Why Were The Radical Republicans Radical?

[My Name Is Kate]

This is my response to Gene's question in the French students thread, which is getting a little off-topic and too detailed for the questions the students asked.

My understanding is that the slave states began to secede before Lincoln ever took office because they took Lincoln at his word when he said that slavery must be kept out of the territories, and that would spell the end of the South's dominant political power and influence in the federal government. Maybe they acted too hastily, but what reason did they have to think Lincoln was bluffing when for most of his political career he had spoken against slavery and the spread of slavery, and emphasized that in the Lincoln/Douglas debates? How could Lincoln not have known they would secede when they had been threatening to do that? Why would he think they were bluffing, or did he actually expect, and even want them to secede? Why was he so uncompromising on the Crittenden plan to modify the Missouri Compromise boundaries in an effort to appease both the abolitionists and the South, which even Seward and Jefferson Davis had accepted?

http://www.history.com/topics/crittenden-compromise

I wouldn't even want to guess what proportion of responsibility for the Civil War deaths falls on Lincoln's and the abolitionists' shoulders, and what proportion falls on the slave South's shoulders. It would be easy to put 100% of the blame on the South because there is no question that slavery is wrong. But Lincoln said he would preserve the Union by either freeing all the slaves or none of them, and here was a plan that might have preserved the Union, which he said was his number one goal, and might also have averted a civil war, so why was it not acceptable to him?