Thaddeus Stevens

Thaddeus Stevens (b 1792) was a Republican Congressman from Pennsylvania. Before the American Civil War, he had a reputation in the South as being a dangerously radical abolitionist. Even Robert E. Lee, a moderate by southern standards and generally a politically fair man, feared Stevens. Said Lee of Stevens, "but for its bloodlessness, his long, thin mouth remind[s me] of a knife gash."

Andries Rhoodie used Stevens's fearsome reputation to his advantage in a falsified version of American history he gave to hide the Rivington Men's true motives. He claimed that Stevens succeeded Abraham Lincoln (who served two full terms) as President and that his hardhearted policies toward the reconstruction of the South allowed black people to gain political, economic, and social advantage over white people that they never relinquished, though he declined to give details. On hearing this falsified history, Lee was convinced that the specter of a Confederate defeat would be disastrous indeed.

In fact, Lincoln was succeeded by Andrew Johnson, a Southerner, when he died at the beginning of his second term. The President elected in 1868 was Ulysses S. Grant. Stevens died three months before Election Day of that year and, had he lived, he would have been one month shy of his seventy-seventh birthday on the day Rhoodie claimed he began his administration.

Of course, the OTL Stevens did indeed support radical and vindictive reconstruction policies toward Southern whites, though they certainly did not result in a permanent eclipsing of the white race by the black.