Lincoln and the Radicals

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This book by T. Harry Williams is considered a classic by many. First published in 1941, its view of the Radical Republicans is dated and tainted by the Dunning School. He begins by describing the ideological makeup of the Republican Party. “No polyglot army of an ancient emperor ever exhibited more variety than did the Republican Party in 1860. Within its diverse ranks were radicals and abolitionists who wanted to destroy every vestige of slavery, moderates who would have been content to restrict its expansion into the territories, Whigs, Free-Soilers, and antislavery Democrats, Eastern manufacturers who hoped for a protective tariff and Western farmers who favored free trade, hardened machine politicians and visionary reformers. Two threads of unity bound this heterogeneous coalition into the semblance of a national organization. Each constituent part was opposed, although with varying intensity, to the institution of Negro slavery. And the party broadly represented the social ideology of the ‘free’ capitalistic society of the North, whose ruling middle class felt it must strike down the political power of the slavocracy in order to complete its economic control of the nation. There was a right and a left wing in the party even before 1860. The moderates were typified by Lincoln, the courtly Orville H. Browning of Illinois, James R. Doolittle of Wisconsin, and Vermont’s venerable Jacob Collamer. They advocated the gradual extinction of slavery, compensated emancipation, and colonization of the Negroes in another land. They detested slavery, and believed the institution could not survive the strain of a long civil war. But they also feared and distrusted the revolutionary ardor of the radicals and the spirit of fanaticism that was inherent in the abolitionists. They opposed the wartime abolition of slavery except as a final measure of military necessity to prevent the disruption of the Union. Hence the conservatives fought from the beginning the hasty plans of the radicals to bring about immediate emancipation. Temperamentally they objected to the reforming zeal of the radicals. Furthermore, unlike the abolitionists, they had some appreciation of the practical difficulties that would follow the sudden liberation of several million slaves. The conservatives were reasonable, able men, but their very virtues rendered them incapable of coping with the determined radicals in a revolutionary period. In contrast to the radicals, the moderates were negative and vacillating, lacking a cohesive program of consistent action. The radicals were the real driving power in the party. They were the men whom young John Hay, Lincoln’s secretary, who had encountered their fierce prototypes of the French Revolution in his superficial reading, dubbed the Jacobins. Aggressive, vindictive, and narrowly sectional, the radicals hated slavery with a bitter personal feeling. But more than slavery they hated its political representatives, the proud cavaliers who had dominated Congress in the fifties and who had scourged the sputtering radical minority with polished gibes. Unlike many of the the moderates, the Jacobins welcomed the outbreak of civil war as the longed-for opportunity to destroy slavery and to drive the ‘slave traders’ from the national temple.” [pp. 4-6] Williams presents us with a highly negative portrayal of the Radical Republicans, and I got the impression that a word count would show he used “Jacobins” far more than he used “Radicals.”

To Williams, the Radicals were never serious men. They were emotional, usually driven by hatred and anger. For example, “Halleck immediately gave the radicals a demonstration of the hopelessness of their cause as long as the Democrats controlled the army patronage. On November 20 he published an order concerning the treatment of fugitive slaves. He asserted that the Confederates were employing them as spies. Therefore he directed that all fugitives within his lines be ejected, and that none be admitted in the future. This action stung the Jacobins to cold fury.” [pp. 50-51] He shows no sympathy for the escaped enslaved people who seized their freedom and were unceremoniously tossed out of the relatively safe environment of the U.S. Army camps to where they would be liable to be brought back into slavery. He has no empathy for the Radical Republicans’ feelings for the escapees. As he writes, “The radicals were in a savage mood as autumn ended.” [p. 51] He refers to the Second Confiscation Act as “drastic.”

To Williams, the Radicals could do no right and Lincoln could do no wrong, while African Americans stood by and let white men determine their fate and were not “prepared” for freedom. One gets only a caricature of the Radical Republicans instead of an actual portrait, and a hagiographic view of Lincoln combined with a racist view of the capacity of African Americans. To Williams, George McClellan is unwilling to fight and wrote Lincoln the “Harrison’s Landing Letter” out of the blue with no warning, not telling us McClellan had earlier asked of Lincoln and had received permission to present his views on how the war should be conducted.

The book is valuable for its place in the historiography of the Civil War as well as its footnoted references, but other than that I find it difficult to recommend it.

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