The "Lancaster's One & Only...Mr. Thaddeus Stevens" Story

It was an ordinary day.  Reading a story in Smithsonian Magazine about one of my hometown's most famous residents...Thaddeus Stevens.  He was portrayed in the story as one of the greatest heroes in U.S. history.  But, why hasn't he gotten his due?  Story begins by saying...Arguably the most important opponent of slavery in American history, Thaddeus Stevens is also the most forgotten. And perhaps...that is why I enjoy writing about my Lancaster hero!  If the abolitionist Pennsylvania congressman is known at all today, it's thanks to Tommy Lee Jones' portrayal of Stevens in the 2012 film Lincoln, where he is the moral absolutist to Lincoln's pragmatic deal maker on the 13th Amendment--a righteous scold with vicious one-liners and a bad toupee.  Yet, at the time of Stevens' death in 1868, he was one of the most revered men in the country.  When he died, he was only the third American ever to lie in state at the U.S. Capitol.  

On the side of Sevens' tombstone

Thousands of mourners attended his funeral.  But, a few years later he was lying in an unkempt grave in Lancaster, Pennsyvania.  Stevens could "lay claim to being one of the best-hated men in our past."  Now...I realize that some of the blame must go to the residents of my home city of Lancaster, since they could have taken it upon themselves to show some respect and made sure his burial site was kept in a respectable state.  Luckily, today Thaddeus Stevens is finally getting his due in Lancaster as well as other locations in his home state of Pennsylvania.  In Gettysburg, a group of citizens erected a bronze statue in front of the Adams County courthouse.

But, the biggest honor will arrive soon when the city of Lancaster's preservationist group LancasterHistory will open the Thaddeus Stevens and Lydia Hamilton Smith Center for History and Democracy in 2025.  The $25 million complex will honor Steven's life and his work.  The site will also showcase regional heroes of the Underground Railroad, including the work of Lydia Hamilton Smith, a freeborn woman with African American heritage who spent 21 years of her life as Stevens' house manager and confidante as well as his alleged common-law wife.  

I have taken many photographs of his home on South Queen Street and the surrounding area.  Stevens was born in Vermont, poor and with a club-foot.  He was ridiculed for his inability, which at the time was thought to have been a punishment from God for something he did wrong in his early life.  When he was 12 years old, his alcoholic father abandoned the family, leaving his mother to work the farm as well as raise her four children.  She worked days and nights to allow her sons a chance to go to school.  That instilled in Thaddeus a lifelong commitment to free public education and a disdain for hereditary privilege.  In 1815 he left Vermont for Pennsylvania to take a job as a schoolteacher, but soon made his way into a law career, passing the bar in 1816 and moving to Gettysburg, PA.

Over the next 21 years he became a renowned trial lawyer, businessman and maverick politician in the state and federal legislature.  He paid his mother back for her investment in him by purchasing her a 250-acre farm with 14 cows.  In the years before the Civil War, Steven's corner of southeastern Pennsylvania was a crucible of pro and anti-slavery forces.  The Southern border of Pennsylvania was a hugh battlefront in the war on slavery.  Pennsylvania had abolished slavery in 1780, but 20 miles away, in the neighboring state of Maryland, slavery was legally protected.  Stevens eventually joined the front lines of resistance.  By 1837, he was an avowed abolitionist, and that year he founded an ironworks outside Gettysburg, with the specific aim of employing free Black men and freedom seekers.  But, during the Civil War, Confederate General Jubal Early burned down Steven's forge enroute to the Battle of Gettysburg.  In 1842, Stevens left Gettysburg for Lancaster to expand his law practice, but also continued his dangerous work harboring fugitives and running a resourceful antislavery spy ring extending throughout southeastern Pennsylvania.  Stevens' spies managed to infiltrate groups of bounty hunters who regularly traveled to Adams and Lancaster Counties.

One of his most daring ploys was to pay off the secretary of notorious bounty hunter George Hughes, whose office on King Street in Lancaster was around the corner from Steven' office on Queen Street.  Hughes' secretary would copy the names of the wanted and immediately pass this information to Stevens' agents, who alerted anyone harboring freedom seekers.  Stevens' greatest legacy came from his chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee during the Civil War, and later the Appropriations Committee during Reconstruction.  Through indomitable grit and spirited political maneuvering, Stevens played the primary role in ushering through Reconstruction via constitutional amendments.  He was the most radical of the Radical Republicans, the fervent antislavery bloc; Stevens was thus a thorn in Lincoln's side who agitated to end slavery with more focus than the President would ever muster, calling it "the most hateful and informal blot that has ever disgraced the escutcheon of man."  Stevens' arguments were crucial in ensuring the passage of the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery, and historians acknowledge Stevens as the main architect of the 14th Amendment, which enshrined equal protections under the law.  He also fought for universal suffrage, though he died 19 months too early to see Black men casting their first votes under the 15th Amendment in 1870.  Radicals like Stevens 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.  Reconstruction was the direct result of Stevens' "parliamentary acumen and his devotion to egalitarian principles." Stevens died in 1868, at the height of Reconstruction, a time of great promise.  Just nine years later, by 1877, Reconstruction had ended with the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, and Stevens' reputation was trashed.  Yet, those who remembered his fading legacy made pilgrimages to his grave.  In the summer of 1886, a group of Black Civil War veterans gathered there and welcomed D. Henderson, a fellow veteran from New York whom had come to pay his respects at what he called the "Sacred Spot."  The men stood in formation and sang "nearer My God To Thee," after which Henderson thanked Stevens for his "Hopeless fight" in holding America to its stated ideals of justice and liberty for all.  I recently made another visit to Stevens' burial site take a few more photos of his tombstone.  His burial site is a few miles from my home at Woodcrest Villa.

I also stopped at his downtown Lancaster home site to see how the renovations are going with his home site on South Queen Street.  The refurbished site will be a true honor to one of Lancaster's most famous people.  The historical site will be one of Lancaster's finest in the downtown area.  I'll take you with me by photographs when it is finished!  My visit to his gravesite and his Lancaster home made me feel like I'm a part of the history of our country.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.  PS - Check out some of my older stories about Thaddeus Stevens that I have written in the past.  PPS - My wife and I named our third child, Paul Thadeus in honor of Thaddeus Stevens.  Tad, as we call him, only has 1 "d" in his name, but is still famous in our family.