South Danville

By Paul Chouinard

Thad­deus Stevens has recent­ly been fea­tured in Steven Spielberg’s, Lin­coln, released nation­wide on Novem­ber 16, 2012, and was nom­i­nat­ed for twelve Oscar nom­i­na­tions. In Spielberg’s film, based on Amer­i­can his­to­ri­an Doris Kearns Goodwin’s, Team of Rivals: The Polit­i­cal Genius of Abra­ham Lin­coln, Thad­deus Stevens is por­trayed by Tom­my Lee Jones. It is the first time since his death in 1868 that he has been por­trayed in an objec­tive, his­tor­i­cal­ly accu­rate manner.

For years Stevens’ rep­u­ta­tion has suf­fered as a result of his por­tray­al of the thin­ly dis­guised char­ac­ter, Austin Stone­man, a fanat­i­cal vil­lain in D.W. Griffith’s land­mark silent film Birth of a Nation. Dur­ing the 1940s, Stevens was por­trayed as a vil­lain in Ten­nessee John­son, a bio­graph­i­cal film about Pres­i­dent Andrew John­son. As the antag­o­nist in both films, Stevens is por­trayed as an unrea­son­able, hos­tile, adver­sar­i­al indi­vid­ual who would let noth­ing stand in his way to meet his goal of pun­ish­ing the South and insur­ing the rights of the freed­men through his vision of Reconstruction.

Spielberg’s Lin­coln focus­es on divi­sions with­in Lincoln’s cab­i­net and the acri­mo­nious debate with­in Con­gress, dur­ing the last year of the war, over the pas­sage of the 13th Amend­ment to the Con­sti­tu­tion free­ing the slaves. The fear that the legal­i­ty of the Eman­ci­pa­tion Procla­ma­tion might be chal­lenged by the south­ern states, once they were read­mit­ted to the Union, made the pas­sage of the 13th Amend­ment essen­tial. While the Eman­ci­pa­tion Procla­ma­tion had freed the slaves, the 13th Amend­ment made slav­ery ille­gal forever.