The "Namesake - Part I" Story

Thaddeus Stevens

It was an ordinary day.  Checking the paper to see the times for the Steven Spielberg's film "Lincoln" which is showing at the Penn Cinema in Lancaster, PA.  I recently wrote another story about the film and how it used cannons that belonged to the former Mayor of Lancaster, Charlie Smithgall, but this story is about one of the characters, or should I say main players in Abraham Lincoln's life, Thaddeus Stevens;  Actually the story ties Thaddeus to LDubs life and family.  Here's how it goes - In 1976 the United States was celebrating it's Bi-Centennial and Carol and I were awaiting the birth of our third child.  We wanted to make it special for our child so we decided we had to give the child a Bi-Centennial name.  Not knowing if it would be a girl or a boy, we had names prepared for both.  Not sure anymore what the girl's name might have been, since we didn't need it, but the boy's name incorporated Thadeus into it, since he was a pretty famous member of Lancaster's history and we liked the name.  Have you noticed yet that I didn't type Thaddeus the same in both the historical figure and in our son's name?  Why, because I didn't realize that it had two "d"s in it when we gave it to our son.  Well, on April 9th our 10lb., 0oz. son was born at the Lancaster General Hospital with a name of Paul Thadeus.  His first name namesake was his paternal grandfather while his second name namesake was Thaddeus Stevens.  A real Bi-Centennial baby so he was.  I have written a few stories about my son and his accomplishments which you can find by clicking on the "children" link at the beginning of my stories.  This story is meant to tell you a little about his namesake and the patriot that he was in our country's history .......... Thaddeus was born in Danville, VT on April 4, 1972.  He was the second son born to Sarah Stevens and his father Joshua, who was an alcoholic and abandoned his family when Thaddeus was 12 years old.  Thaddeus was burdened with a club foot from birth and ridiculed throughout his childhood.  His mother was determined that he would succeed in life and at the age of 15 moved her family to Peacham, VT and enrolled him in the free Caledonia Grammar School, also known as Peacham Academy.  Stevens was smart and excelled in school and eventually enrolled at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire where he graduated in 1814.  His academic performance was respectable, but he excelled in debate.  Following graduation he decided to study law and moved to York, PA to begin his career.  He became one of the best lawyers of the 19th century, but never attended law school.  Seems that most attorneys did not attend law school at the time.  Stevens began his law journey in 1815 in the office of a distinguished York attorney and financed his studies by teaching at a private academy in York.  His year as a teacher would be useful background when he later became a champion of public education in Pennsylvania.  In 1816 he passed the bar exam and moved to Gettysburg to begin his law practice.  It is here where he spent the next quarter-century of his life.  Thaddeus was a superb trial attorney arguing over 1,000 cases while in Gettysburg, some for murder, and only lost one case, his first.  Because of his childhood background of poverty, he defended many clients who where too poor to pay him as well as many blacks who were held as slaves.  In 1822 he was elected to the town council as a Federalist, the first of his four political parties.  Being that he was a champion of public schooling, he once said, "May the film be removed from the eyes of Pennsylvania and she learn to dread ignorance more than taxation."  Wow!  In the late 1820s he joined the Anti-Masonic movement, since he was an opponent of the elite, and argued that the Masons unfairly and illegally favored each other in business, politics and legal matters.  The Masons also refused to accept any member with a disability, so because of his club foot he fought they even harder.  In 1833 he was elected to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives where he served intermittently for almost a century.  His greatest achievement as a state legislator was defending free public schooling where in 1834 he joined with Democrat George Wolf to promote the state's first free-school law.  In the late 1830s he became an ardent abolitionist and refused to sign the new 1838 state constitution because it did not give black citizens the right to vote.  At the same time he lost considerable money in the panic of 1837 and in 1842 decided to move his law practice to the the larger city of Lancaster.  Because of this move he became a famous Lancastrian and the reason Carol and I picked Thadeus for the middle name of our third child.  I have more to tell about how Lincoln and Stevens became allies and why Stevens plays a prominent roll in the movie "Lincoln."  Tomorrow's story will give you a bit more of local flavor.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.