Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.4 | The History Cooperative

The Selected Papers of Thaddeus Stevens. Vol. 1: January 1814-March 1865. Ed. by Beverly Wilson Palmer and Holly Byers Ochoa. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997. xxxiv, 549 pp. $37.50, isbn 0-8229-3972-X.)

In testimony before the United States House Judiciary Committee in December 1998, the historian Sean Wilentz warned members that, if they voted to impeach President Bill Clinton, they risked "going down in history with the zealots and fanatics" (New York Times, Dec. 17, 1998). Wilentz's remark transparently alluded to a popular image of Thaddeus Stevens and Republicans who demanded President Andrew Johnson's ouster for obstructing Reconstruction in 1868. In this first volume of Stevens's papers, through 1865, handsomely edited by Beverly Wilson Palmer and Holly Byers Ochoa, readers will find a politician of rare and uncompromising principle, but whether they will find a zealot and a fanatic is something else entirely. . . .

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