“The Whole Fabric of Southern Society Must Be Changed”: Thaddeus Stevens on Land Reform

Background: In this 1865 speech delivered to a Republican gathering in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Radical Republican leader Thaddeus Stevens laid out a detailed case for redistributing southern land to freedpeople and others who had remained loyal to the Union.

We especially insist that the property of the chief rebels should be seized and appropriated to the payment of the national debt. . . By forfeiting the estates of the leading rebels the government would have 394,000,000 of acres besides their town property, and yet nine-tenths of the people would remain untouched. Divide the land into convenient farms. Give, if you please, forty acres to each adult male freedman. Suppose there are 1,000,000 of them. That would require 40,000,000 acres, which deducted from 394,000 leaves 354,000,000 acres for sale. Divide it into suitable farms, and sell it to the highest bidders. I think it . . . would average at least $10 per acre. That would produce $3,540,000.

The whole fabric of southern society must be changed and never can it be done if this opportunity is lost. . . . How can republican institutions, free schools, free churches, free social intercourse exist in a mingled community of nabobs and serfs? If the South is ever made a safe republic let her lands be cultivated by the toil of. . . free labor . . .

Nothing is so likely to make a man a good citizen as to make him a freeholder. Nothing will so multiply the production of the South as to divide it into small farms. . . . No people will ever be republican in spirit and practice where a few own immense manors and the masses are landless. Small and independent landholders are the support and guardians of republican liberty.

Source: Speech of the Honorable Thaddeus Stevens Delivered in the City of Lancaster, September 7, 1865 (Lancaster, PA, 1865).