When It Was Grand: The Radical Republican History of the Civil War by LeeAnna Keith (review)

Historians of the Civil War era are well acquainted with such Radical Republicans as Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner, who shepherded some of Reconstruction’s most progressive legislation through Congress. In When It Was Grand, LeeAnna Keith introduces readers to lesser-known members of the Radical Republican wing, some of whom never held political office or worked in Washington, D.C., but pursued Radicals’ “nearly mystical” vision of “representative government based on free labor” before and during the Civil War (4). Beginning with the founding of the Republic Party in 1854 and ending with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, When It Was Grand seeks to show that forward-thinking Radical Republicans worked with abolitionists and reformers to expand federal power and secure Black freedom.

The book chronicles the stories of men and women who advocated for a number of Radical policies that abolished slavery, expanded Black political participation, and transformed the U.S. Constitution. In part 1, Keith argues that Radicals steered the Republican Party toward total abolitionism. The Kansas controversy united and mobilized Radicals, who came to support violence as a means to fight the expansion of slavery. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 consolidated the Radical wing of the party and extended its membership to free Black men, such as Lewis Hayden of Boston. The Reverend Theodore Parker and other Radical Republican Transcendentalists worked within electoral politics to end enslavement, unlike such radical abolitionists as William Lloyd Garrison, who believed the U.S. government and Constitution buttressed the institution of slavery. The Dred Scott decision (1857) compromised the Republican strategy to contain enslavement based on party founder Salmon P. Chase’s “Freedom National” interpretation of the Constitution, which held that slavery was a local, not national, institution. Therefore, enslavement could only exist under the protection of local government. Dred Scott bolstered the Garrisonian argument, and many Radicals began to endorse disunion, just as others redoubled their efforts to reform the system through electoral politics. Some began to push for Black men’s voting rights, and a fringe of Radicals, including women such as Lucy Stone, campaigned to extend the vote to women. Radicals supported and glorified John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry in 1859, which, Keith suggests, initiated civil war. After Harpers Ferry, Radicals eagerly met the Slave Power’s threats of secession with war.

In part 2, Keith describes how Radicals pushed the Republican Party toward “a broader antiracist agenda” after the Civil War began (13). Radicals sought military avenues to end enslavement through confiscation and Black enlistment. Many pushed for Black male suffrage, and some hoped to redistribute confiscated Confederate estates to freedpeople by leasing or selling the land. President Abraham Lincoln’s role as leader of the Republican Party is ambiguous. Keith suggests that his moderate policies undermined Radicals, such as John and Jessie Frémont, but Lincoln eventually embraced aspects of the Radical agenda and “showed a better command of race relations etiquette” than many white Radicals. White Radicals, Keith concludes, fell short of envisioning “true equality,” failing to include Black leaders in some public forums and to integrate public accommodations (270).

When It Was Grand expands definitions of who was a Radical Republican by looking past party insiders and elected officials. Instead, Keith focuses on antislavery activists and women. Readers of Manisha Sinha’s The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (2016) and Stephen Kantrowitz’s More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889 (2012) will be familiar with many of the figures Keith documents to highlight how Radicals embraced militant abolitionism and moved their party to the left. Keith’s focus on Radicals’ embrace of militant abolitionism joins new works, such as Kellie Carter Jackson’s Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence (2019), and explains how the violence of the 1850s led to war. Keith shows how the...