Radical Republicans

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The Radical Republicans were a political faction within the Republican Party originating from the party's founding in 1854—some six years before the Civil War—until the Compromise of 1877, which effectively ended Reconstruction. They called themselves "Radicals" because of their determinations to facilitate the rapid, complete, and permanent eradication of slavery in the United States through constitutional means, without resorting to a direct legislative or executive assault on the institution in established slave states. Their peacetime political approach was to exclude slavery from areas under federal government authority, including territorial lands, the District of Columbia and international waters so as to confine slavery within its existing state boundaries. There the institution was expected to decline and undergo dismantling by the state governments themselves with federal encouragement. Radical Republicans of the 1850s exhibited "a persistent refusal to compromise with the South on any question involving slavery," insisting upon a "denationalization" of the institution. When war broke out in 1861, radicals supported immediate military emancipation of slaves in the rebellious states On the issues of nativism, anti-Catholicism and prohibition of alcoholic beverages, radical Republicans regarded these as distractions or impediments to their abiding mission to eradicate slavery. Though many Republicans held anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, and pro-temperance sentiments, they emphatically opposed these becoming politicized and alienating key demographics that they wished to enlist in the anti-slavery cause. To the extent that radicals tolerated nativism, it was largely that the nativists Know-Nothings were expected to undermine the Whig and Democratic Parties and clear the way for the rise of the Republican Party. Nativists ultimately cast their votes for Republican politicians, their ideology was never embraced by the party establishment which regarded them with suspicion. In the late 1850s, moderate Republicans drew closer to the radical wing of the party in their hostility toward the Slave Power....