Articles and Book Reviews by Fergus M. Bordewich
Back in the American Pantheon
The man who did so much for the antislavery cause was once regarded as a dangerous zealot. No more.
[Book review] Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary by Bruce Levine
Review By Fergus Bordewich in The Wall Street Journal, March 2021.
NO AMERICAN POLITICAL FIGURE has been more distorted in popular memory than Thaddeus Stevens, the Radical Republican congressman who played a major role in guiding the nation’s trajectory through the Civil War and after. Along with much else, he pressed the government to face down the threat of secession, to recruit black men into the Union’s armed forces and to embrace full emancipation. In the war’s aftermath, he led the fight to secure civil rights for all black Americans, including their right to hold public office. He was also a driving force behind the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, who had tried to speedily restore former Confederates to political office in the Southern states. When Stevens died in 1868, at the age of 76, the Reconstruction policies he had championed so ardently were still in place, though they would be sabotaged within a decade.
(Above) Thaddeus Stevens, ca. 1867. Photo: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
One of the oldest members of Congress at the time, Stevens died in 1868 at the age of seventy-six, too soon to witness the ultimate demise of the Reconstruction policies he championed. A postwar convention of freedmen dubbed him a "beacon light for our race," while Frederick Douglass deemed him "more potent in Congress and in the country than even the president and the cabinet combined." But with the acceleration of the Jim Crow era, Stevens was reduced to the caricature of a vengeful zealot obsessed with black people. That warped image came to full fruition in the popular, blatantly racist 1915 film "Birth of a Nation," in which he was contemptuously portrayed in the guise of "Senator Stoneman" as a dupe besotted with a sinister "mulatto" who inspired his advocacy for the advancement of blacks. More broadly, the erasure of the real Thaddeus Stevens epitomized a generations-long denigration of abolitionism and the efforts of postwar Republican radicals to complete the transformation in American race relations that was begun by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution.
Even in the North, Southern views of Reconstruction as a vicious assault on their "institutions" were validated by historians of the "Dunning School"—named for the influential Columbia University historian William A. Dunning—who held that blacks were fundamentally inferior and dominated historiography deep into the twentieth century. In 1931, the popular New England historian James Truslow Adams described Stevens as "perhaps the most despicable, malevolent and morally deformed character who has ever risen to a high power in America," and in 1937 his biographer Thomas Frederick Woodley posited that Stevens's physical deformity, a club foot, "had eaten into the vitals of his ego," and done "irreparable damage" to his personality. The modern Civil Rights Movement spurred a gradual reevaluation of Stevens, notably in Hans Trefousse's 1997 biography "Thaddeus Stevens: Nineteenth Century Egalitarian." Yet broader recognition of Stevens's importance continued to lag. (So little was he appreciated in his hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania that in the early 2000s his neglected home and office were slated for demolition to make room for a new convention center; thanks to the efforts of local preservationists, parts of the buildings were saved and will eventually become a museum, but much was destroyed.)
Mr. Levine, a retired professor of history at the University of Illinois, has now restored Stevens to his deserved seat in the pantheon of nineteenth century political men with this concise and powerful new biography. With his acute grasp of both prewar and wartime politics, he pilots us deftly through Stevens's rise through the Whig party, the antislavery movement, the Republican party's evolving radicalism—Stevens was one of the party's founders in Pennsylvania—the nuances of wartime rivalries and alliances, and the fierce battle to enact truly revolutionary legislation after the war. Unlike many politicians in any age, Stevens was not an opportunistic shape-shifter. He was always blunt and forthright about what he believed, but pragmatic enough to know when compromise was necessary. He was, in short, a passionate idealist who knew how to get things done. In this, he was a contrast to better-known abolitionist colleagues like Sen. Charles Sumner, who was a memorably powerful orator on behalf of the antislavery cause, but almost completely ineffective at negotiating the passage of legislation.
Mr. Levine is an unabashed but not uncritical admirer of his subject. He regrets Stevens's brief tactical dalliance with the American or "Know Nothing" Party in the early 1850s and his ambivalence toward the urban poor, and he charges Stevens with being slower than he might have been to advocate for black men's right to vote. But he rightly praises what made him great. Stevens, Mr. Levine writes, "dedicated much of his life to creating a more egalitarian and democratic form of capitalist society than the one he found," envisioning a wholly merit-based, prejudice-free America in which blacks and whites alike were freed from every form of human oppression, inequality, and degradation by class.
He came by his affinity with the poor virtually ab ovo. Born into hardscrabble poverty in rural Vermont and raised by a single mother who was singularly devoted to his education, Stevens rose by dint of extraordinary personal determination to graduate from Dartmouth and eventually become one of the most sought-after lawyers in his adopted state of Pennsylvania. There, as a member of the state constitutional convention and legislature in the 1830s, he shaped Pennsylvania's first law mandating free public education, a deeply controversial issue at the time, since many men couldn't see why they should pay for the schooling of others' children. He embraced with equal commitment both the Whig doctrine of active government support for national industrial development and the abolitionism that would eventually define the greatest political work of his life. He permitted fugitive slaves traveling on the Underground Railroad to be sheltered on his properties, most likely in the basement of the tavern that he owned next-door to his home. In 1851, he also undertook the successful defense of several Pennsylvania men, both black and white, who were arrested and charged with treason for fighting off slave hunters in a melee near the town of Christiana, which resulted in the death of one of them and the near-fatal beating of another. The case against them was a marquee effort by the administration of President Millard Fillmore to show that it was serious about enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law that had been enacted the previous year. In standing up to "professional dealers in human flesh," Steven declared in court, what the defendants did was "honorable, humane, and noble." The jury's acquittal of the defendants was a turning point in public resistance to the hated law.
It was in the House of Representatives, in which Stevens served from 1849 to 1853, and then as one of the leaders of the Republican majority from 1859 until his death, that he had his greatest impact. "Stevens regularly staked out a position well in advance of public opinion," writes Mr. Levine. "Time after time, Stevens forged ahead when others, including members of his own party, hung back. He preferred to shape public opinion rather than bow before it." Stevens regarded the Civil War as nothing less than a second American revolution, and he threw every fiber of his being into ensuring that it would be a victory for the ideals he believed in. To the political challenges posed by the war, Mr. Levine says, "Stevens responded with great intellectual flexibility, repeatedly recalibrating his thinking about major issues, reevaluating old assumptions, and pressing new initiatives in the face of changing circumstances. He proved unusually able to grasp the nature of a given historical moment, to perceive the moment's implicit logic, to follow that logic to its conclusions, an to fight with all the considerable energy and skill at his command for the measures to which those conclusions pointed him, no matter how unprecedented or extreme they might appear. If in doing that Stevens sometimes felt the wind of history in his sails, he also worried that what he believed must be one would not be done, that the government and its leaders would fail to fulfil history's mandate."
His effectiveness owed as much to his forceful personality as it did to his parliamentary skill. His whiplash sarcasm was famous. A colleague later described his style as "bitter, quick as electricity, with a sarcastic, blasting wit," while others dryly referred to the powerful committee he chaired as the "Committee of Mean Ways." In debate, he was never florid as many of his fellow members were, typically speaking in a low, deliberate voice, "dropping his sentences as though each one weighed a ton," as the journalist Noah Brooks put it, and launching sarcastic broadsides at his opponents "as coolly as if he were bandying compliments."
Rare among public men, life had never rubbed off the sharp edges of Stevens's radicalism. Indeed, the trench warfare of politics and the furnace of war fortified his conviction that government was a moral endeavor and that men must be pushed as well as led toward fulfillment of the Founding Fathers' ideals. In July 1868, he delivered what was in effect his political epitaph, soon after the House's approval of the Fourteenth Amendment, the essential principles of which he had done more than any other legislator to shape. Speaking from his chair because he was too ill to rise, he declared in an enfeebled voice, "My sands are nearly run, and I can only see with the eye of faith. I am fast descending the downhill of life, at the foot of which stands an open grave. If you and your compeers can fling away ambition and realize that every human being, however lowly or degraded, by fortune is your equal, that every inalienable right which belongs to you belongs also to him, truth and righteousness will spread over the land, and you will look down from the top of the Rocky Mountains upon an empire of one hundred millions of happy people."
Mr. Levine is a fine guide to Stevens's political career. Surprisingly, however, he leaves unexplored Stevens's remarkable relationship with the mixed-race Lydia Hamilton Smith, who began working as his housekeeper in Lancaster and eventually became his business partner, close friend, and sometime companion at public events. There has long been speculation about the true nature of their relationship, which Steven Spielberg's film "Lincoln" presented in a memorable bedroom scene as, in essence, a common law marriage. There is, however, no evidence at all to suggest either that the relationship was sexual or that it was not. Mr. Levine has also scanted Stevens's other personal relationships—apart from his mother's intense influence—such as those with his nephews, for whom he filled the role of mentor and stand-in father, close political allies and friends, and former president James Buchanan, Stevens's Lancaster neighbor. These lapses are disappointing in a book that otherwise delineates Steven's life with such crisp detail and clarity. Nevertheless, they are only modest shortcomings in a work that stands as a fitting monument to one of the most formidable gladiators ever to tread the halls of Congress.