No American political figure has been more distorted in popular memory than Thaddeus Stevens, the Radical Republican congressman who played a major role in guiding the nation’s trajectory through the Civil War and after. Along with much else, he pressed the government to face down the threat of secession, to recruit black men into the Union’s armed forces and to embrace full emancipation. In the war’s aftermath, he led the fight to secure civil rights for all black Americans, including their right to hold public office. He was also a driving force behind the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, who had tried to speedily restore former Confederates to political office in the Southern states. When Stevens died in 1868, at the age of 76, the Reconstruction policies he had championed so ardently were still in place, though they would be sabotaged within a decade.
