Radical Republicans

12 Key excerpts on "Radical Republicans"

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  Reconstruction

  • Eric Foner(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Harper

    (Publisher)

  The Making of Radical Reconstruction

  I T was a peculiarity of nineteenth-century politics that more than a year elapsed between the election of a Congress and its initial meeting. The Thirty-Ninth Congress, elected in the midst of war, assembled in December 1865 to confront the crucial issues of Reconstruction: Who would control the South? Who would rule the nation? What was to be the status of the emancipated slave? In both Houses, Republicans outnumbered Democrats by better than three to one. Clearly, a united party would have no difficulty enacting a Reconstruction policy and, if necessary, overriding Presidential vetoes. But American parties are not tightly organized, ideologically unified political machines, and the interaction between the Republican party’s distinctive factions would go a long way toward determining the contours of Congressional policy.

  The Radical Republicans

  On the party’s left stood the Radical Republicans, a self-conscious political generation with a common set of experiences and commitments, a grass-roots constituency, a moral sensibility, and a program for Reconstruction. At the core of Congressional Radicalism were men whose careers had been shaped, well before the Civil War, by the slavery controversy: Charles Sumner, Ben Wade, and Henry Wilson in the Senate; Thaddeus Stevens, George W.Julian, and James M. Ashley in the House. With the exception of Stevens they represented constituencies centered in New England and the belt of New England migration that stretched across the rural North through upstate New York, Ohio’s Western Reserve, northern Illinois, and the Upper Northwest. Here lay rapidly growing communities of family farms and small towns, where the superiority of the free labor system appeared self-evident, antebellum reform had flourished, and the Republican party, from the moment of its birth, commanded overwhelming majorities.

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  Silencing the Opposition

  How the U.S. Government Suppressed Freedom of Expression During Major Crises, Second Edition

  • Craig R. Smith(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 3 The Radical Republicans and Reconstruction

  Craig R. Smith

  W hen he should have been scouting the Union army for General Lee, J.E.B. Stuart decided to raid an iron works just south of Harrisburg. His mission was successful in the immediate sense: the foundry was destroyed and several workers were killed. Unfortunately, the iron works belonged to Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens and one of those killed was his nephew. When the war ended, Stevens, perhaps more than any other Republican, wanted his revenge.

  That desire for revenge would not only result in the muzzling of the South, it would lead to a civil war within the Republican Party when its leaders, including Stevens, turned on their own presidents, first Lincoln for being too conciliatory and then Andrew Johnson for allegedly conspiring with the South. This case of silencing the opposition has significant similarities and differences with the Alien and Sedition crisis. It revolves around a war, around an external threat prompted by Southern arrogance, around a perceived threat of internal subversion by the president, and around a threat to the power of a major political party. In this case, however, the crisis arises just as the war ends and it leads to a division in the ruling party between the Congressional and executive branches. Furthermore, it contains an example of those being suppressed by one group trying to silence a third group. The circularity of these forces is impressive as Republicans free Blacks and disenfranchise the ex-Confederate leadership, while the ex-Confederates attempt to disempower newly freed Blacks.

  As with the Federalists, the Radical Republicans ran a strong rhetorical operation that helped them pass significant and constitutionally suspect legislation; but the Radicals faced an intransigent president absolutely opposed to their program, a debacle the Federalists avoided with the acquiescence of President John Adams. Since the Radicals succeeded in the face of perhaps tougher resistance at the outset, their success at emasculating the South and rendering President Johnson ineffective deserves special attention.

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  A Short History of Reconstruction

  • Eric Foner(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • HarperCollins e-books

    (Publisher)

  Yet whatever Radicals’ indecision as to the economic future of the postwar South, the core of their ideology—that a powerful national state must guarantee blacks equal political standing and equal opportunity in a free-labor economy—called for a striking departure in American public life. As Congress assembled, no one knew how many Republicans were ready to advance this far. The growing perception of white Southern intransigence, and President Johnson’s indifference to the rights of blacks, helped propel the party’s center of gravity to the left. Radicalism, however, possessed a dynamic of its own, based above all on the reality that in a time of crisis, Radicals alone seemed to have a coherent sense of purpose. The “one body of men who had any positive affirmative ideas, Texas Senator-elect Oran M. Roberts discovered upon arriving in Washington, was “the vanguard of the radical party. They knew exactly what they wanted to do, and were determined to do it.” Repeatedly, Radicals had staked out unpopular positions, only to be vindicated by events. Uncompromising opposition to slavery’s expansion; emancipation; the arming of black troops—all these had, at first, little support, yet all finally found their way into the mainstream of Republican opinion. “These are no times of ordinary politics,” declared Wendell Phillips. “These are formative hours: the national purpose and thought grows and ripens in thirty days as much as ordinary years bring it forward.”

  Origins of Civil Rights

  From the day the Thirty-Ninth Congress assembled, it was clear the Republican majority viewed Johnson’s policies with misgivings. Clerk of the House Edward McPherson omitted the names of newly elected Southern Congressmen as he called the roll, and the two houses proceeded to establish a Joint Committee on Reconstruction to investigate conditions in the Southern states and report on whether any were entitled to representation.

  Some of Johnson’s supporters considered these steps a direct challenge to Presidential authority, but Johnson’s annual message to Congress took a conciliatory approach. Essentially, the President insisted, “the work of restoration” was now complete—all that remained was for Congress to admit Southern representatives. On the other hand, he conceded that Congress had the right to determine the qualifications of its members, apparently offering it some role in judging Reconstruction’s progress. Most Republicans appear to have accepted the message as an acceptable starting point for discussions of Reconstruction. Radical proposals to overturn the Johnson governments and commit Congress to black suffrage fell on deaf ears. “No party, however strong, could stand a year on this platform,” one Republican newspaper commented.

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  Civic Ideals

  Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History

  • Rogers M. Smith(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  10 The America That Never Was The Radical Hour, 1866-1876 To forge a new Union without slavery, Republicans emancipated and empowered blacks, first with arms, then with citizenship and civil rights, and finally with the franchise. Their dramatic efforts produced three constitutional amendments and six major federal statutes that comprised the most extensive restructuring of Amer-ican citizenship laws in the nation's history, apart from the adop-tion of the Constitution itself. And the legal foundations of this re-structuring were far more consistent than those of the heavily compromised Constitution: though not wholly unalloyed, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, the Civil Rights Acts of 1866,1870,1871, and 1875, the Expatriation Act of 1868, and the Naturalization Act of 1870 all proclaimed egalitar-ian, nationalistic liberal republican principles to a degree that was unimaginably radical for most Republicans in 1860. The laws did not prevent the building of new systems of racial injustice in the United States, but they did establish a new framework for civic ar-guments that could not easily be ignored. In accounts stressing the liberal democratic character of America's true civic ideals, these reforms are rightly prominent. Yet authors of those accounts face the grave task of explaining the swift eclipse of Radical Congressional Reconstruction, already well under way in the early 1870s, though its final repudiation did not come until the 1890s. That eclipse contrasts to the ongoing suc-cess of Reconstruction's Republican sponsors. From 1864 to 1912, the party of Lincoln gained popular majorities in nine of twelve presidential elections and won ten. It controlled the Senate for forty-four of those forty-eight years and the House for thirty, with the Democrats in full control of Congress for only four years. Once

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  From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South

  Central Georgia, 1800-1880

  • Joseph P. Reidy(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • The University of North Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  3 Thus, perhaps ironically, the relatively quick collapse of Republican rule in Georgia created conditions remarkably like those prevailing in areas undergoing emancipation outside the United States: landed elites controlled local government, with little, if any, independent input by the former slaves. This lesson is instructive for two reasons. First, it did not take the other southern states long to fall into the same situation—nowhere did the Republicans stay in power for as long as a decade. Second, during modern times (again, with the exception of Haiti), no agricultural laboring class (whether slaves, serfs, or peasants) succeeded in winning control over a state until the twentieth century. Even then, few could go it alone; they struggled as parts of coalitions with other working or bourgeois classes.

  The Republican party stood as the premier ally. Freedmen took comfort in the growing influence of Radicals over Reconstruction. If at first freedpeople miscalculated the role of northern finance capitalists, who anchored the party’s Moderate wing, the Moderates’ commitment to creating governments friendly to industrial development orchestrated by a strong central state soon became clear.4 The question remained, however, whether viable coalitions of former slaves, northern immigrants, southern unionists, and antebellum free black persons could be forged to create such governments.

  Over most of the South, the Republicans faced a determined, sophisticated opposition, which, though not without internal divisions of its own, was united behind a program of social hierarchy whose central tenet was the unfitness of freedmen to exercise the franchise. The planters and merchants who articulated this viewpoint accused congressional Radicals of forcing unrepresentative government upon the traditional electorate. At the same time, they laid out a case explaining why freedmen were unqualified. The foundation of the argument was the innate inferiority of persons of African descent. Emancipation might well do away with slavery, but no mere edict could make freedmen fit to vote. Over time, they found an increasingly receptive audience in the North, among Moderate Republicans as well as Democrats.

  If so much of Georgia’s story replicated that of its neighboring states, within months of the start of Radical Reconstruction, Georgia departed from the pack. Before the Republican government had been in office three months, both houses of the legislature expelled their black members. For that action, Congress imposed another round of military occupation and supervised Reconstruction during 1870 and 1871; no sooner had that ended than Democrats gained control of the legislature and Republican governor Rufus B. Bullock fled the state rather than face certain impeachment and civil prosecution on corruption charges. Following hastily called elections, Democrat James M. Smith assumed the governor’s office in January 1872, thereby ending the brief but tumultuous Republican reign.

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  Free Expression and Democracy in America

  A History

  • Stephen M. Feldman(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  ch a p ter 6 R epublican Democracy ∫o m R eco≥tru±ion through 1920 The Civil War sundered America along multiple jagged lines. A cataclys-mic event by any account, the mortality figures alone were staggering. Between the Union and the Confederacy, 665,000 American soldiers died, 50 percent more than during World War II. 1 After the war, during Reconstruction, the North sought to solidify its victory over the South, yet Northerners themselves divided among Radical Republicans, moder-ate Republicans, and (Northern) Democrats, many of whom had been wartime Copperheads. Moderate and Radical Republicans disagreed, for instance, about the degree to which national governmental power should be expanded. Moderates preferred that national power remain within tra-ditional federalism limits, while radicals pushed for broader national pow-ers. Among Democrats, Northerners and Southerners had split before the war on the question of popular sovereignty. While Southern Democrats had sought federal protection of slavery within the territories, Northern Democrats had insisted that the people within local communities should always reign supreme. The Northern Democratic antebellum leader, Ste-phen Douglas, insisted “that the people of every separate political com-munity (dependent colonies, Provinces, and Territories as well as sovereign states) have an inalienable right to govern themselves in respect to their internal polity.” After the war, Northern Democrats maintained their emphasis on popular sovereignty within local communities, apparently justifying a more forgiving attitude toward the supposedly contrite white { 154 } chapter six Southerners (both before and after the war, Northern Democratic concep-tions of the sovereign “people” did not include blacks). 2 Partly because of these political divisions, Northerners never precisely agreed on the meanings of the Reconstruction amendments: the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth.

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  The State of Black America

  Progress, Pitfalls, and the Promise of the Republic

  • Center for Urban Renewal and Education, William B. Allen(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Encounter Books

    (Publisher)

  6 While the old guard of leaders recognized that they did not have the same support from the national GOP as their predecessors, and that the Southern Democratic Party was resurgent, they understood these shifts as temporary. Most importantly, they believed that they stood on a powerful moral argument related to voting rights and the meaning of the Civil War and Reconstruction that could ultimately win the day in the public sphere.

  Put another way, while some in the Republican Party no longer wanted a prolonged fight over voting rights in the South, black political leaders like Robert Smalls remained committed to the ideals they believed to be at the core of the Republican Party. Sensing that they were entering the political wilderness, these Stalwart Republicans echoed Frederick Douglass’s 1872 clarion call that “the Republican Party is the ship and all else is the sea.”7 Keenly aware that they were out of step with where the party was heading—and where many new black leaders saw as the proper direction of black political life—the old guard politicians believed that they were a major political victory away from securing a return to Reconstruction.

  Challenging the standard interpretations of black politics in the post-Reconstruction era, this essay charts a new path for understanding how black Americans understood the Republican Party in the late nineteenth century. I move beyond the standard post-Reconstruction interpretation of African American political history, which has emphasized how, in the wake of Republican Party’s abandonment of black Southerners following the Compromise of 1877, black Americans were left with only the marginalized realm of symbolic politics. This interpretation, I argue, obscures the fact that after the Reconstruction there was still considerable storm and stress within the remaining bastions of black politics over the meaning of the Republican Party. Far from representing isolated or exceptional places in the black world, the South Carolina Lowcountry and Washington, D.C., both served as “living archives” of an earlier era’s political history. While unable to reverse the larger shift toward disfranchisement, the late-nineteenth-century black leaders who struggled over the meaning of the Republican Party built a counter memory that helped keep the political vision of the Reconstruction alive during the Jim Crow era.

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  Encyclopedia of U.S. Campaigns, Elections, and Electoral Behavior

  • Kenneth F. Warren(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  The radicals also imposed Republican rule on the former Confederate states, through a coalition of freed slaves, Scalawags (southern whites who joined the Republican Party and called for acceptance of the radicals’ reconstruction policies) and Carpetbaggers (northern whites who moved into the former Confederate states during reconstruction). The party would become dominant in presidential elections, winning six of the eight presidential elections 1864–92. The only Democrat elected during this period was Grover Cleveland, who was elected in 1884 and 1892. In 1876 (Tilden) and 1888 (Cleveland), the Democratic candidate won the popular vote, but lost the electoral vote. Following the contested presidential election of 1876, President Rutherford B. Hayes removed federal troops from Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, the last three states under military occupation. With the end of Reconstruction, the Republican Party would virtually disappear from the south until the middle of the 20th century, as the south went Democratic. It was during this era that the party’s traditional symbol, the elephant, came into use. A political cartoon drawn by Thomas Nast was published in the November 7, 1874, edition of Harper’s Weekly and depicted a Republican elephant and a Democratic donkey; both symbols endure. THE FOURTH PARTY SYSTEM 1896–1932 By 1896, a new era was emerging in American politics. The Civil War and Reconstruction were no longer salient issues in American politics. The Industrial Revolution had transformed America, and it would transform the competition between the two major political parties. By 1896, the Republicans supported big business, the gold standard, protective tariffs, and pensions for Union military veterans. The 1896 Republican platform was also the first to call for women’s suffrage.

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  Washington during Civil War and Reconstruction

  Race and Radicalism

  • Robert Harrison(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  They looked to it to ensure equal and adequate provision for the colored schools, which the city government, until the Republican takeover in 1868, stubbornly refused to do, and to keep management of those schools as far as possible in their own hands. Like black Republicans further south, they held to an almost millennial view of the party’s purpose. According to G. H. Brooks of the Seventh Ward, “The Republican party had been used, through the providence of God, to deliver the race, and if they showed ingratitude to the party they would show ingratitude to God.” For all its faults, the Republican Party was the party of freedom. The opposition Conservative or Democratic Party, on the other hand, consisted of “white rebels” who “wanted to reduce them to a condition next door to slavery.” “If the Republicans were defeated,” Walker White warned his fellow black Republicans, “the Democrats would drive them from their homes . . . and they and their children would be compelled to sit on the sidewalk.” 45 44 Cf. Saville, “Rites and Power,” 89–90; Saville, Work of Reconstruction, 143–51, 170– 75; Fitzgerald, Union League in the Deep South, 66–71; Scott, “Stubborn and Disposed to Stand their Ground,” 119–20; Hahn, Nation under Our Feet, 173–76; Elsa Barkley Brown and Gregg D. Kimball, “Mapping the Terrain of Black Richmond,” Journal of Urban History 21 (March 1995), 305–8; Richard Paul Fuke, Imperfect Equality: African Americans and the Confines of White Racial Attitudes in Post-Emancipation Maryland (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999), 185–88. 45 Evening Star, April 23, 14, May 27, 1868. For local Republican platforms, see Evening Star, June 3, 1867, May 9, 1868. Race, Radicalism, and Reconstruction 203 As Michael Fitzgerald found in the Deep South, newly enfranchised blacks, many of them newly emancipated, saw politics as a way of improv- ing their economic prospects.

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  Decades of Reconstruction

  Postwar Societies, State-Building, and International Relations from the Seven Years' War to the Cold War

  • Ute Planert, James Retallack(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  This racially egalitarian nationalism had limits. In the West, many Republicans adopted virulently anti-Asian views, objected to citizenship for Chinese immigrants, and had a similarly negative out- look concerning Native Americans. But in the East, the party’s official political and ideological commitments rejected a “white man’s government” and endorsed “color blind” republicanism based on the Declaration of Independence. See the 1868 and 1872 Republican national platforms in Thomas Mackey, ed., Documentary History of the American Civil War Era (Knoxville, TN, 2013), 163–172. US Reconstruction and the Caribbean after 1865 185 their departure from Americans’ traditional white racial nationalism, Republicans articulated a series of pro-Reconstruction arguments. Blacks who supported the national government were more worthy of citizenship than disloyal southern whites who had fought to break up the nation and continued to resist federal power. African American sol- diers had proven their race’s capacity for republican citizenship through their bravery on the battlefield. 24 Other arguments centered on the justice of allowing citizens, of whatever race, to defend their interests at the ballot box. 25 Some Republicans focused on the United States’ mission to spread republicanism throughout the world. They warned that if African Americans were denied equal rights, the United States’ republican mission would be compromised because other nations would spurn racist US institutions. 26 Republicans appealed to Americans’ patriotism by arguing that US republican institutions were so strong that they possessed sufficient transformative power to uplift and incorporate recently enslaved peoples of African descent. 27 Those arguments provided an ideological rationale for Reconstruction, but for many Republicans, electoral concerns were paramount.

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  The Union Divided

  Party Conflict in the Civil War North

  • Mark E. Neely Jr., Mark E. NEELY(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  Their voting strength before the war was rural rather than urban, and what told on the hus-142 “ P A R O X Y S M S O F R A G E A N D F E A R ” tings was as much their political and moral message as their smokestack issues. 6 Nevertheless, as Eric Foner has proved in a book of classic stature, there was a broad range of opinion within the pre-war Republican party. That spectrum, which he deªnitively described in Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War, spanned from conserva-tives who hated the South for holding back economic legis-lation desired by northern business and industry to in-tensely moral antislavery activists concerned to end slavery because of its cruelty to African Americans. It is a pity that Foner’s book ends with the onset of the Civil War, because nothing as comprehensive or persuasive exists to describe the Republican party at war. 7 And it is not possible simply to extend Foner’s scheme for understanding the antebellum Republicans forward into Lincoln’s presidency because the Civil War made much of the original Republican outlook, like its platform, irrelevant. The party’s opposition to the slave power remained rele-vant, of course, and grew in importance after the border states’ afªliation with the Union was assured in late 1862. But the economic outlook of the Republicans did not follow a straight path through the war years. There were two impor-tant reasons for that, and neither of them has received much attention from historians heretofore. First, the war served temporarily to unsettle the Republi-cans’ conªdence in capitalism. I use the term “capitalism” advisedly here, rather than the term made popular by Foner, “free labor ideology,” for Republicans always retained conª-dence in “free labor.” But “free labor,” taken literally, com-prised only part of the northern economic system, and that 143 T H E R E P U B L I C A N P A R T Y A T W A R

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  The Reconstruction Era

  Primary Documents on Events from 1865 to 1877

  • Donna L. Dickerson(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  In this country at this moment both Radicalism and Conservatism, as the names of a policy of national reorganization, are very easily defined and comprehended. Thus Radicalism holds that the late rebel States should not be suffered to take part in the government of the Union which they have so zealously striven to destroy except after searching inquiry into their condi- tion, and upon terms which shall prevent any advantage having been gained by rebellion. By the result of the war the suffrage of a voter in South Car- olina weighs as much as the vote of two voters in New York. Is that a desir- able state of things? Would any fair-minded voter in South Carolina claim that he ought to have a preference in the Union because, however honestly, he has rebelled against it? ... Radicalism holds that equal civil rights before the law should be guar- anteed by the United States to every citizen. It claims that the Government 72 The Reconstruction Era which commands the obedience of every citizen shall afford him protection, and that the freedom which the people of the United States have conferred the people of the United States shall maintain. Is that a perilous claim? Is any other course consistent with national safety or honor? Once more: Radicalism asserts that, as the national welfare and per- manent union can be established only upon justice, there should be no unreasonable political disfranchisement of any part of the people. It denies that complexion, or weight, or height are reasonable political qualifications. . . . This is Radicalism. Is it unfair? Is it unconstitutional? Is it anarchical or revolutionary? It denies no man's rights. It deprives no man of power or privilege. It claims for the National Government nothing which is not insep- arable from the idea of such a Government. Does it demand any thing that every prudent and patriotic man ought not to be willing to concede? ...

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