The Radical Republicans were a radical faction of the 19th-century Republican Party that existed from the party's foundation in 1854 until the end of Reconstruction in 1877. The Radical faction of the Republican Party was founded mostly by former Whigs such as William H. Seward, Thaddeus Stevens, and Horace Greeley, although former Democrats such as John A. Logan, Edwin Stanton, Benjamin Butler, and Ulysses S. Grant became Radicals during the American Civil War. The Radicals were united solely by their support for the immediate, complete, and permanent eradication of slavery without compromise, views which were seen by the moderate President Abraham Lincoln as far too radical.
The Radicals were once seen as agents of the northern capitalist class whose anti-slavery professions were primarily a mask for a commitment to economic measures which would stimulate the growth of industry and enlarge the profits of businessmen. More accurately, they adhered to entrepreneurialism, nationalism, and utilitarianism, and they embraced a program of comprehensive political, economic, and social change. The term "Radical" was fluid, as 1850s radicals such as William H. Seward became moderates or conservatives in the next decade, and Radical allies James W. Grimes of Iowa, William P. Fessenden of Maine, Lyman Trumbull and Richard Yates of Illinois, and Horace Greeley of New York exhibited conservative tendencies. Instead, "Radicalism" meant refusing to compromise with the South on any question involving slavery. The Radical Republicasn did not think alike on all matters, as they did not share any unified economic policy or purpose; Seward, Stevens, and their allies were firm Whiggish adherents of protection and government aid to business, while Chase and most of the Massachusetts radicals were free-traders who tended to oppose pro-business measures. Most prewar Radicals came from the Free Soil Party, while a few had been Liberty Party men, Conscience Whigs, and Democratic Barnburners. Radical Republican districts were concentrated in rural and small town New England, and in the rural areas of New York and Pennsylvania and the American West settled by New England immigrants. New England's diaspora, with its small towns and independent farmers, were centers of literacy, religion, economic progress, Republican radicalism, and heavy Republican electoral majorities. The cities of New England, with their commercial ties to the South and large numbers of immigrants, tended to be more conservative and gave Republican candidates substantially fewer votes than did the countryside. Vermont, an almost entirely rural state, was the most radical in the North, giving Lincoln 76% of its vote in 1860. In New York, the New Englander populations came down like an avalanche for John C. Fremont, including in the "Little Vermont" region of St. Lawrence County. Some of the upstate New England areas had been strongly Whig or strongholds of the Locofoco Democrats before becoming centers of Radical Republicanism during the 1850s. The Northern Tier of Pennsylvania, the Western Reserve of Ohio, and the rural areas of Wisconsin and Michigan were all populated by New Englander and New Yorker migrants, and were hubs of Radicalism. New England and the Yankee West were fertile soil for reform movements of all kinds, including religious revivals, abolitionism, and Radical Republicanism.
To most radicals, economic issues were only peripheral to the basically moral question of slavery. The Radicals sought to keep the moral side of the slavery issue from being obscured by any other aspect, including economic comparisons of the North and the South. Just before the Civil War, as conservative tendencies appeared in the Republican Party, radical leaders intentionally made inflammatory speeches in Congress to bring out the religious and moral issues in the anti-slavery movement. The Radicals also believed that, once slavery was ocnfined to the slave states and its extension forever prohibited, Southerners themselves would take up the work of abolition, believing that a small aristocracy of slaveholders controlled Southern life and politics and stifled the aspirations of poor non-slaveholders. The Radicals supported the fostering and development of anti-slavery sentiment in the slave states, and Simon Cameron believed that the poor whites of the South were brothers to the Northern whites and were their natural allies, and had to be taught that the Radicals were battling for their rights.
At the 1860 Republican National Convention, the Radicals succeeded in shaping the official policy of the Republican Party by adding to the Republican platform that slavery could not constitutionally exist in any territory because of the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment. The Radicals and conservatives would battle for control of the Republican Party in almost every northern state from 1856 to 1860, with the Radicals supporting national supremacy and an almost unlimited view of the powers of the federal government, going farther than the limited-government Liberty and Free Soil parties. In 1860, Conservative Republicans joined with Constitutional Unionists and Douglas Democrats to endorse a single candidate against Judge Jacob Brinkerhoff in Wisconsin. The Radicals believed that the Union had been established for the noble purposes of securing the right of all Americans to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that the founders intended that slavery should one day cease to exist in the nation; meanwhile, the conservatives believed that the preservation of the Union was an end in itself and called for the anti-slavery agitation to be abandoned. Many Radicals were willing to accept disunion if it meant preserving liberty, but the start of the Civil War led to the Radicals adopting full-fledged nationalism. By then, the Radicals were stronger in the Upper North than in the more southerly free states, and they remained an influential minority within thet Republican Party. On most issues, the Radicals saw eye-to-eye with the ex-Democrats in the party, as a large number of them were free traders and foes of government aid to business, while suporting a states' rights interpretation of the Constitution before the Civil War. The ex-Democrats and Radicals also shared a common political enemy in the conservatives who wished to commit the party to a Whiggish economic program and a moderate approach to the slavery question.
After the Civil War's end, the Radicals pushed for the establishment of civil rights for former slaves, the full implementation of emancipation, the disenfranchisement of former Confederates, and equality and voting rights for freedmen, but the former Radical-turned-conservative President Andrew Johnson opposed the Radicals' harsh anti-Southern measures and narrowly survived an impeachment effort pushed by the Radicals in the US Congress. The Radical Republicans won control of Congress in 1866 and were able to enfranchise African-Americans with two "Reconstruction amendments" and by militarily suppressing the Ku Klux Klan, but the dawn of the Gilded Age, a series of corruption scandals in the Grant administration, and the Panic of 1873 led to the Northern public losing interest in Black civil rights and refocusing its attention on economic issues and civil service reform. In 1872, an anti-Reconstruction and anti-corruption faction of the Republican Party split from the GOP to form the Liberal Republican Party, led by Greeley, who argued that Reconstruction's goals had been achieved, and that the military governments set up in the South were breeding widespread corruption. Leading Radical Charles Sumner also joined the new party, but the vast majority of abolitionists remained loyal to the Grantist-dominated Republican Party, and the Liberal Republicans were defeated in the 1872 presidential election. Nevertheless, public support for Reconstruction continued to decline, and the moderate Republican Rutherford B. Hayes agreed to end Reconstruction in 1877 in exchange for the Democratic Party's recognition of his contested victory in the 1876 presidential election. With the end of Reconstruction, the Radical, Moderate, and Conservative Republicans - whose labels applied to their views on emancipation and civil rights - found themselves divided between the conservative and pro-spoils system Stalwarts and the pro-civil service reform Half-Breeds. The Radicals - who were themselves divided on issues such as hard/soft money, labor reform, and protectionism - were divided, and many Radicals, Union war veterans, and political bosses supported the Stalwarts because of their support for civil rights and the existing patronage system.
The Radical Republicans were racially progressive, with many Radicals supporting land redistribution in the American South to grant freedmen a means of self-support, as well as supporting the establishment of Freedmen's Bureaus and schools to extend educational opportunities to newly-freed Blacks. However, the Radicals' Democratic opponents accused them of being stooges of Northeastern business interests, as the national Republican Party enjoyed the most support in the industrial North, and Southern Democrats accused Northern "carpetbaggers" (almost all of whom were Radicals) of exploiting the South's weakness and the loyalty of newly-enfranchised Black voters to push an agenda favorable to big business in the North. In fact, the Radical Republican future president Benjamin Harrison was both a Radical (who was later opposed to the Chinese Exclusion Act as well) and a spokesman for fiscal conservatism during the 1870s. The Dunning School of historiography argued that the Radicals were solely motivated by their desire to support Northeastern business interests; in reality, while ex-Whig Radicals did support high tariffs, ex-Democrat Radicals generally opposed tariffs, and there were bitter internal debates over hard money or inflationist soft money.
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