# Radical Republicans The Radical Republicans were the wing of the [[Republican Party]] that pushed hardest, and earliest, for the United States to treat formerly enslaved people as full citizens. They were "radical" by the standards of their own party: where moderates wanted the South restored to the Union quickly and cheaply, the Radicals wanted the social order that produced secession dismantled, and they were willing to use federal power to do it. The label began as an insult. By the late 1860s the faction had adopted it, and historians kept it. Their strength was in Congress, not the White House. [[Thaddeus Stevens]] of Pennsylvania led them in the House; [[Charles Sumner]] of Massachusetts led them in the Senate; Secretary of War [[Edwin Stanton]] was their ally inside a hostile cabinet. They never held the presidency, and for three years after [[Abraham Lincoln]]'s assassination they were at war with the man who did. ## Why it's on the map Almost every constitutional guarantee that American civil-rights law now rests on was written by this faction, in a fight it was widely expected to lose. The [[Fourteenth Amendment]] — birthright citizenship, equal protection, due process against the states — is their document. So is the structure of the argument that a national government may override a state that strips its own residents of rights. The reaction against them matters just as much. The campaign to discredit Reconstruction as vindictive misrule by fanatics and outsiders became [[The Lost Cause]], and its themes — federal civil-rights enforcement as tyranny, Black political participation as fraud, violence against voters as an understandable response to provocation — recur on the American right long after the faction itself was gone. ## What they wanted - **Civil and political rights for freed men**, including the vote, enforced by the federal government rather than left to the states. - **Congressional control of Reconstruction.** Terms for readmitting the Confederate states should be set by Congress, not by a president acting alone while Congress was out of session. - **Disqualification of Confederate leaders** from holding office, rather than the mass pardons that returned them to power. - **Economic independence for the freed population** — land, schools, and legal standing — pursued through the [[Freedmens Bureau]] and, in Stevens's case, proposals to redistribute planter estates that the rest of Congress refused. ## The fight with Andrew Johnson [[Andrew Johnson]] became president in April 1865, with Congress out of session until December. He used the gap to reconstruct the South on his own terms: mass pardons for ex-Confederates, provisional governors drawn from their ranks, and no federal guarantee of Black rights. The restored legislatures responded with the [[Black Codes]], which bound freed people to white employers through vagrancy and labor-contract rules and barred them from testifying against white people in court. When Congress returned, it refused to seat the South's newly elected representatives — many of them the same men who had taken their states out of the Union. Instead, on December 13, 1865, the two chambers created a **Joint Committee on Reconstruction** of nine representatives and six senators, co-chaired by Stevens and Senator William Fessenden of Maine and known as the Joint Committee of Fifteen. It spent months taking testimony from Southerners, white and Black, about conditions in the former Confederacy. Congress also passed the [[Civil Rights Act of 1866]] over Johnson's veto — the first time major legislation had been enacted in the United States over a presidential veto. ## The Fourteenth Amendment In late April 1866 the committee produced the joint resolution that became the Fourteenth Amendment. It made anyone born or naturalized in the United States a citizen, guaranteed equal protection of the laws, reduced a state's representation in proportion to the voters it excluded, barred oath-breaking Confederates from office, and gave Congress the power to enforce all of it. The Senate passed it on June 8, 1866, and the House adopted the Senate's version on June 13, 1866. Congress then required the former Confederate states to ratify the amendment before being readmitted. Ratification was completed on July 9, 1868. Johnson fought it. He told Southern politicians to refuse ratification and wait for the midterms, promising that a Democratic Congress would discard Republican Reconstruction and let his own plan proceed. ## The 1866 midterms That bet failed completely. Through the summer of 1866 white mobs attacked Black residents and Unionist conventions — in Memphis in May, and in New Orleans on July 30, where a white mob attacked a convention that had called for extending the vote to Black men; the National Park Service records thirty-four Black supporters and three delegates killed, and contemporary accounts put the toll higher. Johnson then broke with precedent and campaigned in person, on a railroad tour from late August to his return to Washington on September 15, 1866, remembered as the Swing Around the Circle. Speaking from the same notes town after town, he called members of Congress traitors who should be hanged and compared himself to Lincoln and to Christ. Northern voters repudiated him. The [[1866 Midterm Elections]] gave Republicans veto-proof two-thirds majorities in both chambers — the result that made congressional Reconstruction possible, produced the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, and set up Johnson's impeachment in 1868. ## Decline The faction's power peaked immediately after that victory and then drained away. Stevens died in 1868; Sumner's influence faded before his death in 1874. Northern attention moved to the economy after the Panic of 1873, Republican moderates turned toward reconciliation with white Southerners, and federal enforcement collapsed. The [[Compromise of 1877]] ended the experiment the Radicals had built, leaving the [[Fourteenth Amendment]] and [[Fifteenth Amendment]] on the books and largely unenforced for most of the next century. ## Connections - [[Thaddeus Stevens]] — Their dominant leader in the House and co-chair of the Joint Committee of Fifteen. - [[Charles Sumner]] — Their leader in the Senate and the faction's moral voice on equal rights. - [[Edwin Stanton]] — Secretary of War and their ally in Johnson's cabinet; his firing triggered the impeachment. - [[Andrew Johnson]] — The president they fought for control of Reconstruction, and impeached. - [[1866 Midterm Elections]] — The election that gave them a veto-proof Congress. - [[Fourteenth Amendment]] — The amendment they drafted and forced through. - [[Black Codes]] — The Southern laws that convinced Congress presidential Reconstruction had failed. - [[Reconstruction and Its Overthrow]] — The longer arc of what they built and how it was destroyed.