Thaddeus Stevens and the Power of the Purse

Steven Spielberg’s 2012 film Lincoln might well have been called Stevens, after its alternate protagonist: the irascible chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Thaddeus Stevens. As played by Tommy Lee Jones, Stevens appears to viewers as a surly congressional stalwart, whose principal role in the drama of the American Civil War was in preventing President Abraham Lincoln from abusing executive power. In a scene depicting a reception at the White House, Stevens is greeted by the president’s wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, who beseeches Stevens to refrain from convening another subcommittee to investigate her household accounts. She accuses Stevens of taking a prosecutorial approach to his work. The congressman withstands the barrage without rejoinder. He knew, just as the crowd assembled in witness to the exchange would have known in 1865, that the House of Representatives controlled the federal budget. If the president and his wife needed new curtains, Stevens and the rest of the House could put the question up for debate. Only the people’s house could decide whether to cut the Lincoln family a check. 

Thaddeus Stevens loomed large in 19th-century American politics. No stranger to controversy, Stevens found himself on the radical fringe of the Republican Party, advocating for emancipation and Black suffrage from the outset of the Civil War. As the chairman of two of the most important committees in the House of Representatives, Ways and Means (1861-1865) and Appropriations (1865-68), he stood at the center of national politics during the height of his career. It was not simply White House decor that concerned Stevens, but also the budgets for the Army and Navy, myriad government contracts signed to produce guns, uniforms, and hardtack to fuel the Union war effort, and the growing federal bureaucracy (and its attendant payroll) required to wage the Civil War.

From the drafting of the Constitution until March 1865, the House Committee on Ways and Means controlled all matters related to revenues and appropriations within the federal government. The power of the purse, as it came to be known, fell to the House as part of the complicated system of checks and balances negotiated at the Constitutional Convention. In the Federalist Papers, No. 58, James Madison posited that “This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.” Whichever federal body held the purse strings, Madison explained, had the responsibility of “reducing … all the overgrown prerogatives of the other branches of the government.” Neither the president nor the Supreme Court could requisition funds for any project without the approval of the House — and no individual, even the executive, could expect access to unlimited means. Nor could the president withhold allocated funds from any government agency or program after the House approved — and the Senate concurred — the annual federal appropriations bill. The House, through its emphasis on proportional representation — based on population — most directly represented the people. And, as Massachusetts politician Elbridge Gerry put it at the federal Constitutional Convention: “the people ought to hold the purse strings.” 

Given the power wielded by the Ways and Means Committee, its chairman was typically one of the most influential and important members of the majority party in Congress. Like many of the men who served before him, Thaddeus Stevens did not ascend to the chairmanship of Ways and Means as an acknowledgement of specialized experience. Financial acumen was seldom a requirement for service. It hardly reflected significant congressional seniority — Stevens had only served three terms in the House before being awarded the role (1848-1850, 50-52, and 58-60). Instead, the appointment recognized his influence and reputation among fellow Republicans, who recognized their comrade’s oratorical skill and legal brilliance. The fact that Stevens garnered so much respect, despite being a radical abolitionist, affirms the party’s assessment of his abilities. His journey to the position involved a lifetime of overcoming adversity. Born into a poor farming family in rural Vermont, Stevens grew up with a club foot and an absent father. After graduating from Dartmouth, Stevens took up the study of law and moved to York, Pennsylvania, to teach and study for the bar. He opened his first law office in Gettysburg in 1816 and began transferring the profits from his legal work to real estate, securing himself a small fortune through interest earned from investments in iron furnaces across southern Pennsylvania.

The Civil War placed unprecedented financial demands upon the Ways and Means Committee’s members. The volume of the work would have been difficult for the ablest and most energetic statesman to manage, and Stevens was 70 years old in 1862, his party’s de facto leader in the House. Military appropriations alone bedeviled Stevens and his colleagues — estimates changed minute by minute as the war consumed more men and material than anyone could have ever predicted. In 1861, the federal budget of $80.2 million devoted some $36.4 million to defense. By 1865, the comparable figures were $1.33 billion and $1.17 billion. 

As chairman, Stevens took on the task of drafting and defending the first federal income tax legislation in the nation’s history. Prior to his tenure, the committee on Ways and Means relied on excise taxes and tariffs to fund the government’s various departments, leaving the pockets of the people untouched. Stevens stressed that the government could not rely on loans to make up the difference in the government’s revenues and expenditures, nor could it risk defaulting on its debts. And, he explained, should the United States prevail in the war, the nation would need funds on hand to begin paying down the cost of the conflict and provide for the care of veterans and their families. 

In March 1865, the House voted to create a new committee dealing solely with appropriations, and another with banking, leaving revenues alone to Ways and Means. It was one of the final actions taken by the 38th Congress of the United States. The reasons for the change are murky. Modern histories of the committee suggest that members of the House sought to achieve a greater distribution of important powers and functions throughout the legislative body. “The tendency of the time is to extravagance in private and in public,” Democrat Samuel S. Cox of Ohio explained, “we require of this new committee their whole labor in the restraint of extravagance and illegal appropriations.” When the House reconvened for the first session of the 39th Congress, Speaker Schuyler Colfax appointed Stevens the chairman of the newly established Appropriations Committee. He served in the role for three years, until his death in 1868. 

Extant correspondence gives little suggestion as to Stevens’ opinion about the creation of the new department. His only public remarks on the proposed changes to the House’s financial responsibilities indicated that he cared little whether Ways and Means was broken up into smaller committees or maintained in its pre-war form. “I have no desire myself to have it one way or the other,” he told his House colleagues, in an address far less politically charged than was his typical oratory. His new committee had responsibility for “the examination of the estimates of all Departments, and exclusively the consideration of all appropriations.” As its chair, Thaddeus Stevens held the government purse strings more firmly than ever.

In the modern era, it might be easy to think Stevens was simply dissembling, using Ciceronian rhetorical tricks to mask his glee at being handed the federal checkbook at the outset of Reconstruction. His new chairmanship did offer the opportunity to make a play for power, and to oversee his own coronation as the czar of Reconstruction. But Stevens refrained. In fact, he threw much of his dwindling energy into a new committee, created in December 1865, on Reconstruction. “The whole fabric of Southern society must be changed and never can it be done if this opportunity is lost,” Stevens had declared that September. While he kept up with the duties of the Appropriations Committee through the spring and summer of 1865, Stevens drafted the resolution to form the Joint Committee on Reconstruction and served as its co-chair once it received the approval of both chambers. It was clear that Stevens could consolidate political power when he wanted, but few of his colleagues — or his political foes — suggested that Stevens might be tempted to use his control over the nation’s finances to advance the Reconstruction committee’s work. Collusion was not a concern.

Very little correspondence from the final three years of Stevens’ life concerned his work on the Appropriations Committee. From his personal and public writing, it is clear that Stevens preferred to devote his mind and his energy to the Reconstruction problem — not Appropriations. The two tasks, though they occasionally overlapped, occupied distinct roles in Stevens’ political life. And while he oversaw the funding for critical Reconstruction programs such as the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, there were never accusations of favoritism or impropriety in delegating funds from his House colleagues. In fact, over the course of Stevens’ tenure as chairman, federal budgets declined significantly: from $520 million in 1866 to $322 million in 1869. Economization was the watchword of the immediate postwar years, and spending decreased across the board, despite the quantity of work facing the federal government.

Stevens even proved willing to make budgetary cuts to Reconstruction programs. In a May 1, 1866, debate on appropriating funds for schoolhouses to be constructed for freedpeople in the former Confederacy, Stevens defended his committee’s request for $3 million. When Illinois Democrat Lewis Ross asked Stevens why Northern constituents should be taxed for such a program, Stevens admitted that the will of the people might not align with his request. He agreed to reduce the amount to just $500,000, while noting his regret that “our friends here still retain a portion of their old hatred of the negro.” Stevens took the smaller appropriations victory to avoid a total loss in advancing an important Reconstruction initiative. Though important, the funds for schoolhouses were a small piece of the Reconstruction puzzle, and while he defended their necessity Stevens was, at the same moment, preparing to introduce the 14th Amendment for debate in the House. That work, he declared just one week later, involved “trying to write the Declaration of Independence’s promise of freedom and equality into the Constitution.” Securing half a million dollars would be the work of a year, a constitutional amendment would represent the achievement of a lifetime. 

During his term as Appropriations chair, Thaddeus Stevens achieved little in the way of funding Reconstruction. Appropriations for the Freedmen’s Bureau, the institutional centerpiece of the Republican reconstruction program, totaled a little over $11 million during Stevens’ tenure. While it might surprise us today that the greatest legislative advocate for Black equality in the 19th-century United States did not bend the power of the purse to fund his radical Reconstruction program, we would do well to remember that appropriations were far from the sole quiver in Stevens’ arsenal. Budgets are the grist for the modern American government mill. Perhaps we expect Thaddeus Stevens to have done more with the power of the purse for this reason. But Stevens knew he derived that power from the will of the people, and he respected its limits. He needed to keep the people on his side, so that he could make sure that nearly four million more Americans were added to their number.