With the coming of the Civil War, another triumvirate emerges to control the destinies of the nation—­Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner and William Henry Seward.  Stevens and Seward had been introduced to politics by the ineffectual and absurd anti-Masonic party, which flitted across the stage in the early thirties.  In 1851, Massachusetts rebuked Daniel Webster for his supposed surrender to the slavery party, made in hope of attaining the presidency, by placing Sumner in his seat in the Senate, and retiring him to private life, where he still remained the most commanding figure in the country.

Seward was already in the Senate, had spoken in reply to Webster, and assumed the leadership which Webster forfeited.  In the House, too, was Stevens, who soon gained prominence by a certain vitriolic force which was in him, and these three men labored unceasingly for the defeat of the South—­indeed, for more than its defeat—­for payment, to the last drop, for the sins it had committed.  They were bound together by party ties and in other ways, but most closely of all by a hatred of slavery, which, with Stevens and Sumner, mounted at times to fanaticism and led them into the errors always awaiting the fanatic.

Thaddeus Stevens, the oldest of the three, had been born in Vermont, but removed to Pennsylvania at the age of twenty-two, and began to practice law there.  In 1831, he was one of the moving spirits in the formation of the anti-Masonic party, which fancied it saw, in the spread of Masonry, a grave danger to the republic.  Two years later, Stevens was chosen a member of the Pennsylvania legislature, but his career did not really begin until, in 1848, at the age of fifty-seven, he was elected a member of the national House of Representatives, where he soon took his place as the leader of the anti-slavery faction.  From that time forward, he was unceasing in his warfare against slavery, frequently going to lengths where few cared to follow, and which would seem to indicate that there was a trace of madness in the man.  He developed an exaggerated and sentimental regard for the negro, and grew radical and relentless toward the South.

At the close of the war, he regarded the southern states as conquered territory, to be treated as such, and his ideas of treatment seem to have been founded upon those of the Middle Ages.  He wished to confiscate the property of all Confederates; endeavored to impeach President Johnson, who was trying to enforce a system of reconstruction which was at least better than that which Stevens advocated.  For a time he seemed to suffer from a very vertigo of hatred, which ate into his soul and destroyed him.  The plan of reconstruction adopted by Congress was an embodiment of his ideas; but Johnson was acquitted of the charges Stevens brought against him, and Stevens’s poison, as it were, turned in upon himself and killed him.  His last request, that his body be buried in an obscure private cemetery, because public cemeteries excluded negroes, shows the man’s unbalanced condition, the length to which his ideas had led him.