| The Radical Faith
Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, they knew, was not the end but the beginning of a new struggle to fulfill eternal truths. The Thirteenth Amendment may have ended slavery, but the ideology that sustained it remained. To the radical Republicans, the work of Reconstruction, in Charles Sumner’s words, was “the grandeur conflict to uphold the primal truths our fathers had solemnly proclaimed.”
The radicals were not all selfless saints, but they all had one thing in common: They worshiped the principles of the Declaration of Independence and sought to make them a living reality. Had the Declaration been confined in 1776 to the subject of political separation, Charles Sumner said in his 1865 eulogy of Lincoln, “it would have been less grand.” What made it grand was the assertion that “all men are created equal,” words Sumner described as the “baptismal vows” of any democracy. Washington had drawn the sword to achieve independence; “Lincoln drew a reluctant sword to save those great ideas” of equal dignity, of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
In 1865, America had survived a cataclysmic war for the meaning of those founding principles; it was a struggle between two contradictory cornerstones. The Declaration’s central claim that all are created equal, the Confederacy’s Alexander Stephens said in 1861, was “an error,” and boasted that the cornerstone of the Southern regime rested on “the great truth” of white supremacy and the “natural and normal condition” of black slavery. Lincoln argued that America was “conceived in liberty” and dedicated to the “proposition” of equal dignity; the Declaration and slavery, he argued, were incompatible. The Civil War thus led to “a new birth of freedom,” as Lincoln said—to a Union without slavery.
But wars are the consequence of ideas. The idea of oppression had not been eradicated by Lincoln’s statesmanship nor by Grant’s sword. “The war of the rebellion,” George Clemenceau observed in 1867, “though it is over in the military sense, still goes on in men’s minds.”
The Southern states during the Reconstruction years effectively reimposed slavery on the freed black population through Black Codes, labor contracts, literacy tests, vagrancy laws, segregation, and violent intimidation. “What is freedom?” James A. Garfield asked in 1865. “Is it the bare privilege of not being chained? If this is all, then freedom is a bitter mockery, a cruel delusion.”
A wave of Southern nationalism helped fuel this movement. In 1866 and 1867, the Virginian Edward Alfred Pollard published The Lost Cause and the Lost Cause Regained, in which he argued that “defending the supremacy of the white man” was the cause for which the Old South had fought and continued to defend against “black Republicanism.” Both books flew off the shelves.
In response, the radicals proposed sweeping civil rights legislation and social programs to protect black Americans—and white Unionists—in the South. “It is necessary that the Declaration of Independence shall be recognized from one end of the Union to the other,” the radical Schuyler Colfax said, “that every man, white or black, shall be admitted to the benefit of the universal and noble principles laid down in it.” The firebrand Thaddeus Steven said that Congress would purge the South’s laws “until they…l earned to venerate the Declaration of Independence.”
The radicals fought bitterly to secure the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments and the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875, forever providing legal challenges to attempted discrimination. However, groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the White League undermined the effectiveness of these measures, and the Supreme Court nullified key provisions of the Civil Rights Acts in the 1880s. In 1896, the Court legitimized Jim Crow segregation laws.
By the 1950s, the South looked as if nothing had changed. “[100] years later, the Negro still is not free,” Martin Luther King, Jr., declared at the Lincoln Monument. The radical faith—in universal right and justice—seemed like the foolish dream of another age.
Perhaps that is why the Declaration was so meaningful to the radicals. It reminds us, as it did them, of ideals and dreams and exhorts us to realize them. It remains a radical faith.