Thaddeus Stevens

Nineteenth-Century Egalitarian

Hans L. Trefousse

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780807864999
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Biographies politiques

One of the most controversial figures in nineteenth-century American history, Thaddeus Stevens is best remembered for his role as congressional leader of the radical Republicans and as a chief architect of Reconstruction. Long painted by historians as a vindictive 'dictator of Congress, ' out to punish the South at the behest of big business and his own ego, Stevens receives a more balanced treatment in Hans L. Trefousse's biography, which portrays him as an impassioned orator and a leader in the struggle against slavery. Trefousse traces Stevens's career through its major phases: from his days in the Pennsylvania state legislature, when he antagonized Freemasons, slaveholders, and Jacksonian Democrats, to his political involvement during Reconstruction, when he helped author the Fourteenth Amendment and spurred on the passage of the Reconstruction Acts and the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. Throughout, Trefousse explores the motivations for Stevens's lifelong commitment to racial equality, thus furnishing a fuller portrait of the man whose fervent opposition to slavery helped move his more moderate congressional colleagues toward the implementation of egalitarian policies.

CHAPTER ONE
NEW ENGLAND YOUTH

In the northeastern corner of Vermont, about ten miles east of St. Johnsbury, lies the small village of Danville. Named after the French geographer Jean Baptiste D’Anville, in 1789 it boasted of 200 families. It was located in the middle of pleasant farming country, in an elevated region, with a broken range known as Cow Hill and Walden Mountain to the west and beautifully diversified hills and valleys to the east. By 1795 it had become the county seat of Caledonia County and prided itself on a courthouse, a jail, and grist and saw mills. Its Yankee inhabitants were mostly farmers—hardworking, religious, and devoted to their Methodist, Baptist, and Congregational churches.¹

It was to this village that Joshua Stevens and his wife Sarah Morrill had come a few years earlier from Methuen, Massachusetts. A shoemaker and surveyor, Stevens had made a new survey of the township, which was considered authoritative. He had the reputation of being an excellent wrestler, able to throw any man in the county. He and his wife had four children: Joshua, born in 1790; Thaddeus, on April 4, 1792; Abner Morrill in 1794; and Alanson in 1797. Joshua later moved to Indianapolis, became a judge, and raised a family; Abner stayed in Vermont, married, had three children, and practiced medicine in St. Johnsbury; Alanson, remaining unmarried, farmed at home. It was Thaddeus, the second son, who was to become famous. Born with a clubfoot, he was marked for life with a handicap of which he was deeply conscious. His name honored the Polish patriot, Thaddeus Kosciuszko.²

Controversy surrounded Thaddeus Stevens all his life. Even the date of his birth was to become controversial, because some detractors, in an attempt to prove that he was the illegitimate son of Count Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, claimed that he was born in 1793 rather than in 1792. Talleyrand was also lame and visited the United States in the 1790s. The falsity of the assertion is easily proven, however, as the Danville town records specify 1792 as the year of Stevens’s birth and the Frenchman came to America only in 1794. But the story persisted.³

Stevens’s real father, Joshua, was reputed to have been “a man of rather dissipated habits.” His son Thad hardly ever spoke of him, and when Edward McPherson, later the clerk of the House of Representatives, asked, “Stevens, what sort of man was your father?” the reply was enigmatic. “I knew very little about him in respect to the quality of his mind,” the son said, and he repeated the story of his father’s athletic ability. The reason for this reticence is easy to surmise. The elder Stevens, after taking his family on a trip to Boston when Thad was twelve years old, abandoned his wife and children not long after coming home. His son, who obviously had a very good recollection of his father, must have deeply resented the fact that his mother was left to fend for the family all by herself. Joshua was allegedly bayoneted and killed at Oswego during the War of 1812, but Sarah grew ever closer to her children.⁴

That Stevens was passionately attached to his mother is certain, for she took special care of her crippled child, a son, who did not have an easy youth. Still and quiet, held back by his physical deformity, he could not take part in the other boys’ games. They would laugh at him and mimic his limping walk. But she made up for it. Recognizing his high intelligence, she was determined to give him a good education. And while this was not easy for her, because of the difficulty of supporting the family after its abandonment by her husband, she did take care of the farm and made ends meet. In addition, when a spotted fever epidemic swept through the area in 1805, she doubled as a nurse to minister to her neighbors. Young Thad, who accompanied her on her rounds, thus saw much suffering, an experience which, according to his friend Alexander Hood, made him conscious of misfortune, so that in later life he always sympathized with the sick and disadvantaged.⁵

He never forgot his mother’s solicitude. “I thought more of my mother than [of] anybody else, and I don’t regard anybody as a Christian who does not come up to my mother’s standard,” he said. On another occasion, calling his mother a very extraordinary woman, he recalled that he had met very few women like her. “My father was not a well-to-do man,” he continued, “and the support and education of the family depended on my mother. She worked day and night to educate me. I was feeble and lame in youth, and as I could not work on the farm, she concluded to give me an education.”⁶

His friend and aspiring biographer McPherson bore him out. “With respect to his mother,” McPherson wrote, “he obliged the fifth commandment to the fullest extent. In his estimation, his mother was everything great, noble, and good. To the last day of his life he was never weary of talking about her. This childlike affection for this parent when he spoke of her created in the mind of the hearer the most vivid impressions as to the original amiability of his nature.” True, although Sarah Stevens was extremely religious and a devoted member of the Baptist Church, her son never formally affiliated with any denomination. Yet he maintained that the greatest pleasure of his life resulted from his ability later to give her a farm of 250 acres and a dairy of fourteen cows as well as an occasional bright gold piece that she could deposit in the contribution box of her church. But the pleasure was marred by guilt feelings. As he recalled, “Poor woman! the very thing I did to gratify her most hastened her death. She was very proud of her dairy and fond of her cows; one night going to look after them she fell and injured herself, so that she died soon after.”⁷

After moving away from Vermont, he continued to visit her frequently and wrote to her faithfully, but when he tried to induce her to join him in Pennsylvania, he found that she minded the absence of a Baptist church in the immediate vicinity. Eager to satisfy her, he decided to have one built and approached the local Baptists with an offer to pay half the construction costs, to which they agreed. But she died before he could carry out his plans. In his last will and testament, he provided handsomely for the upkeep of her grave.⁸

Peacham, the next village south of Danville, boasted of an academy, and presumably because of her ambitions for Thaddeus, who, like his father, had learned how to make shoes, but in her mind was destined for better things, Mrs. Stevens moved the family there in 1807. It was an attractive place, located on the divide between the Connecticut River and Lake Champlain, with several ponds as well as Devil Hill, from which both the Green and White Mountains were visible. As early as 1794 it contained a Congregational church, and the next year the school, at the same time when Danville, as the county seat, procured the courthouse. Most of the inhabitants worked on their farms on the east side of the village, which by 1810 had grown to became the home of some 1,300 people.⁹

The Caledonia Grammar School, also known as the Peacham Academy, in which Stevens was now enrolled, was chartered in 1795 and opened its classes two years later. To be admitted, a student had to be at least eight years old, be able to read a sentence intelligently “so as to study English grammar to advantage,” and to give one “exhibition” a year. He could be expelled for blasphemy, forgery, perjury, adultery, or any other violation of the laws. Cursing, tavern tippling, cards, and dice were prohibited, and students had to be in by nine o’clock at night. For Caledonia County residents, tuition was one shilling per year.¹⁰

To attend this school, Thad, who lived at what was then known as the Graham place, about a mile and a half away, walked back and forth twice every day. He did well at the academy, where he joined one of the two parties, one scholastic and the other political. It did not take him long to become the leader, presumably of the latter, competing with the rival group led by Wilbur Fisk, later the president of Wesleyan University and a famous Methodist minister. But Thad’s career was not free from trouble. Contrary to the rules of the academy, he took part in the performance of a tragedy, a transgression he committed in the evening of September 4, 1811, after having refused to give the required exhibition in the daytime while the trustees were waiting. For this breaking of the rules, he and twelve fellow students were reprimanded by the Board of Trustees, which required them to sign an apology. “We, the Subscribers, students in the Academy at Peacham,” it was worded, “having been concerned in the exhibition of a tragedy in the evening of the 4th of September, 1811, contrary to the known rules of the Board of Trustees on reflection are convinced that we have done wrong in not paying a suitable respect to the authority of the board and hereby promise that as long as we continue students at this Academy we will observe such rules as the Board may prescribe.” Willful and headstrong as he reputedly was, he yielded only after he had no other recourse.¹¹

After Peacham Academy, in 1811, young Stevens enrolled in the sophomore class at Dartmouth College. For some reason, however, he did not stay, and spent his junior year at the University of Vermont. This university, situated on a hill overlooking Lake Champlain at Burlington, took pride in its central building, University Hall, a structure 165 feet long by 75 feet wide at the middle, topped by a tower rising 40 feet above the roof. It contained forty-six students’ rooms, a chapel, various halls for recitations and other purposes, as well as a library and museum. The admission requirements of the university included “good moral character” as well as an examination by the president and tutors in Latin and Greek, particularly in the six books of the Aeneid, four of Cicero’s orations against Catiline, and four gospels in the original Greek. Chapel attendance on Sunday mornings and evenings was obligatory.¹²

Stevens seems to have done well again at the university. He even wrote a tragedy in three acts, “The Fall of Helvetic Liberty,” which was performed prior to commencement in 1813, and in which Napoleon, French generals, and their Swiss counterparts constituted the dramatis personae. But again he managed to get into trouble. It so happened that neighboring farmers’ cows used the unenclosed campus as a pasture. Prior to commencement, their owners were warned to keep them away. One of these refused to comply, and when Stevens and a fellow student were walking under the trees a week before graduation and saw the cow, they decided to kill it. Procuring an axe from a fellow student, they did so, and when, on the following day the owner complained to the president, the innocent owner of the now bloody axe fell under suspicion and was about to be expelled on the day of graduation. This possible outcome horrified Stevens and his friend. Throwing themselves upon the mercy of the owner, they promised to pay him twice the value of the cow if he would help them. The farmer agreed, told the college authorities that soldiers had killed the animal, and the accused student was cleared and allowed to graduate. Stevens later did pay the farmer, who sent him a hogshead of Vermont cider in return. It was obvious that Thad was basically too decent to let an innocent man suffer.

The story that Stevens watched the Battle of Lake Champlain from campus and saw Thomas McDonough defeat the British at Plattsburg Bay is probably apocryphal, as in September 1814 he was no longer in attendance at Burlington. At any rate, the university’s buildings were taken over by the federal government because of the war; the institution had to close, and Stevens returned to Dartmouth for his senior year.¹³

The young man who set out for Dartmouth, was, with the exception of his deformed foot, “a perfect physical man, commanding in appearance.” Reddish chestnut hair, hazel eyes, and a finely proportioned face gave him the aspect of a well-formed youth. He was athletic, an excellent swimmer and horseman, and knew how to keep his weight down. After carrying an inebriated companion home in Peacham and witnessing his death within a short time, he became very abstemious in the use of alcoholic beverages. As he wrote many years later, “Man can enjoy no happiness, unless his body, and his mind, are free from disease. . . . Intemperance, never in a single instance, fails to deprive its victim of some portion of his bodily or mental health, and generally of both.” And while he never became a complete teetotaler—at times, he ordered good wines—he always favored temperance movements.¹⁴

His new college at Hanover, New Hampshire, was justly famous. Its central hall, three stories high, with a cupola, was located in the middle of an enclosed green, flanked by several additional buildings. By 1811, it already had 124 students. As at Vermont, an entrance examination was required, prospective students being tested in Virgil, Cicero’s orations, the Greek New Testament, Latin, and arithmetic. Tuition was £80 a year, but the cost of living was not high; Amos Kendall, later a member of Andrew Jackson’s kitchen cabinet, spent only $570 for his college course at Dartmouth. For the first three years, two thirds of the instruction was devoted to Greek and Latin, the remainder to English grammar, logic, geography, mathematics, surveying, philosophy, and astronomy. In the senior year, when Stevens entered, the emphasis was on metaphysics, theology, and “political law.” The administration also furthered composition and public speaking, with declamations in chapel every Wednesday. The regimen was strict; chapel was at five o’clock in the morning in an unheated building, then came a recitation, then breakfast, study, a second recitation at eleven, and another period of study. Afternoon classes met at three or four, with evening prayers at six. On Saturday afternoons there were no classes except evening prayers, and on Sundays there were chapel services in both the morning and afternoon.¹⁵

No matter how difficult this course of studies may have been, Stevens was graduated in 1814 after taking part in a conference on the topic “Which has been more deleterious to society—war, luxury, or party spirit?” He defended luxury as the greater ill, as against party spirit, and left the college with a good education, which he always enhanced by assiduous reading.¹⁶

At Dartmouth as well as elsewhere, Stevens made enemies. After his death, one of his former roommates professed to remember that Thad “was then inordinately ambitious, bitterly envious of all who outranked him as scholars, and utterly unprincipled.” According to this biased observer, he showed “no uncommon mental power, except in extemporaneous debate. He indulged in no expensive vices, because he could not afford them, and because his ambition so absorbed him that he had little taste for anything that did not promise to gratify it. He was not popular enough with the class to get into Phi Beta Kappa, or even to be nominated for membership. This was a source of great vexation for him, though he was very careful not to express his vexation. Yet it burst out once, in our room, in an unguarded moment.”¹⁷

The patent exaggeration of this account is clear. In later life, no matter how hostile many observers were, they never denied Stevens’s great intelligence, and he was popular enough with his fellow students to correspond with them in the most informal manner. The story about his failure to be nominated or initiated into Phi Beta Kappa may be true; yet it was written many years afterward, when Stevens had long been accused of hostility to the Freemasons because of his alleged rejection by the secret fraternity at college. In reality, his fanatical opposition to the order can be explained much more simply. The Masons by charter refused admission to “cripples,” a restricti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• THADDEUS STEVENS
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• CHAPTER ONE NEW ENGLAND YOUTH
• CHAPTER TWO RISING PENNSYLVANIA LAWYER
• CHAPTER THREE BUDDING POLITICIAN
• CHAPTER FOUR LEGISLATIVE LEADER
• CHAPTER FIVE ANTI-MASON IN TROUBLE
• CHAPTER SIX RELUCTANT COALITIONIST
• CHAPTER SEVEN ANTISLAVERY WHIG
• CHAPTER EIGHT EMERGING REPUBLICAN
• CHAPTER NINE UNIONIST ADVOCATE
• CHAPTER TEN WAR LEADER
• CHAPTER ELEVEN REPUBLICAN FIREBRAND
• CHAPTER TWELVE RADICAL OF RADICALS
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN LINCOLN’S CRITIC AND EULOGIST
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN RADICAL RECONSTRUCTIONIST
• CHAPTER FIFTEEN FUGLEMAN OF THE JOINT COMMITTEE
• CHAPTER SIXTEEN LEADER OF THE THIRTY-NINTH CONGRESS
• CHAPTER SEVENTEEN THWARTED CONGRESSIONAL MANAGER
• CHAPTER EIGHTEEN ARCHFOE OF THE PRESIDENT
• CHAPTER NINETEEN DEFEATED RADICAL
• CHAPTER TWENTY EPILOGUE
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX