MARCH 2020 83Radicalism
is more than
a packet
of views or
policies. It is
a disposition.of academic affiliations, Bordewich is a master of the
character sketch, summarizing complicated figures in
a few swift phrases. But Lincoln himself never comes
alive in his pages. Indeed, he scarcely appears. He
lurks just offstage, stepping forward now and then
to try, briefly and usually without success, to stymie
the righteous zeal that propels the Radicals. The last
line of the book declares that “a whole generation of
politically heroic Republicans ... led Congress to vic-
tory in the Civil War.” It’s an odd formulation—you
probably thought the North won the war.
Bordewich has chosen to tell his sprawling
story of legislative activism and ascendancy mainly
through four members of Congress: Senators Ben-
jamin Wade of Ohio and William Pitt Fessenden
of Maine, and Representatives Thaddeus Stevens of
Pennsylvania and Clement Vallandigham of Ohio.
Vallandigham is the only Democrat, a leader of an
anti-war faction whose preference for the Union
was complicated by his pro-slavery sympathies. The
rest are Republicans, and two of them, Stevens and
Wade, proudly called themselves Radicals and behaved
accordingly. Fessenden, at one time a conservative,
grew more sympathetic to the Radicals’ aims as the
war dragged on.
Congressional power fell in the lap of Republicans,
thanks to the departure of Wigfall and his southern
colleagues; their seizing of it seems, in retrospect, less a
matter of superior gamesmanship than a law of politi-
cal gravity. Calling for stronger prosecution of the war,
immediate liberation of the enslaved, and confisca-
tion of all property owned by the southern belliger-
ents, Radicals quickly took control of the Republican
caucus. Perhaps, Bordewich writes, the Radicals “have
something to teach us about how our government can
function at its best in challenging times, and how crisis
may even make it stronger.” Lesson No. 1: Get most of
your opponents to leave town before you try anything.
The Radicals were quick on their feet, exploiting
national turmoil to break a legislative logjam. For
decades Southern Democrats, their numbers swollen
by the Constitution’s infamous three-fifths clause, had
blocked a series of domestic programs proposed first
by the Whigs and then by their Republican successors.
Here was the chance to neutralize the Democratic
aversion to centralized power and advance a collec-
tivist vision of the commercial republic, laying the
foundation, Bordewich writes, “for the strong activist
central government that came fully into being in the
twentieth century.”
The flurry of legislating was indeed “transforma-
tive,” as Bordewich says. He points in particular to
four pieces of legislation as landmarks. The Home-
stead Act promised 160 acres of federal land to any
citizen willing to live on it and farm it for five years.
The Pacific Railway Act financed the trans continental
railroad and further opened up the western territories
to white settlement. The third bill created the federal
Department of Agriculture. And the Morrill Land
Grant College Act would distribute federal land to
states and localities for the purpose of building pub-
lic institutions of higher learning dedicated to teach-
ing agriculture and other practical arts—a miracle of
democratization in the history of American education.
Yet in Bordewich’s telling, Lincoln had little to do
with the ambitious measures, as if the bills were signed
by autopen during coffee breaks. In fact, two of them
were explicitly endorsed in the Republican platform
that Lincoln ran on in 1860; he made a special plea
for the Department of Agriculture in his first annual
message to Congress. Bordewich also downplays the
inevitable unintended consequences that accompany
government expansion, even what seem to be the most
benign reforms. The railway act, with its crony capital-
ism and funny-money bond issues, led straight to the
Gilded Age and the creation of half a dozen robber-
baron fortunes. Those “federal lands” that Washington
gave away in the railway and homestead acts were not,
except in the sneakiest sense, the federal government’s
to give away; the land rush they touched off may have
guaranteed the otherwise merely predictable genocide
of the Native Americans already living there.
In the name of designating the Radicals as the fore-
runners of contemporary liberalism, Bordewich tries to
draw a continuous line from the Civil War Congress to
the New Deal and the Great Society. Yet the line has
too many zigs and zags and ups and downs to clinch a
causal connection. And in fact, many of the features of
big government (19th-century style) fell away before
long. Calvin Coolidge, for instance, 60 years after the
Civil War and a few years before the New Deal, over-
saw a federal government that was in most respects
closer in size and scope to the ante bellum government
than to the modern state that was soon to emerge.If Bordewich oversells the legacy of the Radi-
cals in Congress, his more fundamental misapprehen-
sion lies elsewhere: His version of events shortchanges
the greatness that humanists of all stripes—not only
historians— have found in Lincoln. The problem is
partly a failure to appreciate that the Radicals were
kibitzers, as many legislators are. But misjudging Lin-
coln’s role as executive and his commitment to larger
obligations is Bordewich’s more telling mistake. Lin-
coln the executive shouldered the responsibility to
lead an entire government and, just as important, an
unstable political coalition. From Radicals to reac-
tionaries, Republicans were held together by a single
strand: a hostility, varying in degree, to slavery. A