 Stanley K. Schultz and William P. Tishler |
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The fact of the matter is there is not a single answer to the question, "who was a Radical?" There are men who, quite obviously, were extremists. Men like Thaddeus Stevens, men like Charles Sumner, the fiery Senator from Massachusetts, caned in the nation's capitol on the floor of Congress by an irate South Carolinian. There were men like Wendell Phillips, one of the leading abolitionists and leading orators and agitators against the South during the 1840s and the 1850s. These were men of extreme positions on certain issues. Let's remind ourselves that the Republican Party had come into being in the mid-1850s committed to limiting the extension of slavery, not to abolishing it. Lincoln initially had stayed with that position. During the early years of the war, a growing number of Republicans in Congress had moved closer and closer to the position of the extremists, the position of abolishing chattel slavery in the United States. These were men who defied Lincoln time and again, men who would defy the new president, Andrew Johnson, in the years after the war. When Johnson came to power in 1865, the leading Radicals in Congress saw their chance to push their viewpoints about reconstructing the South. Radicals regarded Andrew Johnson with contempt. Although the political viewpoints of "radicals" came in many shades and they often disagreed about other important national issues, from the 1866 elections on, a Radical Republican was any member of Congress committed to destroying the institution of slavery and committed to some kind of civil rights for African-Americans.
The Radicals seized power, in part, because of growing hostility toward President Johnson and some of his actions in the early months of 1866 when Johnson vetoed two bills that Congress had passed. The first was an extension of a former piece of legislation called the Freedman's Bureau Bill, designed to educate newly freed slaves while also providing "forty acres and a mule" to aid freedmen in farming. Johnson vetoed the bill on the grounds that until the former Confederate states returned, Congress did not have the right to set up such provisions. The second bill that Andrew Johnson vetoed angered the Radicals even more, the first civil rights act in American history, the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Essentially, all it did was bestow citizenship on the newly freed slaves, but Johnson vetoed it as an unnecessary invasion of states' rights. The Radicals interpreted the President's vetoes as evidence that he himself, personally, was a racist and stepped up their demands for control over Reconstruction. They gained control of the powerful Joint Committee of Fifteen, the committee on Reconstruction, and it was in that committee that the Forfeited Rights theory was applied to the South. Their cause was helped by the fall elections of 1866. Their own skillful campaigning and political errors by President Johnson resulted in an increasing number of Radicals elected to Congress. From that point on, the Radicals were in full charge of Reconstruction, and would have their way with the South. What was the nature of Radical Reconstruction? Well, since 1865, many myths, many legends, have built up about the nature of Reconstruction. Those myths were given wide public viewing and approval in 1915 when the first feature length motion picture that Hollywood made appeared on the silver screens of the nation. The movie was Birth of a Nation, by the great director D. W. Griffith. More than any other single film, it presented the Southern viewpoint of the nature of Reconstruction. Those myths we can capture in words used by the Southerners themselves: "The Tragic Era;" "The Dreadful Decade;" "The Age of Hate;" "The Blackout of Honest Government." Let me just briefly and quickly summarize these for you. |
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