Thaddeus Stevens (1792 - 1868)

Born 4 Apr 1792 in Danville, Caledonia, Vermont, United States

Ancestors

Died 11 Aug 1868 at age 76 in Washington, District of Columbia, United States

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Biography

Thaddeus Stevens is Notable.

Thaddeus was part of the Underground Railroad.

Thaddeus Stevens was a part of the Abolitionist Movement.

Abolitionist who opposed slavery and assisted with the underground Railroad. In Congress, he was the primary moving force behind the passage of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery. His nicknames were The Old Commoner and The Great Commoner.

Stevens was born in Danville, Vermont, on April 4, 1792. He was the second of four children, all boys, and was named to honor the Polish general who served in the American Revolution, Thaddeus Kościuszko. His parents were Baptists who had emigrated from Massachusetts around 1786. The boys' father, Joshua Stevens, was a farmer and cobbler who struggled to make a living in Vermont. After fathering two more sons (born without disability) Joshua abandoned the children and his wife Sarah (née Morrill).

Thaddeus was actively involved in the defense of runaway or fugitive slaves. The abolition of slavery became his primary political and personal focus. He was actively involved in the Underground Railroad, assisting runaway slaves to get to Canada, as many as 16 a week. ^[1] He hired spies to keep an eye on slave-catchers in town, and his residence became a station on the Underground Railroad as acknowledged in April 2011 by the National Park Service. ^[2]

He was a member of the House of Representatives from Pennsylvania, a powerful Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee during the American Civil War and one of the leaders of the Radical Republican faction of the Republican Party during the 1860s. He was the primary moving force behind passage of the 13th Amendment, outlawing slavery.

Stevens never married, though there were rumors about his 20-year relationship (1848–1868) with his widowed housekeeper, Lydia Hamilton Smith (1813–1884). Thaddeus Stevens died on the night of August 11, 1868 in Washington DC.

He is interred at Shreiner Cemetery in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. ^[3]

Legacy

• Stevens County, Kansas is named in his honor.
• The Thaddeus Stevens & Lydia Hamilton Smith Center for History and Democracy is a historic site currently under development as an interactive history museum and community education facility by LancasterHistory. At this time, the Center has a tentative opening date of 2025. ^[4]
• Portrayed by Tommie Lee Jones in the 2012 movie 'Lincoln' by Steven Spielberg.

Sources

1. ↑ https://stevenscollege.edu/legacy-of-thaddeus-stevens/#:~:text=He%20was%20actively%20involved%20in,until%20his%20death%20in%201868
2. ↑ https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2012/novemberdecember/feature/remarkable-radical-thaddeus-stevens
3. ↑ Find a Grave, database and images (accessed 03 December 2020), memorial page for Thaddeus Stevens (4 Apr 1792–11 Aug 1868), Find A Grave: Memorial #982, citing Shreiner Cemetery, Lancaster, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, USA ; Maintained by Find A Grave.
4. ↑ https://www.lancasterhistory.org/about-sschd/

See also:

• Wikipedia

• Danville Historical Society

• There appear to be multiple biographies of Thaddeus Stevens, This is an amateur citation for one of them: Thaddeus Stevens, by Samuel Walker McCall (1851 - 1923) (New York: Houghton - Mifflin, 1899). This version of this particular biography is freely available from The Internet Archive (archive,org); accessed 6 April 2024.