When It Was Grand
The Radical Republican History of the Civil War
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A Civil War Monitor best book of 2020
A group biography of the activists who defended human rights and defined the Republican Party’s greatest hour
In 1862, the ardent abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison summarized the events that were tearing apart the United States: “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.”
Garrison’s simple statement expresses the essential truths at the heart of LeeAnna Keith’s When It Was Grand. Here is the full story, dramatically told, of the Radical Republicans—the champions of abolition who helped found a new political party and turn it toward the extirpation of slavery. Keith introduces us to the idealistic Massachusetts preachers and philanthropists, rugged Midwestern politicians, and African American activists who collaborated to protect escaped slaves from their captors, to create and defend black military regiments and win the contest for the soul of their party. Keith’s fast-paced, deeply researched narrative gives us new perspective on figures ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Brown, to the gruff antislavery general John Fremont and his astute wife, Jessie Benton Fremont, and the radicals’ sometime critic and sometime partner Abraham Lincoln.
In the 1850s and 1860s, a powerful faction of the Republican Party stood for a demanding ideal of racial justice—and insisted that their party and nation live up to it. Here is a colorful, definitive account of their indelible accomplishment.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
High school history teacher Keith (The Colfax Massacre) resurfaces the Republican Party's progressive, antislavery origins in this energetic yet muddled account. Beginning with the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, Keith documents how the party's "most ardent faction" helped to provoke the Civil War and laid the groundwork for constitutional amendments abolishing slavery and granting African-Americans equal protection and the right to vote. She categorizes congressmen Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens, abolitionists John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison, philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, and unitarian minister Theodore Parker as "Republican Radicals," and credits the raising of the 54th Massachusetts and other African-American Union Army regiments, the funding of Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry by the "Secret Six," and the launch of Garrison's Liberator newspaper as major achievements in the cause. Keith stretches the definition of radical Republicanism to the point of distortion, claiming that it was both a political faction and a "religious and philosophical movement," and grouping nearly every American who opposed slavery, assisted freed slaves, or supported the Union cause under the same banner. Ending her account before Reconstruction, however, she obscures the Radicals' greatest legislative achievements. The result is a wide-ranging history that does little to illuminate its weighty subject.
