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When It Was Grand: The Radical Republican History of the Civil War
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About This Book
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 "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.
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"Still, her book seems fresh, because it covers militants who have never been juxtaposed before ..."
"Keith writes at length and with eloquence about the role of black abolitionists in pressing for emancipation before and during the war; black military service during the war; and radicals' efforts to use confiscation, loyalty oaths, and especially black enfranchisement to reconstruct the South during and after the war."
"Author Keith...casts light on the important role of so-called Radical Republicans in inculcating the idea of abolition into mainstream American thinking ..."
"well-researched, densely detailed ..."
"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."
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