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Van Gosse, Bruce Levine. Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice., The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 1, March 2023, Pages 503–504, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad082
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This is a book historians of the United States have long awaited. Thaddeus Stevens may be the most revolutionary figure in American history, yet existing studies of his life miss his significance in profound ways. Bruce Levine takes Stevens’s measure as the “American Robespierre” (as furious southerners attacked him), although in Levine’s telling, the “American Lenin” would be more accurate as Stevens was a leader “unusually able to grasp the nature of a given historical moment, to perceive that moment’s implicit logic, to follow that logic to its conclusions, and to fight with all the considerable energy and skill at his command for the measures to which those conclusions pointed him, no matter how unprecedented or extreme they might appear” (121–22).
Levine has produced a brisk, concise political biography focusing on Stevens’ evolution as a republican revolutionary, from his ideological formation in the antebellum years to his achievements at the center of power in the 1860s. It contains many valuable new insights. Contrary to earlier views, Stevens’ detestation of slaveholders and their political allies came early, with his fellow Antimason William H. Seward noting his “abhorring slavery in every form” in 1830, decrying Jackson’s Democrats as “the subservient party in the North” (44). Crucially, Stevens disdained racialism in any form, seeing no distinction other than a sordid fetishizing of complexion, preferring “the pale” over “the dark face,” as he put it in his maiden House speech in 1850 (74). In the 1860s, he expressed explicit solidarity with Native Americans and Chinese immigrants when even abolitionists often ignored the former and disdained the latter. Throughout, Levine underlines Stevens’s Vermont heritage as the origin for his strikingly nonracial republicanism, in addition to his mother’s Baptist faith.
