I Speak for Thaddeus Stevens by Elsie Singmaster

First published: 1947

Type of work: Biography

Type of plot: Historical chronicle

Time of work: 1792-1868

Locale: Vermont, Pennsylvania, Washington, D. C.

Principal Characters:

• Thaddeus Stevens, lawyer and statesman
• Sally Morrill Stevens, his mother
• Joshua,
• Morrill, and
• Alanson, his brothers
• Lydia Smith, his housekeeper
• Abraham Lincoln
• Andrew Johnson
• Members Of Congress, the
• Cabinet, and the
• Armed Forces

Critique:

I SPEAK FOR THADDEUS STEVENS is a biography in the form of a novel, a work making understandable as a man the complex and often contradictory character of the famous partisan statesman of the Civil War period. The author tells the story of his life as a series of dramatic episodes, each under its proper date and each presenting some crisis, either a triumph or a defeat, in his private affairs or public career. Much of the material in the book is based upon Stevens letters and papers previously unused by historians; the result is a carefully detailed portrait of the man against the unsettled age in which he lived. A native of Pennsylvania, Elsie Singmaster has presented faithfully in her novels and short stories the regional patterns of Pennsylvania German life and the history of the state through three decisive periods in our national life—the frontier in French and Indian days, the American Revolution, and the Civil War.

The Story:

In a Vermont cabin, on April 4, 1792, neighbor women had looked pityingly at a sleeping young mother while they wrapped the deformed foot of her newborn child. There was no need, however, to pity Sally Morrill Stevens, whose brave spirit was greater than her frail body. She would care for her second son as tenderly as she had looked after little Joshua, his father’s namesake and a cripple at birth. She called the baby Thaddeus, after Thaddeus Kosciusko—a hero’s name.

When Joshua Stevens, shiftless cobbler and surveyor, disappeared at last into the wilderness, there were two more children in the cabin. Morrill and Alanson stood up straight and were quick on their feet, but lame Thaddeus was Sally’s favorite. Ambitious for her sons, she never complained as she worked and planned for their future.

Thaddeus struggled to excel. One day he limped through deep snow, his legs cut and bleeding on the icy crust, to speak before patrons and students of the grammar school in Peacham. His subject was free and universal education. Sensitive because of his own deformity, he learned to hate suffering and to sympathize with the weak. Swimming and riding gave him an athlete’s body. His teachers and books borrowed from John Mattocks, Peacham lawyer, had trained him well by the time he was ready for Dartmouth College. Sally had hoped he would preach. He thought of Webster, already famous, and told her that he wanted to be a lawyer.

Vermont seemed a sparse land to her ambitious sons. Crippled Joshua traveled west with his bride. Thaddeus went to York, Pennsylvania, to teach and read for the law. Too impatient and poor to complete another year’s residence before he could practice in York County, he rode south across the state line and became a member of the Maryland bar.

Returning, he settled in Gettysburg. At first no clients found their way to his office and few Gettysburgians wanted to hear his frank opinions on slavery and education, but children flocked around him to hear his stories of the Vermont woods. Blacks watched him on the street and whispered that he was their friend as well.

Defense lawyer in a murder trial, he lost his first case in court, but his townsmen praised him after he made his plea for justice and mercy. As his reputation grew men could measure his success by his fine house in Gettysburg and the great tract of mountain land providing ore and charcoal for Caledonia Forge, of which he was a partner. Sally Stevens now owned a fine farm in Peacham; he gave openhandedly to his brothers—Joshua in Indiana; Morrill, a doctor in Vermont; Alanson, with Sally on the farm. He fought Masons and Jackson Democrats and men cheered all night under his windows when he was elected to the Legislature. He was forty-one. There was still time for Washington, for Congress, perhaps the White House.

In 1837 word came to him in Philadelphia that the free education bill was about to be repealed. By train and stagecoach he hurried to Harrisburg and risked his political future with his proposed amendment to strike out the bill of repeal and to insert after the clause, “Be it enacted,” the words “To establish a General System of Education by Common Schools.” Speaking on that motion, he saved the free school system of Pennsylvania.

His fame spread. Men respected and hated and feared the blunt, shrewd orator whose voice was heard everywhere. In Philadelphia, during the Buckshot War, a mob attacked an assembly hall and he and his friends escaped through a window. Campaigning for Harrison, he hoped for a Cabinet appointment. But Harrison died and Tyler forgot campaign promises. Ruined by his partner’s failure in 1842, he moved to Lancaster. There he made money and paid his debts. Young men begged the opportunity to read law in his office. He became an ironmaster, owner of a great furnace at Caledonia. Sometimes Washington seemed a long way off. He waited.

Free-Soil Whigs elected him to Congress in 1848. Fighting the compromise measures and the Fugitive Slave Law, he spoke for gentle Sally Stevens, for old John Mattocks, lover of justice, for slaves fleeing northward along the Underground Railroad. He defended the three white men and thirty-eight Negroes accused after the death of a Maryland farmer in the Christiana riot; later he was to recall how Lucretia Mott and other Quakers had dressed the Negroes alike, to the confusion of witnesses and prosecution. Retired from Congress, he traveled to Vermont in 1854. Sally Stevens was dead, Morrill and Alanson before her. The slander of his enemies could never hurt her now. Joshua was soon to die. Thaddeus was sixty-two and failing, but men were mistaken when they said he was too old for public life.

In 1855 he helped to launch the Republican Party in Lancaster. In 1858 he returned to Congress. In Chicago, in 1860, he heard Abraham Lincoln nominated.

He rode the war years like an eagle breasting a whirlwind. Abraham Lincoln was President, but Thaddeus Stevens spoke for the Republican Party. Often impatient with the sad-eyed, brooding man in the White House, he steered through Congress the bills which gave Lincoln men and money to fight the Civil War. Lydia Smith, the decent mulatto at whom men sneered, kept his house on B Street. Sometimes he thought of the Cabinet post or Senate seat he believed his due, but usually more important matters filled his mind. Confederate troops, marching toward Gettysburg, had burned Caledonia Furnace. A nephew died at Chickamauga. Unbowed by personal misfortune, he argued for the Thirteenth Amendment, insisted upon education and suffrage for the Negro. There was little time for the card games he loved; he read more often when he went to bed at night—Shakespeare, Homer, the Bible.

Hating weakness and compromise, he fought Andrew Johnson after Lincoln’s death. Congress, he thundered, should be the sovereign power of the nation. Sick and weak, he proposed Article Eleven by which the House hoped to impeach Johnson. Too ill to walk, he was carried into the Senate to hear that decisive roll call. He heard around him whispers of relief, anger, and despair as the telling votes were cast. Friends asked him if he wished to lie down after his ordeal. He answered grimly that he would not.

Although bitter in defeat, he would not let his fellow Republicans punish Vinnie Ream, the little sculptress involved in Johnson’s trial, and he angrily insisted that she keep her studio in the Capitol. His detractors claimed he was too mean to die when he refused to take to his bed during that hot Washington summer, but by August the end was near. Devoted son, generous kinsman, loyal friend, harsh enemy, he died at midnight on August 11, 1868. The telegraph clicked the news to the world.

Further Critical Evaluation of the Work:

Elsie Singmaster’s I SPEAK FOR THADDEUS STEVENS is less a work of fiction than a work in which fiction and history compete as standard-bearers for the story of humanity’s triumphs and failures. It is the historical novel of the Age of Emancipation and the fictional biography of Thaddeus Stevens, uncompromising champion of the underprivileged and disadvantaged.

In overcoming his own personal weakness, the deformity with which he was born, Thaddeus Stevens found symbolic strength in defending the weak and poor. He championed the rights of Pennsylvanians to have free education, risking his own career in the process; he stood for the rights of black people, and attacked the Fugitive Slave Law when it was politically damaging to do so. Singmaster’s portrait of the man, whose uncompromising opinions were “imbibed with his mother’s milk,” creates a convincing psychological gestalt of Thaddeus Stevens, who became a superior man by overcoming his innate feelings of inferiority.

As a historical novel, I SPEAK FOR THADDEUS STEVENS recreates an earlier age by infusing it with life. The Free-Soil Whigs, Masons, and Jackson Democrats come to life as men in a political drama unfolding before Thaddeus Stevens. Singmaster’s scrupulous use of historical data sheds new light on the Civil War Congress and the struggle for the Thirteenth Amendment. The novel’s climax, the attempted impeachment of Andrew Johnson which failed in the Senate, underscores the tragic theme of Thaddeus Stevens, advocate for the sovereign rights of the people.

Singmaster’s style is unobtrusive and sparse, devoid of rhetorical flourish and pretense. She writes in clear, unelaborate language whose intention is to present, close to reality, the struggle of Thaddeus Stevens against the forces of ignorance and oppression. I SPEAK FOR THADDEUS STEVENS is the very personal statement of Elsie Singmaster about man’s inhumanity to man, and humane forces which can rise to the challenge.