As was the custom, he read law with a York attorney and passed the Maryland bar in 1816. After teaching, Stevens turned to the study of law. Stevens graduated from Caledonia County Academy in Peacham, Vermont, in 1811 and received his bachelor’s of arts degree from Dartmouth College three years later.Ī Dartmouth friend who had moved to York, Pennsylvania, to teach, persuaded Stevens to join him. His father, a drifter, soon left his family but Stevens’ mother, Sarah Morrill Stevens, was determined that her children receive a good education. And in Pennsylvania, his home state for fifty-three of his seventy-six years, Stevens is acclaimed as the father of Pennsylvania’s public education system.īorn two hundred years ago on April 4, 1792, in Danville, Vermont, he was one of four children. Historians of Congress and of the nation’s economy credit Stevens for his masterful legislative leadership, during which he chaired two powerful financial committees.
For his endeavors to secure freedom and civil rights for former slaves and African Americans, he is remembered as a champion of human rights.
Griffith’s classic film Birth of a Nation, character Austin Stoneman is unabashedly modeled on Thaddeus Stevens, complete with clubfoot and wig. Ex-Confederates called him “the scourge of the South,” an epithet which survived into the twentieth century. In his thirty-five year legislative career, Thaddeus Stevens garnered several reputations.
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