“There is a war because there was a Republican Party. There was a Republican Party because there was an Abolition Party. There was an Abolition Party because there was slavery.” So stated the famous abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison.
LeeAnna Keith's recently released book, When It Was Grand: The Radical Republican History of the Civil War, is about the exciting (for me, as a political junkie, at least!) founding of the Republican Party and the role played by the Radical Republicans before, during, and after the Civil War.
On these pages, we meet names we know well: Abraham Lincoln; William Seward; John Brown, Thaddeus Stevens, Zechariah Chandler, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and others. We're also introduced to little-known Abolitionist heroes, like James H. Lane, the “Bleeding Kansas” Jayhawker and future Senator; Sherman Booth, an Abolitionist from Wisconsin who unfortunately destroyed his reputation with a serious crime; the Oberlin College Rescuers from Ohio, led by Charles Langston and Orindatus Simon Bolivar Wall; and others. We march in parades with the Wide Awakes. We cheer for courageous women, early feminists like Jessie Benton Fremont, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucy Stone.
Keith's thesis is that “[Radical Republicans] would make America great by restoring the original course of slavery toward its ultimate extinction” (p. 5).
Professor Keith leaves us to ponder on our own how the Republican Party has changed since those founding years, when the Party supported universal suffrage; equal rights; and voting rights for all. She concludes: “The Radicals excelled at envisioning an alternative America, even in the darkest days. Their example instructs the present, illuminating a path to a better world. By commitment, organizing, and relentless activism, they made themselves into the greatest generation of American progressives, despite their reverses. To commemorate their trials and triumphs is to move at last in the direction of a truly post-Confederate United States” (p. 292).
I heartily recommend this book!
Guy Purdue
*LeeAnna Keith is a professor of history at the Collegiate School in New York City. She is also the author of “The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction” (2009). She is a recipient of a Gilder Lehrman Institute fellowship. Her articles have appeared in “The Dictionary of American History” and “The Journal of Southern History.”