... provides an anticipated and most welcome update of this anti-racist champion in the age of Black Lives Matter, falling Confederate monuments, and rising calls for transformational policy ... Stevens’s path to wartime racial and economic justice pioneer was a lifetime in the making, and Levine diligently tracks his subject’s decades-long evolution, exploring key developments that other biographers have neglected ... Unlike Abraham Lincoln and others, Stevens was adamant that the Confederate states had in fact left the Union. That secession was illegal, he maintained, did not mean that it had not occurred. Levine masterfully illustrates how Stevens used that fact to justify more sweeping war measures and, eventually, a transformation of Southern society ... Transformed by the interracial demands of working people on the ground, the popular image of Stevens has done a volte-face since the nadir of Jim Crow. Levine’s excellent biography is both the product and culmination of that labor ... exquisite.
Bruce Levine [...] restores [Stevens] fully to his place in the American pantheon with [...] a concise and powerful biography. With a firm grasp on the era’s political history, Mr. Levine pilots us deftly through Stevens’s rise in the Whig Party, his early participation in the antislavery movement, and his part in the founding of the Republican Party, with its opposition to the spread of slavery. He tracks as well the nuances of wartime rivalries and alliances and the fierce battle to enact revolutionary legislation after the war ... Mr. Levine is an unabashed but not uncritical admirer of his subject ... Mr. Levine is a fine guide to Stevens’s political career ... a work that stands as a fitting monument to one of the most formidable gladiators ever to stride the halls of Congress.
Levine has produced a work of popular history. It takes pains to put Stevens’s actions in context and provides background on his early life and the road to civil war. The writing is occasionally clunky but the history is vital. In the end, Reconstruction remained a road not taken, even as Stevens drove the train as fast as he could.
Levine restores Stevens’ reputation and contextualizes his political views ... not a full biography. We learn very little of Stevens’ personal life ... Levine writes in lucid prose with a great depth of understanding so that we see the evolution and occasional backsliding in Stevens’ thinking about race, slavery and economic and social justice. It’s impossible to read this book without seeing a reflection of our own combustible times. In the 1850s, for example, immigration was a hot-button national issue, though the targeted minorities at that time were German and Irish. Levine quotes liberally from Stevens and his contemporaries, allowing the essence of the man to shine through.
Levine’s book isn’t precisely a biography of Stevens. He seems largely uninterested in Stevens as a person, and provides almost no insights into what he was like outside of his documented political opinions and causes. This is a shame, for his personal life and personality partly drove his political life ... More curious, given his focus on the issue of racial justice, is Levine’s silence on Stevens’ relationships, especially his close and enduring tie with his widowed Black housekeeper, Lydia Hamilton Smith, which was widely publicized during his life ... the Stevens inhabiting Levine’s book is curiously inert, even offstage for pages at a time while the author recites (admittedly relevant) legislative history. The character of the man is barely visible in these pages, and it’s a shame that he fails to draw parallels between Stevens’ radical campaign for true equality and our current moment. Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary isn’t the Stevens reboot these urgent times deserve.
Levine takes a fresh approach to the life of abolitionist and congressman Thaddeus Stevens ... Levine’s biography of the South’s much-loathed Northern antagonist is a fine addition to the literature of this ever-relevant era.
Easily the most detailed and important account of Stevens, this well-written biography belongs in every academic library and all other libraries with an emphasis on American history.
... fascinating yet flawed ... Levine is at his best documenting the evolution of Stevens’s views on slavery, from the seeds of abolitionist thinking planted as a student at Dartmouth to his rise in the tentatively anti-slavery faction of the Whig Party in the 1840s, brief alignment with the nativist Know-Nothings in the 1850s, and pivotal role as a leader of the radical Republicans pushing for the Emancipation Proclamation and a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. Though he provides valuable historical context and ably tracks the era’s landmark legislation through Congress and the White House, Levine falls short in explaining how Stevens accrued and exerted his outsized political power. Still, this is an accessible and well-researched introduction to one of the most consequential lawmakers in U.S. history.
