard of one of nineteenth century America’s most powerful, most passionate, and most hated political figures, the radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens. Although the story of the Underground Railroad is replete with legends of exotic hiding places, they are actually quite rare. “I’ve looked at many tunnels that were alleged to have been used by the Underground Railroad,” says the dark-haired, bespectacled Delle, a man of ordinarily skeptical disposition. “Usually, I’m debunking these sites. But in this case, I can think of no other possible explanation.”

The site sheds a dramatic new light on the life of Stevens, a brilliant lawyer with a rapier wit, a withering Yankee gaze, and a commitment to racial equality that was far in advance of his time. Stevens was the father of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, which guaranteed African-Americans civil liberties and the right to vote, and the architect of post-Civil War Reconstruction. A lightening rod for the political passions that electrified the United States during and after the Civil War, he was almost forgotten for more than a century after his death in 1868. “If you stopped a hundred people on the street today, right here in Lancaster, and asked them who Stevens was,” says Lancaster’s gregarious mayor, Charlie Smithgall, “I bet only fifty would know, and most of them would think you were talking about the junior college that has his name on it.”

 

IRONICALLY, STEVENS’S REPUTATION in Lancaster is dwarfed by that of his neighbor and bitter ideological rival, James Buchanan, the nation’s fifteenth president and possibly its worst, whose palatial home has been lovingly restored as a memorial. Stevens’s far more modest home lay utterly neglected, until now. (Unfortunately, much of it, including the recently excavated archaeological site, is slated to be demolished to make way for a massive new convention center.) The two men could not have been more different: one the foremost radical of his generation, the other a pro-slavery Northerner, or “dough face,” who committed his career to the preservation of the South’s “peculiar institution.” Stevens was a man driven by deep-running moral convictions, Buchanan diplomatic, legalistic, and so priggish that Andrew Jackson once impatiently dismissed him as “a Miss Nancy”—a sissy. Yet their lives ran in curiously parallel courses. Both men had humble origins. Buchanan was born in a log cabin on the Pennsylvania frontier in 1791, Stevens a year later in poverty, in rural Vermont. Both were lifelong bachelors, workaholics, and fueled by intense political ambition. Both lawyers, they built their careers in Lancaster, and lived less than two miles apart. And both would die in 1868, two months apart, amid the postwar trauma of Reconstruction. For decades, their politics were inextricably intertwined, the twin counterpoints of the age when slavery was the six-hundred pound gorilla in the parlor of American democracy. One of them would lead the United States to the brink of Civil War. The other would, more than any other American, shape its aftermath.

Lancaster was a prosperous little rose-red city of some ten thousand souls when Buchanan arrived there in 1812. Its handsome two- and three-story brick or cut-stone homes were laid out in pleasing, dignified lines as befit a city which had served as the state’s capital since 1799. Furniture makers, gunsmiths, shoe factories, and markets for the thousands of German and Quaker farmers who lived in the surrounding county lent its unpaved streets an atmosphere of bustle and importance. Fresh out of Dickinson College, Buchanan was a young man on the make, determined to please his demanding Scots-Presbyterian father, who never tired of telling him how much he had sacrificed to send him to school. Had he lived in the present day, he would have been described as the quintessential inside-the-Beltway type politician who advanced himself mainly through appointive positions and government connections rather than the common touch. Physically imposing at six feet, and impressing those who met him with his clear blue eyes, he entered Congress as a Federalist in 1820. His primary loyalty was to his own career, however. In 1828, he threw his support to the Federalists’ archenemy, Andrew Jackson, and went on to serve five terms in Congress as a Democrat. After serving as Jackson’s ambassador to Russia, he was elected to the Senate (not by popular vote, but by the state legislature, in accordance with the laws of that time), and later went on to become Secretary of State under James Polk, winning plaudits for his advancement of American claims in the far Northwest, and for his important role in the negotiations that ended the war with Mexico.

Buchanan was already established as a star in the nation’s political firmament by the time Thaddeus Stevens moved to Lancaster, in 1842. Stevens had come to Pennsylvania after graduating from Dartmouth College, and had settled first in the growing town of Gettysburg. There he quickly became recognized as the most brilliant lawyer in town, in spite of two potentially crippling disabilities, a clubbed foot, and a disfiguring illness that caused him to permanently lose all his hair while still in his prime. (He wore a curly wig throughout his career, and it is said that once when a political admirer begged for a lock of his hair, he plucked off the entire wig, and gave it to her with a mordant smile.) His early political career was hitched to a vehicle which, bizarre though it seems today, was a powerful force in the 1830's, a crusade against the Masons, who were then regarded by many as a sinister political cabal, a sort of secret government within the government, whose members were more loyal to each other than to the public interest. However, as a member of the Pennsylvania legislature, he was also an early and eloquent advocate for public education, successfully urging his fellow lawmakers, in 1835, to “build not your monuments of brass or marble, but to make them of everliving mind.” Stevens’s hatred of slavery was rooted in his Yankee upbringing. But it was an incident that occurred in 1826 that transformed it from a mere sentiment into a lifelong passion. In that year, he successfully defended the owner of a runaway slave, who as a consequence was sent back to bondage in Maryland. The case was a professional triumph, but Stevens was deeply disgusted with himself. From then on, his commitment not only to the total abolition of slavery, but also to the personal equality of whites and African-Americans—a principle that was anathema even to many abolitionists—would be relentless.

 

LIKE A GREAT MANY Americans, Buchanan condemned slavery in the abstract, while supporting it in fact. He was firmly convinced that the Constitution sanctioned slavery wherever it existed. Slavery was “one of those moral evils from which it is impossible for us to escape without the introduction of evils infinitely greater,” he asserted in a speech to Congress, in 1826. “There are portions of this Union in which, if you emancipate your slaves, they will become your masters.” He proclaimed his willingness to “bundle on my knapsack” and race to the South’s defense, if it should ever become necessary. That was almost precisely what he would do for the rest of his political life. He vigorously defended the Fugitive Slave Law, which required that Northerners regardless of their beliefs collaborate in the recapture of runaway slaves anywhere in the country, while condemning the “fanatical folly” of Northern abolitionists. Says historian Jean Harvey Baker, of Goucher College, “He was totally opposed to abolitionism, and pro-Southern. He wanted to protect the Union as it was, run by a Southern minority. He just didn’t give a damn about slavery.”

Although Buchanan had long dreamed of becoming president, the office had always remained beyond his grasp. When he was appointed to yet another diplomatic post, as Minister to England in 1853, he supposed that his career was effectively over. He was sixty-one years old, an elderly man by the standards of his time. However, this apparent exile from the political arena ironically brought him the very prize that had eluded him. While he was away, every other nationally known Democrat was damaged by bitter partisan infighting over whether or not slavery should be extended to the Western territories. Only Buchanan was left unscarred and thus, more by default than design, he found himself the party’s candidate for President in 1856. His views on slavery were now put to the ultimate test.

During the campaign, Buchanan made no speeches at all. His opponents made a mockery of his silence. Thaddeus Stevens, a founder of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania, was utterly disgusted with his fellow Lancastrian, and attacked him with the kind of scathing sarcasm for which he was already famous. “There is a wrong impression about one of the candidates,” Stevens declared. “There is no such person running as James Buchanan. He is dead of lockjaw. Nothing remains but a platform and a bloated mass of political putridity.” Nevertheless, the Democrats cruised to an easy victory over John Fremont.

From a modern point of view, it is difficult to judge Buchanan objectively. Because he always regarded slavery as a legal issue rather than a moral one, he resembles the appeasers before World War II, who sought peace at any price, even in the face of a great evil. However, he does have his defenders. “Buchanan revered the Constitution with an almost religious fervor,” Says Samuel Slaymaker, director of the Wheatland Foundation, which operates the Buchanan home in Lancaster. “He was afraid of the masses, but he was also afraid of the presidency becoming too powerful. He saw the president as an administrator for the laws that Congress made, not as someone who was there to make the law himself. He foresaw that a war would be long and bloody, and feared that the country might not survive it. He felt that if there was any way to avoid it, we should. In Pennsylvania, slavery had been phased out gradually in the 1790's, through proper legal procedures. Buchanan thought that if it was left alone in the South, eventually it would fade out there too. He felt that the abolitionists only made things worse by provoking Southerners with their ‘immoderate language.’”

Buchanan’s inaugural address was a masterpiece of complacency. “Everything of a practical nature has been decided,” Buchanan declared. “No other question remains for adjustment, because all agree that under the Constitution slavery in the states is beyond the reach of any human power except that of the respective states themselves wherein it exists.” The new President was, of course, living in a political dream world. Hardly had he taken the oath of office when Kansas exploded in bloody guerilla warfare between pro- and anti-slavery forces.

 

WHILE BUCHANAN TEMPORIZED, Stevens was living a double life, as a prominent lawyer and politician, and a clandestine activist. His radical abolitionist views were well-known to everyone. But the extent of his secret activity on behalf of fugitive slaves is only now becoming clear. It was a crime to harbor and assist fugitives, punishable by a substantial fine, and possibly years in prison. Stevens lent assistance to fugitives during his days in Gettysburg, and after his move to Lancaster he continued to provide aid to those traveling eastward from the city of Columbia, a key center of Underground Railroad activity, fourteen miles away. He also paid a spy to keep watch on slave catchers active in the area, and passed on what he learned to fugitives who were in danger of recapture. “I have a spy on the spies and thus ascertain the facts,” he wrote to his collaborator Jeremiah Brown, concerning a group of fugitives. “All this, however, must remain secret or we will lose all the advantages we now have. These are the eighth set of slaves I have warned within a week.” No surviving documents describe precisely how the cistern behind Stevens’s brick home on South Queen Street was used in the Underground Railroad. Perhaps fugitives were delivered to Lancaster from Columbia, where the affluent African-American lumber merchant William Whipper was known to ship them eastward by rail in special compartments of freight cars that he owned. The fugitives might then have been delivered in barrels to the tavern (which as also owned by Stevens) next to Stevens’s house, and hidden in the cistern for a few hours, or days, until they could be passed on to one of the several Underground Railroad stations elsewhere in Lancaster County.

It was in Lancaster that Stevens also began his remarkable relationship with the part-African-American Lydia Hamilton Smith, who would serve for the last fifteen years of his life as his housekeeper, property manager, and confidante. It is quite likely, given her connections in the local African-American community, that it was Smith who actually managed the movement of fugitives in and out of the house, and saw to their needs when they were being sheltered there. Although a mulatto by the criteria of the mid-nineteenth century (her father was Irish), Smith was very light skinned, with an oval face, small features and straight hair. While it was widely rumored in Stevens’s lifetime and afterward that they were lovers, no hard evidence exists to support that, and Stevens’s only recorded comment on the matter is decidedly ambiguous: “I believe I can say that no child was ever raised or, so far as I know begotten under my roof.” Smith was, in any case, treated with great respect by Stevens, who always addressed her as “Madam,” gave her his seat in public conveyances, and included her in social occasions with his friends.

As the Southern states moved inexorably toward secession, Buchanan responded with equivocation. “He met the crisis of secession in a timid and vacillating spirit, temporizing with both parties, and studiously avoiding the adoption of a decided policy,” recalled The New York Times, in his obituary. “To every appeal from the loyal men of the country for an energetic and patriotic opposition to the plots of the Secessionists, his only reply was: ‘The South has no right to secede, but I have no power to prevent them.’” When Lincoln took the oath of office, as the Times put it, Buchanan “retired to the privacy of his home in Wheatland, followed by the ill-will of every section of the country.” Yankees called him a Southern toady, while Southerners blamed him for not facilitating their secession from the Union. He eventually proclaimed his support for total Northern victory, but by then no one cared.

 

WITH THE COMING of war, Thaddeus Stevens began to approach the apogee of his power. He had served many years in the Pennsylvania legislature and in Congress from 1848 to 1852. Reelected in 1858, he welcomed the war as an opportunity to end slavery once and for all. Appealing to the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, he declared in January, 1862, nine months before Lincoln would issue the Emancipation Proclamation (which would only free those slaves in Rebel territory), “The occasion is forced upon us, and the invitation presented to strike the chains from four millions of human beings, and create them MEN; to extinguish slavery on this whole continent; to wipe out, so far as we are concerned, the most hateful and infernal blot that ever disgraced the escutcheon of man.” Although he considered Lincoln far too willing to compromise on matter of race, Stevens was a key backer of the administration in his position as chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee.

After the war, Stevens understood, as many did not wish to, that the former slaves could only be secure in the exercise of their newly-won rights with the support of the federal government, and when necessary, federal troops. “We have imposed upon them the privilege of fighting our battles, of dying in defense of freedom, and of bearing their equal portion of taxes; but where have we given them the privilege of ever participating in the formation of the laws for the government of their native land?” Stevens asked Congress, in 1865. “By what civil weapon have we enabled them to defend themselves against oppression and injustice? Call you this liberty? Call you this a free republic where four millions are its subjects but not its citizens?”

Stevens and his allies pressed for a transformation of the South that would “work a radical reorganization in Southern institutions, habits and manners,” and “revolutionize their principles and feelings.” He warned, “This may startle feeble minds and shake weak nerves. So do all great improvements in the political and moral world.” The Radicals, led by Stevens, argued that blacks must everywhere have the vote, which was still denied them even in some Northern states, and that in order to become the economic equals of whites, freed slaves must have land and capital. He pressed tirelessly, though unsuccessfully, for confiscation of the lands of rebel leaders, and its distribution, along with cash payments and farming equipment, to the freedman.

Seventy-five years old, with less than two years left to live, and in almost constant pain from a variety of ailments, Stevens focused his efforts on a new amendment to the Constitution, the Fourteenth, which would prohibit states from abridging equality before the law, and bar former Confederates from office and from voting in national elections until 1870. Although Stevens felt that the measure did not go far enough, it would totally change the states’ relationship to the federal government, by making it explicit that Americans were citizens of their nation first, and of their respective states second, and that states were therefore bound to abide by federal law. It was a truly revolutionary measure in the South where, in the pre-war effort to suppress criticism of slavery, states had passed laws limiting freedom of the press, the freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly, and even imposing censorship of the U.S. mail.

 

THE RADICALS WERE APPALLED when they realized that Lincoln’s successor, Tennessee-born Andrew Johnson, intended to allow the rebel states to speedily reenter the Union, without significant punishment of rebel leaders, or plans to protect the rights of newly-freed slaves. Their worst fears were confirmed when, in spite of the Fourteenth Amendment, passed in 1866, the President permitted elected assemblies of former Confederates to enact new laws designed to reduce freedmen to semi-slavery, as anti-black rioting swept Southern cities, leaving hundreds of African-Americans dead. Stevens had himself carried in a chair onto the floor of the House, and in a voice so weak that his colleagues had to crowd around him to hear him, he pleaded with his colleagues to consider what was at stake in the South. “While the South has been bleeding at every pore, Congress has done nothing to protect the loyal people there, white or black, either in their persons, in their liberty, or in their property,” he whispered.  Stevens got what he wanted, and federal troops returned to the South. It is said that the speech was one of the few ever delivered in Congress that resulted in the changing of votes on the spot. Stevens’s last battle was a losing one, however. He led the effort to impeach Johnson for firing the Radical members in his cabinet, a movement that failed—by a single vote—to oust the president from office.

“Stevens was ahead of his time because he truly believed in racial equality,” Says Hans Trefousse, author of “Thaddeus Stevens: Nineteenth Century Egalitarian”. “Without Stevens, the effects of Reconstruction, the Fourteenth Amendment and the Fifteenth Amendment, guaranteeing suffrage to the freedmen, would have been impossible.” Although he would not live to see the enactment of the Fifteenth Amendment, in 1870, no one had worked harder or longer to make it a reality. Says Trefoussse, “In practice, those amendments were effectively nullified in the South, in the years after the end of Reconstruction. But they were still in the law. In the twentieth century, they would remind Americans of what they had once stood for: they were still there as the standard that the nation had set for itself.” 

The North won the Civil War, but lost the remembrance of it. By 1877, federal troops had been completely withdrawn from the South. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments were systematically undone by a combination of harsh discriminatory laws and the terrorism of vigilante organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. The South, and indeed most of the nation, slumped into almost a century of entrenched racism and institutionalized segregation. In the memory of a country committed to reconciliation at the expense of the rights of African-Americans’ rights, there was little place for the furious idealism of an egalitarian like Stevens. The nadir in Stevens’s reputation was reached with D.W. Griffith’s classic 1915 film “The Birth of A Nation,” a Civil War epic which heroized the Klan, and smeared blacks as clownish and lascivious monsters whose freedom endangered American democracy. (President Woodrow Wilson liked the film so much that he gave it a private showing at the White House.) Stevens was portrayed as a vengeful hypocrite, plotting with his diabolical black mistress to instigate a race war against helpless Southern whites. Someone who learned about Stevens only from the film might have supposed that he and Lydia Hamilton Smith were the source of all the nation’s racial problems. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, James Buchanan’s stock steadily rose, at least in Lancaster, and in the 1930's Wheatland was restored to its luxurious mid-nineteenth century splendor. When the Lancaster Historical Society published a guidebook to important sites in the city’s downtown, in 1962, Stevens’s home wasn’t even included on the map.

 

AS SNOWFLAKES SWIRLED and danced over the streets of Lancaster, Jim Delle and I walked through the row house where Thaddeus Stevens lived, just a block from Penn Square where in times gone by crowds of supporters once roared to his surging oratory. The years have taken a heavy toll. The house’s modest Georgian facade has been covered over with ugly white modern bricks, and a garage door has been punched through the front of Stevens’s front parlor. Decrepit industrial carpeting, broken plaster, and scrawled graffiti cast a mournful pall through his one-time law office. Behind the house, Delle scraped the snow off the sheet of plywood that covered the broken crown of the cistern, and we climbed down into it on an aluminum ladder. In the dank brick compartment, Delle pointed out the small aperture through which fugitives had crawled from the tunnel that led to the tavern basement next door. The cistern was more than an exotic hiding place. It was physical proof of Stevens’s personal commitment not just to the abstract principle of emancipation, but in the most personal way possible to the men and women who suffered under slavery.

I kept thinking of the fiery, iron-willed, silver-tongued man who had made this refuge possible, at a time when harboring fugitive slaves was a federal crime. He had died thinking himself a failure. But he had paved the way for the civil rights advances of the twentieth century. In the 1950's and 1960's, the nation would have to learn again the lesson that Stevens tried to teach in the 1860's, that the rights of African-Americans could only be protected by the power, and occasionally the armed force, of the federal government. Had land been distributed to the ex-slaves as Stevens wished, the nation might well have been spared much of the shameful racial history that followed, and might instead have created a stable, economically and politically independent black middle class. After generations of neglect, however, his greatest work, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, still lay waiting for Americans to rediscover their meaning, and they became the foundation upon which was erected virtually all the civil rights legislation that reshaped the country since the 1960's.

Whether enough of Stevens’s home survives intact to become a museum dedicated to him and to the regional activities of the Underground Railroad, as local preservationists wish, is still an open question. Developers agreed after considerable local protest to leave about half of Stevens’s house standing, but they maintain that the rest must be leveled to make room for the new convention center. “We can’t just walk away from this house,” says Randy Harris, the former director of the Lancaster Preservation Trust, who has fought to prevent the demolition of the house and the adjoining properties that belonged to Stevens. “Stevens is way too important a figure in our history to abandon once again.” —Fergus M. Bordewich