Thaddeus Stevens review: the Radical Republican America should remember

Thaddeus Stevens deserves to be better known. A leading radical Republican of the Reconstruction era, he is perhaps best known for Tommy Lee Jones’s portrayal in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. In his new biography, though, Bruce Levine dismisses the movie’s story of Stevens and his mixed-race housekeeper Lydia Hamilton Smith as lovers by writing that “no firm evidence substantiates it”. Similarly, Jones’s line “Trust? Gentlemen, you seem to have forgotten that our chosen career is politics,” falls into the category of “too good to check”.

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Until recently, history – or at least historiography – has not been kind to Stevens. His reputation fell as the national mood shifted. As Levine notes, even John F Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage praised Andrew Johnson while calling Stevens “the crippled, fanatical personification of the extremes of the Radical Republican movement”.

Owning an iron works and serving in the Pennsylvania legislature where he promoted common schools for all, Stevens later went to Congress to represent Lancaster, then as now a swing district in a swing state. Known for his “iron will and great courage” and “quick wit and sharp tongue”, he possessed a flinty, independent mind.

“He did not play the courtier,” as one congressman observed, and “he did not flatter the people; he was never a beggar for their votes.” He promoted economic development while opposing the “aristocracy of wealth and pride”. Like Abraham Lincoln, he spoke at Cooper Union in 1860, where he discussed “the long and persistent war between Liberty and Slavery, between Oppression and Freedom”, the theme that dominated his public life. By 1861, as the civil war began, Stevens was responsible for its financing as chairman of the committee on ways and means.

He was an early and ardent supporter of abolition of slavery. But the Union moved slowly in that direction and, as Spielberg makes clear, some supported it only as a matter of military necessity. But events moved swiftly. Military defeats in 1862 hastened the end of slavery through the Second Confiscation Act; slaves who crossed to Union lines were “forever free of their servitude”. The Militia Act authorized Lincoln to raise Black troops with the promise of freedom.

On 31 January 1865, the House voted for abolition. Military necessity had joined with moral imperative. Levine notes that “the chamber’s floor and galleries erupted in cheers, tears and ecstatic shouts of celebration” but oddly omits the real drama of the moment, the absolute stillness immediately after the result was announced, in solemn recognition of what had been done, before the cheers and 100-gun salute.

As with slavery, so with Reconstruction. Stevens thought Lincoln too lenient, instead seeking to remove “every vestige of human bondage” and “to inflict condign punishment on the rebel belligerents”. He and other Radicals believed the rebellious states had actually left the Union, in contrast to Lincoln’s position that the Union remained intact. Stevens and the radicals wanted harsher conditions – in particular, regarding equal rights for the freed people, including voting for all adult males – before readmitting southern representatives to Congress. In contrast, Levine quotes a biography of the Maine senator William Pitt Fessenden, who “regarded Reconstruction as a problem to be solved rather than an opportunity to be grasped”. On that difference hung the next hundred years of US history.

As the war raged, Stevens replied “I won’t” to a demand he give up the concept of racial equality before the law. With the Union victorious, his policies became increasingly radical, focusing on the Civil Rights Act of 1866, voting rights and land reform. He also supported the rights of Chinese immigrants in California.

This led to bitter debates with the Johnson administration and within Congress. Stevens worked hard to advance what became the 14th amendment with its guarantee of citizenship and “equal protection of the laws”. Johnson demanded, as Levine puts it, “to know why Stevens should not be hanged as a traitor” – the first but sadly not the last example of violent presidential rhetoric against opponents praising democracy.

Stevens promoted land reform as the key to Black economic independence: “Divide this land into convenient farms. Give, if you please, 40 acres to each adult male freedman” with $50 to build a house and farm buildings, then use the proceeds of other confiscated land sold at auction to pay off the national debt and pensions for Union soldiers.

For all this he was in some quarters calumnied as a Jacobin. Property rights concerns doomed his proposal even as he argued that “nothing is so likely to make a man a good citizen as to make him a freeholder”.

Stevens pushed Johnson’s impeachment through his reconstruction committee. Then as now, drafting formal articles presented tricky questions. Stevens would have preferred broader articles on Johnson’s refusal to execute laws passed by Congress rather than a focus on the Tenure of Office Act. But his health was failing and moderates voted to acquit.

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Stevens died that summer of 1868, two Black ministers attending his deathbed. Racially integrated pallbearers brought his body to the Capitol, where he lay guarded by Black soldiers before being buried at his request in the only racially integrated cemetery in Lancaster, with the epitaph EQUALITY OF MAN BEFORE HIS CREATOR.

Had he lived, could America have avoided the painful end of Reconstruction? Land reform might not have prevented Jim Crow – racism was too deep – but Stevens was surely correct that land ownership would have ended the dominance of the planter class. Spike Lee, for one, named his production company “40 Acres and a Mule”.

Levine has produced a work of popular history. It takes pains to put Stevens’s actions in context and provides background on his early life and the road to civil war. The writing is occasionally clunky but the history is vital. In the end, Reconstruction remained a road not taken, even as Stevens drove the train as fast as he could.

• Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice is published in the US by Simon & Schuster