Thaddeus Stevens is someone we have all heard about, but not too much. At least until Stephen Spielberg made him the dark hero of his 2012 movie Lincoln.
As the country was going through its Secession Winter after Lincoln was elected Stevens said of the lame duck president that “Buchanan is a very traitor” on December 19, 1860.
In 1816, Stevens opened his law office in Gettysburg at the site of today’s Gettysburg Hotel on Lincoln Square.
In Stevens’s hands is the 14th Amendment.
Sources:
Trefousse, Hans L.. Thaddeus Stevens: Nineteenth-Century Egalitarian (Civil War America) (p. 103). The University of North Carolina Press.
Follow Reconstruction Blog on Social Media:
