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net there is no hope.' The repudiation of Frémont's amazing military emancipation only confirmed Stevens's opinion of Lincoln's impossible weakness.1 Then came the President's plan of compensation. 'The most diluted milk and water proposition ever given to the American nation,' he snorted. And so on for months, with criticisms of Lincoln's policies and methods. Just a momentary flare of enthusiasm for the patient, weary man in the White House when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. But after the fashion of revolutionists, Stevens was pushing ahead. Emancipation was not enough. The South must be punished under the rules of war, its land confiscated, the slaves made equals of the whites nothing less. These offending States were out of the Union and in the rôle of a belligerent nation to be dealt with by the laws of war and conquest.2 Yes, and Congress, not the Executive, must deal with them. Thus, in 1864, Stevens was forcing the fighting against Lincoln, culminating in the Wade-Davis Bill, its passage, and the pocket veto and the President's proclamation of explanation. 'What an infamous proclamation!' wrote Stevens to a friend.

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At the moment the bullet of Booth closed the career of Lincoln, he was less the leader of his party than Thad Stevens.

V

Such the background of the old man meditating, in Lancaster in the summer of 1865, a war on Johnson. This was his career: what of his character? Like all human beings, he was not all white nor black.

3

His political character was that of a misanthrope, and he could have smiled indifferently upon the parliamentary methods of Walpole. He once replied to a fellow partisan who said his conscience would not permit him to take a certain course: 'Conscience, indeed! Throw conscience to the devil and stand by your party.' Having little faith in his fellow men, he was convinced that all were governed by their baser and more selfish instincts. He was the perfect cynic. Reproached for a parliamentary trick denounced as a 'most outrageous thing,' he was so much the cynic 1 Woodburn, 183.

2 Congressional Globe, January 8, 1863.

3 Philadelphia Ledger; quoted, Lancaster Intelligencer, January 17, 1866.

that he was not in the least annoyed. 'You rascal,' he replied with his dry grin, shaking his fist playfully under the nose of his accuser, 'if you had allowed me to have my rights, I would not have been compelled to make a corrupt bargain in order to get them.'1 It was characteristic of him not to deny the trickery. He despised hypocrisy. His worst faults were not concealed.

3

This frank indifference to the morals of his strategy made him a dangerous foe in political and congressional struggles. His tremendous power as a party leader lay in the biting bitterness of his tongue and the dominating arrogance of his manner, before which weaker men shriveled. When a colleague dared question the wisdom of his policy, he replied with studied contempt that he did not 'propose either to take his counsel, recognize his authority, or believe a word he says.'2 His flings were consuming flame, his invective terrible to withstand. 'The Almighty makes few mistakes,' he once said in court, inviting attention to the countenance of the defendant. 'Look at that face! What did he ever fashion it for save to be nailed to the masthead of a pirate ship to ride down unfortunate debtors sailing on the high seas of commerce.' 3 One who observed him well thought that 'the intensity of his hatred was almost next to infernal.' There were no neutral tones in his vocabulary. 'I could cut his damn heart out,' he once exclaimed, referring to Webster, after his 7th of March speech. When a friend, conveying the news of John Brown's raid, lamented that he would probably be hanged, Stevens replied, 'Damn him, he ought to hang.' 5 He had no sympathy with failure. Thus there was a hardness about him that made men dread him. Time and again he was to enter a party caucus with sentiment against him to tongue-lash his followers into line. It was easier to follow than to cross him. He had all the domineering arrogance of the traditional boss. He brooked no opposition. Schurz noted even in his conversation, 'carried on with a hollow voice devoid of music... a certain absolutism of opinion with contemptuous scorn for adverse argument.' He was a dictator who handed down his decrees, and woe to the rebel who would reject them.

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2 Reply to Bingham, Congressional Globe, January 28, 1867. Cox, Three Decades, 365. 5 Hensel, 23. • Schurz, II, 214.

On his feet, speaking, there was much about him to awe the spectator. A master of robust Anglo-Saxon speech, he spoke with pith and point, but as a stern master laying down the law. Despite his lame foot, he stood straight as an arrow until extreme old age, and firmly poised. There were few purple patches in his speeches, and yet at times there were flashes of supreme eloquence. The general impression, however, was rather that of force and fire. The coldly stern face, the beetling brows, his underlip protruding with an intimidating defiance, he was neither graceful nor appealing to the sympathies. His power on the platform or in the House was in his awe-inspiring earnestness — that and the impression he conveyed of dignity and authority. He spoke, too, always for a purpose, and went directly to the point. Here a bolt of wit, there of irony, and then a glow of humor- but these were flashes, and he was deep again in his argument or invective. There was a suggestion of cruelty in his wit and something clammy in his humor-like a surgeon joking at his job. Something like the jollity of Marat, it was. 'It smacked of Voltaire.' Gestures he had but few, and these were angular, graceless, jerky, but when he accentuated the intensity of his passion by clasping his long bony hands together in front of him, the effect was dramatic. Thus, unconscious though it may have been, he had art in his delivery -he dramatized himself and his subject. His was distinctly the eloquence of a revolutionary period. An orator who served with him in the House said that 'in the great French struggle, his oratory would have outblazed Mirabeau.' 2 Charles Sumner, with whom oratory was an art, hesitated whether to describe him as an orator or as a debater of the school of Charles James Fox. There was nothing in the Stevens of debate that remotely resembled Fox, and his oratory was so individualistic as to puzzle the imitator of Cicero and Burke.3

1

Staggering on the verge of the grave in the last years of his life, he remained the reigning wit to the end. Even on his death-bed he replied to a visitor's observation on his appearance with the

1 Cox, 365.

2 Schurz, II, 214; Julian, Recollections, 309; Congressional Globe, Donnelly, December 17, 1868; ibid., Senator Morrill, December 18, 1868.

* Congressional Globe, December 18, 1868.

comment that 'it is not my appearance but my disappearance that troubles me.' Unlike Lincoln, he was not a story-teller. His wit and humor were inspired by occurrences about him. He scattered them with a reckless prodigality. Many of his best mots were spoken in running undertones in the course of debate, as the old man moved about the floor, and audible chuckles followed him in his meanderings, to the annoyance of the speaker. 'He daily wasted, in this private and semi-grotesque distribution of mirth, sense, and satire, a capital sufficient, could it have been preserved, to rival almost any of the acknowledged masters among the colloquial wits of this or any other age,' thought Senator Morrill.2 There was a bitter Voltairian flavor to his fun. "They ask us to go it blind,' a speaker in the House was saying, when Stevens convulsed the members with the interpolation, 'It means following Raymond' - one of his pet aversions.3 Dodging an ink bottle thrown at him in Lancaster in a tavern brawl, he dryly said, 'You don't seem competent to put ink to better use.' A perambulating speaker in the House pacing the aisles arrested his attention. 'Do you expect to get mileage for that speech?' he asked, and, turning his back, walked away. Yielding reluctantly to a tiresome member, he fired a Parthian shot: 'I now yield to Mr. B., who will make a few feeble remarks.'

4

The best and most pointed illustration of his humor is found in his apology to Lincoln for an unkind observation on a trait in Cameron. 'You don't mean to say you think Cameron would steal?' asked Lincoln. 'No, I don't think he would steal a red-hot stove.' Finding the reply too good to keep, Lincoln repeated it to Cameron, who indignantly demanded a retraction. Stevens went forthwith to the White House. 'Mr. Lincoln, why did you tell Cameron what I said to you?' he asked. 'I thought it was a good joke and didn't think it would make him mad.' 'Well, he is very mad and made me promise to retract. I will now do so. I believe I told you he would not steal a red-hot stove. I now take that back.'

Thus, in his wit and humor there was always something of a sting. He was amusing with his bow, but his arrows hurt. The

1 Forney, 1, 37.
2 Congressional Globe, December 18, 1868.
'Henry J. Raymond, Boutwell, п, 10.
4 Hensel, 15.

waggery, however, contributed not a little to his prestige in the House. He was picturesque and colorful, able, eloquent, and resourceful, dominating and domineering.

VI

In his daily life he was essentially a man's man, with a sprinkling of the masculine vices and virtues. In his home at Lancaster, he was conspicuously absent from the social affairs of the community. Engrossed in his profession and in politics, he found other means of recreation. Though not given to the vice of quotation, some of his speeches disclosed a mind in contact with the literary classics. He read history and the classics, but little poetry or contemporary fiction.1 It was said that 'he loved Pope's "Essay on Man" more than Siderfin's Reports.' 2 In his sleepingroom, on a table by the bed in which he was wont to read, were usually found copies of Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, Milton, and the Bible. But it is easier to imagine him in the midst of his cronies in his office in the evening, chatting with neighbors in the tree-lined street, or gathered about a table in a smoke-filled room, with cards. Very old men remember that he never visited the homes of the city. His friends knew where to find him. The son of one of his warmest admirers and political lieutenants recalls that his father 'never admired his tastes and companionships,' and that he 'was a gambler and had no social side.' 4 Whenever it was necessary for him to entertain visiting celebrities, he would summon the wife of his close friend Dr. Carpenter, across the street, to receive for him.5

His biographer, while conceding that he gambled, playing poker and other games for money, denies the popular impression that he was an inveterate gambler. There was, nevertheless, long a tradition around Gettysburg that the gambling proclivities of the young there were due to the example Stevens set while living in the community. An unmarried man, with no social life or inclinations, with few if any close associations with women, and living in a town where there was little entertainment outside the

1 Hensel, 25.

* Ibid., Dickey.

2 Globe, December 17, 1868, Woodward.

4 Author's notes at Lancaster.

5 Author's Lancaster notes - recollections of Carpenter's daughter.

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