Lincoln And The Radicals

This book examines Lincoln's associations with the Radical Republicans during the Civil War and how their policies shaped the country and war effort.

"A great American tale told with a deft historical eye, painstaking analysis, and a supple clarity of writing.”—Jean Baker “My husband considered you a dear friend,” Mary Todd Lincoln wrote to Frederick Douglass in the weeks after Lincoln’s assassination. The frontier lawyer and the former slave, the cautious politician and the fiery reformer, the President and the most famous black man in America—their lives traced different paths that finally met in the bloody landscape of secession, Civil War, and emancipation. Opponents at first, they gradually became allies, each influenced by and attracted to the other. Their three meetings in the White House signaled a profound shift in the direction of the Civil War, and in the fate of the United States. James Oakes has written a masterful narrative history, bringing two iconic figures to life and shedding new light on the central issues of slavery, race, and equality in Civil War America.

The story of how Congress helped win the Civil War--a new perspective that puts the House and Senate, rather than Lincoln, at the center of the conflict. This brilliantly argued new perspective on the Civil War overturns the popular conception that Abraham Lincoln single-handedly led the Union to victory and gives us a vivid account of the essential role Congress played in winning the war. Building a riveting narrative around four influential members of Congress--Thaddeus Stevens, Pitt Fessenden, Ben Wade, and the proslavery Clement Vallandigham--Fergus Bordewich shows us how a newly empowered Republican party shaped one of the most dynamic and consequential periods in American history. From reinventing the nation's financial system to pushing President Lincoln to emancipate the slaves to the planning for Reconstruction, Congress undertook drastic measures to defeat the Confederacy, in the process laying the foundation for a strong central government that came fully into being in the twentieth century. Brimming with drama and outsize characters, Congress at War is also one of the most original books about the Civil War to appear in years and will change the way we understand the conflict.

This is the story of the men who, as political realists, fought for the cause of racial reform in America before, during, and after the Civil War. Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, Benjamin F. Wade, and Zachariah Chandler are the central figures in Mr. Trefousse's study of the Radical Republicans who steered a course between the extreme abolitionists on the one hand and the more cautious gradualists on the other, as they strove to break the slaveholder's domination of the federal government andthen to wrest from the postbellum South an acknowledgment of the civil rights of the Negro. The author delineates their key role in founding the Republican party and follows their struggle to keep the party firm in its opposition to the expansion of slavery, to commit it to emancipation, and finally to make it the party of racial justice. This is the story as well of the tangled relationship of the Radical Republicans with Abraham Lincoln—a relationship of both quarrels and mutual support. The author stresses the similarity between Lincoln's ultimate aims and those of the Radical Republicans, demonstrating that without Lincoln's support Sumner and his colleagues could never have accomplished their ends—and that without their help Lincoln might not have succeeded in crushing the rebellion and putting an end to the slavery. And he argues that by 1865 Lincoln's Reconstruction policies were nearing those of the Radicals and that, had he lived, they would not have broken with him as they did with his successor. Lincoln's assassination left the Radicals with no means to translate their demands into effective action. Their efforts to remake the South in such a way as to secure justice for the Negro brought them into conflict with President Johnson, in whose impeachment they played a leading role. Although they succeeded in initiating congressional Reconstruction and adding the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the Constitution, the Radicals lost power after the failure of the Johnson impeachment. Mr. Trefousse shows how, despite their declining influence throughout the 1870s, their accomplishments helped make possible—a century later—the resumption of the struggle for civil rights.

This first collection of the essays of the late T. Harry Williams brings together some of the best shorter works of a man who was, by any standard, one of the finest historians of our time. Spanning the range of Williams’ interests, this volume contains essays on the Civil War, Reconstruction, the ear of the world wars, military affairs, the craft of the historian, and the careers of Abraham Lincoln, Huey Long, and Lyndon Johnson. Williams’ reputation rests on such large-scale works as Lincoln and His Generals and the Pulitzer-Prize winning biography Huey Long—exhaustively researched studies, monumental in their scope and ambition. Providing Williams with the chance to let his gaze probe beyond the fixed borders of such works, the essay was a flexible medium in which he could freely pursue some of the ideas that grew out of his daily regimen of writing and reading. He used the essay to examine large themes that spanned many areas of his interests as well as specific incidents in the course of American history, to reach both a popular audience and his fellow historians, to test ideas for books in the planning stage, and to assess the works of his colleagues. Among the essays brought together in this volume are “That Strange Sad War,” in which Williams examines the Civil War as the first truly, and tragically, modern war; “Abraham Lincoln: Pragmatic Democrat,” which sees Lincoln as the supreme example in our history of the union of principle and pragmatism in politics; and “The Louisiana Unification Movement of 1873,” which traces the short history of an ambitious attempt to bring about racial unity in Reconstruction Louisiana. In “Interlude: 1918-1939”—an essay published here for the first time—Williams analyzes the weakened state of American military preparedness before Franklin Roosevelt came into office and turned his attention to the growing threat of Hitler’s Germany. In “The Macs and the Ikes: America’s Two Military Traditions,” Williams contrasts the opposing types of military leaders in American history—those generals in the mold of Dwight Eisenhower who follow orders and submit to the power of the president and Congress, and the more fractious generals such as Douglas Macarthur, who view the military as an aristocracy of courage and genius and bridle at the reigns of civilian authority. “Huey, Lyndon, and Southern Radicalism” traces the common political roots of two men Williams considered among the most successful “power artists” of the century. And in “Lyndon Johnson and the Art of Biography,” Williams discusses his own plans to write a biography of Johnson and speaks of his unapologetic belief in a great-man theory of history.