... provides an anticipated and most welcome update of this anti-racist champion in the age of Black Lives Matter, falling Confederate monuments, and rising calls for transformational policy.

Bruce Levine [...] restores [Stevens] fully to his place in the American pantheon with [...] a concise and powerful biography. With a firm grasp on the era’s political history, Mr. Levine pilots us deftly through Stevens’s rise in the Whig Party, his early participation in the antislavery movement, and his part in the founding of the Republican Party, with its opposition to the spread of slavery. He tracks as well the nuances of wartime rivalries and alliances and the fierce battle to enact revolutionary legislation after the war.

Levine has produced a work of popular history. It takes pains to put Stevens’s actions in context and provides background on his early life and the road to civil war. The writing is occasionally clunky but the history is vital. In the end, Reconstruction remained a road not taken, even as Stevens drove the train as fast as he could..

Levine restores Stevens’ reputation and contextualizes his political views.

Levine’s book isn’t precisely a biography of Stevens. He seems largely uninterested in Stevens as a person, and provides almost no insights into what he was like outside of his documented political opinions and causes. This is a shame, for his personal life and personality partly drove his political life.

Levine takes a fresh approach to the life of abolitionist and congressman Thaddeus Stevens.

Easily the most detailed and important account of Stevens, this well-written biography belongs in every academic library and all other libraries with an emphasis on American history..

... fascinating yet flawed.