From the collection of P. H. Meserve
JOHN SHERMAN
WHO TRIED TO HEAL THE BREACH BETWEEN PRESIDENT JOHNSON AND THE SENATE
THADDEUS STEVENS>
THE LEADING OPPONENT OF THE MOVEMENT TO RESTORE SLAVERY, AND THE MOST BITTER OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON'S ANTAGONISTS
Thus Mr. Stevens' discourse was apt to make him appear a hardened cynic, inaccessible to the finer feelings, and indifferent whether he gave pain or pleasure. But now and then a remark escaped him—I say "escaped him," because he evidently preferred to wear the acrid tendencies of his character on the outside—which indicated that there was behind his cynicism a rich fund of human kindness and sympathy. And this was strongly confirmed by his neighbors at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, his home, where on one of my campaigning tours I once spent a day and a night. With them, even with many of his political opponents,
"old Thad," as they called him, appeared to be eminently popular. They had no end of stories to tell about the protection he had given to fugitive slaves, sometimes at much risk and sacrifice to himself, and of the many benefactions he had bestowed with a lavish hand upon the widows and orphans and other persons in need, and of his generous fidelity to his friends. They did not, indeed, revere him as a model of virtue, but of the occasional lapses of his bachelor life from correct moral standards, which seemed to be well known and freely talked about, they spoke with affectionate lenity of judgment.
When I saw him again in Washington at the opening of the Thirty-ninth Congress, in December, 1865, he looked very much aged since our last meeting, and infirm in health. In repose his face was like a death-mask, and he was carried in a chair to his seat in the House by two stalwart young negroes. There is good authority for the story that once when they had set him down, he said to them, with his grim humor: "Thank you, my good fellows. What shall I do when you are dead and gone?" But his eyes glowed from under his bushy brows with the old keen sparkle, and his mind was as alert as ever. It may be that his age—he was then seventy-four—and his physical infirmities, admonishing him that at best he would have only a few years more to live, served to inspire him with an impatient craving and a fierce determination to make the best of his time, and thus to intensify the activity of his mental energies. To compass the abolition of slavery had been the passion of his life. He had hailed the Civil War as the great opportunity. He had never been quite satisfied with Lincoln, whose policy seemed to him too dilatory. He demanded quick, sharp, and decisive blows.
WILLIAM PITT FESSENDEN
HEAD OF THE JOINT COMMITTEE ON RECONSTRUCTION, WHICH WAS DENOUNCED BY PRESIDENT JOHNSON AS AN "IRRESPONSIBLE CENTRAL DIRECTORY"
Now that the abolition of slavery was actually decreed, he saw President Johnson follow a policy which, in his view, threatened to undo the great work. His scornful anger at Andrew Johnson was equaled only by his contempt for the Republicans who sided with the President. He was bound to defeat this reactionary attempt and to see slavery thoroughly killed beyond the possibility of resurrection, at any cost. As to the means to be employed, he scrupled little. He wanted the largest possible Republican majority in Congress, and to this end he would have expelled any number of Democrats from their seats, by hook or crook. When my old friend and quondam law partner, General Halbert E. Paine, who was chairman of the Committee on Elections in the House, told him that, in a certain contested election case to be voted upon, both contestants were rascals, Stevens simply asked: "Well, which is our rascal?" He said this, not in jest, but with perfect seriousness. He would have seated Beelzebub in preference to the angel Gabriel, had he believed Beelzebub to be more certain than Gabriel to aid him in beating the President's reconstruction policy. His speeches were short, peremptory, and commanding. He bluntly avowed his purposes, however extreme they seemed to be. He disdained to make them more palatable by any art of persuasion, or to soften the asperity of his attacks by charitable circumlocution. There was no hypocrisy, no cant in his utterances. With inexorable intellectual honesty, he drew all the logical conclusions from his premises. He was a terror in debate. Whenever provoked, he brought his batteries of merciless sarcasm into play with deadly effect. Not seldom, a single sentence sufficed to lay a daring antagonist sprawling on the ground amid the roaring laughter of the House, the luckless victim feeling as if he had heedlessly touched a
heavily charged electric wire. No wonder that even the readiest and boldest debaters were cautious in approaching old Thaddeus Stevens too closely, lest something stunning and sudden happen to them. Thus the fear he inspired became a distinct element of power in his leadership—not a wholesome element, indeed, at the time of a great problem which required the most circumspect and dispassionate treatment.