Why Were The Radical Republicans Radical?

[Liz Rosenthal]

(04-30-2013 03:46 PM)JMadonna Wrote:  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.