Why Were The Radical Republicans Radical?

[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.