House Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania (April 4,1792-August 11,1868), was a leader of the Radical Republicans who opposed President Abraham Lincoln's lenient treatment of ex-Confederates. Stevens was the most aggressive abolitionist. His funeral in Lancaster, Pennsylvania was attended by twenty thousand people, half of whom were freedmen. The epithet on his tombstone was his own writing. "I repose in this quiet and secluded spot, not from any natural preference for solitude, but finding other cemeteries limited as to race, by charter rules, I have chosen this that I might illustrate in my death the principles which I advocated through a long life, equality of man before his Creator."
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