Special poetry edition
Thaddeus Stevens Society November 9 meeting to include tribute dinner to Bradley Hoch
Special poetry edition
Thaddeus Stevens Society November 9 meeting to include tribute dinner to Bradley Hoch
How to keep the Thaddeus Stevens museum open forever
September 2025
By Ross Hetrick
If you want the Thaddeus Stevens museum in Gettysburg to survive forever, you should contribute to the Thaddeus Stevens Society "forever fund" during the Adams County Community Foundation's Giving Spree .
The Giving Spree is an annual event that raises money for 111 charities in Adams county. The Thaddeus Stevens Society is one of those organizations and we are asking people to donate to our endowment fund with the Community Foundation, which is called the "Forever" fund. The big day for the Giving Spree is November 6 when people can make donations at the Wyndham Hotel in Gettysburg or online at ACCFGivingSpree.org.
Before the event, donors can get donation forms and mail them in. Forms are available at the Thaddeus Stevens Museum at 46 Chambersburg Street in Gettysburg or by emailing info@thaddeusstevenssociety.com with your name and address. You may also want to consider making donations to the other worthwhile charities listed on the form. You do not have to be rich to donate. The Community Foundation will take donations as small as $1.
It is absolutely necessary that the museum endowment fund continues to grow to ensure the long term survival of the museum. Due to the generosity of our supporters, the Stevens fund now stands at $31,000. We get a small percent of this each year with the rest continuing to grow from investment returns. But we need a lot more in order to substantially support the museum. It is something that should have been done a hundred years ago.
People living from the 1860s to the early part of the 20th century, would have thought Thaddeus Stevens would be remembered as well as Abraham Lincoln. Major newspapers devoted their entire front pages to his death, schools throughout Pennsylvania were named after him, veteran clubs were named in his honor and for a brief period of time there was a Thaddeus Stevens Club in New York city. Music was written about him. He was a super star.
But no statues of Stevens were erected and no museums to his memory were created. At the same time, ex-Confederates, their descendants and supporters were actively vilifying Stevens through books and movies. And they won. By the middle of the 20th century Stevens was all but forgotten.
This has turned around somewhat in the last 25 years and there are now two statues of Stevens in Gettysburg and Lancaster and a museum in Gettysburg and another one slated to open next year in Lancaster. But the Gettysburg museum, which is essential to preserving Stevens's memory, could disappear in future decades if it does not have a strong financial foundation.
So to all you Thaddeus Stevens admirers, affectionately called Thaddites, please take the time to get the donation form either from the museum or by sending an email to info@thaddeusstevenssociety.com. Then write down your donation and check off the "Forever" box and mail it in. Future Thaddites will thank you.
Ross Hetrick is president of the Thaddeus Stevens Society, which operates the Thaddeus Stevens Museum at 46 Chambersburg St. in Gettysburg, PA. The Society also participates in the Adams County Giving Spree, which will be held on November 6. More information about the Great Commoner can be found at the society's website: https://www.thaddeusstevenssociety.com/
By Mike Barton
We know Stevens best when he was old and sick and when with grim and awful courage he made the American Congress take the last step which it has ever taken towards democracy. The abolition-democracy. . . began its moral fight against slavery in the thirties and forties and, gradually transformed by economic elements concluded it during the war. The object and only real object of the Civil War in its eyes was the abolition of slavery, and it was convinced that this could be accomplished only if the emancipated Negroes became free citizens and voters. . . In advocacy of these things it reached the highest level of self-sacrificing statesmanship ever attained in America; and two of the greatest leaders of the ideal, Stevens and Sumner, voluntarily laid down their lives on the altar of democracy and were eventually paid, as they must have known they would be paid, by the widespread contempt of America.
W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935)
But what earthly glory is there equal in lustre and duration to that conferred by education?. . . build not your monuments of brass or marble, but make them of ever-living mind!
Thaddeus Stevens, 1835 Speech to Pennsylvania House on free public schools
Education and perfect religious freedom are the foundation of all true liberty.... How dangerous, therefore, is the apparently pious doctrine that the "Christian Religion is a part of the common law!" If it be true, all who disbelieve that religion are habitual breakers of the law. The Jew, the Hindoo, the Pagan are perpetual malefactors...beyond the protection of the law... (Under this doctrine an English King) after robbing all the Jews of the Kingdom of all their wealth, either sent them to death or banished them from the Empire...Those who have a sincere regard for the Christian Religion can fear no greater evil to it than to have it mingled with the affairs of State. Those who love civil liberty must shudder at the idea that this doctrine is ever to prevail in this Republic.
Thaddeus Stevens, 1848, legal brief and pamphlet on religious freedom
From my earliest youth I was taught to read the Declaration of Independence and to revere its sublime principles. As I advanced in life and became somewhat enabled to consult the writings of the great men of antiquity, I found in all their works which have survived the ravages of time and come down to the present generation, one unanimous denunciation of tyranny and slavery, and eulogy of liberty.. Homer, Aeschylus the great Greek tragedian, Cicero, Hesiod, Virgil, Tacitus and Sallust, in immortal language; all denounced slavery as a thing which took away half the man and degraded human beings and sang peans in the noblest strains to the goddess of liberty. And my hatred of this infernal institution and my love of liberty was further inflamed as I saw the teachings of Socrates and the divine inspiration of Jesus.
Thaddeus Stevens, January 13, 1865 speech to US House
Demagogues of all parties, even some high in authority gravely shout, “This is the white man's government." What is implied by this? That one race of men are to have the exclusive right forever to rule this nation and exercise all acts of sovereignty, while all other races and nations and colors are to be their subjects and have no voice in making the laws and choosing the rulers by whom they are to be governed? Wherein does this differ from slavery except in degree? Does this not contradict all the distinctive principles of the Declaration of the Independence?
Thaddeus Stevens, December 18 1865, speech to US House
I had another proposition (made December 4, 1865) which I hope may again be brought forward. It is this: All national and state laws shall be equally applicable to every citizen, and no discrimination shall be made on account of race or color. There is the genuine proposition; that is the one I love; that is the one I hope before we separate, we shall have educated ourselves up to the idea of adopting, and that we shall have educated our people up to the point of ratifying.
Thaddeus Stevens, January 31, 1866, speech to US House
In my youth, in my manhood, in my old age, I had dreamed that when any fortunate chance should have broken up for awhile the foundation of our institutions, and released us from obligations the most tyrannical that ever man imposed in the name of freedom, that the intelligent, pure and just men of this Republic, true to their professions, and their consciences, would have so remodeled all our institutions as to have freed them from every vestige of human oppression, of inequality of rights, of the recognized degradation of the poor, and the superior caste of the rich. In short that no distinction would be tolerated in this purified Republic but what arose from merit and conduct. This bright dream has vanished "like the baseless fabric of a vision."
Thaddeus Stevens, June 13, 1866, speech to US House of Representatives Quoted in part in Appellant's Brief at 94, Brown v. Board of Ed., 347 U.S. 483 (1954)
I do this out of respect to the memory of my mother to whom I owe whatever little prosperity I have had on earth...
Thaddeus Stevens, 1868, last will and testament
PRELUDE
My dreams are haunted
By the beginning of tragedy,
After the fall of Troy,
A beacon fire in the night
Igniting the mountaintops
To send a message
To a queen and mother
From her husband the king,
He had achieved the goal
For which he had murdered their daughter,
Iphigenia on an altar,
As counseled by a priest to appease
A virgin goddess of hunting,
And charm
The howling winds off Aulis
The conquest of a city,
Burned to the ground,
A people murdered and enslaved,
Countless soldiers dead
Stripped of their armor,
A chained concubine prophesying death,
Rewards for a king,
Who would sacrifice his daughter,
Forsaking all his human majesty
For wealth and power,
Inherited ignorance,
Ancestral fear,
Who was once a god,
Buried under the atrocities
With his catalogue of desperate arts
That had made us human,
The myth of a god
Sacrificing himself for love of Man,
Mocked by the myth of gods
Made in the image of those few among us
Who sacrifice children
Standing alone
In the night,
The Queen and mother
Saw the beacon fires
Marching towards her
Across the dark mountains,
Beneath the irrelevant stars,
Relentless, majestic,
She knew their meaning,
But unafraid,
Stood silently watching,
And dreamed of other worlds
The fires on the mountains
Died out one by one
Drawing in their burden
Of true darkness behind them,
She turned away
And entered into
The desperate sorrow of her home
To try to prepare
A just welcome
For the king and his gods,
For which she must have known
She would one day be murdered
By her only son,
Whom she had sent away
Too late to save,
A child sacrificed
To his heritage and condemned
To return to his boyhood home to perform
The sacrifice of his mother
In the name of his father,
The daughter killing, sister killing father,
Forsaking all his human majesty
For wealth and power,
Inherited ignorance,
Ancestral fear,
Promethius,
Who was once our creator,
Now an embarrassment
To the dominion of aristocratic gods
And their families of corpses,
Still watching from other worlds,
The murdered mythology of a human rebellion
Still haunting a civilization
Thousands of years of sorrow later,
We are here,
Absolved from the sacrifice of children,
Our god having accepted his own child
As the final perfection of human sacrifice
By a father,
And a mother,
And as the final perfection of a god
Sacrificing himself for love of Man,
Yet still we acquiesce in
Unbearable numbers of our children dying
Randomly from the diseases of creation,
Rendering so much of love fear,
So much of life ashen absurdity,
And still we have not learned,
In the face of fear,
In the face of the unknown,
Whatever the still auguring priests demand,
Whatever the terror or the promise,
When the time of sacrifice comes,
It is the father who must die for his daughter
And his son,
The mother who must die for her son
And her daughter,
The old who must sacrifice themselves
For the young,
Instead, we have taken our sons,
Who have survived the diseases of creation,
Dressed them up as soldiers,
And sacrificed them
In their hundreds of thousands
And we are haunted
And the beacon fires are ready to burn
In the night
THE PAST
I am old,
I was there
When the dreams of our fathers
Died between the generations,
The compromises with atrocity,
The hypocrisy,
The compromises honored
More than the dreams,
The final sacrifice
To feral gods of war
For the conquest and enslavement
Of the newly freed lands of Mexico,
The Declaration a mockery
To the world,
Now the fathers are dead,
Leaving us their children
To heal ourselves of civil war
With their abandoned dreams,
Did they fail us?
Or will we fail them?
The fathers believed in law,
And through the law they tried to send to us,
Past the ancient watch towers of slavery,
Dreams of other worlds,
A cry to their children to escape
The heritage of a civilization,
A weapon embedded in the law of the nation
For a better generation to understand,
A constitution crying out,
In defiant shame in defiance of its world-
Slaves are persons,
And the clause-
No person,
Shall be deprived of liberty,
Of life or property
Without due process of law,
A clause the states could be forced to follow
To guarantee
A republican form of government,
And to recognize a privilege
Of being born
A child of the nation
But a better generation
Could not be born
From the Union
Between man and atrocity,
The new generations were still born
Lamed by their inheritance of fear
And acquiescence,
The people remained unable to understand
A human rebellion,
The dreams written into law were abandoned,
Fading into dead words
Forgotten by the people
Left to be interpreted by judges alone,
And judges seldom dream,
The slave masters detected the threat,
Whips in hand mastered
The docile dreamless courts,
Seized their power to judge the laws,
Excluded the people and the person
From the clause,
And all the dreams of the Revolution,
Marshall’s Barron court holding;
We are not a people,
We are a nation of states united by an oath
To uphold self-evident truths
The states believed were lies,
The Declaration an embarrassment
To the law of the Nation,
The fathers, as dreamless as judges,
Having intended
To create a free nation
Whose children were condemned
To be born
Into petty tyrannies,
Beyond the protection of law,
Beyond the reach of dreams
And so
A child of the Nation is born,
Deprived of liberty at birth
Taken from his mother,
Taken from her mother,
Taken from his father,
Taken from her father,
A child born
To be sold at auction
To be tortured and consumed
By the aristocracy
Of America
Now a young man,
Now a young woman,
The child is led to a stake,
The scars of the whip
Already on his back,
Already on her back,
Each mark a symbol
Of sacred honor
In America
The child of the nation
Is bound to the stake
And burned alive,
The other is hung from a tree,
A white mob roaring,
A flag, red white and starred, flying
In the rising smoke
While the slave masters
Laid out their plans
To fill the land with their fires,
The continental sky with their smoke,
So that in a world blighted
By the random death of children
In unbearable numbers,
We would long endure as a nation
That devours its young,
Condemning them
To be born enslaved,
To be whipped and hobbled as little ones,
To grow up scarred and maimed,
To die burning at the stake
Or hanging from a tree,
Or roaring with a white mob,
And so,
In response to the ashen absurdity in creation,
We acquiesce
And create another absurd nation
Yet I am here,
Born into poverty,
Lamed at birth,
Abandoned by my father,
Hungry, thirsty, sick, a stranger,
I was taken
To be educated
In the desperate thought of a civilization,
Antiquity, the Religions, the Moderns,
The synthesis of the Declaration,
A common man,
Less than common,
A lame peasant,
Shown the existence
Of great achievements
Of thought and love,
Of sorrow,
The escape from inherited ignorance
And ancestral fear,
Taught how to dream from within
The endless tragedy of a civilization,
Allowed to obtain wealth and power,
A child of the Nation
But I too fell
With the generations,
Allowed myself to be corrupted
By the acceptance of the union with atrocity,
Advocated as a young lawyer
To dreamless judges
That the law of a free state
Should deliver up to slave masters,
To torturers and executioners,
A young mother,
A fugitive from our atrocity,
Charity,
And her children,
And extinguish a family,
The mother taken from her husband,
The little children
Taken from their mother
And their father,
The mother sacrificed,
The children sacrificed,
The father weeping
For his family sacrificed
To the American aristocracy
On the altars of its pale gods,
And they were lost,
And I was lost,
Forsaking my humanity
And all I had ever learned
Of thousands of years of sorrow,
To seek wealth and power
Within an ancestral culture
Dedicated to human degradation
But I had been taught how to dream,
And the dreams came,
I dreamed I was in the womb,
The spirit of our god
Was moving
Over the face of the land
Seeking an unborn child to strike,
That men should not forget
They are conceived in sin
And deformed at birth,
Pain struck me and I screamed
Until I was born,
I awoke, a symbol
Trying to interpret itself
I raged
At the god who maimed me,
At the father who left me,
At the children who shunned and taunted me
Because I could not run or dance,
Raged
Until I understood a young mother
Who dreamed of other worlds
And was free
To refuse consent
To her ancestral god’s demand
For the sacrifice of her son,
Rejecting the cold dogma of her religion,
She freed herself to follow the desperate yearning of her Faith
For love greater than Faith,
Great enough to endure the loss of hope,
Depriving the all-powerful god
Whom she devoutly worshipped,
Of the power to condemn a child,
Barring that divinity
From her human realm
Of mother and child,
And I became aware,
Even if love alone
Could not protect a child
From the diseases of creation,
Where there was freedom,
Love could free a child
From sacrifice
To myth and hate
And self-loathing,
And I saw,
In that human realm
From which the ancient gods had been barred,
Gods and men were not the enemy,
Fear and ignorance were the enemy,
And I began to be free
And I dreamed,
I could atone,
Uncorrupt myself,
I could build a home for my mother,
I could build my own home
As a station along the Underground Railroad
To harbor my soul
And all fugitives from our atrocity,
I could be a father to the orphan,
I could provide work and care to the poor,
I could ensure an education
For all our children,
So all our children
Would know the existence
Of the desperate sorrow
Of a civilization,
Know how to dream of other worlds,
I could advocate,
As an old lawyer in a true court of law,
That armed resistance
To Fugitive Slave Act kidnappings
At Christiana,
Could not be treason,
I could show the people
How to reconstruct a nation
That may justify the majesty
Of a beacon fire in the night
Igniting the mountaintops,
And allow a return home
With a reward of sacrifice
That may be laid down
Before a nation of weeping mothers
And fathers;
The end of the war of a civilization
With itself,
Our surviving children
Becoming the first nation,
The first people,
To fully comprehend
The tragedy
Of human atrocities committed
In the presence of human dreams,
And be free
To create new worlds
We have pierced the Southern land
With graves,
Headstones in the cemeteries
Of Shiloh, Fredericksburg, Vicksburg,
Unmarked burials in the manicured lawns
Of plantations along every line of march,
The scattered bones of dying boys
Crying out for their mothers
On the ground
Of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor
The graves of our sons
Now bind the South
To the Nation,
But how long can the sons of the North,
Who died that the nation might live,
Be left with honor
In an alien land?
How long can the sons of the slaves of the South,
Who died that the nation might live,
Be left with honor
In a familiar land?
Now that we have become a Union
Of mass graves,
We must at last be able to see
That the slave masters left the human realm
Long before the war,
Creating a fallen world unknown
Even to the fallen North,
Unknown even to the long history of atrocity
In our tragic civilization,
Unknown to the earth itself,
Dedicated to the creation
Of forms of slavery
And aristocracy
Never before conceived
Or brought forth
Upon any continent
A new slavery of force,
Of enslaved bodies,
Aristocrats claiming
To have discovered and bound
A separate slave race
Which they could breed under the lash
On their blood-soaked plantations,
A race to which their own children could belong,
To which their own brothers and sisters could belong,
Forcing their own sons
And their own daughters
To be born as infant slaves
To be sold as commodities to be consumed
By the whip, the tree and the fire,
Father and daughter,
Father and son,
The fathers
Forsaking all human majesty,
Imitating their one true god,
Saturn and his child
On Goya’s wall
A new slavery of consent,
Of enslaved minds,
A people hollowed out as children,
Broken of dreams,
Defining themselves entirely
By what they are not
And who they hate,
Trained to obey gods
Commanding them
To become mere followers of powerful men,
Willing slaves
Of those who tell them
Being nothing in a white skin
Is honor enough
For an American,
Their masters corrupting the solace of a faith
To convince them their god loved the lowly
Because of who they hate,
The least of us hating the least of us
Made proud of their hate,
Proud of their children’s inherited
Ignorance and hate,
And fear,
Blindly obeying the commands of auguring priests
To hate not only the bound slave,
But anyone
Who, by word or example,
Shows them
There exist great achievements
Of thought and love,
Of sorrow,
There exist dreams of other worlds,
From which they have been barred
By their masters
Who have hidden the South
From the promise of life
Inherent in the dreams
Of the Declaration
Our children cannot have died
To keep that world in the Union,
We cannot bear,
We and our god cannot survive
The sacrifice
Unless we find a way to heal
The eight million still bleeding victims
Of that world,
To secure the freedom of four million African slaves
Striving to free themselves
From ten generations of terror,
To free four million white slaves
Given away as children
Into the bondage of ignorance and hate,
Unable even to comprehend they are enslaved,
And to heal ourselves and our god
Of the source of our complicity,
So that we may begin
To become a nation,
Not of little states
And their petty chieftains,
But of a free people
Let us begin the search for the altar
On which five hundred thousand sons were sacrificed,
Let us begin Reconstruction
THE PRESENT
The second Thirteenth Amendment
Has failed,
Our people had lifted up their eyes
To see the founding dreams of our Nation,
But the little states
Produced too many little men
Demanding the preservation
Of their little stages on which to strut,
Condemning the amendment to serve
The hereditary hypocrisy of the Union,
The expression of victory
Over treason and slavery
Embedded in the law of the nation,
Twisted by conservative theologians
Of states’ rights and race hate
Into dead words abolishing,
Not slavery,
But the three fifths clause alone,
Becoming a weapon
To give control of the nation
Back to the slave power, to the traitors,
After they were defeated on the battlefield,
The rebels,
Fanaticism intact even daring
To send their vice president,
Their confederate cornerstone obscenity
Of a human mind
Rejecting the Declaration in obedience
To the myth of gods made
In the image of his fellow aristocrats
Of the whip, the tree and the fire,
To again stain the American Senate,
As if the war had never happened,
As if our sons’ graves did not exist,
As if renewing a union of tyrannies
Would create anything
Other than the barbarism and wars,
Executioners and torturers
And child sacrifice
Of the last four score and nine years,
And of all the thousands of years before then
Standing among the graves
And scattered bones of our sons,
We must now remember
The dreams of our fathers,
And the dreams of our mothers,
We must create the nation
They conceived, but could not bring forth,
Taking the step forward
They dreamed we would take,
The step humanity,
In its long history of fear,
And contempt for itself
Has always refused to take,
A new nation dedicated
To giving life
To the highest achievements
Of thousands of years of thought and love and sorrow,
The truths that have always been self-evident
Endlessly crying out from a civilization at war with itself;
There can be no child blighted or deformed by birth,
Marked for sacrifice to wealth and power
Inside the iron molds of myth
Beyond the protection of love,
We cannot hide from ourselves and each other
In multi-colored robes of caste,
There can be no unpersoned strangers,
No maimed peasant class,
There can be no slave,
The child-sacrificing few among us cannot be masters,
All of us,
All,
Must be taught how to be free,
To find our own way
Without forsaking each other,
And become the first people
To allow each new generation
To know what we have created
And what we have not,
And what we have done,
To stand face to face with
The true unknown
Alone and with and for each other,
The people and the person dancing
On that edge,
Fully aware of their shared fate and sorrow,
The first ennobled people
This was the Word conceived
At our beginning,
Our Declaration,
The mortal Logos,
And now the Word
Is again
Screaming in the womb
In the chaos
Of the second thirteenth amendment,
The re-awakened people of the Declaration
Have finally seen the Union
For what it was;
The continuing grip on our nation
Of humanity’s ancient contempt for itself
For its cowardice and impotence
In the face of the forces
It does not understand,
And humanity’s ancient delusion,
Forced on each new generation,
That by condemning, enslaving and killing
Each other and our children,
We ally ourselves with
The gods of creation,
Become like them
By imitating their actions
And gain power
Over the universe
And its howling winds,
And now know
Why the war came
We cannot renew the Union,
We must have our second Revolution
To destroy the tyranny of states,
To give the Declaration
And the Bill of Rights,
The promise of life inherent
In the dreams and law
Of the first Revolution
Directly and equally
To all the people,
To finally make that promise
To each other,
And become
The first nation
To allow all of its children
To be free
Of the inherited myths
Of their degradation,
Led, as perhaps we only could be,
By an old man near death,
Whom the wildest winds of heaven and earth
Can carve out no further,
Taught how to dream
And dreaming
To the end
Against the obscenity
Of the human alliance with
The diseases of creation
The Fourteenth Amendment
Has failed,
The slave masters mock the offer
To be allowed to join the Nation
On condition of accepting the Amendment,
Mock the offer
To join a nation of a free people,
Mock the idea of due process and equal protection
Of law for Americans and their children,
They continue re-enslaving the freedmen
With terror, mass murder and black codes,
They continue creeping,
With the aid of one of their still bleeding victims
Now sitting in the White House,
Towards control of the national government,
Dragging behind them
The corpses of our soldier sons
To pile them up
Next to their own murdered children
On the altars of their pale gods
The slave masters and their white victims
Will never freely join a free nation,
Watch the puppet motions
Of the white victim in the White House,
Born a white slave of the South,
Seeming, with his innate gifts,
To have escaped to freedom,
Obtaining wealth and power
Beyond any dream,
Unable to heal the wounds
Of his childhood
Which now convulse him
As he tries to strut on the national stage,
Reverting to his status as a mere follower
Of his former masters,
Defining himself,
As his masters trained him,
By his hatred of the black race
And his pride in the achievement of a white skin,
Becoming a demagogue spewing resentment
At anyone and any law that might show him
There exists a promise of life
From which he was barred
By his heritage of hate and degradation
We cannot produce any more of these ruined beings,
We must remake southern society,
Destroy the aristocracy of America,
Destroy its white slave culture of submissive hate,
We must create a new world in the South
Free of the infection,
Or it will destroy our future
As it did our past
But we will not use death to destroy the aristocracy of America,
We will not condemn to death
The aristocrats who betrayed the Nation,
We will not try to guillotine our way to a better world,
We must know at last,
After thousands of years of betrayal and desperate sorrow,
We cannot destroy aristocracy
By imitating the gods it has made in its own image
We will use education to destroy the aristocracy of America,
The power of the slave master traitors
Who enslaved children,
Is based on inherited ignorance, ancestral fear,
The sacrificing of children
By breaking their minds
To be commensurate with
Their inherited social and economic degradation,
That power must be broken,
The Freedmen’s Bureau
And its teachers
Must begin educating
All the victims of the South,
The victims of our Union,
Allow the freed slaves
To know of a world
Free of the whip, the tree and the fire,
Allow the white slaves
To escape their degradation;
The control of their hearts and minds
By other men
We will use confiscation to destroy the aristocracy of America,
The power of the slave master traitors
Who sold children to torturers,
Is based on wealth,
The ownership of the land,
Vast plantations,
Four hundred million acres,
Every acre soaked in atrocity,
That power must be broken,
A republican form of government cannot exist
Amid dramatic inequality of wealth,
“Republican institutions, free schools, free churches,
Free social intercourse cannot exist
In a mingled community
Of nabobs and serfs,
Of the owners of twenty-thousand-acre manors
And lordly palaces,
And the occupants of narrow huts inhabited
By low white trash,”
The few rich believing themselves allied with gods,
The people brutalized into blind obedience
To the brutal myths
Their rich masters use to control them,
The gifted among the people believing they can rise
Only by escaping their humanity and imitating their masters,
We must confiscate the slave masters’ land to end their rule
And help pay for their treason,
We must gift forty-acre plots to the freed slaves,
Break up the rest into small farms
To be sold at auction to the white slaves
For whatever price they can pay,
Create a new world
Of millions of free stakeholders,
Giving economic life
To the victims of the South,
The victims of our Union
We will use Democracy to destroy the aristocracy of America,
The power of the slave master traitors
Who branded the faces of children,
Is based on control of the vote
A power that has become deadly to the nation
By the elimination of the three fifths clause
In that still enslaved land,
That power must be broken,
There must be universal suffrage
For freed slaves and white slaves,
The consent of the governed,
We must “allow all beings with immortal souls in their bodies
To take part in the government
Under which they are to serve,
Under which they are to live,
Under which they are to raise their children
And under which they are to die,”
We must give political life
To the victims of the South,
The victims of our Union
We will use force to destroy the aristocracy of America,
The power of the slave master traitors
Who beat children to death,
Is based on violence,
The whip, the tree and the fire,
The chain, the club, the branding iron,
The knife and the gun
And the white mob roaring,
That power must be broken,
The military must occupy the South
To allow obedience
To the laws of Reconstruction,
To allow acceptance of the Fourteenth Amendment
And the Bill of Rights,
To protect the freed slaves
While they learn how to use their new freedom,
To protect the white slaves while they learn
They too can flee their masters
And be free
And there is money,
We must now grow beyond blind obedience
To the ancient myth of gold,
There is not enough gold in the world
To finance our reconstructed world,
Just as there was not enough gold in the world
To finance the war,
The fiat currency we invented for war,
Greenbacks that saved the nation,
Must be preserved to serve peace,
We cannot return to hard money,
To bank notes representing metal
That cannot grow with a newly freed economy,
Notes whose vulnerable, unpredictable value
Is controlled by rich men hoarding,
Frenzied men mining,
And the greed of speculators,
Creating panics,
Breaking banks,
Bankrupting countless lives,
The currency of our nation
Cannot be controlled by a few brutal men,
Subject to the limitations of their imitations of creation,
Finite, randomly hostile to humanity,
Money must now be a fully human creation,
Created by the people
And required by the people
To serve the needs and achievements of the people
If we destroy the America aristocracy,
There can be law,
Law prevailing over wealth and power,
Myth and hate,
Inherited ignorance and ancestral fear,
The living law of a Revolution,
The dreams in the law of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments
And of the Fifteenth that will surely follow,
The law requiring equal protection of law
For every child in our nation,
Eliminating the tyranny of states
And finally recognizing
That the promise of life
Inherent in the Declaration and the Bill of Rights,
The promise of a life
Free from the ancient traditions of atrocity,
Aware of the desperate dreams of humanity,
Is a privilege of being born
A child of the Nation
Confiscation has failed,
So many of us,
Who have come to wealth and power,
Were born into poverty,
Have come from nothing,
From families,
From fathers and mothers
Who had nothing,
Who had no status
In our society,
Our nation carries the memory
That all of us come from nothing,
All of us knowing
Our ancestors came here
Because they were nothing there,
Therefore,
Unless we were to condemn
Our own parents,
Our own ancestors,
We knew in our hearts
The truth that had never before
Been taken to heart,
The truth the young sacrificed god
So many of us claim to worship
Had dreamed of teaching:
Status in a human society
Is irrelevant to status
As a human being.
Therefore,
Lest we should forget
And become like other nations,
Dreamless,
Unaware of the tragedy of our atrocities
And our ruin,
We declared to ourselves,
To the world
And to the Creator,
We would forever judge ourselves
Against the dream of another world,
Where our children are all equal
But the gentiles condemned by Christ
Are always with us
With their faith
That humanity is an illusion,
And all worlds must have great ones
To lord it over the rest of us,
Having long ago converted the Christians
To the delusion
That Jesus loved hereditary aristocrats
More than the least of us,
That Christ was just another pale sky god
Of wealth and power, fear and ignorance,
A goddess of hunting or a god of Job,
Ready to maim and murder children
To maintain his dominion,
And that the only goal of escape
From slavery and tyranny
Was to imitate your former masters,
They made their way
To the New World
To convert the Americans
To a newer version of their faith-
Wealth, however acquired,
Is a sign of Christ’s love,
Poverty, however acquired,
A sign of Christ’s hate,
And he who would be first among us
Must be rich
Now they preach to us;
Slavery was a mere error
In economic policy,
Preventing elect white men
From becoming rich men
By starting out as rail splitters in the West,
And once the North and the West
Are protected by changes in law
From the accounting error of black slavery,
Reconstruction will be done,
Our sons and our god
Sacrificed to create an economic system
As a new Way
To equate status in society
With status as a human
These federalist conservative gentiles
Now claim
That confiscation of the land
Of the slave master traitors
As a penalty for their crimes,
Is an offense
Against the pale creator
Of economies and private property,
And god must be obeyed,
And they fear,
More than they fear their god,
If confiscation is allowed today
Against child enslaving traitors,
A successor aristocracy
May not be protected from confiscation
If it commits similar crimes tomorrow,
We must sacrifice the southern poor
And their children
To a new gentile aristocracy condemned by Christ,
Keep alive the hope of the ancient heritage
Of aristocratic gods and their families of corpses
We still have education,
Voting rights, military protection and law,
To reconstruct the South and the Nation,
But they too are failing,
The white slave in the White House
Will not execute the laws of Reconstruction,
As commander-in-chief he has given racist generals
Control of the military occupation of the fallen states,
Ordering them to give aid and comfort
To the slave master traitors
In resisting the laws of the Nation,
In resisting the freedom, education and voting rights of freed slaves
Through terror, mass murder and black codes,
In resisting the freedom and education
Of white slaves
By herding them into roaring white mobs
The tradition of compromise with atrocity,
The acquiescence in the hypocrisy of the Union,
The degradation of everyone touched
By the union of tyrannies,
Gave the vice presidency
And then the presidency
To this still bleeding victim of the South,
To an enslaved mind,
Just as the enslaved Union
Was finally dying
From the endless sacrifice of our sons
In the ancient ceremony of civil war,
He must be impeached and removed from office
Before he creates a new alliance
Of rich northern racists,
Southern slave masters
And southern white slaves,
To give a new birth
To the slave master aristocracy,
An alliance that will destroy our people
If we do not destroy the slave master culture
Before allowing the South
To join the new nation:
A culture of degradation spreading throughout the nation,
Ignorant rich men,
Dreamless,
Unaware of the desperate thought and love,
The sorrow
Of a civilization,
Honoring wealth and profit and power
Above all human majesty,
The most brutal few among us
Ruling the Nation,
Controlling minds delivered as children
Into the bondage
Of inherited ignorance and hate,
And fear,
Our dream of the first noble people
Perishing from the earth
Impeachment has failed,
Conservatives blinded
By their condemned gentile federalist faith
That control of the people and the protection of wealth
Is the only goal of any government,
Have aligned themselves
With the northern racists
In a new society of federalists
To prevent the people
From removing a traitor from the presidency,
They will allow the law to change enough
To keep slavery out of the West and North,
Protecting their economic religious theory,
But a racist autocrat claiming the power
To ignore the laws of the Nation,
Need not be driven in humiliation
From the head of the national government
If he serves the interests of wealth,
The office of President must be protected
In order to serve a successor aristocracy,
Changing the law is enough of a reward
To justify the sacrifice of civil war
They are deluded,
Law alone will not be enough
To protect new generations in the West and North
From the chains of the slave power in all its forms,
Without presidents serving and obeying the law of the people,
Without the destruction
Of the white slave culture of the Southern aristocracy,
So that, as my sometimes too moderate friend Bingham has said
About the dance of the people and the person,
‘None are above the law so that no man lives for himself alone,
But each for all’,
The law of our Revolution will fail,
Fade again into dead words
Forgotten again by a fearful and submissive people,
Left again to the care of the servants of aristocracy;
The dreamless judges of the nation
Too many judges of the Nation have never known the dream
Against which we declared we would forever judge ourselves,
Too many have always served those few among us
Capable of the last full measure of atrocity,
Turning our revolutionary law into killing letters,
Aristocratic law,
The law of the dead,
Barron judges,
Farwell’s fellow servant judges,
Dred Scott judges,
To whom the law
Is the dead speaking to the dead
Speaking to themselves,
Soft whispers among the graves
Only they can overhear,
Murmuring of fealty
To the brutal gods
We tried to kill,
Of adherence
To the ancient alliance
With the diseases of creation
Against which we rebelled,
Rigor mortised minds,
Preferring the unchanging dead
To the striving of the living,
But only the dead they can understand,
The dead most like themselves,
The background dead,
The dead who when alive did not dream,
The ghosts of minds that lived and died
Enslaved by their heritage,
Unaware there could be dreams
Of other worlds
The dreamless judges hear those dead whisperers,
But are deaf to the living Word
Screaming from unbearable sacrifice,
Screaming from the law
Of our Revolutions,
From the Declaration,
The Bill of Rights,
Our Amendments,
And they are blind to the vision of law
At the heart of our dreams:
Revolutionary law is not a means to preserve the past,
By which dead fathers try to force their living children
To repeat their lives,
It is a desperate plea to the future,
Based on a faith
That rebellion will break the existing world enough
To allow better generations to be born,
Able to comprehend the dreams and sorrows
And failures
Of the fathers’ sacrifice,
And of the mothers’ sacrifice,
To see the vision which
The people of our own generation,
Scarred by the ancient barbaric world
Into which we were born,
Could not see face to face,
It is a plea to our children to be better than us,
To create new worlds,
Not to prolong the agonies
Of the old world
Against which we rebelled
So many of us here were educated,
Taught how to dream from out of the heart
Of tragedy and shared desperate sorrow,
And together,
Searching for the altar
On which our children were sacrificed,
We did dream
Of bringing to life the new nation
Of which the founders dreamed,
Where free generations could be born,
And of the new worlds
They would create,
Where all children have escaped
The myths of power and hate,
And are free to find their own way
Without forsaking each other
But the judges were not among us,
They were not educated,
They were merely trained,
Unable to imagine
There have been and will be
Achievements of thought and love,
Of sorrow,
About which they know nothing,
Trained to be menials of the last original federalist,
Scouring the empty rooms of his crumbling plantations
In search of their new masters,
Trained to believe
Our Nation and its laws were created,
Like all prior realms created
During mankind’s long history
Of contempt for itself,
Not to free and ennoble the people,
But to control them,
To make controlling the living
As easy as controlling the dead
Ignorant followers
Of dead federalists
And their beloved Sedition Act,
Of Marshall’s Barron, Shaw’s Farwell
And Taney’s Dred Scott,
Priests of Saturn,
Counselors to Agamemnon,
Appointed for life
Because they have been trained for life
To obey
The easy certainties and absolute truths
Of whatever gods of wealth and power,
Ignorance and fear,
The few among us have chosen
To seek to control
Those of us who were never taught to dream,
Those of us whose dreams are broken,
Dogmas and religions
They will honor
Above the law,
Above the Nation,
Above their Faith,
Above their humanity
THE FUTURE
A future haunts
My dreams,
Servile judges
Will drain life from the law,
Degrading our Amendments
Into dead killing letters
To serve a new aristocracy,
Inherited ignorance
Will depress and destabilize the economy
In obedience to the myth of gold,
The people of this generation,
Weakened by fear of economic ruin,
And by the new honor given
To greed, fear and envy
In the new economic religion,
Will succumb
To the wounds inflicted by being born
Into the degradation
Of the Union with atrocity,
And to the wounds inflicted
By its fight to survive,
By so much death,
And they will turn away in their fear and pain
From the dreams of our revolution,
From the dangerous uncertainties
Of a struggle for a new world,
Turn again for safety
To the ignoble simplicity
Of mindless obedience to the absolute truths
Of the gods of race, wealth and power,
Their political leaders
Becoming liveried servants of greed,
Withdrawing military protection
From the South,
Abandoning law itself,
Inaugurating a counterrevolution
Of terror
Hundreds of thousands of our soldier children sacrificed
On the altars of the pale gods and the god of Job,
Those ancient gods rising again to demand obedience
To fear and ignorance,
And consent to their infliction of death,
Honored again by the weeping mothers and fathers,
Forced again on the next generation,
Reconstruction will fail
I am old,
I was there
When the full array
Of pale gods
Ruled in Pennsylvania
And fought against the education of all our children,
Teaching that freedom
Meant the right
To forsake
Your brother’s
And your sister’s
Child,
Teaching the delusion
That Christ had adopted the gentile faith
He had condemned
And therefore education
Should be given
Only to the children of the prosperous
And denied to the children of the poor,
Teaching that knowledge
Was a dangerous threat
To the safety of obedience
To the absolute truths
Of inherited ignorance,
Ancestral fears,
Teaching the “war cry and battle axe of ignorance,”
But I showed them
The synthesis of rebellion in the Declaration
And its teaching
That to condemn any child
To a life of fear and ignorance,
Was to forsake all human majesty,
To respond to the fear
Of the uncertainty and suffering of creation,
And to the fear
Of the uncertainty and suffering of an economic system,
With the sacrifice of a child,
And the people felt their common humanity,
Believed with me for a moment in its existence,
Placed it for a moment
Above their certainties
Long enough
To allow the process to begin,
A culture of education spreading,
The people slowly awakening,
Education keeping alive the hope
Of the new worlds
Our nation was created
To make possible
And so I dreamed of another world,
Education alone would survive in the South,
Without confiscation, without Democracy,
Without force, without law,
The Freedmen’s Bureau
And the school teachers
Who sacrificed themselves
For so many children,
Had done enough
To begin the process,
To allow the freed slaves
To continue educating themselves
And their children
Among the ruins of war and Reconstruction,
A culture of education spreading,
A newly freed people,
Unburdened by pale gods
And myths of power,
Refusing to imitate their former masters,
In the face of terror,
Slowly building their strength
Could this be the true dream?
Did our revolution break the old world enough
To allow former slaves to find a way
To educate their children
And their children’s children
To know how they endured beyond hope,
To know there have been and can be
Great achievements of thought and love,
Of shared desperate sorrow,
Allow them to dream of other worlds
Without pale gods of power,
And someday
Advocate their dreams
To the Nation,
And recall the Nation
To its purpose,
To its dream?
Make the South
The source
Of a new birth of freedom?
And could descendants of freed slaves
And of the outcasts of Dred Scott,
In that future,
Stand as lawyers before the Nation’s highest court,
Before nine old white judges,
The chief justice,
By some magic of dreams,
The last true Republican,
And argue that education had become
The foundation of every child’s ability
To be free,
To dream,
And therefore must be an equal right
Of all the children of the Nation,
A right infringed by the segregation
Of school children
Into ex-slaves and white mobs?
A new right,
Required by the freedom seeking logic of our revolutionary laws,
For a new world?
And could they bring to life my own words
To speak again in that true court of law,
As the ancestral voice of a lawgiver
Crying out to his children to be better than him,
To create new worlds better than his world,
To have the courage,
The nobility,
To endlessly pursue an ideal they know may never be reached;
The Fourteenth Amendment,
Placing all children equally
Under the protection of the law,
Within the reach of dreams,
Fulfilling the Declaration
We made to ourselves and to the Creator
And in that brief moment of new life
Could I see the judges themselves,
In that future,
Standing among the massive ruins
And mass graves of extinguished generations
Left behind by future cataclysms
Of ever-intensifying destruction
In our civilization’s endless civil war
Between atrocity and dreams,
Be forced by the children of our own atrocity
To confront the limit of unbearable sacrifice
And the coming of a world destroyed
By the fire of suns created by man,
And at last understand
They must educate themselves deeply enough
In the desperate thought of a civilization;
Antiquity, the Religions, the Renaissance,
The Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment,
Romanticism, evolutionary eons,
Quantum uncertainty, relative time,
Medical science,
The Moderns,
The synthesis of the Declaration,
The synthesis of the Fourteenth Amendment,
The whole catalogue of our desperate arts
Hurled against the diseases of creation,
Hurled against the ashen absurdity in creation
And in ourselves,
For the Nation to at last have judges
Freed from their training in the federalist faith in death,
Inherited ignorance, ancestral fear,
Unafraid of the living world,
Unwilling to sacrifice new generations
To wealth and power, myth and hate,
Able to understand the intent
Of the law of our revolutions,
Able to bring to life the dream against which
We promised to forever judge ourselves?
Thought and love and sorrow
Defeating the culture of white slavery,
Defeating the culture of the gods of aristocracy,
Defeating the ancient contempt of humanity
For itself?
The Declaration placed at the heart
Of the law of the Nation
It is just a dream,
Too many of our children will be blighted
And will die
Among the still surviving
Trees, fires and smoke
And roaring white mobs
Of the old world
For that dream to live,
Too many gods of race,
Wealth and power
Would have to die,
Too many pale gods would have to stay dead,
Too many enslaved minds would have to be freed
And if not just a dream,
Just the endless cycle of a civilization
Forever at war with itself,
The ancient gods of power always rising again
To silence the voices of humans,
To convince us our dreams are illusions,
Destroying that new birth of freedom
As they have so many rebellions,
As they will our rebellion,
There are no true unknowns,
No great achievements of thought and love,
Of sorrow,
No new worlds,
Just new weapons of war,
Men and their gods are the only enemy,
And always will be;
Dreams, sacrifice, fear, contempt, slavery,
Atrocity, desperate sorrow,
Dreams...
Brutal men and their gods always finding a way
To devour their young
Until we are no longer haunted,
Love will not endure,
Our only hope,
An endless, dreamless
Sleep
THE END
Here is death,
I see my open grave,
Death waiting,
Demanding my consent
To the end of dreams
But even here
At the end at the edge of the grave,
Weary,
Beyond hope,
I cannot consent,
I have not yet atoned
As I die
Rage
With me
Against the alliance
Between humanity and death,
Rage
With me
Against the sacrifice of children
To wealth and power,
Ignorance and fear
As I die
I give you new impeachment articles
To drive autocracy and the culture of white slavery
From the office of the president,
I explain to you
The dangers of the failure to fight the slave aristocracy
Through confiscation,
I warn you
Against the economic slavery
Of hard money,
I offer you
A law to educate
The children of our Capitol
To help spread education
Throughout the South and the Nation,
Advocating at the end,
As I did at the beginning,
For the education of all of us
In our desperate dream
Now I stand before you for the last time,
A peasant child
Born into poverty,
A lame child
Who could not run or dance,
An outcast child
Abandoned by his father,
Shunned and taunted,
Marked for sacrifice
To wealth and power,
Myth and hate,
A leader of the Nation
And I cry out to you with my last breath--
You who have survived this civil war,
And are still young,
“With the promise of length of days
And brilliant careers,”
You may still live to see the Nation
Of which we dreamed from out of our shared desperate sorrow,
If you remember what we have learned here,
In this time, caught
Between our dead fathers and our dead sons,
Our nation, our people, will survive,
The sacrifice will be justified,
Only as long as those who obtain wealth and power
Can hear our Word the mortal human Logos screaming
From the graves of our fathers,
The graves of our mothers
And the graves of our sons:
“All, every human being,
However lowly born
Or degraded by fortune
Is your equal.”
Are you listening?
I close my eyes for the last time
And dream;
I emerge onto the summit
Of the highest mountain
At the heart of our land,
I begin to run and dance
On that mountaintop,
Beneath the near stars,
I see the beacon ready to be lit,
A flaming torch ready for my hand,
I take hold of the flame
And light the beacon,
The fire rises to meet the near stars,
The light moves out over the face of the land,
Even into the darkness lingering
Upon the face of the deep,
Millions turn towards the fire,
I can see them all
In the light
And I know
They are our sons and daughters
In a distant future,
In a New World,
Our children
“Of every race, language and color”
Who have sought to be free,
To find their own way
Without forsaking each other,
And they are free,
They see the beacon fire
That I, a child of the Nation,
Have been allowed to light,
Understand its meaning,
And I am free
I repose in this quiet and secluded spot, not from any natural preference for solitude, but finding other cemeteries limited as to race by charter rules, I have chosen this that I might illustrate in my death the principles which I advocated through a long life,
Equality of Man Before His Creator
Thaddeus Stevens, 1868, from his grave