Why Were The Radical Republicans Radical?

[My Name Is Kate]

Were they really so far ahead of their time in their attitude toward black people and equal civil rights for freedmen, or did they have some hidden agenda?

[Gene C]

They had an agenda, and it wasn't hidden. It was to punish the southern leaders for the death, damage caused by the civil war.
Radicals did not want former southern political leaders participating in local and national government. Would you want to put the people you felt were responsable for the civil war, back in power?

Much (but not all) of the Radicals attutudes towards black people and civil rights was to embarrass and humiliate rich white southern slave owners/politicians and aristocrats.

[Bill Richter]

We all ought to (re)read C. Vann Woodward's "The Seeds of Failure in Radical Race Policy," in Harold M Hyman (ed.), New Frontiers of the American Reconstruction (Urbana: U of Ills Press, 1966), 125-47.

He posits that the whole Northern Reconstruction program was based on a fear that if the South were not made "Heaven on Earth" for the newly freed blacks hey would all emulated the runaways of before the Civil War and head north in droves. When that failed to be the car, the Yanks abandoned Reconstruction and allowed the South to "redeem" itself through Jim Crow and Peonage.

It was not until black labor was outmoded by the mechanical cotton picker that the South allowed blacks to leave, indeed encouraged them, all of which was spurred on by he need for factory labor to fight WW I, and less labor in the agricultural South.

[My Name Is Kate]

Were there any Radical Republicans who were sincere, and didn't just have an agenda, for instance, Thaddeus Stevens?

[Bill Richter]

Most definitely, read Hans Trefousse, The Radical Republicans: Lincoln's Vanguard for Racial Justice (New York: Knopf, 1969). But I tend to think everyone has an agenda, whether we agree as to its merits or not.

[My Name Is Kate]

Why were the southern states so afraid that Lincoln was determined to abolish slavery, that some of them immediately seceded from the Union when he was elected, when he stated in his first inaugural speech that he had no intention of doing so, and did not even have the constitutional right to do so? Why didn't they trust him?

If the South hadn't seceded, and if the Civil War could have been delayed until after the mechanical cotton picker was invented and there was less need for slaves, would slavery likely have died a natural death, and the war been avoided altogether?

[Bill Richter]

The South did not trust Lincoln. A lot of modern historians do not either. I have an essay on this in my book Sic Semper Tryrannis: Why Booth Shot Lincoln, available on Amazon.

Oddly enough, Lincoln's real plan of emancipation was to free the slaves gradually culminating in complete freedom by 1912. I do not think the war would have ben delayed much. The South saw slavery more than a labor system--it was a social division of the nation based on race. The North had its own separation policy--what later was practiced in the South too after black freedom. It was called segregation or in the vernacular, Jim Crow.

[Thomas Thorne]

The South feared a Republican administration would permit the dissemination of abolitionist literature and would foster through the use of patronage the disaffection of non slave holding whites who might undermine slavery.

This explains the hysteria in the South caused by Hinton Rowan Helper"s book "The Impending Crisis of the South." Helper, a North Carolinian, was a racist who was also an abolitionist. He believed that slavery was retarding the progress of the South. Helper's book was banned in many parts of the South and was gleefully endorsed by many prominent Republicans to the horror of Southern politicians.

But what was the greatest emotional combustible thrown onto the fire was the Southern reaction toward John Brown's attempt to incite a slave insurrection at Harpers Ferry. Southerners knew the fate of the French slaveholders in Santo Domingo-modern Haiti-destroyed by a victorious slave insurrection in the 1790's. They saw their own fate in successful John Browns and did not believe Republican denunciations of Brown were sincere. John Brown's activities were financed by prominent people and endorsed by the cultural aristocracy of the North. I believe it was Emerson who said that John Brown "made the gallows as glorious as the cross." The tolling of many New England church bells in Brown's memory and the attempt to adjourn the Ohio legislature in Brown's memory made many Southerners cringe at the thought of what a Lincoln administration would bring.
Tom

[JMadonna]

This should probably go under the title of "things I learned while looking up something else" but I was shocked to read:

" As the sessions of the Confederate Congress were closed to the public and secrecy strictly maintained as to the most of its proceedings, while no records were kept of its debates, the account of any of its activities must necessarily be based upon fragmentary sources."

If the Republicans were "Radical" at least they were open about it. What do you call a congress that meets in secret for 4 years?

Yeah, Yeah, I know... Health Care Democrats... don't bother

[Laurie Verge]

There are numerous volumes entitled something like the Journal of the Congress of the Confederate States housed at the Library of Congress. They are said to contain minutes from open, closed, and executive sessions of both the Confederate Senate and House. Evidently not all meetings were airtight in secrecy.

[Liz Rosenthal]

This should probably go under the title of "things I learned while looking up something else" but I was shocked to read:

" As the sessions of the Confederate Congress were closed to the public and secrecy strictly maintained as to the most of its proceedings, while no records were kept of its debates, the account of any of its activities must necessarily be based upon fragmentary sources."

If the Republicans were "Radical" at least they were open about it. What do you call a congress that meets in secret for 4 years?

The Confederacy was not a democracy and obviously dispensed with any democratic pretenses. In fact, prior to the war, the southern slave states were really not free for anyone, whether you were a slave or not. You didn't have free speech. By the mid-1830s, you couldn't talk about slavery in the South except to praise it. By the 1850s, due to local legislation, it became impossible, in some places at least, for slaveowners to even manumit their slaves!

Even worse, the U.S. wasn't really a democracy during the pre-war years. For one thing, the southern states had disproportionate representation in Congress... because they got additional House members based on three-fifths of the number of slaves counted in the census. The slaves couldn't vote, or give three-fifths of a vote, but the slaveowners' interests were protected by the additional House members they got via the three-fifths rule. And in Congress, discussion of slavery, again, was verboten unless the institution was being praised. Former President John Quincy Adams, later a House member from Massachusetts, led a struggle in Congress during the 1830s to get Congress to even receive anti-slavery petitions from anti-slavery and abolitionist groups in the North!

The South, which was supposedly so concerned about "state's rights," didn't care for state's rights for northern states, whose people objected to being forced to assist in the capture of runaway slaves.

As for the North, prior to the Civil War, free blacks often suffered under various legal disabilities simply because they were black. Illinois was one of the worst offenders in this area.

Despite all the horrors, bloodshed and privation of the Civil War, the war did enable Lincoln to place the U.S. on the path to becoming a true democracy (with "a new birth of freedom"). This wasn't fully realized till the mid-20th century, but the nation was finally on its way.

[Eva Elisabeth]

The South feared a Republican administration would permit the dissemination of abolitionist literature and would foster through the use of patronage the disaffection of non slave holding whites who might undermine slavery.

This explains the hysteria in the South caused by Hinton Rowan Helper"s book "The Impending Crisis of the South." Helper, a North Carolinian, was a racist who was also an abolitionist. He believed that slavery was retarding the progress of the South. Helper's book was banned in many parts of the South and was gleefully endorsed by many prominent Republicans to the horror of Southern politicians.

But what was the greatest emotional combustible thrown onto the fire was the Southern reaction toward John Brown's attempt to incite a slave insurrection at Harpers Ferry. Southerners knew the fate of the French slaveholders in Santo Domingo-modern Haiti-destroyed by a victorious slave insurrection in the 1790's. They saw their own fate in successful John Browns and did not believe Republican denunciations of Brown were sincere. John Brown's activities were financed by prominent people and endorsed by the cultural aristocracy of the North. I believe it was Emerson who said that John Brown "made the gallows as glorious as the cross." The tolling of many New England church bells in Brown's memory and the attempt to adjourn the Ohio legislature in Brown's memory made many Southerners cringe at the thought of what a Lincoln administration would bring.
Tom

How should slavery have retarded the progress of the South? I thought the opposite was the case due to agriculture as the basic (or even single?) source of revenue and wealth.
And - this might be a rather dumb question - I also thought that, even if the economic contest was one reason for abolitionism, most of the abolitionists were more or less in favour not only of the slaves' freedom but also of real equality. If I read through this thread I feel I was wrong, so: to what extend did the abolitionists intend to achieve equal rights for the blacks? Or better: about how many of them did so?

[Liz Rosenthal]

Eva:

Slavery hindered the South's economic development because that is practically *all* the South had. There was little manufacturing - manufacturing was concentrated in the North - and most of the economic "opportunities" in the South related to slavery in some way. If you weren't a slaveowner, you could be an overseer, or a sheriff (for want of a better name) looking out for runaway slaves. Then there were the poor whites, who barely eked out a living on a small patch of soil. The poor whites made up the overwhelming majority of the white population in the South. But the slaveowners controlled the politics and the economy. There was little hope of upward mobility for the poor. That is, unless you were interested in the military. Military service was the chief way out of the southern economy and the South was a very militaristic society. This accounts for the disproportionate number of southerners among American military officers at the time that Civil War broke out... and why it was so hard for Lincoln to find good generals, since most of them had left their Federal offices to join the Confederacy!

Goods tended to be purchased from the North or as imports from abroad, since little was made in the South. Receiving education in the South was chiefly the province of the plantation owners and their families. At the same time, plantation owners and their families looked down on work. They believed that it was beneath a gentleman to work. In the North, everybody had to work. The wealthy became wealthy by working or through technological inventions or smart investing or all three.

The North was ahead of the South not only in manufacturing, but in education, "internal improvements" (which Southerners tended to oppose), upward mobility, immigration, finance and many other things that were vital to a strong, diversified economy.

(In fact, much of the money that bolstered the Southern slave economy was actually situated in the North! This is a shameful fact that most Americans probably don't know. Northerners were also instrumental in the "slave trade" - that is, the kidnapping of Africans from western Africa to bring to the U.S. to be sold into slavery.)

As far as how many abolitionists favored racial equality, someone else may be able to answer that. In general, I think some did and some didn't.

How should slavery have retarded the progress of the South? I thought the opposite was the case due to agriculture as the basic (or even single?) source of revenue and wealth.
And - this might be a rather dumb question - I also thought that, even if the economic contest was one reason for abolitionism, most of the abolitionists were more or less in favour not only of the slaves' freedom but also of real equality. If I read through this thread I feel I was wrong, so: to what extend did the abolitionists intend to achieve equal rights for the blacks? Or better: about how many of them did so?

[J. Beckert]

Northerners were also instrumental in the "slave trade" - that is, the kidnapping of Africans from western Africa to bring to the U.S. to be sold into slavery.)

A great many were kidnapped and sold by their own people:

"The shameful history of some traditional leaders remains an awkward subject on which many politicians prefer to maintain silence. One exception was in 1998 when Yoweri Museveni, the president of Uganda, told an audience including Bill Clinton: "African chiefs were the ones waging war on each other and capturing their own people and selling them. If anyone should apologise it should be the African chiefs. We still have those traitors here even today."

[Eva Elisabeth]

Liz, this sounds as if the South - irrespective of slavery - grew increasingly inferior to the North. But if that was the case and the main alternative to agriculture for people to survive was military service, didn't this weaken the South even more (the military servants had to be payed, but didn't "produce" anything of equivalent economic value)? And in this case, wasn't the war condemned to be a lost case for the Southeners from the beginning?