The Mad Dreams of Thaddeus Stevens

This book, sponsored by the Thaddeus Stevens Society based in Gettysburg, offers a unique approach to understanding Thaddeus Stevens' life and legacy. The book takes its title from a poem that constitutes the book's final chapter. That poem attempts to capture, as W.E.B. Du Bois put it, Stevens' "grim and awful courage" in his struggle to lead the country through Civil War and Reconstruction towards, in Stevens' words, the creation of a society in which each of us, "no matter how lowly born...