By Ruth Ward
Now is the time to bring forward VT-reared Thaddeus Stevens, Lincoln’s sidebar Civil War strategist who stridently pressed the president first to emancipate the slaves and, once freed, to arm them.
Known, feared, revered for his wit and wisdom, it was Congressman Stevens who scripted the phrase “40 acres and a mule.” In his tome Black Reconstruction, W.E.B. DuBois wrote that Stevens was the sole member of both the House and Senate to understand the imperative economic need of the freed slaves to reproduce themselves and the imperative political need to provide those resources and tools.
For Reconstruction, it was Thaddeus Stevens who drafted the now-in-the-news 14th Amendment. He also drafted the 13th and 15th Amendments, known collectively as the Constitution’s Slave Amendments. He put these forth, not as an attempt to institutionalize democracy with opaque strokes, but rather to succinctly articulate the foundational purpose of the U.S. Constitution by legally equipping its content against impostors.
In sum, Stevens, the most powerful congressional leader in the history of the U.S. by virtue of what he organized and implemented during the Civil War and Reconstruction, left no room for debate about the exacting purpose of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
The 14th Amendment was Stevens’ legal sword, aimed to slay the systemic injustice of slavery, as it signaled the wants of whip-lashing political impostors on the nation’s law-making body as the Civil War ended. Stevens’ backstory, with its not-well-enough-known, formative VT-rearing, substantiates and reinforces the ruling of the Colorado Supreme Court’s Trump decision.
A stand-alone figure of stunning, seminal congressional feats (ferociously opposed by many), Thaddeus Stevens minced no words, ever, relative to the workings of justice. This was his practice in a system that he early discerned as prone to economic corruption via insurrection, as the Civil War represented.
What Thaddeus Stevens masterminded in the 14th Amendment requires our full awareness of his strategic tactics as these validate, by the content of his political example, the Colorado court’s decision.
Born with a club foot on a Danville farm and brought to Peacham Academy by his mother after his father abandoned the family of 4 sons, Thaddeus Stevens early aroused public introspection about the root causes of systemic injustice, as politics and economics intertwine. In Peacham Academy’s weekly public debates he presented such topics as Toussaint L’Overture’s purpose in leading Haiti’s successful slave rebellion, as it implicated Napoleon’s France. Outspoken at both the University of Vermont and Dartmouth, Stevens set out immediately to a boarder state—PA—to read himself onto the bar. This to make laws to eliminate slavery, as exampled by his home state’s 1791 founding Constitution.
His raucous tenure in PA’s state legislature leaves the legacy of establishing state funded education for all students, a first policy inclusive of all those in poverty of all races. Once in DC, he organized the Joint Committee of Congress that coordinated both the Senate and the House under his direction during the Civil War. This is where Lincoln accessed his insights and how the funding for the war was appropriated.
Stevens masterminded Civil War era legislation with the reins of the Radical Republicans, whose commitment was to save the Union, by extricating slavery and the constitutional infrastructure that supported it. Stevens is the key figure who re-adjusted the U.S. mobile at its center-pole.
More than any other figure in U.S. political history, Thaddeus Stevens stands alone for the regulations written into the Constitution to safeguard democracy against insurrectionists. What he put in place was a straight forward legal treatise to build back the U.S. Constitution to a rule-of-law document that would prohibit, forever, the return to political leadership, via ballot-box selection, those insurrectionists of the then South, who seized the reins to regain influence on the Hill as the Civil War turned back on them.
What makes section 3 of the 14th Amendment incontestable, in its intent, is Thaddeus Stevens.
— Patryc Wiggins lives in Guild, NH
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