Radical Republicans

These policy goals and the rhetoric in their favor often made it extremely difficult for the Republican Party as a whole to avoid alienating large numbers of American voters of Irish Catholic, German, and other White ethnic backgrounds.

In fact, even German-American Freethinkers and Forty-Eighters who, like Hermann Raster, otherwise sympathized with the Radical Republicans' aims, fought them tooth and nail over prohibition.

After unsuccessful measures in 1866 resulted in violence against former slaves in the former rebel states, Radicals pushed the Fourteenth Amendment for statutory protections through Congress.

After Johnson vetoed various congressional acts favoring citizenship for freedmen, a much harsher Reconstruction for the defeated South, and other bills he considered unconstitutional, the Radicals attempted to remove him from office through impeachment, which failed by one vote in 1868.

The term "radical" was in common use in the anti-slavery movement before the Civil War, referring not necessarily to abolitionists, but particularly to Northern politicians strongly opposed to the Slave Power.

The Radicals came to majority power in Congress in the elections of 1866 after several episodes of violence led many to conclude that President Johnson's weaker reconstruction policies were insufficient.

In a pamphlet directed to black voters in 1867, the Union Republican Congressional Committee stated: [T]he word Radical as applied to political parties and politicians ... means one who is in favor of going to the root of things; who is thoroughly in earnest; who desires that slavery should be abolished, that every disability connected therewith should be obliterated.

The Democrats were strongly opposed to the Radicals, but they were generally a weak minority in politics until they took control of the House in the 1874 congressional elections.

On issues not concerned with the destruction of the Confederacy, the eradication of slavery and the rights of Freedmen, Radicals took positions all over the political map.

The argument, common in the 1930s, that the Radicals were primarily motivated by a desire to selfishly promote Northeastern business interests, has seldom been argued by historians for a half-century.

Radical Republicans were often critical of Lincoln, who they believed was too slow in freeing slaves and supporting their legal equality.

Lincoln appointed many Radical Republicans, such as journalist James Shepherd Pike, to key diplomatic positions.

[18] The Radical Republicans opposed Lincoln's terms for reuniting the United States during Reconstruction (1863), which they viewed as too lenient.

Johnson vetoed 21 bills passed by Congress during his term, but the Radicals overrode 15 of them, including the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and four Reconstruction Acts, which rewrote the election laws for the South and allowed blacks to vote while prohibiting former Confederate Army officers from holding office.

The Liberals lost badly, but the economy then went into a depression in 1873 and in 1874 the Democrats swept back into power and ended the reign of the Radicals.

The Civil Rights Act of 1866 made African Americans United States citizens, forbade discrimination against them and it was to be enforced in Federal courts.

The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution of 1868 (with its Equal Protection Clause) was the work of a coalition formed of both moderate and Radical Republicans.

The Radical Republicans were successful in their efforts to impeach President Johnson in the House, but failed by one vote in the Senate to remove him from office.

Once in office, Grant forced Sumner out of the party and used Federal power to try to break up the Ku Klux Klan organization.

As white Democrats now dominated all Southern state legislatures, the period of Jim Crow laws began, and rights were progressively taken away from blacks.

[26] The Dunning School, based at Columbia University in the early 20th century, saw the Radicals as motivated by an irrational hatred of the Confederacy and a lust for power at the expense of national reconciliation.

[26] According to Dunning School historians, the Radical Republicans reversed the gains Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson had made in reintegrating the South, established corrupt shadow governments made up of Northern carpetbaggers and Southern scalawags in the former Confederate states, and to increase their power, foisted political rights on the newly freed slaves that they were allegedly unprepared for or incapable of utilizing.

Beale and Woodward were leaders in promoting racial equality and re-evaluated the era in terms of regional economic conflict.

Since the 1950s, the impact of the moral crusade of the civil rights movement led historians to reevaluate the role of Radical Republicans during Reconstruction, and their reputation improved.

[33] These historians, sometimes referred to as neoabolitionist because they reflected and admired the values of the abolitionists of the 19th century, argued that the Radical Republicans' advancement of civil rights and suffrage for African Americans following emancipation was more significant than the financial corruption which took place.

They also pointed to the African Americans' central, active roles in reaching toward education (both individually and by creating public school systems) and their desire to acquire land as a means of self-support.