Radical Reconstruction

The radical reconstruction was a time during which the states that had followed the Confederacy were controlled by the federal government. When the Confederate forces surrendered in April 1865, the American Army started out on a mission, the postwar that determined process of reconstruction. The president at the time viewed the reconstruction as a weapon to remove Southerners from their allegiance to the Confederacy and end the war sooner. The radical reconstruction in the South attempted to deal with the problems that the Civil War had left and the get rid of slavery. " The driving force of Radical ideology was the Utopian vision of a nation whose citizens enjoyed equality of civil and political rights secured by a powerful and beneficent national state. With the radical reconstruction, the civil war wedded new conception of powers and potentialities of the national state. More fully than the Republicans, the Radicals embraced the wartime expansion of national authority, determined now to allow federalism and state' rights to obstruct a sweeping national effort to define and protect the rights of citizens." Book Internet

"Period after the American Civil War in which attempts were made to solve the political, social, and economic problems arising from the readmission to the Union of the 11 Confederate states that had seceded at or before the outbreak of war. Pres. Abraham Lincoln planned to readmit states in which at least 10% of the voters had pledged loyalty to the Union. This lenient approach was opposed by the Radical Republicans, who favoured the harsher measures passed in the Wade-Davis Bill." Book Internet 'After the North defeated the South in the Civil War, politicians faced the task of putting the divided country back together. There was great debate about how severely the former Confederate states should be punished for leaving the Union. With the assassination of President Lincoln in 1865, it was up to President Andrew Johnson to try to reunite former enemies. The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 laid out the process for readmitting Southern states into the Union." (Reconstruction)

The radical Reconstruction was the violent, dramatic, and still considered a conflicting era following the Civil War. "Even among the Republicans in Congress, there was considerable disagreement about the proper approach to Reconstruction—disagreements that reflected the same factional division (between the party's Conservatives and Radicals) that had created disputes during the war over emancipation. The Conservatives advocated a mild peace and the rapid restoration of the defeated states to the Union; they insisted that the South accept the abolition of slavery; but beyond that they did not propose to interfere with race relations or to alter the social system of the region. Some Radicals favored granting suffrage to the former slaves, as a matter of right or as a means of creating a Republican electorate in the South. Other Radicals hesitated to state a position for fear of alienating public opinion— few Northern states permitted blacks to vote." (reconstructing the nation)

"The constitutional amendments and legislative reforms that laid the foundation for the most radical phase of Reconstruction were adopted from 1865 to 1871. By the 1870s, Reconstruction had made some progress in providing Freedmen with equal rights under the law, and they were voting and taking political office. Republican legislatures, coalitions of whites and blacks, established the first public school systems in the South. Beginning in 1874, however, there was a rise in white paramilitary organizations, such as the White League and Red Shirts, whose political aim was to drive out the Republicans. They also disrupted organizing and terrorized blacks to bar them from the polls.[2] From 1873 to 1877, conservative white Democrats (calling themselves "Redeemers") regained power in the states." (Reconstruction era of the United States)

"The Republican radicals (ultra-liberals) in Congress had very different ideas about Reconstruction. They thought Lincoln was "too soft" on the South, and wanted to “revolutionize Southern habits, institutions and manners”; they wanted to see the South rebuilt according to a new order. Northern Republican newspapers such as the New York Tribune agreed. Radical believed that the South should be treated as "conquered provinces, and that the rebel states had committed "political suicide." They claimed that no state governments could exist in the South until Congress restored them under any conditions it deemed necessary." (Reconstruction)