Friends,
IN THESE TIMES published in its April 2020 issue a rembrance of Lorraine Honig
who passed away in January, and reported that while on a blind date she met her
future husband Victor Honig. It was 1948 and they were at a May Day March
in support of Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party’s presidential
candidate. What a way to start a relationship.
Kagiso,
Max
Published
on Portside (https://portside.org/)
Thaddeus Stevens, Revolutionary
Bruce
Levine
April
4, 2020
Jacobin
If
Abraham Lincoln was, in historian James McPherson’s apt words, a
“reluctant” revolutionary, Thaddeus Stevens was an eager one. “There was in
him,” Frederick Douglass said of the Radical Republican and Pennsylvania
congressman, “the power of conviction, the power of will, the power of
knowledge, and the power of conscious ability,” qualities that “at last made
him more potent in Congress and in the country than even the president and
cabinet combined.”
An
ardent believer in the “free labor” capitalist society then developing in the
US North, Stevens strove throughout his life both to assist that economic
system’s growth and to rid it and the nation as a whole of “every vestige of
human oppression” and “inequality of rights.” At the national level, he worked
above all to outlaw the ownership of human beings that was central to the
economy, social relations, and politics of the Southern states. Accomplishing
that task, he well knew, would be a huge undertaking. It would require
radically transforming Southern society, stripping the wealthy planter class of
both its most valuable property and the source of its social authority and
political power.
Ruling
classes, however, do not surrender their wealth and power willingly, passively,
or peacefully. Slave state leaders verified that historical truth by launching
an armed rebellion after his antislavery party, the young Republican Party, won
the presidential election of 1860. When that rebellion led to war, Thaddeus
Stevens, by then a Republican leader in the House of Representatives, was one
of the first to grasp the conflict’s implications and the requirements of
defeating the pro-slavery forces.
Although
others in his party attempted to achieve a military victory by restricting the
Union to cautious, conservative methods and goals, Stevens emphatically opposed
them. “We must treat this as a radical revolution,” he insisted, because
“ordinary means cannot quell this rebellion” or “prevent its recurrence.” Only
bold and radical measures striking at the very foundations of the slavery-based
South — and the implementation of those measures with the kind of “ardor which
inspired the French revolution” — would accomplish that.
In Service of the Revolution
In
the wartime US Congress, Stevens fought for strong antislavery and antiracist
laws and policies, measures that Abraham Lincoln and others would only come
around to later. He was one of the first to call for freeing Confederate slaves
and was among the first to insist on the need to recruit black men, free and
slave, into the Union’s previously lily-white armies. He pushed for the
permanent abolition of slavery — not only in the rebellious states but
throughout the United States — a year before Lincoln endorsed that idea.
When
the South was finally defeated, Stevens saw in the ensuing tasks of
“Reconstruction” an opportunity to bring the country’s laws and government into
fuller accord with the Declaration of Independence’s assertion of human
equality. He demanded civil and political rights for African Americans, urging
the federal government to use all the force at its disposal to defend and
enforce those rights against white-supremacist terrorism. (They were eventually
codified in the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments,
whose enforcement the modern Civil Rights Movement would demand a century
later.) When Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, allied himself after the war
with the South’s white elite in order to restore and reinforce white supremacy,
Stevens pushed the House to impeach the president. Only the resistance of more
conservative Republicans in the Senate prevented the Radical Republican from
getting his wish.
Although
trained as a lawyer, Stevens was not especially concerned with staying within
the four corners of the law or even the Constitution. His north star was the
needs of the revolution. He justified confiscating Confederate property and
slaves, for instance, by arguing that the seizures were necessary to suppress
the planters’ rebellion. Whether an action was moral or immoral, he argued,
depended upon the ends that it served and on the particular context in which
the action occurred. Stevens was not rejecting morality as a guide. But he held
that whether an action was moral or immoral depended upon the ends that it
served, on the particular context in which the action occurred. Implicit in
this line of thinking, of course, was a belief that an appropriate end dictates
and justifies the means needed to achieve it.
Then
and now, this claim is commonly deplored in the name of absolute standards of
right and wrong that transcend time, place, and circumstance. But Thaddeus
Stevens considered his own, more practical, understanding of the relationship
between ends and means both irresistible and unassailable. His was the same
moral compass that revolutionary forces throughout history have commonly
utilized.
Stevens
found legal support for his approach in “the laws of war,” as explicated by the
eighteenth-century Swiss scholar Emer de Vattel. The United States was in a
fight for its very life, Stevens argued, invoking Vattel, and it was obliged to
do whatever was necessary for victory. But when the war itself was won, Stevens
simply modified his argument. Having suppressed the rebellion and begun
emancipation, the Union must secure its wartime accomplishments and continue
“perfecting” the republic by ensuring equal rights for all, black and white.
That goal was the sole standard against which the rightness or wrongness of
government action must be judged.
Some
worried that such reasoning could also justify tyranny. Stevens responded by
directing attention back to the specific ends being sought in each case. That
was the way to evaluate the legitimacy of the means being justified. Thus, he
noted, both the wartime Union and the leaders of the pro-slavery rebellion
claimed extraordinary governmental powers. Must we judge both sets of claims to
be of equal merit, Stevens asked. Of course not, he continued. We uphold one
claim and reject the other because of the very different ends that each
actually serves. In the Union’s case, he said, extraordinary “power is
granted for good,” while in the Confederacy’s case, extraordinary power is
“seized for mischief.”
Stevens’s
ends-based argument reappeared in his impeachment crusade against Andrew
Johnson. While the Pennsylvania representative occasionally gave lip service to
the narrow framework of other Republicans — who claimed that
to be impeached a president must violate a specific law — Stevens’s
core motive for trying to remove Johnson from office was not that he was a
lawbreaker. Nor was Stevens animated by his personal distaste for the man,
although Stevens had indeed come to despise Johnson. (When another congressman
tried to excuse the president on the grounds that he was, after all, “a
self-made man,” Stevens replied acidly that he was “glad to hear it, for it
relieves God Almighty of a heavy responsibility.”)
But
at bottom, Stevens was far less concerned with punishing a villain or
penalizing past crimes than with clearing a path for future positive action. As
with the extraordinary measures that he had championed during the war, that is,
Stevens shaped his Reconstruction policies with less concern for the formal
legalities involved than for the ends he deemed urgent.
He
thus told his party’s caucus in early January 1867 (according to a reporter’s
summary) that Republicans needed to impeach Johnson because “it was impossible
to reconstruct the South with Andrew Johnson as President.” When a Democratic
congressman denounced impeachment’s motives as political, Stevens agreed. The
fight to oust Johnson, he readily acknowledged, was “wholly political” in
purpose — it was, in other words, indissolubly bound up with a struggle over
government policy. Johnson’s removal was necessary for the implementation of
policies that would “protect . . . the liberty and happiness of a mighty
people” and “take care that they progress in civilization and defend themselves
against every kind of tyranny.”
Thaddeus Stevens’s Radical Proposal
More
conservative members of Stevens’s party not only blocked Johnson’s impeachment.
They also killed one of the congressman’s most radical and potentially
transformative initiatives.
After
the war, Stevens called upon the federal government to confiscate lands owned
by the Southern elite and give them to former slaves as small farms. Doing
so, he argued, would provide at least a measure of justice to the “four
millions of injured, oppressed, and helpless men, whose ancestors for two
centuries have been held in bondage” and forced to perform the labor that paid
for the land in question. Creating and safeguarding a democratic society,
Stevens argued further, demanded such a measure. “It is impossible that any
practical equality of rights can exist,” Stevens explained in the fall of
1865, “where a few thousand men monopolize the whole landed property.” For “how
can republican institutions, free schools, free churches, free social
intercourse exist in a mingled community of nabobs and serfs?”
As
a party floor leader in the House of Representatives whose initially unpopular
proposals had often proved essential, Stevens had won great authority among
many fellow Republicans. But very few of them were willing to follow his lead
on this issue. Just one day after Stevens introduced a land-reform bill, the
House overwhelmingly rejected it. More than two-thirds of the Republicans who
voted (including even some members of the party’s radical wing) joined Democrats
in opposition, and another ten Republicans abstained.
Why?
Because most Republican leaders — staunch champions of “free
labor” capitalist society — refused to cancel the
private-property rights of plantation owners. The challenge of treason and
armed rebellion had eventually reconciled them to the abolition of a form of
property — human property — that they already
considered illegitimate and even sinful. But they balked at infringing,
especially in peacetime, upon claims to another form of property — private
property in land — that remained as close to their hearts as
ever. Many also feared that if black farmers were granted land, they would
refuse to use it to grow cotton (a crop so closely associated with slavery),
thereby harming New England’s important textile firms.
More
broadly still, Republican leaders and their business-backers worried that
redistributing property to assist exploited and impoverished people would set a
dangerous precedent, one that might encourage similar demands in the North.
After all, warned the Republican New York Times, calls to seize
property and give it to the poor posed “a question . . . of the fundamental
relation of industry to capital.” So “if Congress is to take cognizance of the
claims of labor against capital” in this case, then “sooner or later, if begun
at the South, it will find its way into the cities of the North.”
A
Boston editor expressed similar anxiety. Attacking landed aristocracies, he
wrote, “is two-edged,” since “there are socialists who hold that any aristocracy,”
including the North’s own economic elite, is anathema. Stoking these fears
among capitalists and their newspaper allies was an unprecedented wave of labor
organizing and worker strikes in the North that was just then cresting.
The
same aversion to labor radicalism would later fuel Northern Republicans’ turn
against Reconstruction as a whole, thereby leaving freed people to the tender
mercies of a reinvigorated and vengeful Southern white elite. As a result, the
fight to further democratize US society was thrown back, and the Second
American Revolution was left unfinished.
Democratizing America
In
his last year of life, 1868, Thaddeus Stevens already thought he saw that
outcome on the horizon. Suffused with gloom, he told a writer that his
principal “regret is that I have lived so long and so uselessly.”
Others,
however, held his achievements in higher regard. Some who did so could not yet
foresee the defeats that lay ahead. Others, because they understood that such
defeats would not be total, that key achievements — especially the abolition of
outright slavery and all that implied — would endure. And still others, because
they believed that the gains that survived and the example that Stevens and
other radicals had set would help future generations to reconquer lost ground.
The
Civil Rights Movement of the twentieth century did accomplish some of that. But
the task of genuinely democratizing US society — especially by
doing away with all forms of racial discrimination and oppression and assisting
those victimized by it to overcome its powerful and poisonous legacy — remains
before us. The kind of dedication and boldness that Thaddeus Stevens displayed
in his lifetime will serve us well as we undertake that work.
Bruce
Levine is the J. G. Randall Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the
University of Illinois. Simon & Schuster will publish his latest
book, Thaddeus Stevens: The Making of a Revolutionary, in January
of 2021.
Jacobin is
a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on
politics, economics, and culture.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt. 206, Baltimore,
MD 21212. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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