#bruce levine

Sticking strictly to political biography, Levine refuses to indulge in conjecture over Stevens’s private life. A tossed-out reference to his having been “perhaps, something of a sexual libertine” goes unelaborated. Conspicuously absent is any discussion of Stevens’s relationship with his longtime housekeeper, Lydia Hamilton Smith, a free woman of color to whom he bequeathed a large enough sum of money for her to purchase the Lancaster home they had long shared. Levine dismisses persistent rumors of romantic intimacy as the work of Stevens’s enemies, and takes the Lincoln film to task for thoughtlessly parroting them. While he may be right that the relationship has garnered too much attention, without at least probing into the matter—or anything else in his private life—the book falls short of offering a definitive account of Stevens’s life. The Lancaster home, now called the Stevens & Smith Historic Site, is slated for renovation and will open as a museum; presumably it will offer a fuller airing of the question.

Likewise, one wishes Levine offered more about Stevens’s possible involvement in the Underground Railroad. Hints that he gathered information about slave-catchers prowling the Lancaster area and “passed along what he . . . learned” to fugitives are tantalizing but ultimately frustrating in how little they tell us. Recent archaeological discoveries at the Stevens residence suggest he may have given refuge to fugitives in his own home; Levine mentions them but does not tell us what those discoveries are.

If Stevens did personally aid runaways escaping to freedom—thus breaking the infamous Fugitive Slave Law—it helps explain his sympathy for John Brown, whose 1859 attempt to ignite a South-wide slave rebellion started the year-and-a-half countdown to civil war. Going significantly farther than other Northern officeholders in embracing the cause of the abolitionist martyr, Stevens told Congress that Brown “deserved to be hung,” not for being a terrorist, but “for being a hopeless fool.” His error? Trying to conquer somnolent, decaying Virginia with only seventeen men when everyone knew it would require at least twenty-five. At that, a Southern congressman whipped out his Bowie knife, but Stevens, characteristically, kept calm, dismissing the disturbance as “a mere momentary breeze.” A year later, during the secession crisis, after yet another provocative Stevens speech, dozens of Southern members began cursing and threatening him. Fellow Republicans formed a phalanx around his desk, guarding him from attack.

Impressive as Stevens’s positions and predictions from the 1850s are, it would be entirely possible to write a book about the run-up to the Civil War that never mentions him. Indeed, Levine himself has done so, in the 1992 edition of Half Slave and Half Free, where his name comes up only in passing. The same is far from true of the war itself, still less Reconstruction. In spurring Lincoln and other Republican moderates to move more aggressively to abolish slavery, stamp out the rebellion, and, he hoped, prevent either from rising again, Stevens made his name as one of the most consequential radicals in American history.

The South’s move to secede after the 1860 election hardly surprised Stevens. Who could blame the slaveowners, he noted, given that the threat had so often succeeded in the past in getting them what they wanted? What was new was the insistence in much of the North that the fundamental plank of the Republican Party’s platform—banning slavery in the western territories—shouldn’t be bargained away, that there should be no more slavery-serving compromises. Unlike, say, William Seward, Stevens refused to consider any deal to avert secession. He opposed the Lincoln-backed Corwin Amendment, which would have offered ironclad constitutional protection to slavery in the states where it already existed—even though he thought it redundant. “Rather than show repentance for the election of Mr. Lincoln,” Stevens said, “I would see this Government crumble into a thousand atoms.”

Yet he also condemned those who favored letting the South go as guilty of “moral treason.” He wanted to fight to keep the Union together and use that fight to dismantle the institution that had caused the conflict in the first place. Stevens was one of the first to see the looming war as an opportunity. The Constitution had been ratified at a moment of Northern weakness; now that the sectional scales had shifted, the time was ripe for repealing its “odious” compromises. “If this Union should be dissolved,” he insisted, “if it should be torn to pieces by rebels, our next United States will contain no foot of ground on which a slave can tread, no breath of air which a slave can breathe.”

Stevens was sixty-nine years old when the Civil War began—some thirty years past the then-average U.S. life expectancy—but a fellow congressman noted that the fight “seemed to rejuvenate him and inspire him with superhuman strength.” Levine shows us a surprisingly flexible war-time Stevens, adapting to circumstance, constantly checking his priors: “He proved unusually able to grasp the nature of a given historical moment, to perceive that moment’s implicit logic, to follow that logic to its conclusions, and to fight with all the considerable energy and skill at his command for the measures to which those conclusions pointed him, no matter how unprecedented or extreme they might appear.” Still, because he worried—rightly, it turned out—that the job would be left half-done, his “self-assurance and self-confidence” in the war years was matched, Levine writes, by “impatience and frustration.” Thus the intensity, the occasional nastiness, invoked by his enemies and analyzed by his biographers; thus Tommy Lee Jones’ superbly lilting snarl.

As chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Stevens held one of the most powerful posts in Congress, and it made him “equivalent to a modern majority leader,” Levine writes. He could move legislation toward a vote or hold it back for reconsideration, though he still had to wrangle the unwieldy Republican caucus, many of whose members often resisted—and severely disappointed—the boldest plans of their whip-cracking floor leader. Stevens, Levine says, could be “stern and severe in bringing laggards into line.” But he did more than exert raw power; he showed his colleagues the direction in which events were forcing them, whether they liked it or not, and rallied them back to the fight at some of the darkest moments of the war.

For all Lincoln’s steady evolution in ratcheting up the federal government’s anti-slavery policies—first instructing the army to shelter escaped slaves as the confiscated property of rebels, then freeing them, then freeing all slaves of the rebels, before finally passing a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery everywhere—Stevens arrived at each of those positions much earlier, and his conception of both the purpose and nature of the war far outpaced Lincoln’s from the start. Lincoln explained in his first annual message to Congress, at the end of 1861, that he had been “anxious and careful” to keep the struggle from “degenerat[ing] into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle.” Stevens never shied away from that possibility—indeed, he welcomed it: “According to my poor judgment, the government must steel itself with sterner resolves, and prepare, if need be, for a revolution.”

In time, Lincoln came to see the truth in what Stevens had long been advocating. Either “we must free the slaves,” the president told his cabinet in the summer of 1862, “or be ourselves subdued.” Only then did he begin drafting the Emancipation Proclamation. By then, however, Stevens was far ahead of him, demanding the truly revolutionary step of arming former slaves—another step Lincoln eventually embraced. When it came out that Black soldiers were being paid less than whites, Stevens agreed they shouldn’t be paid equally—he said that Black troops should get more, for their “perils are greatest.” (Confederates took no Black prisoners but enslaved them or killed them on sight.) The Black abolitionist William E. Walker thanked Stevens for having “guarded our interests with more than a jealous and watchful eye.” People throughout the North sent him similar letters. “God Bless You Thaddeus Stevens,” one western New Yorker wrote. “Amid all the obloquy & insults of pro-Slavers and Devils you have dared to stand up a man.”

As important as abolition was, however, Stevens knew it would be useless without guaranteeing some degree of political and economic equality between the newly freed slaves and their reluctant white countrymen. By the end of his life, he was advocating unequivocally for full civil rights for African Americans (including, after some regrettable hesitation, the right to vote), not only in the South but in the North as well, where ensuring a future of racial equality had hardly been a widely cited reason to go to war.

Reconstruction, in Stevens’s capacious understanding of the term, was to operate simultaneously on two parallel tracks—the first legal and constitutional, the second social and economic. The freed people might as well have been left in slavery if they weren’t going to be endowed with rights that alone could protect them from future oppression, he believed. But he also continued to hold that political liberty would inevitably be a brittle thing unless paired with true economic independence, and that was only possible through the ownership of land. To that end, he called for expropriating the estates of the richest rebels and redistributing them as small farms to former slaves—a form of immediate reparations that, if enacted, would have made “our next United States” an infinitely more just and equal nation.

Before such a radical land-reform program could be considered, however, Congress had to decide what to do with the ex-rebels. Lincoln, before his assassination, had contended that the self-styled Confederate states had never really left the Union; they had only temporarily surrendered some of its protections. He set fairly generous terms for a state’s readmission—only one-tenth of the voters needed to take an oath of loyalty to the Union. To Stevens, this wasn’t nearly sufficient. He wanted to punish all ex-Confederates by banning them from holding public office and even from voting—the demand later weakened into the present version of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Section 3, which only blocked leading rebels from office—and also to empower the emancipated by allowing them to do both. Late in the war, Stevens objected to what he already saw would be the rapid slackening of Northern resolve and the revival of the iniquitous compromise tradition that had upheld both slavery and the Union ever since the founding. For him it wasn’t nearly as pressing to get the Southern states back in the Union as it was to cleanse them of “every vestige of human bondage,” to empower the freed people, and “to inflict condign punishment on the rebel belligerents, and so weaken their hands that they can never again endanger the Union.”

Far sooner than most, Stevens saw that the ascension of Andrew Johnson to the presidency presented a potentially fatal threat to that larger project of Reconstruction. Johnson rapidly accelerated the process of reunification that Lincoln had already begun, freely doling out pardons to ex-Confederates, defending the South’s restrictive “Black codes” that limited the freed people’s rights of labor and mobility (Johnson said in one State of the Union address that “negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people”), and demanding the readmission of Southern representatives into Congress. Johnson did nothing when former Confederate soldiers and politicians were elected as governors and senators; some wore their grey uniforms to work.

Southern whites accepted abolition of slavery because it seemed they were powerless to stop it, but, as Levine writes, they considered it “the outer boundary of change.” Even if specific whites couldn’t own specific Blacks anymore, one Union officer observed, the ex-rebels retained “an ingrained feeling that the blacks at large belong to the whites at large.” Freed people were forced to work for starvation wages, often for their former masters. Southern whites felt, as the officer put it, that “this kind of slavery is better than none at all.” Ad hoc militia companies intimidated Blacks into submission and brutally assassinated those who refused. The years after the war saw massacres of Black people in Charleston, and Norfolk, followed by even grislier ones in Memphis and New Orleans.

Stevens took the lead in resisting all of this, fighting against the return of normalcy, the much-desired reversion to what South-friendly Democrats called “the Union as it was.” When Southerners (and their Northern allies) insisted, as a certain breed of American politician never seems to tire of doing, that the time had come for unity, for setting aside old partisan hatreds, Stevens shot them down: “Let not these friends of secession sing to me their siren song of peace and good will until they can stop my ears to the screams and groans of the dying victims at Memphis.”

Ultimately, however, these horrific murders and Johnson’s blatant racism strengthened Stevens’s hand, for they showed that nothing less than full and thorough revolution in the South would prevent that status quo antebellum from taking hold again. By 1867, when some Republicans had already started to lose interest in the whole project, Stevens told them pointedly that “radicalism is the only thing now that will save and rescue us.” Levine charts the pivotal role Stevens played in helping to draft and pass the 14th Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Military Reconstruction Act of 1867, and other important measures of early Reconstruction. The novelty and import of these measures can hardly be overstated. As Eric Foner showed in his recent book The Second Founding, they were the first to give the federal government new powers—to protect the rights and liberties of its citizens—rather than take them away.

Yet even such sweeping constitutional changes, Stevens saw, would not be enough to guarantee the fruits of the Union’s victory. He wanted to redistribute the land of the region’s wealthy slave-owning planters to those they had once claimed as property. This, he held, would establish a far more egalitarian society in the South and put the freed people in a position of economic as well as legal independence—a precondition, to his mind, for meaningful citizenship. Taking roughly four hundred million acres from the wealthiest white Southerners (those with properties larger than one or two hundred acres), he would give forty acres to each adult Black man, then sell off the rest to raise money for Union soldiers’ pensions and other uses.

But Stevens’s campaign for land reform found few allies among Republicans who feared invading the precious private-property rights they and their deep-pocketed backers held so dear. Abolishing slavery had been one thing, but seizing land? Republicans were already turning against their own democratizing initiatives—shrinking, as the original founders had, from the radical implications of their own revolution. The Times feared that should Congress “take cognizance of the claims of labor against capital” in the South, eventually its interest in the matter “will find its way into the cities of the North.” A Boston newspaper noted that taking aim at the aristocracy of the South would encourage those “socialists” elsewhere “who hold that any aristocracy” should be extinguished.

Stevens was unmoved, declaring with his customary vinegar that his proposals could be “condemned only by . . . that unmanly kind of men whose intellectual and moral vigor has melted into a fluid weakness which they mistake for mercy.” But with the Northern public starting to tire of the whole Southern question—Ulysses S. Grant ran for president in 1868 on the Bidenesque slogan, “Let us have peace”—Stevens’s power in Congress was starting to falter just as his health began rapidly to decline. His final speeches were difficult to make out. He had to be carried into the Capitol in a chair, wrapped in warm blankets. “Stevens seemed to be surviving only by the sheer force of will,” Levine writes. That steely will finally gave out on August 11, 1868. He was seventy-six years old.”