Why Were The Radical Republicans Radical?

[Liz Rosenthal]

(05-11-2013 02:56 AM)Eva Elisabeth Wrote:  Liz, you were right, I really enjoyed reading "Tad Lincoln's father". The title might be a bit misleading since the book is as much about J.T.'s life. But she reveals some interesting insights about her education and (social) habits, e.g. I was amazed that monolingual foreign language teaching (students were only allowed to speak French at school) had already been practised in those days. I suppose Mary's education had been about the same, what a difference to A.L.'s poor frontier schooling!
I was also pleased with the (uncommmon) point of view on Mary, whom J.T. first of all introduces and presents as a lovable, likable character. Whatever positive I had read about Mary before, her skills and abilities had always been stated in a way an attorney defends an dafendant, but none of this had suggested truely lovable character traits.
Back to school(ing). J.T. mentions that during wartime no schools were open in Washington (p.65). Is this true? As far as I know, Washington was only once (in July 1864)seriously threatened, so why? Was it due to the risk of passing on epidemic deseases? Were the buildings used as military hospitals or did the teaching staff have to serve as nurses or soldiers?
Finally, what do the 3"R's" in "we formed some acquaintance with the '3R's'" (p.22) stand for? (Whoever could give a hint,please help!)

I actually don't know the answer to the question of whether all schools in Washington DC were closed during the Civil War. If true, several factors may have been at work. In the months leading up to the Civil War, the city bled residents. A huge number of southerners left to go South, to fight for their state or the Confederacy or to be with family. Probably there were a good number of northerners who went North for similar reasons, although my impression is that Washington was dominated by southerners, culturally and demographically. And, of course, slavery was alive and well there. But I suppose that, with southerners and some other city residents leaving, the student populations of existing schools were decimated - not to mention the population of teachers and even school owners/administrators. And, certainly, as the war progressed and the casualties mounted and the troop presence in the city increased, all available space was likely needed for hospitals and for soldiers, medical professionals and humanitarian volunteers to take up residence. Someone else here might know, though, to what extent public schools even existed in Washington at the time war broke out, with Washington being a southern city, and the South not being particularly friendly to the public schools movement that had been gathering steam in the North, so we might just be talking about the closing of a bunch of privately-run schools. My guess is that children were probably schooled in people's homes during the war, by private tutors or perhaps in informally established classrooms. Again, here, someone else probably knows better than I do.

[My Name Is Kate]

Why did the Radical Republicans lose interest in supporting the rights of Freedmen after 1868, which coincidentally (or maybe not) was the year black men were granted the right to vote? (I got this from Wikipedia.)

[Gene C]

Kate, I'm not totally sure, but many of the more radical republicans were not reelected in 68'. Now that the war had been over, people wanted to move on from those issues and focus on other things. A significant portion of the population realy didn't care if black men got the right to vote.

Johnsons years as president had been tough on the country. One of the main reasons Johnson kept his job - even though a large number of politiicains didn't like him, they liked Ben Wade (the person who would replace him as president if he was impeached) even less. Wade was one of those "radical republicans" not reelected in 68'. He had served 18 years in the senate.

[L Verge]

I'm very weak on everything that occurred during the reconstruction of the South - frankly, the word Reconstruction signaled the end of what I was interested in in American history all through my schooling years! My mind only focused on what happened in the U.S. before 1866.

Over the past ten years, I have forced myself to at least consider the years 1866-1899. That said, I think Gene's reply above is definitely one of the answers to Kate's question. Also, I think I'm correct that the Freedmen's Bureau (it had a much longer name) was created in March of 1865 to function for just one year. It ended up being sanctioned through 1872, when Grant disbanded it. I thought its chief reason for disbanding had to do with budget crunches - the funding from Congress dried up as national laws to protect the freedmen went into effect.

I'm not sure that the bureau's life depended on the Radical Republicans, even though that group did support the rights of the newly freed Negroes. They did help to get critical legislation through that protected (or tried to protect) those rights: The Civil Rights Act of 1866, the 14th and 15th Amendments, and things called Enforcement Acts when white-protection groups such as the Klan and others threatened the rights. Didn't there also come a point where the states were supposed to be protecting their black citizens instead of the federal government??

Therefore, I'm inclined to say that the Radical Republicans didn't drop their interest in helping the freedmen. Time, legislation, and other issues just caused things to move on to other areas.

[Wild Bill]

Reconstruction was over for all practical purposes by 1870. Tenn was readmitted in 1866, all other states on July 28, 1868, and the four laggards, Va, Tex, Miss, and Ga (reconstructed twice in 1868 and again in 1870, after the st leg threw out all black reps after being readmitted the first time) by 1870. All that was left was to suppress the KKK by 1872 and from there on out open white violence against Republicans (white and black) took the Southern st govts one by one until 1877, as the North tired of saving their brethren in the South. See, Trelease, White Terror and Rabel, But There Was No Peace.

[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?

[JMadonna]

The Missouri Compromise was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. The Crittenden plan would have been ruled unconstitutional on the same grounds.

[My Name Is Kate]

This is my reply to a post that no longer exists.

Any attempt to keep slavery out of the territories was unconstitutional because it violated the non-exclusion clause in the Constitution (maybe someone can remember which clause that is...I don't at the moment.) At least that is my understanding. If I am wrong about that, someone please explain to me why.

But the point I am trying to make is that Lincoln said his number one goal was to keep the Union together, and that he would do it either by freeing all of the slaves or none of them. In other words, the plight of the slaves was not his major concern. So if the Crittenden Compromise offered an opportunity to both keep the Union together and avoid a civil war, why did Lincoln not jump at the chance? Because he didn't want slavery to spread? Yes, he said that, but why then did he also say he would save the Union by not freeing any of the slaves, if that was the only way to do it? Either slavery was objectionable to him or it was not. Or did he only care about possible future slaves in the territories, but not the slaves in the slave states? Interfering with either of them was unconstitutional. Stopping the spread of slavery in the territories would put an end to the South's political domination in the federal government. Is that why the plight of those slaves was more important to him than the ones in the states?

[brtmchl]

(01-29-2014 08:21 AM)JMadonna Wrote:  The Missouri Compromise was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. The Crittenden plan would have been ruled unconstitutional on the same grounds.

The Kansas - Nebraska Act negated everything. Making the Missouri Compromise obsolete in favor of "popular sovereignty." Did the Supreme Court ever take this on? Could they have ruled this unconstitutional since each state would be voting Free or Slave and Slaves were seen as property not people?

Kate: "But the point I am trying to make is that Lincoln said his number one goal was to keep the Union together, and that he would do it either by freeing all of the slaves or none of them. In other words, the plight of the slaves was not his major concern."


Kate: "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?"

I think the difference lays in President Lincoln vs Lincoln the Statesman. Obviously Lincoln's early speeches reflect his feelings toward slavery and his actions to do away with slavery. Critics of Lincoln will point out that he has flip flopped many times on this issue, some have gone so far as claiming he was a racist. Lincoln was a politician, an exceptional politician, and politicians speak to the crowd in which they are in front of. Lincoln the President is a different story. As President, his main job WAS to preserve the Nation ( Union ). As President there is little he can do except to obey and abide by the law of the land and Slavery WAS legal. Now as President in a time of War, a War in which Marshall Law is envoked and Presidential War powers are enacted, changes can be made much faster than in peacetime when all laws are written by a divided Congress.

We can debate whether President Lincoln maneuvered the South into firing on Fort Sumter. But make no mistake, War was coming! The nation was a Powder Keg and no amount of Compromise lasted very long for the 30 years prior to the War. I contend that the Civil War did not start at Fort Sumter or Harper's Ferry or even the election of Abraham Lincoln, but in 1854 with the signing of The Kansas - Nebraska Act and the border War that broke out shortly after.

[Rob Wick]

Kate,

With all due respect, you're mixing up some things here.

First, what Lincoln personally felt about slavery and what the Constitution (in his mind) allowed him to do are two different things. Lincoln never believed that the government could end slavery without an amendment to the Constitution, even though he personally found the practice repugnant. He did not believe it was unconstitutional to keep slavery out of the territories, and while I am certainly no Constitutional scholar, I would question whether or not it was not allowed, given that the Northwest Ordinance did keep slavery out of those territories. Indeed, Stephen A. Douglas believed each territory had the right of popular sovereignty in determining whether the state was to be free or slave.

Lincoln felt the Crittenden Compromise would allow slavery to spread into the territories unchecked, and he was opposed to that. However, he was willing to let the states decide on the Corwin Amendment, which as he saw it simply codified his understanding of the law as it stood.

You also have to remember the time surrounding Lincoln's oft-quoted statement about preservation of the Union. He made it in response to Horace Greeley's "The Prayer of Twenty Millions" editorial in the summer of 1862. At the time he responded to Greeley, the Emancipation Proclamation was nearly ready to be unveiled. It was almost two years after the Crittenden Compromise that Lincoln made that declaration, and he did it as a political move which he believed to be necessary.

Whether Lincoln "cared" about the slaves in the Southern states is a subjective question. He knew there was nothing he could do to stop slavery there short of a Constitutional amendment. Read Eric Foner's The Fiery Trial on Lincoln's evolving view of race and slavery.

Best
Rob

[Liz Rosenthal]

Excellent summary of the facts, Rob! You put it all in a very tight, flawless nutshell!

[My Name Is Kate]

Why was the Constitution not more clear on something as important as the subject of slavery, or was it deliberately vague because slavery obviously went against that other stuff about all men (forget about women...) being created equal, etc.? And if the Constitution was so vague about slavery that different politicians could interpret it in different ways to suit their purposes, why would the slave states have consented to ratify the Constitution and become a part of the Union?

Rhetorical question: Is vagueness and deception the essence of politics?

One thing I do not think I am wrong about: There never should have been any concessions made to slavery in the Constitution, and if that meant forming a Union out of only free states, that was the moral thing to do.

[Gene C]

Let's look at it this way.

At the start of the civil war, a large amount of the population believed slavery to be morally wrong, but the government said it was legal.
Today, a large amount of the population consider homosexual marriage and/or abortion to be morally wrong, but the government says it is legal.

My point is, don't expect the govenment to set the standard or be the example for what is and isn't morally right.

[L Verge]

I feel that the writers of the Constitution had no choice but to "ignore" the slavery issue. 1. The Articles of Confederation had failed to bring about a united country. 2. A substantial amount of states that were needed to cooperate in building a united country were slave states. 3. The new Constitution would need to be ratified by a majority of the states before becoming law. 4. The slavery issue in writing would only cause trouble with getting the document signed into law. 5. So let's ignore it for the time being, and get the Constitution ratified. 6. The elected government from that point on could argue about how to deal with the issue via amendments.

That's exactly what they did, only it took over fifty years; a civil war; and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to get there.