Hailed as “the most important congressman in the House of Representatives during the Civil War” and still honored in Pennsylvania as the father of its public school system, Thaddeus Stevens grappled in his day with many of the issues that confront us today: racial and economic equality, affirmative action, and equal access to education.

Volume one of the projected two-volume edition of The Papers of Thaddeus Stevens covers Steven’s political career from his Vermont youth to the end of the Civil War.  It includes letters and speeches from his early days as a Gettysburg lawyer and as a representative in the Pennsylvania assembly through his antislavery efforts to the 1865 passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, freeing all slaves.

Thaddeus Stevens has been called “the greatest dictator Congress ever had,” a man who in 1867 held more political power than any man in the nation, including the president.  In his day Stevens grappled with many of the issues that confront us today: racial and economic equality, affirmative action, and equal access to education.  The second volume of a two-volume edition covers Steven’s later years during the tumultuous period from the end of the Civil War to his death in1868.  It includes letters, speeches, and remarks Stevens delivered as he championed equal rights for the freedmen and steered key Reconstruction measures through Congress.  This volume also contains letters from loyalists and ex-Confederates to Stevens reflecting their reactions to conditions in the South.

This landmark volume collects Lucretia Mott's correspondence for the first time, highlighting the length and breadth of her work as an activist dedicated to reform of almost every kind and providing an intimate glimpse of her family life. 

Mott’s achievements left a mark on reform movements from abolition to women's rights. The letters cover her work in these causes as well as her founding of key antislavery organizations; her friendships with Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth; her efforts to bring Quakers into the abolitionist movement; and her part in organizing the 1848 Seneca Falls Woman's Rights Convention. Other correspondence cover her fifty-six-year marriage, the five children she raised to adulthood, and informal insights and news with and about her cherished family. 

An invaluable resource, Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott reveals the incisive mind, sense of mission, and level-headed personality that made this extraordinary figure a major force in nineteenth-century American life.