STEVENS, Thaddeus (1792-1868), was born at Peacham, Vermont, U.S., April 4, 1792, graduated at Dartmouth College in 1814, and then settled in Pennsylvania. He soon became a leading lawyer of Lancaster, Pa., so far interested in politics as to be elected by the Whig party to the State legislature for several terms and to the federal house of representatives 1849-63. When the mass of the Northern Whig party went into the new Republican party he went with it, and returned to Washington as a Republican representative in 1859, just before the outbreak of the Civil War. This position he retained until his death, just outlasting the Civil War and reconstruction. During this period of American history he was one of the leading characters. The methods on which he proposed to conduct the war were always drastic: the wholesale confiscation of lands in the seceding States, the disfranchisement of insurgent citizens, the emancipation and enfranchisement of the negroes, all found in him their earliest and warmest advocate. While other parties and leaders were continually shifting their ground, changing their theories of the relations of the Union to the seceding States as the struggle grew more intense, Stevens was consistent from beginning to end. The almost universal theory was that the war was prosecuted only to enforce the constitution; it was therefore incumbent on those who prosecuted it to obey the constitution punctiliously, how- ever puzzling might be the difficulties into which it led them. Stevens, on the contrary, insisted that armed resistance to the constitution had the effect of suspending the constitution within the area of the resistance; that the success of the resistance would show whether the suspension was to be temporary or permanent; and that, in the meantime, those who resisted the constitution were entitled to no rights under it,—in fact, to no rights except those reserved under the laws of war. This was too radical even for the war party; but, at the end of the war, Stevens’s pronounced ability gave him the leadership of the house committee on reconstruction. Even in this position, he never obtained a formal endorsement of his theory; but the practical management of reconstruction shows its strong influence in many features otherwise inexplicable. He lived to take a leading part in the unsuccessful impeachment of President Johnson, and to see the admission of the first instalment of reconstructed States, and died at Washington, August 11, 1868.

Stevens’s life has been written from a friendly and from a hostile point of view,—the former in the volume entitled Thaddeus Stevens, Commoner, the latter in Harris’s Political Conflict in America.

A Life of Robert Stevenson, by his son David Stevenson, appeared in 1878. David Stevenson (1815-86), who along with his brother Alan succeeded to his father’s business, was the author of a Sketch of the Civil Engineering of North America (1838, republished in “Weale’s Series,” 1859), Marine Surveying (1842), Canal and River Engineering (1858; 2d ed. enlarged, 1872; 3d ed. 1886), and of various papers read before learned societies.