CHAPTER IV

THADDEUS STEVENS: A PORTRAIT

MORE than one stranger

I

to Lancaster appeared that summer,

to find his way up a narrow, tree-lined street in the old section to a three-and-a-half-story red-brick house with two front doors, one opening into the home and the other into the office of Thad Stevens. In the same block was an old hotel, and at the corner was a beer saloon. For a generation, politicians had frequented the office day and night, and in the home the master had spent many years with his books. On summer evenings he might have been seen frequently sitting on the steps, which were directly on the street, or walking along leisurely under the trees, or examining the fruit trees in the back yard. Perhaps a comely mulatto woman would respond to the knocker and usher the visitor into the presence of the grim old man in an easy-chair.

If the visitor had seen the portrait of Stevens by Eicholtz, painted when the old man was in his thirty-eighth year, he would have been shocked at the face and figure before him in the room. He would have expected a handsome and patrician face, with bright, beaming eyes denoting some softness and sentiment, and some elegance of apparel, with ruffled shirt-front and black stock, and would have been disappointed. The charm of those earlier years had long since fled. The softness, suggesting sentiment, was gone. The old man in the chair was much thinner of face, his lips no longer full, but hard and set, the cheeks pale rather than of a healthy glow, and albeit the hair was black, it was but a wig imitation.1 If he rose to meet the guest, it would have been observed that his movements were stiff and angular, for this was an old man of seventy-three. He now availed himself of the privilege of old age to be less careful of his appearance, and he was clearly not concerned with the concealment of his defects. When an old abolitionist woman impulsively requested a lock of his hair, the 1 Callender, 144,

old man handed her his wig with a sardonic grin.1 An illness had left him bald as a plate, but it was a luxurious mass of black hair that covered his nakedness.

Despite a crippled foot, he had, in earlier years, been an impressive figure, almost six feet in height, and with the fine muscular development of an athlete. In truth, he had been a famous horseman in his time, and he abandoned the saddle and the pleasures of the canter only when old age decreed. As a young man at Gettysburg, he kept his own hunters and rode to hounds, and long afterward old mountain men loved to tell of his daring in the chase. And he had been a lusty swimmer, too, boasting in his prime that he could have swum the Bosphorus as easily as Byron, who also had a club foot. But the canter, the chase, the swim were no longer for the bitter old man who sat that summer in his house in Lancaster meditating war. His mouth was large and expressive of his biting tongue and sarcastic nature. The upper lip was thin. A prominent aquiline nose gave him the look of an angry eagle - a dominating, if not a domineering aspect. His head was large and well-formed. His countenance had more the stony features of authority than sweetness,' said a friend.3

After an hour's conversation, the visitor would have left with an unsatisfied curiosity as to the character of this amazing man. Despite the debilitated body, he would have been impressed with the tremendous force that flowed from it, and with the bitterness of its spirit. And, in a sense, it was the most disturbing bitterness imaginable, for there was something of a wild gayety about it. Here, surely, was an untamed eagle, or an old man strangely unsoftened by the years. Had he not said with a chuckle that he intended to die 'like Nicanor, in harness,' and 'die hurrahing'? 4 And such candor! Cunning this old man might possess, but it was not the cunning of concealment. His worst enemies were to admire and respect him for his frankness; and however offensive to reason some of his convictions, he had the courage to express them without a qualm. He had, said a journalist who often disagreed with him, 'opinions of his own, and a will of his own, and he

never flinched from the duty of asserting them.'1 This man in his den was as much a revolutionist as Marat in his tub. Had he lived in France in the days of the Terror, he would have pushed one of the triumvirate desperately for his place, have risen rapidly to the top through his genius and audacity and will, and probably have died by the guillotine with a sardonic smile upon his face. Living in America when he did, he was to become the most powerful dictatorial party and congressional leader with one possible exception in American history, and to impose his revolutionary theories upon the country by sheer determination.

II

His had been a bitter and an abnormal life. Born in poverty in a Vermont village seventy-three years before Andrew Johnson succeeded to the Presidency, he had but a slight remembrance of his father, who was also a mysterious character. A village shoemaker who seems to have taught his young son how to make the family shoes, he enjoyed a local notoriety as a wrestler. Then he passes out of the picture. Some say that he was killed in the War of 1812; others that he just tired of the chains of domesticity and wandered away never to be heard of any more. Just as gossip has explained Lincoln's genius by giving him various fathers among the great, and accounted for Andrew Johnson's power in the same graceful manner, it was sometimes said that Talleyrand, meandering about America in 1791, was Stevens's father. Whoever the father, the mother evidently was a woman of strong character, for she appears to have been the one love of Stevens's life. We get glimpses of her flitting about from one sick-room to another ministering to her neighbors and dragging the child along.

It has been suggested by Professor Woodburn it was at these sick-beds that he learned to sympathize with suffering, though tenderness was never to be an obtrusive part of his character where his prejudices were touched. Living remote from wealth and fashion, he early formed an incurable contempt for aristocracy, and this was to determine his political views to a considerable extent. Even at Dartmouth College, where he was an assiduous student, his class consciousness was awakened. 'The democracy rule in 1 The Nation, August 20, 1868.