Thaddeus Stevens Nineteenth-Century Egalitarian
This was the best rated book on Republican Radical Stevens as near as I could tell. It wasn’t an easy book but I felt I needed to get the other side of the story. The side that kept being told was a classic story of the losers telling it. Twenty and more years after the Civil War ended the South began telling a different story than one of defeat and slavery. It became a story of glory bravery and they even changed the war’s name. It became the War between the States and other more picturesque descriptions.
My Grandfather had no illusions about the war. His next door neighbor was an escaped slave that he surmised had been castrated in slavery. My Grandfather sought his master’s degree in Columbia University in History with the aim of using it be become a school superintendent. He probably was aware of Columbia having a reputation for cutting the South some slack because it was the hotbed of revisionism of the Civil War. Its most famous professors told a story of the defeated South being overrun by greedy northerners helping ex slaves destroy the South. It was the image that perfectly suited America’s first Monster hit movie Birth of a Nation. The great irony for me is that just two years later my Grandfather would become an officer in an all black infantry division during World War 1. He did much to tell a very different story about black soldiers explaining that properly let they were as good as any other. This was not the view of the South or its historians.
The passage that I photographed is about the battle for hearts and minds that began with the days after Lincoln’s assassination. The >>> school of civil war history in Columbia painted radical republicans like Stevens as vengeful in their persecution of the defeated South. Stevens did battle Lincolns successor Vice President Andrew Johnson as both men angled to take over the Republican party. That’s a battle I’ve been losing for my family’s inheritance for the past 30 years. Its not a battle I’m willing to concede.
