To Break the Slave Power: Thaddeus Stevens, Land Confiscation, and the Politics of Reparations

Abstract

This article returns to the post–Civil War period to reconstruct Congressman Thaddeus Stevens’s political thought. Stevens argued that incorporating former slaves into republican society required a federal policy of land confiscation and redistribution in the South. According to the Republican congressman, taking land from the planter class, not just granting land to freed slaves, was a necessary component of any plan intended to break the slave power and inaugurate an interracial republic. My recovery of Stevens’s defense of land confiscation offers us critical purchase on contemporary demands for slave reparations. I compare the tenets of contemporary reparations discourse and Stevens’s efforts to form a true republic. Recovering Stevens’s bid orients us toward the potential uses and dangers of resurrecting a politics of Reconstruction premised on the active taking of material power from those who disproportionately wield it.