Radical Republican definition of Radical Republican in the Free Online Encyclopedia.

Radical Republican

Member of the Republican Party in the 1860s committed to the emancipation of slaves and the equal treatment and enfranchisment of blacks. Zealous antislavery advocates in the Congress pressed Pres. Abraham Lincoln to include emancipation as a war aim. They later opposed his policy of lenient Reconstruction of the South under presidential control and passed harsher measures in the Wade-Davis Bill. After Lincoln's death the Radicals supported Pres. Andrew Johnson but soon demanded congressional control of Reconstruction. Johnson's attempt to break the Radicals' power led them to pass the Tenure of Office Act; his challenge of the act led to his impeachment. Radical Republican leaders included Henry Winter Davis (1817–65), Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, and Benjamin Butler. Their influence waned as white control over Southern governments gradually returned in the 1870s.

They also wanted to deny the right to vote to those who had supported the Confederacy, to mobilize the recently emancipated slaves on behalf of Radical Republican candidates and causes by promising them property that would be then confiscated from the former Confederates, to deny the Southern states congressional representation in Washington, and to install puppet state governments subservient to the Radical Republicans.

Andrew Johnson, unreconstructed: President Andrew Johnson steadfastly ... by Dwyer, John J. / The New American

Harsin estimates that there were a few thousand radical republicans in Paris of the July Monarchy.

Barricades. The War of the Streets in Revolutionary Paris, 1830-1848 by Berlanstein, Lenard R. / Journal of Social History

[8] Dixon's concern with the political implications of domestic arrangements becomes especially clear in his depiction of the radical Republican Congressional leader Austin Stoneman (Dixon's fictionalized version of Thaddeus Stevens), whose real deformity is not the clubfoot the narrator obsessively mentions, but rather his position at the head of a miscegenous household.

Slouching toward Beastliness: Richard Wright's Anatomy of Thomas Dixon by Eby, Clare / African American Review

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