Electoral district of Bancroft

Transcription

>> So okay, these are the sort of grounds of agreement in the Republican Party, which rises in the 1850s. But like any party, it has factions, particularly a new party which is drawing people from all sorts of previous political alignments. It's a coalition. The Republican Party is a coalition, and there is persistent tension between radicals and conservatives in the party, between former Democrats and former Whigs. People came from different parties into the Republican Party. And it's useful to sort of try to separate them out and see what these different groupings represent. Now the most well-known among historians is the Radical Republicans. The Radical Republicans. We will hear a lot about them as the Civil War and Reconstruction progresses. And there's a lot of literature: who were the Radical Republicans? What did they represent? Were they agents of the Northern business class (some people say that) cynically using the issue of slavery to try to fasten Northern capitalist control on the South? Were they genuine humanitarians, the predecessors of the modern civil rights movement, you know, who devoted themselves to a moral cause? They're difficult to classify. There's not even agreement, apart from a few people, like Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, and others, exactly who the Radicals were, although everybody in this period spoke about the Radical Republicans as a distinctive group in the Republican Party. One thing that is clear is they did not.. What made you a Radical? It was not your views on economic issues. There was no such thing as a Radical Republican view on economic issues. Thaddeus Stevens, who himself was an iron manufacturer in Pennsylvania believed in a high tariff to protect manufacturing. Charles Sumner believed in free trade; that was the ideology of Boston, where he came from. They didn't.. they were all committed to this notion of this superiority of free labor. But that didn't translate into specific economic policies, apart from relating to slavery. What united, my view is, what united this group, which is not a majority but a significant part of the Republican Party, is that their careers were shaped by the slavery issue. Long before the Republican Party emerged, they had been devoted to this question of fighting slavery. In reality, you might consider them political abolitionists. They were in the political system, they ran for office, they held office, they were members of Congress, they were members of…, they were governors. But they had worked in the 1840s to force the slavery issue into national politics. And in the 1850s, their main principle was: opposition to slavery must be the paramount aim of the Republican Party. Whatever it said on railroads, whatever it said on tariffs, opposition to the westward expansion of slavery must be the primary focus of the Party. So when other people came along and said, "No, no, let's moderate that," the Radicals were always against it. The Radicals represented a particular geographical area of the North (most of them) which we, for lack of any more imaginative title, we call the Upper North. New England, upstate New York, northern Ohio, northern Illinois, Michigan, the upper strand of the North. This is an area, New England, you might say New England and the belt of New England migration stretching westward. These counties, these areas were known as, many of them, as "burned-over districts." They had been the site of all sorts of religious and reform enthusiasms, evangelical revivals of religion, the rise of utopian communities, the temperance movement. The abolitionist movement was much stronger in this Upper North than in the Lower North, which we'll talk about in a minute. This was the stronghold of political radicalism, and as Southerners claim, Puritan culture, you know, a kind of a desire to purge the world of sin and go out smiting sinners wherever you could find them, and the South being, you know, one good example to them. It was also areas that were growing rapidly, economically. They were prosperous. They were on this transportation network, whether it's upstate New York or northern Ohio, Illinois, etc. And they were rapidly expanding economically. And therefore, the free labor idea had tremendous plausibility in these, in these areas. Many of these Radicals, many of these Radical Republicans were, as I said, strongly influenced by abolitionism. One, Owen Lovejoy, a congressman from Illinois, who becomes a pal of Lincoln's, is the brother of Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist editor who had been murdered, killed by a mob in 1837, defending his printing press, and became the first martyr of the Abolitionist Movement. Charles Sumner and others had been strongly influenced by William Lloyd Garrison. They're not abolitionists in the full sense because, working within the political system, they know there is nothing directly that can be done against slavery in the South. Congress can't just pass a law abolishing slavery in the South. But they try to figure out other ways to get at that, at that aim. They always stress the moral issue of slavery. You read--the notion that these guys are interested primarily in economics is absurd, if you read their speeches: they never talk about it. They talk about the moral… they sound like abolitionists, they talk about the moral imperative of attacking the evil of slavery. And they insist that their goal was, their ultimate goal, was not just non-extension, but abolition. Abolition. How are you going to get there? Well, our friend, James Oakes, who teaches down at City University of New York, has a book coming out, well, he published a previous book called "Freedom National." He has another one coming up. This notion of "freedom national" is this sort of radical idea, that is to say: confining slavery to the states where it exists, and putting the federal... and going more than that, severing the federal government's connection with slavery. Every place where the federal government has authority, slavery should be abolished. Where is that? Washington DC, federal, I don't know, outposts, like forts and things like that, federal ships. I mean, there's not that many. But the main point is you surround the South with a cordon of freedom. They used this term, a "cordon of freedom." You cut off, you cut off expansion. And then you work on the Upper South, the states like Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, where slavery is not expanding. Certainly in Maryland it's already declining. It's not growing in Virginia. And you chip away at the Southern...at the outposts of slavery. Now whether this is a realistic idea or not is very hard to say. Probably not, really. But certainly, many in the Deep South were already nervous about the commitment of the Upper South to slavery. And so this Radical notion of a cordon of freedom struck a lot of fear in the hearts of many, many Southerners. But my main point here about the Radicals is that they insist that this, that this issue of slavery (non-extension, freedom national) should be the fundamental principle of the Republican Party. They fight to not allow nativism, anti-immigrant sentiment, to become prominent in the Republican Party. Anything they think diverts from this primary question.