A New Biography of Thaddeus Stevens, 1814

Thaddeus Stevens, Dartmouth 1814, is the subject of a new biography, Thaddeus Stevens: Scourge of the South (New York: Norton, 448 pp., $7.50), written by Fawn M. Brodie. The author is well remembered in Hanover, where she lived from 1941 to 1945 while her husband, Dr. Bernard Brodie, was an instructor in Dartmouth's Department of Government. Mrs. Brodie is the author of another biography, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, the MormonProphet.

Previous biographies of Thaddeus Stevens have been written largely in political terms, with emphasis on his role as chief architect of the Reconstruction in the South after the Civil War, and have been, as Mrs. Brodie points out in her foreword, either passionately for or passionately against him, mostly the latter. This new study, according to the author, does not pretend to absolute detachment, but it does try "to suggest what may have been the basis of Stevens' extraordinary capacity for hatred, which was an energizing force for good and evil right up to his death." Many things in his turbulent life are redefined in the light of his "desperate inner needs."