Much of Thaddeus Stevens’s life is well documented, but not so with his involvement with the Underground Railroad. Helping fugitive slaves was against the law and secrecy was of the utmost importance. But over the last century and a half, more information has been found that reveals Stevens’s participation.
It has been generally accepted that Stevens’s Caledonia iron mill near Chambersburg, PA, which he owned from 1837 to 1868, was a stop of the Underground Railroad since it had large African-American workforce and freedom seekers could blend in. He was also involved as an attorney in many fugitive slave cases while he lived in Gettysburg and Lancaster.
An 1847 letter from Stevens to a colleague tells about how he had a “spy on the spies” and would warn freedom seekers of slave catchers lurking in the area. The double agent was later identified as Edward H. Rauch, who told a reporter that he was part of a secret organization that Stevens formed to thwart slave catchers in the Lancaster area. Rauch said he would act as if he was in league with the slave catchers and then relay the information to Stevens.
In 2003 an archaeological dig behind the location of Stevens’s Lancaster house, found a possible passageway from the next door building to a cistern that might have been a hiding place for fugitive slaves. However, this assertion has been challenged.
In 2009 a manuscript by Oliver Cromwell Gilbert was discovered detailing his escape with other freedom seekers from slavery in Maryland and how Stevens assisted him. After crossing the Susquehanna River they were directed to Stevens’s house in Lancaster. There Stevens gave them a note and instructed them to go several more miles to a stop on the Underground Railroad.
As a result of these findings and other research done by Randy Harris, an Underground Railroad expert in Lancaster, Stevens’s grave and house in Lancaster and his Caledonia iron mill have been included in the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom.
While Stevens participation in the Underground Railroad was kept secret during his lifetime, his contempt for laws that facilitated the catching of fugitive slaves was on full display while he was a congressman. He particularly opposed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which denied alleged runaways a jury trial and the right to testify. Stevens particularly attacked a provision requiring bystanders to assist slaveowners in capturing freedom seekers.
“The slaveholder may pursue his slave among them [Pennsylvanians] with his foreign myrmidons unmolested, except by their frowning scorn,” Stevens said in congressional debates, “But no law that tyranny can pass will ever induce them to join the hue and cry after the trembling wretch who has escaped from unjust bondage,”
This proved to be the case a year later near Christiana, PA where a slaveowner was meet with armed resistance to capturing an escaped slave and tried to recruit four Quakers who refused. The slaveowner was killed in the ensuing melee and the Quakers and others were put on trial for treason. Stevens was part of the defense team that won an acquittal for all involved. But it cost Stevens’s his congressional seat since the Whig party would not nominate him again.
But Stevens returned to congress in 1858 as a Republican to see the legislative destruction of slavery during the Civil War.
