Thaddeus

THADDEUS STEVENS--Alphonse B. Miller--Harper ($4).

If the Civil War was, as some have called it, the Second American Revolution, Thad Stevens was its leading Jacobin. Much attention has been focused on his thorny character, little on his role in history. The Northern beneficiaries of his Reconstruction ruthlessness have guillotined him with forgetfulness. In the sense that any interest in Stevens is new, Author Alphonse Miller contributes a useful biography, benefits largely by the sweep of the historical and political drama.

A Vermont poor boy, Thad Stevens was admitted to the bar in John Wilkes Booth's birthplace, Bel Air, Md., practiced law in York, Pa. He had the tough, narrow tenacity and discernment of the perfect sectional and sectarian infighter. As far as he saw, he saw clearly; as far as he thought, he thought honestly and without sentiment. His passionate sympathy for the Negro found fearless expression in his years of intimacy with his mulatto housekeeper, Lydia Smith, generally accepted as his common-law wife.

From the first, Stevens saw that the Civil War would be a long war, ridiculed the statesmen who thought the South would be exhausted in six months, urged that it be "laid waste," "depopulated," "planted with a new race of freemen." He saw that slavery was the basic economic and military weapon of the South, might be similarly exploited by the North, insistently urged the freeing of the slaves as an act of war.

With the Confederacy's collapse, Stevens was the driving force behind all measures to grant the Negro full citizenship, to hold the South in military bondage. When Johnson opposed him with Lincoln's moderate policies, Stevens organized his impeachment, marshalled the Republican radicals, browbeat the wavering, traded and intrigued. Failure to impeach Johnson was a severe blow to the aging, implacable Stevens. Shortly afterwards he died. He was buried in a Negro cemetery --"not from any natural preference for solitude," says his epitaph, "but finding other cemeteries limited by charter rules as to race, I have chosen this that I might illustrate in my death the principles which I advocated through a long life, equality of man before his Creator." (By all the evidence, Thad Stevens was an atheist.)

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