Shortly before the Civil War a young lawyer came down from Vermont and settled in Adams County, Pennsylvania. There he saw fugitive slaves escaping from bondage, and as a conductor on the Underground Railroad he helped them to liberty. The irony of the thing entered into his soul and he gave himself with all his powers to combat that evil and to deliver the oppressed. When the great crisis, to which all those events were pointing, had broken over the nation, Thaddeus Stephens was perhaps the most powerful influence in the government of the United States. When he came to die, his only attendants were two Negro preachers.

Today in the very midst of Lancaster, in a shabby cemetery, you can see his tomb, and on the tomb these words: “Finding that other cemeteries were restricted as to race by charter rights, I have chosen to lie in this humble spot, in order that I might testify, even in my death, to those principles which I have advocated through a long life.”