ylvania 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.

Charles Sumner, who was to the Senate much what Stevens was to the
House, although a larger and better-balanced man, was a typical
Bostonian and inheritor of the New England conscience, which, of course,
meant that he was opposed through and through to slavery. He was a
successful lawyer, and as his sentiments were well known, he was chosen
to succeed Webster when the latter wavered on the anti-slavery question,
and threw some pledges of assistance to the South. There was never any
doubt about Sumner's position, no sign of wavering or coquetting with
the enemy, and in 1856, he was assaulted by a southern senator and so
severely injured that three years passed before he coul