Thaddeus Stevens

Pennsylvania Radical who drove abolition, the Fourteenth Amendment, and Reconstruction from the House floor.

Overview

Stevens, whose abolitionism dated to the 1830s, returned to Congress in 1859 and became chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, the House's most powerful post. He pushed the confiscation of rebel property, helped steer the Thirteenth Amendment to passage, demanded citizenship and voting rights for freedpeople, and drove the Fourteenth Amendment. As the leading Radical he broke with Lincoln over leniency, then helped lead impeachment of Andrew Johnson as a House manager. He died in 1868 and was buried in a cemetery he had deeded for Black residents, an epitaph to the equality he had championed.