By Ross Hetrick
When Thaddeus Stevens lost his congressional seat representing Lancaster, PA in 1853, he thought he would never see Congress again. “It is more than probable that hereafter I shall never meet any member here or elsewhere,” Stevens told colleagues in March 1853. “I desire to part with no unfriendly feelings towards any of you,” he said.
Was he ever wrong. He would come back in 1858 as a Republican and he would become the most powerful member of the House of Representatives after the Civil War. But even though he did not hold political office during that interim period, he was very involved in politics, laying the ground work for his comeback.
Stevens had moved from Gettysburg to Lancaster in 1842 to make more money as a lawyer in a larger city to support his money-losing Caledonia iron works near Chambersburg. In 1848 he ran for Congress as a Whig and won. During his first two years, the biggest issue was the Compromise of 1850. Besides bringing California into the Union as a free state and prohibiting the slave trade in Washington, D.C. the measure included the infamous Fugitive Slave Act, which required citizens anywhere in the U.S. to assist slaveholders in capturing fugitive slaves. Of course, Stevens was vehemently against it.
“The distinguished senator from Kentucky [Henry Clay] wishes further to make it the duty of all bystanders to aid in the capture of fugitives; to join the chase and run down the prey,” Stevens said in Congress. “This is asking more than my constituents will ever grant. . . . No law that tyranny can pass will ever induce them to join the hue and cry after the trembling wretch who has escaped from unjust bondage.” Stevens words proved to be prophetic.
On September 11, 1851 a slaveowner in pursuit of fugitive slaves was meet by a self protection group of African Americans near Christiana, a town near Lancaster. The group blew a horn and neighbors came to help them, including four white men. The slaveowner tried to recruit the white men who turned out to be Quakers and they refused, The confrontation ended with the slaveowner being killed and the fugitive slaves escaping. The four Quakers along with other participants were put on trial for treason in Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Stevens was a member of the defense team that got them all off.
Stevens’s opposition to the Compromise of 1850 and his participation in the Christiana Resistance case was too much for the Silver Grays, conservative Whigs, who controlled the party in Lancaster. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, Stevens bowed out of the Whig nomination contest. But then Stevens took one of most controversial actions of his political career, he joined the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic American party, also known as the Know-Nothings.
This would seem completely against Stevens’s principles of tolerance and religious freedom. But it made sense during this time of political party turmoil. The Whigs were being torn apart over the slavery issue and the Republican party was yet to be born. Of course, the Democrat party, the slavery party, was not an option for Stevens. He also had a history of pursuing his own agenda and ignoring the general goals of whatever party he was in.
With the support of the Know-Nothings. Stevens was able to get Anthony E. Roberts elected to Congress in 1854, defeating the Democratic and Whig candidates. Then in 1855 he joined the year-old Republican party, which more closely aligned with Stevens’s decades long crusade against slavery. He then was elected to the House of Representatives in 1858 and became a leader in the effort to legislatively destroy slavery.
Ross Hetrick is president of the Thaddeus Stevens Society, which operates the Thaddeus Stevens Museum at 46 Chambersburg St. in Gettysburg, PA. More information about the Great Commoner can be found at the Society’s website: https://www.thaddeusstevenssociety.com/
