Thaddeus Stevens Society

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,

Mount Ida

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,

Prometheus,

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

Thaddeus Stevens Society

Wednesday, September 24, 2025

The Great Commoner, Fall 2025, No. 51 www.thaddeusstevenssociety.com

Monday, September 15, 2025

Thaddeus Stevens Chronicles No. 57

Friday, September 12, 2025

The Mad Dreams of Thaddeus Stevens