“Equality of Man Before His Creator”: Thaddeus Stevens’s Struggle for Radical Reconstruction on December 4, 1865

Open Access
- Author:
- Royer, Curtis M
- Area of Honors:
- American Studies (Harrisburg)
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- John Rogers Haddad, Thesis Supervisor
John Rogers Haddad, Thesis Honors Advisor
Anne Verplanck, Faculty Reader
Dr. Ronald Walker, Faculty Reader - Keywords:
- Thaddeus Stevens
Stevens
Thaddeus
Civil War
Reconstruction
Andrew Johnson
Johnson
Andrew
Fourteenth Amendment
1865
Congress
Radical Republican
Politics
History
American Studies - Abstract:
- December 4, 1865 remains one of the least remembered dates in American history. Yet, the implications of the events of that day affect us even today. United States Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania (1792-1868) worked with fellow Republicans in the House of Representatives to bar Southern representative-elects from taking their seats in Congress on December 4, 1865. This thesis explores December 4 as a pivotal date to both the United States and the career of Stevens. If the Southern representative-elects, some of whom were former Confederate officials, were permitted to take their seats in Congress they may have worked with Northern Democrats to reverse the progress made by Republicans during the Civil War by permanently manipulating the Thirteenth Amendment to reinstate a form of slavery. Southern legislatures had already begun the process of recreating a slave-like system with the black codes. Stevens found these codes to be highly disturbing. Instead, Stevens consulted the Constitution and effectively barred the Southern delegation from Congress. In this thesis I argue that Stevens was the key player behind keeping the Southern representative-elects from taking their seats and that without his actions on December 4, 1865, Radical Republicans would not have enacted their version of Reconstruction. Thus, there would not have been a Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which played a significant role in twentieth and twenty-first century Supreme Court cases like Brown v. Board of Education, Loving v. Virginia, and Obergefell v. Hodges.