Thaddeus Stevens

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Thaddeus Stevens

(born April 4, 1792, Danville, Vt., U.S. — died Aug. 11, 1868, Washington, D.C.) U.S. politician. He practiced law in Pennsylvania, defending fugitive slaves without fee. In the U.S. House of Representatives (1849 – 53, 1859 – 68), he opposed the extension of slavery into the western territories. After the American Civil War, as a leader of the Radical Republicans, he demanded strict conditions for readmission of the seceded states. He helped establish the Freedmen's Bureau and secured passage of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. He opposed the moderate Reconstruction policies of Pres. Andrew Johnson and introduced the resolution for his impeachment.

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(1792–1868), radical Republican and leader of the House of Representatives

Stevens was born in Danville, Vermont, graduated from Dartmouth, and established himself as a lawyer in Gettysburg and later in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He was an excellent parliamentarian who served (with few interruptions) in 1833–42 as an Anti‐Mason in the Pennsylvania legislature, where he was instrumental in saving the bill for compulsory free education. Elected to Congress in 1848 as a Whig, he took a determined antislavery stand and retired in 1853, only to be reelected in 1858 as a Republican.

As a strong opponent of the secessionists, in 1861, Stevens became chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, a position that enabled him to frame and implement important legislation during the Civil War. Stevens constantly pressured President Abraham Lincoln to institute an antislavery policy. He believed that only the laws of war, not the Constitution, applied to the seceded states, which he considered conquered provinces and in which he advocated confiscation of rebel property. His adept congressional leadership enabled him to raise the necessary funds for the Union forces, particularly by the introduction of paper currency “greenbacks,” which he favored throughout his career.

After the war, Stevens was the main proponent in the House of Radical Reconstruction. Largely responsible for denying seats to Southern members and for the establishment of the Joint Committee of Fifteen on Reconstruction, he became the principal author of the Fourteenth Amendment; the Reconstruction Acts, which initially remanded the Southern states to military rule; and the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. Often called vindictive and a dictator of Congress, Stevens was in fact opposed to the death sentence and did not succeed with many of his measures that fell short of his desires. Nevertheless, his advocacy for equal rights for the freedmen was an important inducement for Republican Reconstruction measures. He died in 1868, disappointed at his failure to procure the conviction and removal of President Johnson.

[See also Civil War: Domestic Course.]

Bibliography

Fawn M. Brodie, Thaddeus Stevens, Scourge of the South, 1959.
Hans L. Trefousse, Thaddeus Stevens: Nineteenth Century Egalitarian, 1997

Biography: Thaddeus Stevens

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Thaddeus Stevens (1792-1868), American congressman, was the leading Radical Republican in the Civil War era.

Thaddeus Stevens, the son of an unsuccessful farmer who subsequently deserted his family, was born on April 4, 1792, in Danville, Vt. Despite his impoverished background and a deformity of the feet, he graduated from Dartmouth in 1814 and became a successful lawyer in Gettysburg, Pa. An Anti-Mason, he became a Whig when that party absorbed his in the mid-1830s. Elected to the state legislature in 1833, he remained for 8 years, becoming noted for his campaign to extend the state's free school system. An early and intense opponent of slavery, he defended fugitive slaves in the courts and, at the Pennsylvania constitutional convention of 1837, unsuccessfully fought black disenfranchisement.

Stevens's intelligence and absolute mastery of political invective made him a frequent spokesman for his party, but his occasional erratic and impulsive actions and his singular ability to end up on the losing side in intraparty struggles kept him from achieving high office. In 1841, failing to get a post in President William Henry Harrison's Cabinet, he retired from the legislature and moved to Lancaster.

Stevens was elected to Congress in 1848 and 1850, becoming noted for his attacks on the South during debates on the Compromise of 1850. Once the slavery question seemed settled, Stevens's antislavery stance seemed inopportune, and he was not renominated in 1852. Revitalization of the slavery issue after 1854 brought him back into politics as a Know-Nothing and then as a Republican when that party emerged in the 1850s. In 1858, again elected to Congress, he renewed his bitter enmity toward Southern slaveholders.

In 1861 Stevens became chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee and helped to secure passage of the legislation needed to finance the Civil War. He and other Radical Republicans urged Abraham Lincoln to pursue an uncompromising war policy to restore the Union, secure freedom for the slaves, and destroy the political power of the slaveholders. Stevens advocated military emancipation, use of African American troops, and confiscation of Confederate property. He insisted that the Southern states not be restored to the Union until they had been thoroughly reconstructed, arguing that by seceding they had lost all rights under the Constitution and were conquered provinces subject to congressional control. Stevens particularly wanted the economic and political power of the planters decreased and schools, land, and ballots provided for the freedmen.

Stevens served on the crucial Joint Committee on Reconstruction in the postwar period, guiding much of its legislation, including the 14th Amendment, guaranteeing civil rights for the freedmen, through the House. An adroit parliamentarian, Stevens intimidated opponents. Yet many of his more radical proposals were never passed. Many Northerners were simply not ready to accept the social implications of radical measures designed to uplift the blacks.

Stevens's views on Reconstruction clashed with President Andrew Johnson's more conservative course. The President's veto of the civil rights and Freedmen's Bureau bills in 1866 and his violent personal attack on Stevens prompted Stevens and other Republicans to break openly with Johnson and to push through a much more stringent congressional Reconstruction program over the President's opposition.

In 1868 Stevens served on the committee that drafted the articles of impeachment against Johnson and was a manager of the case before the Senate. Johnson was acquitted in May, and Stevens died on August 11 in Washington. He requested that he be buried in a black cemetery to "illustrate in my death the principles which I advocated through a long life - Equality of Man before his Creator." Stevens's tragedy lay in the nation's unreadiness to begin the social and economic reforms necessary to make legal guarantees for blacks meaningful.

See also Reconstruction, congressional

Sources

Fawn Brodie, Thaddeus Stevens: Scourge of the South (New York: Norton, 1959)

US History Companion: Stevens, Thaddeus

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(1792-1868), political leader. In the traditional view of Reconstruction, Thaddeus Stevens was the evil genius who wrecked President Andrew Johnson's lenient policy and turned the South over to the depredations of "black rule." Today, he is seen more sympathetically, as an outspoken foe of slavery who sought to accord blacks the rights of American citizenship and to provide an economic underpinning for their freedom.

Born and educated in New England, Stevens moved as a young man to the Lancaster area of Pennsylvania, where he practiced law and entered the business of iron manufacturing. Born with a clubfoot--then considered a mark of evil--he felt at home among the dissenters and outsiders (most notably the Amish) who peopled the region. He never married, but lived for years with a black housekeeper and showed no interest in either confirming or denying rumors about their relationship.

Successively an Anti-Mason, Whig, and Republican, Stevens served several terms in the Pennsylvania legislature, where he won renown as an advocate of free public education. He also emerged as an outspoken foe of slavery and defender of the rights of the state's black population. He served as a delegate to Pennsylvania's constitutional convention of 1838 but refused to sign the final document because it limited the suffrage to whites. He served in Congress between 1849 and 1853 and was reelected in 1858, in time to argue against northern concessions to the South in the secession winter of 1860-1861.

During the Civil War and Reconstruction, Stevens came into his own as the most radical of the Radical Republicans. His personal qualities--honesty, imperviousness to criticism or flattery, willingness to use daring means to achieve his ends--won the respect even of political foes. A master of parliamentary tactics, he knew when to bully the House and when to compromise. His quick wit and sarcastic tongue were legendary--"I would sooner get into difficulty with a porcupine," one colleague remarked.

During the war, as chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means, Stevens urged the administration to emancipate and arm the slaves. He opposed as too lenient President Abraham Lincoln's Ten Percent Plan for readmitting Confederate states to the Union during Reconstruction, and by the end of the war he was advocating black suffrage in the South and the disfranchisement of former Confederates.

To Stevens, Reconstruction offered an opportunity to create a "perfect republic," shorn of racial inequality. As Republican floor leader, he shepherded to passage key measures of Congressional Reconstruction--the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Reconstruction Act of 1867--even though none of these was as radical as he desired. He was one of President Johnson's fiercest congressional critics and an early advocate of his impeachment.

Stevens was most closely identified during Reconstruction with his plan for the division of planters' land among the former slaves, which, he insisted, would make them "small independent landholders, ... the support and guardians of republican liberty." "The whole fabric of southern society," he declared, ""must" be changed, and never can it be done if this opportunity is lost." But Stevens's plan was too radical for most Republicans, and after the passage of the Reconstruction Act, his influence waned.

When he died in 1868, Stevens one last time challenged Americans to rise above their prejudices, for he was buried in an integrated Pennsylvania cemetery, with an epitaph written by himself: "I have chosen this that I might illustrate in my death the principles which I advocated through a long life, Equality of Man before his Creator."

Bibliography:

Fawn Brodie, Thaddeus Stevens: Scourge of the South (1959); Ralph Korngold, Thaddeus Stevens (1955).

Author:

Eric Foner

Columbia Encyclopedia: Thaddeus Stevens

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Stevens, Thaddeus, 1792-1868, U.S. Representative from Pennsylvania (1849-53, 1859-68), b. Danville, Vt. He taught in an academy at York, Pa., studied law, and was admitted to the bar in Maryland. He practiced law in Gettysburg (1816-42) and then in Lancaster, Pa. He also entered the iron business. Stevens first achieved political prominence as an Anti-Mason, and from 1833 to 1841 he served in the Pennsylvania legislature. An aggressive, uncompromising man possessing a formidable, sardonic wit, he helped defeat a bill abolishing the state's public-school system and was a vigorous proponent of a protective tariff. In his first two terms in Congress, Stevens was a Whig but also a forthright abolitionist, and he quit in disgust at his party's moderate stand on the slavery issue. A leading organizer of the Republican party in Pennsylvania, he returned to Congress in 1859. As chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means, he was a powerful figure throughout the Civil War. Stevens secured huge appropriations for the Union forces and succeeded in having paper money authorized as legal tender. His hatred of the South seems to have been based on principle. After Henry W. Davis was defeated for reelection in 1864, Stevens in the House and Charles Sumner in the Senate were the leaders of the radical Republicans in Congress who opposed President Lincoln's moderate plan of Reconstruction. In Stevens's view, the Southern states defeated in the Civil War were "conquered provinces" and as chairman of the joint committee on Reconstruction he intended that they be treated as such. Victorious in the congressional elections of 1866, the radicals nullified the Reconstruction program of President Andrew Johnson, placed the South under military occupation, proscribed most ex-Confederates, and enfranchised African Americans. Stevens himself proposed the Fourteenth Amendment. Sincere in his devotion to the betterment of African Americans, Stevens nevertheless frankly admitted that the legislation guaranteeing them suffrage was designed to keep the Republican party in power. He dominated the committee that drew up the impeachment charges against Johnson and was one of the House managers in the subsequent trial before the Senate. Stevens requested that he be interred in a cemetery with African Americans rather than in a burial ground closed to them.

Bibliography

See biographies by S. W. McCall (1899, repr. 1972), J. A. Woodburn (1913), T. F. Woodley (rev. ed. 1937, repr. 1969), A. B. Miller (1939), R. N. Current (1941), R. Korngold (1955), F. M. Brodie (1959, repr. 1966); T. H. Williams, Lincoln and the Radicals (1942, repr. 1960).

Wikipedia: Thaddeus Stevens

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Thaddeus Stevens

Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Pennsylvania's 8th & 9th district
In office March 4, 1849 – March 3, 1853 March 4, 1859 – August 11, 1868
Preceded by	John Strohm Anthony E. Roberts
Succeeded by	Henry A. Muhlenberg Oliver J. Dickey

Born	April 4, 1792(1792-04-04) Danville, Vermont, U.S.
Died	August 11, 1868 (aged 76) Washington, D.C., U.S.
Political party	Federalist, Anti-Masonic, Whig, Republican
Spouse(s)	none
Profession	Politician
Signature

Thaddeus Stevens (April 4, 1792 – August 11, 1868), of Pennsylvania, was a Republican leader and one of the most powerful members of the United States House of Representatives. As chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Stevens, a witty, sarcastic speaker and flamboyant party leader, dominated the House from 1861 until his death and wrote much of the financial legislation that paid for the American Civil War. Stevens and Senator Charles Sumner were the prime leaders of the Radical Republicans during the American Civil War and Reconstruction. A biographer characterizes him as, "The Great Commoner, savior of free public education in Pennsylvania, national Republican leader in the struggles against slavery in the United States and intrepid mainstay of the attempt to secure racial justice for the freedmen during Reconstruction, the only member of the House of Representatives ever to have been known, as the 'dictator' of Congress."^[1]

Recent archeological work around his Lancaster, Pennsylvania home and office has uncovered the probable involvement of Stevens and his housekeeper, Lydia Hamilton Smith, as conductors in the underground railroad. Stevens and Smith’s homes are undergoing restoration and will be opened the focus of a museum and heritage center.

Historians' views of Stevens have swung sharply since his death as interpretations of Reconstruction have changed. The Dunning School, which viewed the period as a disaster and held racist views of blacks, saw Stevens as a villain for his advocacy of harsh measures in the South, and this characterization held sway for most of the 20th Century. Austin Stoneman, the naive and fanatical congressman in D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, was modeled on Stevens. Additionally, he was portrayed as a villain in The Clansman, the second novel in the trilogy upon which "Birth of a Nation" was based. He was also portrayed (by Lionel Barrymore) as a villain and fanatic in Tennessee Johnson, the 1942 MGM film about the life of President Andrew Johnson.

1 Early life
2 Political life
- 2.1 Radical Republicanism
3 Death
4 Legacy
5 See also
6 Notes
7 References
- 7.1 Primary sources
8 External links

Early life

Stevens was born in Danville, Vermont on April 4, 1792. His parents had arrived there from Methuen, Massachusetts around 1786. He suffered from many hardships during his childhood, including a club foot. The fate of his father Joshua Stevens, an alcoholic, profligate shoemaker who was unable to hold a steady job, is uncertain. He may have died at home, abandoned the family, or been killed in the War of 1812; in any case, he left his wife, Sally (Morrill) Stevens, and four small sons in dire poverty.^[2] Having completed his course of study at Peacham Academy, Stevens entered Dartmouth College as a sophomore in 1811, and graduated in 1814; before doing so, he spent one term and part of another at the University of Vermont. He then moved to York, Pennsylvania, where he taught school and studied law. After admission to the bar, he established a successful law practice, first in Gettysburgin 1816, then in Lancaster in 1842. He later took on several young lawyers, among them Edward McPherson, who later became his protegé and ardent supporter in Congress.

Stevens never married but two of his adult nephews came to live with him. He shared his home and parental responsibilities with his mixed-race housekeeper of twenty years, Lydia Hamilton Smith, but historians are unsure whether the relationship was sexual, as was widely rumored.

Political life

At first, Stevens belonged to the Federalist Party, but switched to the Anti-Masonic Party, then to the Whig Party, and finally to the Republican Party. In 1833, he was elected on the Anti-Masonic ticket to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, where he served intermittently until 1842.^[3] He introduced legislation to curb secret societies, to provide more funds to Pennsylvania's colleges, and to put a constitutional limit on state debt. He refused to sign the new state constitution of 1838 because it did not give the vote to black citizens. He also came to the defense of a new state law, passed on April 1, 1834, providing free public schools. Newly elected members of the Pennsylvania State Senate tried to repeal the public education act, while the lower house tried to preserve it. Although Stevens had been reelected with instructions to favor repeal, in a great speech, he defended free public education and persuaded the Pennsylvania Assembly to vote 2-1 in favor of keeping the new law.

Stevens devoted most of his enormous energies to the destruction of what he considered the Slave Power, that is the conspiracy he saw of slave owners to seize control of the federal government and block the progress of liberty. In 1848, while still a Whig party member, Stevens was elected to serve in the House of Representatives. He served in congress from 1849 to 1853, and then from 1859 until his death in 1868.^[4]

He defended and supported Native Americans, Seventh-day Adventists, Mormons, Jews, Chinese, and women. However, the defense of runaway or fugitive slaves gradually began to consume the greatest amount of his time, until the abolition of slavery became his primary political and personal focus. He was actively involved in the Underground Railroad, assisting runaway slaves in getting to Canada. An Underground Railroad site has been discovered under his office in Lancaster, PA. This office, along with Lydia Smith's home, is located next to the new conference center in the center of Lancaster. The office, along with Lydia Smith's home, may soon become a museum open to the public.

During the American Civil War Stevens was one of the three or four most powerful men in Congress, using his slashing oratorical powers, his chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee, and above all his single-minded devotion to victory. His power grew during Reconstruction as he dominated the House and helped to draft both the Fourteenth Amendment and the Reconstruction Act in 1867.

Radical Republicanism

He was one of two Congressmen in July 1861 opposing the Crittenden-Johnson Resolution stating the limited war aim of restoring the Union while preserving slavery; he helped repeal it in December. In August, 1861, he supported the first law attacking slavery, the Confiscation Act that said owners would forfeit any slaves they allowed to help the Confederate war effort. By December he was the first Congressional leader pushing for emancipation as a tool to weaken the rebellion. He called for total war on January 22, 1862:

"Let us not be deceived. Those who talk about peace in sixty days are shallow statesmen. The war will not end until the government shall more fully recognize the magnitude of the crisis; until they have discovered that this is an internecine war in which one party or the other must be reduced to hopeless feebleness and the power of further effort shall be utterly annihilated. It is a sad but true alternative. The South can never be reduced to that condition so long as the war is prosecuted on its present principles. The North with all its millions of people and its countless wealth can never conquer the South until a new mode of warfare is adopted. So long as these states are left the means of cultivating their fields through forced labor, you may expend the blood of thousands and billions of money year by year, without being any nearer the end, unless you reach it by your own submission and the ruin of the nation. Slavery gives the South a great advantage in time of war. They need not, and do not, withdraw a single hand from the cultivation of the soil. Every able-bodied white man can be spared for the army. The black man, without lifting a weapon, is the mainstay of the war. How, then, can the war be carried on so as to save the Union and constitutional liberty? Prejudices may be shocked, weak minds startled, weak nerves may tremble, but they must hear and adopt it. Universal emancipation must be proclaimed to all. Those who now furnish the means of war, but who are the natural enemies of slaveholders, must be made our allies. If the slaves no longer raised cotton and rice, tobacco and grain for the rebels, this war would cease in six months, even though the liberated slaves would not raise a hand against their masters. They would no longer produce the means by which they sustain the war."^[5]

Stevens led the Radical Republican faction in their battle against the bankers over the issuance of money during the Civil War. Stevens made various speeches in Congress in favor of President Lincoln and Henry Carey's "Greenback" system, interest-free currency in the form of fiat government-issued United States Notes that would effectively threaten the bankers' profits in being able to issue and control the currency through fractional reserve loans. Stevens warned that a debt-based monetary system controlled by for-profit banks would lead to the eventual bankruptcy of the people, saying "the Government and not the banks should have the benefit from creating the medium of exchange," yet after Lincoln's assassination the Radical Republicans lost this battle and a National banking monopoly emerged in the years after.

U.S. Reps. John A. Bingham and Thaddeus Stevens before the Senate addressing the impeachment vote on U.S. President Andrew Johnson.

Stevens giving his closing remarks of the impeachment of President Johnson.

Stevens was so outspoken in his condemnation of the Confederacy that Major General Jubal Early of the Army of Northern Virginia made a point of burning much of his iron business, at modern-day Caledonia State Park to the ground during the Gettysburg Campaign. Early claimed that this action was in direct retaliation for Stevens' perceived support of similar atrocities by the Union Army in the South.

Stevens was the leader of the Radical Republicans, who had full control of Congress after the 1866 elections. He largely set the course of Reconstruction. He wanted to begin to rebuild the South, using military power to force the South to recognize the equality of Freedmen. When President Johnson resisted, Stevens proposed and passed the resolution for the impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868.

Stevens told W. W. Holden, the Republican governor of North Carolina, in December, 1866, "It would be best for the South to remain ten years longer under military rule, and that during this time we would have Territorial Governors, with Territorial Legislatures, and the government at Washington would pay our general expenses as territories, and educate our children, white and colored and both."^[6]

Death

Thaddeus Stevens died at midnight on August 11, 1868, in Washington, D.C., less than three months after the acquittal of Johnson by the Senate. Stevens' coffin lay in state inside the Capitol Rotunda, flanked by a Black Honor Guard from Massachusetts. Twenty thousand people, one-half of whom were African-American, attended his funeral in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He chose to be buried in the Shreiner-Concord Cemetery because it was the only cemetery that would accept people without regard to race.

Stevens wrote the inscription on his head stone that reads: "I repose in this quiet and secluded spot, not from any natural preference for solitude, but finding other cemeteries limited as to race, by charter rules, I have chosen this that I might illustrate in my death the principles which I advocated through a long life, equality of man before his Creator."

Stevens monument is at the intersection of North Mulberry Street and West Chestnut Street in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Legacy

Thaddeus Stevens School, also known as Thaddeus Elementary School, located at 1050 21st Street, NW in Washington, D.C. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.

Stevens dreamed of a socially just world, where unearned privilege did not exist.^[7] He believed from his personal experience that being different or having a different perspective can enrich society.^[7] He believed that differences among people should not be feared or oppressed but celebrated.^[7] In his will he left $50,000 to establish Stevens, a school for the relief and refuge of homeless, indigent orphans. "They shall be carefully educated in the various branches of English education and all industrial trades and pursuits. No preference shall be shown on account of race or color in their admission or treatment. Neither poor Germans, Irish or Mahometan, nor any others on account their race or religion of their parents, shall be excluded. They shall be fed at the same table."

This original bequest has now evolved into Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology. The College continually strives to provide underprivileged individuals with opportunities and to create an environment in which individual differences are valued and nurtured.

In Washington, D.C., the Stevens Elementary School was built in 1868 as one of the first publicly funded schools for black children. President Jimmy Carter's daughter, Amy Carter, attended the school.^[8]

Other locations named in honor of Thaddeus Stevens includes the community of Stevens, Pennsylvania,^[8] and Stevens County, Kansas.^[8]

Buildings associated with Stevens are currently being restored by the Historic Preservation Trust of Lancaster, PA with an eye toward focusing on the establishment of a $20 million dollar museum. These include his home, law offices, and a nearby tavern. The effort also celebrates the contributions of his housekeeper Lydia Hamilton Smith who was involved in the underground railroad.

Notes

^ Trefouse p. xi
^ "Thaddeus Stevens". Dictionary of American Biography. American Council of Learned Societies, 1928-1936.
^ http://politicalgraveyard.com/bio/stevens8.html
^ Congrssional Biography
^ Woodburn 178-179
^ Holden, Memoirs of W. W. Holden (1911) p. 85 online at [1]
^ ^a ^b ^c Woodburn pp 606-620
^ ^a ^b ^c Knapp, Tom (2009-04-03). "Stevens to honor Stevens, Town was named for famous legislator, who got it a post office". Intelligencer Journal. http://articles.lancasteronline.com/local/4/235847. Retrieved 2009-05-09.

References

Beale, Howard K. The Critical Year: A Study of Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction. (1930)
Belz, Herman. Reconstructing the Union: Theory and Practice During the Civil War. (1969)
Benedict, Michael Les. A Compromise of Principle: Congressional Republicans and Reconstruction 1863-1869. (1974)
Brodie Fawn M. Thaddeus Stevens, Scourge of the South (1959), controversial psychohistory
Bryant-Jones, Mildred. "The Political Program of Thaddeus Stevens, 1865", Phylon (1940-1956), Vol. 2, No. 2 (2nd Qtr., 1941), pp. 147–154 in JSTOR/271784
Foner, Eric. Thaddeus Stevens, Confiscation, and Reconstruction," in Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, eds. The Hofstadter Aegis (1974).
McCall, Samuel Walker. Thaddeus Stevens (1899) 369 pages; outdated biography online edition
Stryker, Lloyd Paul; Andrew Johnson: A Study in Courage (1929), hostile to Stevens online version
Trefousse, Hans L. Thaddeus Stevens: Nineteenth-Century Egalitarian (1997) online version
Woodburn, James Albert. The Life of Thaddeus Stevens: A Study in American Political History, Especially in the Period of the Civil War and Reconstruction. (1913) online version
Woodburn, James Albert. "The Attitude of Thaddeus Stevens Toward the Conduct of the Civil War," The American Historical Review, Vol. 12, No. 3 (April, 1907), pp. 567–583 in JSTOR

Primary sources

Palmer, Beverly Wilson and Holly Byers Ochoa, eds. The Selected Papers of Thaddeus Stevens 2 vol (1998), 900pp; his speeches plus letters to and from Stevens
Stevens, Thaddeus, et al. Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, at the First Session ...by United States Congress. Joint Committee on Reconstruction, (1866) 791 pages; online edition
Memorial Addresses on the Life and Character of Thaddeus Stevens: Delivered ...by United States 40th Cong., 3d sess., 1868-1869. (1869) 84 pages; online edition

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Thaddeus Stevens

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Stevens, Thaddeus.

United States House of Representatives
Preceded by John Strohm	Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Pennsylvania's 8th congressional district 1849 – 1853	Succeeded by Henry A. Muhlenberg
Preceded by Anthony E. Roberts	Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Pennsylvania's 9th congressional district 1859 – 1868	Succeeded by Oliver J. Dickey
Political offices
Preceded by John Sherman	Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee 1861 – 1865	Succeeded by Justin S. Morrill
Honorary titles
Preceded by Abraham Lincoln	Persons who have lain in state or honor in the United States Capitol rotunda August 13-August 14, 1868	Succeeded by Charles Sumner

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	congressional reconstruction
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