Why Were The Radical Republicans Radical?

[Thomas Thorne]

Dear Eva
Please call me Tom

The Confederacy established a manufacturing base to create a sufficient number of small arms but had significant problems with making artillery. It is estimated that 2/3 of Confederate artillery pieces were captured from Union forces or taken from Union armories. Confederate artillery increasingly suffered from poor quality of metals and inferior fuses. One Southern officer said the "combination of Yankee artillery with Rebel infantry would make an army that could be beaten by no one."

It is distressing to report that not that many abolitionists or anyone else believed in modern concepts of racial equality. Sure Congress passed the civil rights acts, Reconstruction laws and constitutional amendments. But the enforcement of civil rights encountered increasing resistance by Southern whites,exhausted indifference by Northern whites and outright sabotage by the courts.

This culminated in the compromise of 1877. To resolve the disputed presidential election of 1876-which by comparison makes the 2000 election seem like a lovefest-Southern Democrats successfully demanded withdrawal of Federal troops from the few remaining states with Reconstruction governments in return for their accepting the election of the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes as president.

Everyone except the former slaves and their children benefited from the overwhelming desire to have the White North and White South reconcile. Both sides now agreed that slavery and disunion were wrong but how the South handled its internal affairs was its own business.
Tom.