Thaddeus Stevens

On April 4, 1792, in Danville, Vermont, Thaddeus Stevens was born into poverty and lived with a club foot that shaped his fierce sympathy for outsiders. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1814, studied law, and built a career in Pennsylvania that joined courtroom skill to antislavery politics. Service in the state legislature and reform causes made him one of the North's most uncompromising radicals.

As a leading Republican in the House during the Civil War, Stevens backed the Confiscation Acts, the Thirteenth Amendment, and aggressive federal war measures against slavery. After 1865 he became one of the chief architects of Congressional Reconstruction, supporting the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Fourteenth Amendment, and military Reconstruction in the South. His conflict with Andrew Johnson made him central to the impeachment struggle as well.

Stevens's program helped define the strongest federal vision of racial justice produced in the nineteenth century. Reconstruction law, later civil rights legislation, and modern scholarship on equality before the law continue to treat his work as a crucial benchmark.