Republicans of today don't match forebears
Thaddeus Stevens was the craggy face of an enlightened circle of legislators opposed to slavery and committed to racial equality in frothy 19th-century America.
Under his leadership in Congress, the United States abolished slavery, recruited Black soldiers, expanded citizenship through constitutional amendments, and created Reconstruction. Stevens, joined by Charles Sumner, Benjamin Butler, Henry Winter Davis and others, were Republicans, a party formed in the 1850s. They were steadfast in their commitment to abolitionism, egalitarianism and Black enfranchisement. They saw the immorality of slavery early and denounced it bitterly. Vilified in the South, Stevens and company were called “Radical Republicans.”
Today that term suggests a cause less noble. Stevens and his partisans are as different in vision from their contemporary descendants as Abraham Lincoln is from Donald Trump.
Stevens was born in Danville, Vt., which celebrates him with a historic plaque. He grew up lame (he had a club foot), poor and fatherless. As a lawyer from Pennsylvania in the hothouse of antebellum America, Stevens demanded an end to slavery. He rejected compromise. He knew slavery would mean civil war, and afterwards, he wanted to uproot every last vestige of white supremacy in the South.
When President Andrew Johnson, a racist, tried to undo Lincoln's reforms, Stevens led the successful campaign to override Johnson's veto. He voted to impeach Johnson, who escaped conviction by one vote in the Senate.
Stevens's reluctance to yield — his gnarled contrariness — made him unpopular in life and death. Yet he clearly saw the reality of the South: A seething dominion of hatred that only radicalism — not moderation — could cure. For that, historians were harsh.
Stevens was “a profile in courage,” though
John F. Kennedy did not call him one in his prize-winning book of that title. A week after Medgar Wiley Evers was assassinated in Mississippi in 1963, however, Kennedy reconsidered.
“I don't understand the South,” he said. “I'm coming to believe that Thaddeus Stevens was right. I had always been taught to regard him as a man of vicious bias, but when I see this sort of thing, I wonder how else you can treat them.”
How else can you treat the South? Stevens could not know that Reconstruction would be reversed, that slavery would be supplanted by segregation, that the South would dismantle what the Civil War had decided. At another level, it is as if he foresaw the triumph of the mythology of “The Lost Cause,” the monuments and the memorials, the Confederate battle flag.
He saw the South much like Henry Morgenthau saw Nazi Germany. Fearing Germany's revival after the war, Morgenthau wanted to destroy its industry and make it an agrarian society. Morgenthau was wrong, Stevens was right.
Today's “Radical Republicans” are not America's better angels. They include racists, nativists, seditionists and conspiracists. They are Senate Republicans who signal they will not confirm anyone Joe Biden nominates to the Supreme Court. They are House Republicans who deny the legitimacy of the 2020 election, ignore the insurrection of Jan. 6 and whisper about impeaching Kamala Harris.
Their cousins in Georgia, Texas, Arizona and beyond are restricting access to minority voting. More ominously, they are removing independent officials who refused to challenge the 2020 results.
It isn't a secret: The Republicans are trying to leverage their advantage in the next election. Or, to throw it into the state legislatures that they control, so they can annul the results.
Predictably, Republicans this week blocked a bill in the Senate to strengthen voting rights nationally. If the Republicans can steal the next election, they will.
The Grand Old Party is no longer grand, far from Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. Republicans are unabashed authoritarians. They are terrified that changing demography will unseat them.
A century and a half ago, Thaddeus Stevens and his high-minded loyalists tried to hold America to its promise. They wanted to save the Republic and its fragile democracy.
Today, their heirs seek to destroy it — and may.