Thaddeus Stevens finally coming to town

From 2 p.m. to 3 p.m., a Civil War re-enactors’ group, the 46th Pennsylvania Brass Band, will play 19th century music, some written specifically to honor Stevens. At 3 p.m. there will be speeches by Gettysburg Mayor Rita Frealing; Gettysburg Borough Council President Wesley Heyser; Adams County Commissioner Chair Randy L. Phiel; and Michael Charney of North Kingsville, Ohio, the major donor for the statue.

There will be another free, public event on Saturday at 9 p.m. behind the Transfer Center at 103 Carlisle St. where a new video will premier about the statue and Thaddeus Stevens. The public is asked to bring their own chairs to both the dedication and video show.

Then on Sunday at 10 a.m. at Caledonia State Park, along U.S. Route 30 between Gettysburg and Chambersburg, Duke Professor William A. Darity Jr., and Folklorist A. Kirsten Mullen will talk about reparations and Stevens’ effort to confiscate land from super-rich southern planters and redistribute it to freed slaves.

The history of efforts to erect statues to Thaddeus Stevens is a long and oft disappointing one. There were two efforts in the early 20th century in Lancaster in Harrisburg, which both failed. The first Stevens statue finally appeared at the Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology in Lancaster in 2008.

But a promised Stevens statue at the renovated Stevens’ public school in Washington, D.C., fell through. A statue was erected in front of Stevens Hall at Gettysburg College in 2015, but not of Stevens, instead of Abraham Lincoln. Yet the Lincoln statue inspired the Thaddeus Stevens Society to start an effort to raise $55,000 to erect the second Stevens statue.

The Stevens Society was founded in 1999 in Gettysburg to promote the legacy of Stevens by holding programs and sponsoring field trips that involved Stevens. It also raised money to support preservation efforts such as maintaining Stevens’s cemetery in Lancaster, Pa. The group got a major boost in 2012 with the release of the movie “Lincoln,” which included a portrayal of Stevens by Tommy Lee Jones. The society now has a membership of about 250 nationally, including six in foreign countries.

The society’s statue effort reached its goal after Michael Charney donated $39,500. A nationwide search for a sculptor garnered 20 proposals; Alex Paul Loza, a native of Peru who lives in Tennessee, was the winner. His sculpture shows a dynamic, determined Stevens clutching a copy of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, his greatest achievement.

Stevens was a unique figure in American history. Even though he only rose to the position of a congressman from Lancaster, he exercised power that was the equivalent of a president. He led a veto-proof Congress against President Andrew Jackson and legislation from Reconstruction to the purchase of Alaska had Stevens’ imprint.

An article in Harper’s Weekly on April 7, 1866, summed up Stevens’ power this way: “That which gives Mr. Stevens the great power which he wields in the House – a power which is almost irresistible – is his emphatic and earnest denunciation of treason. The country has suffered so much in the past from vacillation, that it greatly admires anything which looks thorough and straightforward. Mr. Stevens’s words have a gladiatorial strength which would have done honor to the boldest of Rome’s orators. They sway men by their sledge-hammer strokes – they are words of iron. Whatever be the wisdom of Mr. Stevens’s acts and speeches, future generations can not fail to render him the tribute which is always yielded to extraordinary force of character.”

While Stevens is finally having statues erected to honor him, the most moving monument to him is his grave in a small Lancaster cemetery, which he selected because it was the only integrated graveyard in the city at the time. The epitaph written by Stevens reads: “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 I advocated through a long life, equality of man before his creator.”