Thaddeus Stevens

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Biography

Thaddeus Stevens (4 April 1792 - 11 August 1868), known as "The Great Commoner," was a member of the United States House of Representatives from Pennsylvania. He was a Radical Republican, and one of the dominant figures in Congress, 1861-1868.

Quotes

This talk of restoring the Union as it was, and under the Constitution as it is, is one of the absurdities which I have heard repeated until I have become sick of it. There are many things which make such an event impossible. This Union never shall, with my consent, be restored under the Constitution as it is!...

The Union as it was, and the Constitution as it is — God forbid it! We must conquer the Southern States, and hold them as conquered provinces (Congressional Globe [Thirty-Seventh Congress, Third Session], 9 December 1862, pages 50-51).

The South must be punished under the rules of war, its land confiscated.... These offending States were out of the Union and in the role of a belliger ent nation to be dealt with by the laws of war and conquest.... And I hold and maintain that with regard to all the Southern states in rebellion... the Constitution has no binding influence, and no application (Congressional Globe [Thirty-Seventh Congress, Third Session], page 239).

Four years of bloody and expensive war, waged against the United States by eleven States, under a government called the "Confederate States of America," to which they acknowl edged allegiance, have overthrown all governments within those States which could be acknowledged as legitimate by the Union. The armies of the Confederate States having been conquered and subdued, and their territory possessed by the United States, it becomes necessary to establish governments therein which shall be republican in form and princi ples and form a more "perfect Union" with the parent government....

The slave power made war upon the nation. They declared the "more perfect Union" dissolved — solemnly declared themselves a foreign nation, alien to this republic; for four years were in fact what they claimed to be. We accepted the war which they tendered and treated them as a government capable of making war. We have conquered them, and as a conquered enemy we can give them laws; can abolish all their municipal institutions and form new ones.... If the rebel States have never been out of the Union, any attempt to reform their State institutions, either by Congress or the President, is rank usurpation (speech delivered in Lancaster, Pennsylvania on 6 September 1865; quoted by New York World, 11 September 1865).

Unless the law of nations is a dead letter, the late war between two acknowledged belligerents severed their original compacts, and broke all the ties that bound them together. The future condition of the conquered power depends on the will of the conqueror. They must come in as new States or remain as conquered provinces. Congress — the Senate and House of Representatives, with the concurrence of the President — is the only power that can act in the matter....

If the so-called "confederate States of America" were an independent belligerent, and were so acknowledged by the United States and by Europe, or had assumed and maintained an attitude which entitled them to be considered and treated as a belligerent, then, during such time, they were precisely in the condition of a foreign nation with whom we were at war; nor need their independence as a nation be acknowledged by us to pro duce that effect....

...[I]t is something worse than ridiculous to hear men of respectable standing attempting to nullify the law of nations, and declare the Supreme Court of the United States in error, because, as the Constitution forbids it, the States could not go out of the Union in fact....

The theory that the rebel States, for four years a separate power and without representation in Congress, were all the time here in the Union, is a good deal less ingenuous and respectable than the metaphysics of Berkeley, which proved that neither the world nor any human being was in existence. If this theory were simply ridiculous it could be forgiven; but its effect is deeply injurious to the stability of the nation. I can not doubt that the late confederate States are out of the Union to all intents and purposes for which the conqueror may choose so to consider them.

But on the ground of estoppel, the United States have the clear right to elect to adjudge them out of the Union. They are estopped both by matter of record and matter in pais. One of the first resolutions passed by seceded South Carolina in January, 1861, is as follows: "Resolved, unanimously, That the separation of South Carolina from the Federal Union is final, and she has no further interest in the Constitution of the United States; and that the only appropriate negotiations between her and the Federal Government are as to their mutual relations as foreign States." Similar resolutions appear upon all their State and confederate government records. The speeches of their members of Congress, their gener als and executive officers, and the answers of their government to our shameful suings for peace, went upon the defiant ground that no terms would be offered or received except upon the prior acknowledgment of the entire and permanent independence of the confeder ate States. After this, to deny that we have a right to treat them as a conquered belligerent, severed from the Union in fact, is not argument but mockery (Congressional Globe [Thirty-Ninth Congress, First Session], page 73).