The Rout of Radicalism: Republicans and the Elections of 1867

THE ROUT OF RADICALISM: Republicans and the Elections of 1867 Michael Les Benedict When Howard K. Beale entitled his great analysis of Reconstruction politics The Critical Year,1 he referred to 1866, when Andrew Johnson and the Republican Congress opened their bitter warfare over Reconstruction policy, a year which culminated in congressional elections in which northern voters endorsed Congress' position that the South was not yet entitled to full restoration of rights and privileges in the Union. The elections of this "critical year" decided the issue between the President and the majority in Congress and set the stage for congressional (usually termed Radical) Reconstruction. But historians generally have underestimated the importance of the elections of 1867 held in nearly every northern state to fill various state and local offices. If the elections of 1866 decided the issue between President and Congress, the elections of 1867 decided a similar issue between more radical and more conservative Republicans. The stakes of the elections of 1866 had been high: whether as part of the peace black Americans in the South would be conceded equal civil rights (and, as it turned out, political rights as well) with white southerners, and whether those rights would be protected by law. The stakes of the election of 1867 were nearly as important : whether the program embodied in the Reconstruction Act of 1867 would set the limit of postwar reform in the South, or whether Republicans would go further yet in changing southern political, economic , and social institutions. Since the publication of Eric L. McKitrick's Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction in 1960, historians have come to recognize the essential conservatism of the reconstruction program Johnson opposed.2 But few 1 Beals, The Critical Year: A Study of Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction (S.Y. 1930). 2McKitrick, Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction (Chicago & London, 1960). See, for instance, LaWanda and John H. Cox, Politics, Principle, and Prejudice, 1865-1866: Dilemma of Reconstruction America (Glencoe, 111., 1963); W. R. Brock, An American Crisis: Congress and Reconstruction, 1865-1867 (N.Y., 1963); Avery Craven, Reconstruction: The Ending of the Civil War (N.Y., 1969). The nearly complete acceptance of this new insight is marked by its incorporation into history textbooks, surely the most conclusive sign the profession can offer of general concurrence in a point of view. See Richard N. Current et al., American History : A Survey (2d ed., N.Y., 1967), 457-62; John M. Blum et al., The National Experience: A History of the United States (2d ed., N.Y., 1968), 376-80; John A. Garraty, The American Nation: A History of the United States (2d ed., N.Y., 1971 ), 508-12. 334 historians have noted the conservatism of congressional reconstruction policy as it emerged in the Reconstruction Act of 1867. That law required that southerners ratify the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution and agree to impartial suffrage for blacks and whites as conditions for restoration to the Union. McKitrick, David Donald, and William R. Brock recognize that this law was the result of compromise between radicals and conservatives, but only Larry G. Kincaid, in an asyet unpublished dissertation, clearly has asserted that the Reconstruction Act was far more satisfactory to conservative Republicans, like William Pitt Fessenden, John Sherman, James G. Blaine, and John A. Bingham, than it was to radicals, like Thaddeus Stevens, Benjamin F. Wade, or Charles Sumner. Research in connection with my own dissertation has led me to agree with Kincaid.3 When Congress adjourned in March, 1867, and as the Democratic and Republican parties girded for the elections to be held in northern states from July through November, radical Republicans immediately began agitating for new measures. Charles Sumner urged passage of a national law (as distinguished from a constitutional amendment) to require racially nondiscriminatory voting qualifications within all states. Not only would this enfranchise blacks in northern states, but it would enfranchise them in the border states of Maryland, Delaware, and Kentucky , where hundreds of thousands of freed slaves were not protected by military authorities acting under the Reconstruction laws. Moreover, it would guard against the possibility that southern states might repeal impartial suffrage laws once they were restored to normal relations in the Union.4 Sumner...