I'm quite a fan of them, although they could have been more effective in implementing their ideals.
Which would have assuredly led to another Civil War.
Seriously though, turning the South in a despotic military state is a very un-American idea if you get down to it.
As is slavery. Funny how that works out.
Yeah, but no one is calling the slaveowners "Freedom Fighters".
Yeah, we're only calling their strongest opposition Freedom Fighters.
Radical Republicanism had very little to do with slavery after a the Reconstruction Amendments were passed. It was much more about subjugating the Southern people and treating them as a conquered nation. Of course, that's terribly hypocritical considering that Republicans made the argument that the South never had actually seceded in the first place.
Well of course silly goose, once slavery was abolished they had little reason to continue to promote anti-slavery legislation.
Of course, Reconstruction was handled wrongly. But that was more of a problem of the Republicans succumbing to a "sensible moderate direction" than them actually following through on the Radicals' ideas. If they had gone all the way with the Radicals' plans the weight of the punishment for the South would've been targeted towards the real villains: the landowners. Instead, what we got was a watered down Reconstruction that slapped the filthy landowners on the wrist while disenfranchising many poor whites in the region (and in reality putting the blunt of the blame on them, instead of the landowners and the Confederate leadership) and help create notoriously corrupt Republican regimes in the South that would set the stage for "the Redeemers".
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