If his political hopes and party schemes had been sometimes successful, his reverses and disappointments had been much greater. Many and severe trials during an active, embittered, and often unscrupulous partisan experience, had tempered his enthusiasm if they had not brought him wisdom. Defeats can hardly be said to have made him misanthropic; but having little philosophy in his composition, he vented his spleen when there was occasion on his opponents in ironical remarks that made him dreaded, and which were often more effective than arguments; but his sagacity and knowledge of men taught him that a hostile and open conflict with a chief magistrate whose honesty even he respected, and whose patriotism the people so generally regarded, would be not only unavailing, but to himself positively injurious. He therefore conformed to circumstances; and while opposed to the tolerant policy of the Administration toward the rebels and the rebel States, he had the tact and address, with his wit and humor, to preserve pleasant social intercourse and friendly personal relations with the President, who well understood his traits and purpose, but avoided any conflict with him. For the first five or six weeks of the third session of the Thirty-seventh Congress, Stevens improved his time in free and sarcastic remarks on the reconstruction policy of the Government, which he characterized as puerile and feeble, and at length, on the 8th of January, he gave utterance to his feelings, maintaining that "with regard to all the Southern States in rebellion, the Constitution has no binding influence or application." He averred that "in his opinion they were not members of the Union"; that "the ordinances of secession took them out of the Union"; that he "would levy a tax wherever he could upon these conquered provinces"; said he "would not only collect the tax, but he would, as a necessary war measure, take every particle of property, real and personal, life estate and reversion, of every disloyal man, and sell it for the benefit of the nation in carrying on this war."