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Biography of Thaddeus StevensName: Thaddeus StevensBirth Date: April 4, 1792 Death Date: August 11, 1868 Place of Birth: Danville, Vermont, United States Nationality: American Gender: Male Occupations: politician Thaddeus Stevens 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 …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…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. Further Reading Richard N. Current, Old Thad Stevens: A Story of Ambition (1942), is a scholarly, somewhat hostile analysis that finds Stevens primarily motivated by political ambition. Ralph Korngold, Thaddeus Stevens: A Being Darkly Wise and Rudely Great (1955), and Fawn M. Brodie, Thaddeus Stevens: Scourge of the South (1959), are sympathetic to Stevens, as is Hans Trefousse, The Radical Republicans (1969), a useful analysis of the ideas and political situation of that group. |