reatened to undo the great
work. His scornful anger at Andrew Johnson was equaled only by his
contempt for the Republicans who sided with the President. He was bound
to defeat this reactionary attempt and to see slavery thoroughly killed
beyond the possibility of resurrection, at any cost. As to the means to
be employed, he scrupled little. He wanted the largest possible
Republican majority in Congress, and to this end he would have expelled
any number of Democrats from their seats, by hook or crook. When my old
friend and quondam law partner, General Halbert E. Paine, who was
chairman of the Committee on Elections in the House, told him that, in a
certain contested election case to be voted upon, both contestants were
rascals, Stevens simply asked: "Well, which is _our_ rascal?" He said
this, not in jest, but with perfect seriousness. He would have seated
Beelzebub in preference to the angel Gabriel, had he believed Beelzebub
to be more certain than Gabriel to aid him in beating the President's
reconstruction policy. His speeches were short, peremptory, and
commanding. He bluntly avowed his purposes, however extreme they seemed
to be. He disdained to make them more palatable by any art of
persuasion, or to soften the asperity of his attacks by charitable
circumlocution. There was no hypocrisy, no cant in his utterances. With
inexorable intellectual honesty, he drew all the logical conclusions
from his premises. He was a terror in debate. Whenever provoked, he
brought his batteries of merciless sarcasm into play with deadly effect.
Not seldom, a single sentence sufficed to lay a daring antagonist
sprawling on the ground amid the roaring laughter of the House, the
luckless victim feeling as if he had heedlessly touched a heavily
charged electric wire. No wonder that even the readiest and boldest
debaters were cautious in approaching old Thaddeus Stevens too closely,
lest something stunning and sudden happen to them. Thus the fear he
inspired became a distinct element of power in his leadership--not a
wholesome element, indeed, at the time of a great problem which required
the most circumspect and dispassionate treatment.

_William Pitt Fessenden_

A statesman of a very different stamp was Senator Fessenden of Maine,
who, being at the head of the senatorial part of the joint Committee on
Reconstruction, presided over that important body. William Pitt
Fessenden was a man who might easily have been overlooked in a crowd.