Overlooked by so many history books written by Democrat professors is the fact that the former rebels were almost completely in charge of the South for the first two years after Appomattox. Not until March 1867 were Republicans able to dissolve the neo-Confederate state governments, when Republicans overrode President Johnson’s veto of Thaddeus Stevens’ Reconstruction Act. In an inadvertent tribute to the heroic Republican, caricatures of Stevens and Lydia Smith are the villains of that pro-Ku Klux Klan movie, Birth of a Nation.

At death’s door and no longer able to walk, the 76-year old Stevens managed the prosecution at the impeachment trial of President Johnson. Just before his death, Stevens helped convince a reluctant House of Representatives to appropriate the money to pay for the purchase of Alaska.

Thaddeus Stevens died in Washington, DC with Lydia Smith at his bedside. An honor guard of black Union army veterans stood at attention while his body lay in state in the Capitol. In an unprecedented tribute to their beloved leader, Republican nominated him for another term, and in death he would win a nearly unanimous victory. Some 20,000 people, half being freedmen (former slaves) from the South, attended his funeral in Lancaster, where he had insisted on being buried in a racially-integrated cemetery and with the epitaph “Equality of Man before his Creator.”

The chaplain of the U.S. Senate delivered this eulogy: “God give to Vermont another son; Lancaster, another citizen; Pennsylvania, another statesman; the country, another patriot; the poor, another friend; the freedmen, another advocate; the race, another benefactor; and the world, another man like Thaddeus Stevens.” Amen.

Michael Zak’s article is adapted from his book Back to Basics for the Republican Party, a history of the GOP from the civil rights perspective.