Many of Stevens’ boldest ideas never came to fruition, such as seizing enslavers’ land to redistribute it to the formerly enslaved. Even so, he was unmatched as a political strategist. “It’s amazing what he does after Lincoln is assassinated,” says Manisha Sinha, a historian and author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition. By the end of 1865, President Andrew Johnson—whom Stevens called a “damned scoundrel”—had issued pardons to Confederate leaders, some of whom were then elected to Congress. Stevens, though by then nearing the end of his life, reminded the Confederate states who had won: He led the effort in Congress to require Southern states to ratify the 14th Amendment before those states could regain federal representation.
The Jim Crow era was not kind to Stevens and his ideals of a multiracial democracy. In the white supremacist film Birth of a Nation, Stevens is embodied by the villain “Austin Stoneman,” a power-hungry ogre intent on punishing the South, complete with limp and ridiculous wig.
“I started school in 1947 and suffered through Pennsylvania history, and I do not recall the name of Thaddeus Stevens ever being mentioned,” says Leroy Hopkins, 81, a retired professor and local historian, whose family has lived in Lancaster County since the 1700s. The Black community, though, including members of Hopkins’ church—Bethel AME—remembered Stevens and, from the late 1800s until around World War II, even led yearly processions to decorate his grave, Hopkins says. Yet post-Reconstruction historians deliberately erased Stevens’ legacy, in both mainstream academia and popular culture.
“The forgetting and erasure of men like Stevens was willful after the fall of Reconstruction and the triumph of Jim Crow,” Sinha says. “Most white Southerners hated him, and Northerners wanted to forget about the failure of Reconstruction. … It was not an accident that Stevens was forgotten.”
Radicals like Stevens, Sinha says, were seen as having overreached in championing Black citizenship, and in the 1868 impeachment of Andrew Johnson for blocking Reconstruction. “The myth that they achieved nothing” is false, she argues. Reconstruction was the direct result of Stevens’ “parliamentary acumen and his devotion to egalitarian principles.” Yet at the turn of the 20th century, Reconstruction was widely presented as a wicked, aberrant episode in U.S. history. “We still live with those legacies,” Sinha says. Which makes it all the more important to recover a true idea of Stevens.