Thaddeus Stevens Chronicles No. 50

 Thaddeus Stevens and the Anti-Masonic party

February 2025

By Ross Hetrick

One of the more unusual aspects of Thaddeus Stevens's political career is his association with the Anti-Masonic party. While he represented the Gettysburg area in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in the 1830s, Stevens was a major figure in the party, got an Anti-Masonic governor elected and even held hearings about the Masons.

The Anti-Masonic party was the first successful third party in America and was created in reaction to an incident in upstate New York in the1820s where a man named William Morgan was presumably killed by the Masons for threatening to reveal the secrets of the ancient fraternal order. Community outrage was increased when the Masons seemingly used their judicial connections to cover up the crime. Coupled with that many prominent politicians, such as George Washington and Andrew Jackson were Masons giving the impression that to get anywhere in politics you had to be a Mason. One of the lasting legacies of the party was the tradition of selecting presidential candidates at conventions.

When Stevens became an Anti-Mason in the early 1830s, the dominant national party was the Democrats, which advocated for the slaveholders of the south. Stevens, who had been an outspoken abolitionist since the early 1820s would never join the Democratic party. Stevens would have also been attracted to the Anti-Mason's position of being against elitism. He deeply believed that people should be judged on their merits, not on who they knew or what organization they belonged to.

Stevens was elected to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in 1833 as an Anti-Mason and he turned out to be a very effective Anti-Mason. His efforts included shutting down the Mason lodge in Gettysburg and getting Joseph Ritner, the first and only Anti-Mason governor elected.

 But he was willing to part with his fellow Anti-Masons when it came to issues he felt strongly about, like education. In 1834 he was able to get a state grant of $18,000 for the new college in Gettysburg, despite many of his fellow Anti-Masons being against it. In reaction to this criticism, Stevens wrote in a letter to the editor: "I have already resolved that the weight of my name shall never again burthen your ticket." However, he remained with the Anti-Masons for many years. 

Of course the Masons did not sit idly by as Stevens attacked them. Jacob Lefever, the editor of the Gettysburg Republican Compiler and a Mason published articles insinuating that Stevens was involved in the death of a woman in 1820s. Stevens brought two libel cases against Lefever and won them handily since the editor had no evidence to back up the allegations. 

The Anti-Masons was a short-lived phenomenon in American history and had petered out by the early 1840s. When Stevens ran for Congress in 1848 after moving to Lancaster, he ran as a Whig. But his time as an Anti-Mason continued to serve as foder for some accounts of his life. In her 1947 novel,  I Speak For Thaddeus Stevens, Gettysburg writer Elsie Singmaster recounts a fictional incident in which Stevens is hunting on horseback and iron workers call out for him to stop. "Can't!" he shouted back. "I'm hunting Masons."

Ross Hetrick is president of the Thaddeus Stevens Society, which is dedicated to promoting Stevens's important legacy. The Society operates the Thaddeus Stevens Museum at 46 Chambersburg St. in Gettysburg, PA. More information about the Great Commoner can be found at the society's website: https://www.thaddeusstevenssociety.com/

Thaddeus Stevens Chronicles No. 49

 The court case that launched Thaddeus Stevens's crusade against slavery

January 2025

By Ross Hetrick

Thaddeus Stevens was riding high in the early 1820s. He was a young up-and-coming lawyer in the prosperous town of Gettysburg. Then he took a case involving a fugitive slave that would change his life and the course of American history forever.

Born in Vermont, the first state to ban slavery in 1777, it would be expected that Stevens would be anti-slavery. Add to that, he had a club foot which would make him sympathetic to the less fortunate.

But at the same time he was brilliant and was able to work his way through the prestigious college of Dartmouth. And like many a self-made man he felt that discrimination was a necessary ingredient to spur people to become successful.

In fact, in a commencement speech at Dartmouth in 1814, Stevens praised inequality as the engine of progress. "Had they [primitive people] been content to remain in a state of equality, they must likewise have remain in a state of barbarism," he said. "For although invention and improvement are not foreign to the nature of man, yet they will never be exercised until they are called forth by new motives of pleasure and profit."

So it was not unexpected for the young Stevens to represent a Maryland slave owner in August 1820 who was trying to recover a fugitive slave. Charity Butler had escaped captivity in Maryland, married Henry Butler, a free Black in Adams county, and had two daughters Harriet and Sophia. 

Years later, her former enslaver found out where she was and he kidnapped Charity and her two daughters. Her husband hired a lawyer who argued in court that Charity had been brought up to Pennsylvania many times while she was still a slave totaling more than six months, the legal limit you could keep a slave in Pennsylvania before becoming free. But Stevens was able to demolish the case by simply pointing out that the six-month rule required the slave to reside in Pennsylvania for a continuous six months.

But the court victory seemingly caught Stevens by surprise. Not only was Charity sent back into bondage, but her two daughters who had never known slavery were sentenced to a lifetime of captivity. "No one knows what Thaddeus Stevens experienced that day, but surely he felt the family's despair," wrote Bradley R. Hoch in his 2005 biography of Stevens, Thaddeus Stevens in Gettysburg: The Making of an Abolitionist. "He no doubt thought about the consequences of his victory for the rest of his life. He never again represented a slave owner against a slave." Hoch wrote.

Not only did he stop representing slave owners but he started vigorously representing fugitive slaves. And on July 4, 1823 he went public with his conversion to abolitionism with a toast at an Independence day celebration. "The next President -- May he be a freeman, who never riveted fetters on a human slave," he proclaimed. It was a bold statement since everyone at the event knew that all but one of the five Presidents up to that time had owned human beings. 

It was only the beginning of his 40-year political crusade that would culminate in the destruction of slavery and the ratification of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution requiring equal treatment under the law. And even in death, Stevens wanted people to know where he stood. He insisted on being buried in the only integrated cemetery in Lancaster at the time and the epitaph on his monument reads: "I reposed 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."

Ross Hetrick is president of the Thaddeus Stevens Society, which is dedicated to promoting Stevens's important legacy. The Society operates the Thaddeus Stevens Museum at 46 Chambersburg St. in Gettysburg, PA. More information about the Great Commoner can be found at the society's website: https://www.thaddeusstevenssociety.com/