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Thaddeus Stevens was a radical Republican congressional leader in the United States during Reconstruction (1865–1877) who fought for the rights of freedmen and insisted on stringent criteria for the readmission of Southern states into the Union following the Civil War. He was born in Danville, Vermont, on April 4, 1792, and died in Washington, D.C. on August 11, 1868. (1861–65).
- Stevens was the driving force behind the exclusion of the South's customary senators and representatives when Congress convened in December 1865. He contributed significantly to the creation of the military rebuilding bills of 1867 as well as the Fourteenth (due process) Amendment to the Constitution as a member of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction. Considering President Andrew Johnson to be "soft" on the South, he proposed the impeachment resolution (1868) and presided over the committee charged with drafting the charges of impeachment. During this time, Stevens pushed for the seizure of Southern plantations from their owners, the division of some of the land among freedmen, and the use of the remaining funds to pay off the country's war debt. This confiscation scheme, however, was unsuccessful.
- He joined the newly created Republican Party in the middle of the decade, which resisted the expansion of slavery into the western regions. He was then elected to Congress once again (1859–68), where he established himself as the "natural leader, who accepted his post by general accord." He exercised this leadership through his legislative prowess, caustic eloquence, and the perks that came with being the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and eventually the Appropriations Committee.
- Stevens rose to prominence with the Radical Republicans after the war as one of their most ardent advocates for the rights of the black masses. He said that the seceded states were in the status of "conquered provinces," to which the restrictions of the Constitution did not apply, in light of the restoration to power of traditional white Southern leadership.
- In failing health, Stevens requested that he be buried among Negroes resting in a cemetery in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. On his tombstone were carved the words he had composed, explaining that he had chosen this place so that he might “illustrate in death” the principle he had “advocated throughout a long life”; namely, “Equality of man before his Creator.”
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