A few months after Thaddeus Stevens died on August 11, 1868, members of the House of Representatives gathered to deliver eulogies about one of the greatest congressmen in U.S. history. The picture they drew was quite remarkable.
The congressmen told how Stevens had saved public education in Pennsylvania in the 1830s and how he had helped to revamped the financial structure of the nation to give it more economic muscle during the Civil War. After the war, he orchestrated the parliamentary maneuver that prevented ex-Confederates from taking over Congress and then led the way in trying to reorganize the South into a more equal society during Reconstruction.
His personal life was praised as one of unbounded generosity and a willingness to defend fugitive slaves for free. The congressmen predicted that statues would be erected to him across the nation and he would be remembered alongside Abraham Lincoln. “The labors and achievements of his life have rendered him immortal,” one congressman said.
The praise went on for 84 pages and the book was published by the government and widely circulated. Copies of that book are now available at the Thaddeus Stevens Museum in Gettysburg. But by the early 20th century, Stevens’s name was a byword for vindictiveness and wrongheaded social movements. What happened?
What happened was the racist teaching of history professionals, a concerted propaganda effort to redeem the traitorous leaders of the Confederacy and an utter lack of support of Stevens’s legacy by his family, friends and admirers.
By the early 1900s, academia was teaching that Reconstruction was a vengeful period with Republicans intent on punishing the south for causing the Civil War and that it was marked by corruption and misrule by a coalition of Black and white politicians. This view of the period was led by Professor Archibald Dunning of Columbia University, who headed what is known as the Dunning School of history.
These teachings in America’s colleges and universities were bolstered on the cultural front by the Lost Cause mythology where the ex-Confederates and their descendants rewrote history saying the Civil War was not about slavery, but states rights, and they started a decades long effort of putting up statues and monuments to their Confederate heroes. They also vilified Stevens through books like Thomas Dixon‘s, The Clansman, and the 1915 silent movie that was made from it, Birth of a Nation.
And while all these things were happening, Stevens’s house in Gettysburg was torn down and his Lancaster house was altered beyond recognition. Various efforts to erect statues in Stevens honor failed and the cemetery in Lancaster where he is buried was abandoned by its original owners and sporadically maintained by volunteers.
But things started turning around for Stevens’s memory in the 1970s as historians like Kenneth Stampp and Eric Foner wrote books about how Reconstruction was a noble effort to create a biracial democracy that failed because of white southerner’s violence. Stevens statues went up in Lancaster in 2008 and in Gettysburg in 2022. A Stevens museum opened in Gettysburg in 2024 and one is slated to open in Lancaster in April 2026.
But efforts to honor Stevens would be so much further along today if people had just heeded the words of those Congressional eulogies back in 1868. Particularly those of Rep. Ignatius L. Donnelly of Minnesota who said this about Stevens:
“He never flattered the people; he never attempted to deceive them; he never ‘paltered with them in a double sense;’ he never courted and encouraged their errors. On the contrary, on all occasions he attacked their sins, he assailed their prejudices, he outraged all their bigotries; and when they turned upon him and attacked him, he marched straight forward, like Gulliver wading through the fleets of the Lilliputians, dragging his enemies after him into the great harbor of truth.”
Ross Hetrick is president and founder of the Thaddeus Stevens Society, which is dedicated to promoting Stevens's important legacy. Hetrick was a business reporter for 18 years in Baltimore and owned Ross's Coffeehouse & Eatery in Gettysburg from 1996 to 2004.