Eric Foner reviews LeeAnna Keith’s new book on the Radical Republicans in this week’s The Nation Magazine. The preeminent historian of the Reconstruction Era gives Keith’s WHEN IT WAS GRAND: THE RADICAL REPUBLICAN HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR a mixed review. Foner writes that Keith “adds to our understanding of how a rising tide of violence in the 1850s served as a harbinger of the Civil War, a conflict that culminated in the most radical act in American history: the uncompensated abolition of slavery. The author of The Colfax Massacre, a highly praised study of the bloodiest act of carnage against African Americans during Reconstruction, Keith makes an important contribution by placing Radicals at the center of these transformative events.”
In spite of his respect for her research, Foner questions why Keith does not offer an “entirely coherent, definition of the Civil War–era Radicals.” The lack of definition of the subject allows her to bring in interesting character, but it obscures more important ones. Foner writes:
she does not confine her account to individuals working within the political system. Her subjects include not only Radical Republicans but also abolitionists, who refused to participate in politics under a Constitution they deemed irreparably proslavery; Transcendentalists, for whom the abolition of slavery was as much a path to intellectual self-realization as a form of political action; and black activists, who campaigned during the war for racial equality in post-slavery America.
Casting this wide net allows Keith to include a variety of antislavery activists in her narrative. But it remains unclear at times what unites these “culture warriors,” as she calls them, or why particular individuals were chosen for in-depth treatment while others were neglected or ignored. The New England philosophers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and the Rev. Theodore Parker (the last surprisingly described as a Republican “party boss”) all receive considerably more attention, for example, than Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens, the leading Radical Republicans in Congress, or less familiar ones such as George W. Julian. Stevens is described as “a wisecracking lawyer said to be secretly married to his black housekeeper”—hardly an adequate description of one of the 19th century’s great egalitarians. …Keith also devotes little attention to the Radicals’ ideology and seems unable to decide how much political power they actually enjoyed. At the outset, she claims they “dominated the Republican party,” a considerable exaggeration; elsewhere she makes them seem like political fringe dwellers.
Foner likes Keith’s description of the way wartime military Radicals pressure Lincoln towards emancipation by freeing slaves within their jurisdictions. But there are drawbacks here as well. Foner says:
Keith deserves praise for shifting the center of gravity of wartime Radicalism away from Washington to military encampments and upstart black gatherings in the Union-occupied South. But in so doing, When It Was Grand seriously neglects some of the political dimensions of Radical Republicanism. In a recent article in Catalyst, a new left- oriented scholarly journal, the Princeton historian Matthew Karp convincingly portrays the rise of the Republican Party in the 1850s and the destruction of slavery during the war as revolutionary outcomes achieved on “the field of democratic mass politics.”
The Radicals were central actors on this terrain. Before the war, they played a large role in the creation of an antislavery majority in the North. It was a development that made possible the election of Lincoln, a moderate Republican who worked closely with Radicals because he understood that they formed a crucial element of what would today be called the party’s base. The Radicals also pushed key pieces of wartime legislation through Congress, among them a measure early in the conflict barring the army from returning fugitive slaves, as well as the first and second Confiscation Acts—key steps on the road to Emancipation.
When It Was Grand stops when the war ends, at the very moment the Radicals begin to achieve their greatest influence and farthest-reaching successes. During Reconstruction, they spearheaded the rewriting of the Constitution to abolish slavery, enfranchise black men, and guarantee birthright citizenship and equal protection under the law regardless of race, bringing into being (if only temporarily) genuine interracial democracy in the United States. Despite the book’s many insights into the Radicals’ actions leading up to and during the war, one wishes Keith had followed their story into the Reconstruction years, linking the struggles for freedom on the plains of Kansas and battlefields of the Civil War with the postwar era’s congressional and presidential initiatives and constitutional changes.
While aware of the Radicals’ accomplishments, Keith ends on a less than celebratory note. In an echo of an earlier era of historiography, she writes that, in her view, “their aims were not pure” and they too often succumbed to the “love of power.” Trying to explain how the Republican Party eventually abandoned its commitment to equality, she claims that only abolitionists like John Brown and Gerrit Smith developed truly “collegial relations” with black activists—a judgment quite unfair to the many Radicals who worked closely with black colleagues in the struggle for equality.
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