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What was Thaddeus Stevens personality?
Thaddeus Stevens was a fearsome reformer, who never backed down from a fight. Stevens carried the resolutely determined spirit of a fighter with him throughout his life. In 1813, a young Thaddeus Stevens was attending a small college in Vermont. This was well before the time when good fences made good neighbors.
What was unique about Thaddeus Stevens?
Thaddeus Stevens was a Radical Republican leader and one of the most powerful members in the U.S. House of Representatives. He focused much of his political attention on civil rights, eventually helping to draft the 14th Amendment.
Who was Thaddeus Stevens and what did he suggest?
Thaddeus Stevens, (born April 4, 1792, Danville, Vermont, U.S.—died August 11, 1868, Washington, D.C.), U.S. Radical Republican congressional leader during Reconstruction (1865–77) who battled for freedmen’s rights and insisted on stern requirements for readmission of Southern states into the Union after the Civil War …
What happened to Thaddeus Stevens after Lincoln died?
After he died, in 1868, his party decided to honor him by nominating him for reelection to Congress. He won in a landslide. And his most hard-fought battles occurred after Lincoln’s death. “I do not believe, sir, in human perfection,” Stevens said in a speech, “nor in the moral purity of human nature.”
Was Thaddeus Stevens with a black woman?
Stevens was not only a public proponent of full racial equality; he long and defiantly lived his own personal life accordingly. Beginning in 1845, he embarked on a 23-year-long intimate relationship with an African-American woman, Lydia Hamilton Smith.
Why did Thaddeus Stevens want to punish the South?
Slavery. When the war began in April 1861, Stevens argued that the Confederates were revolutionaries to be crushed by force. He also believed that the Confederacy had placed itself beyond the protection of the U.S. Constitution by making war, and that in a reconstituted United States, slavery should have no place.
How did Lincoln legally justify the Emancipation Proclamation quizlet?
In a display of his political genius, President Lincoln shrewdly justified the Emancipation Proclamation as a “fit and necessary war measure” in order to cripple the Confederacy’s use of slaves in the war effort.