Author Interview--Leeanna Keith (When It Was Grand) Part 1

H-CivWar Author Interview--LeeAnna Keith (When It Was Grand) Part 1

Discussion published by Niels Eichhorn on Thursday, September 3, 2020

Hello H-CivWar Readers:

Today we feature LeeAnna Keith to talk about her new bookWhen It Was Grand: The Radical Republican History of the Civil War, published by Hill and Wang.

LeeAnna Keith teaches history at the Collegiate School for Boys in New York City. She is the author of The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction.

To start the interview, LeeAnna, could you tell our readers how you became interested in writing a book about the Radical Republicans?

LAK: At the beginning, I got to know amazing Radical Republicans when writing about the Colfax Massacre. The combination of black veterans and politicians in the Republican establishment of Reconstruction Louisiana and white southerners and new arrivals willing to join with them as allies struck me as the best kind of heroic action. Colfax Massacre is such a desolate, awful little book and I wanted to write about something more affirming of human nature.

When It Was Grand is practically the reverse version of the same story, but told on a national scale. I look at how white men and women, initially in the North, join forces with their black neighbors and then with the enormous black population of the South. They achieved so much in changing people’s ideas about race and citizenship in such a short period of time! And I cut my story short before any of the terrible events that doom Reconstruction: Lincoln’s assassination, the Andrew Johnson debacle, and massive white resistance. When you squint at it and look between the fingers of your facepalm that way, American History can actually look inspiring.

That is rather interesting that your second book is the prequel to the first book. I did wonder why you ended in 1865, is your Colfax book the answer?

LAK: I started with the question, “who are the most exciting Radical Republicans,” looking at the Reconstruction period, still curious about some crazy Louisiana stories, marveling at black legislators integrating the University of South Carolina in the 1870s, and weeping over the white missionary family that lived as pariahs in my hometown in Alabama trying to unite the North and South branches of the Methodist Church. I took the names of these Reconstruction figures -- William Walker, Joseph P. Newsham, Richard T. Greener, Aral S. Lakin, and others -- into the 1850s to try to find how the movement that had produced such courageous politicians had begun.

My technique in writing The Colfax Massacre had been to look just below the surface of popular memory for stories that had dropped from the larger narrative of American History. Using my list of names as search terms and adding all the associates and associations I could find, I soon had a cadre of Radical Republicans I could follow through the birth of the party in 1854 into the war years in great detail.

Citation: Niels Eichhorn. Author Interview--LeeAnna Keith (When It Was Grand) Part 1. H-CivWar. 09-03-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/4113/discussions/6396264/author-interview-leeanna-keith-when-it-was-grand-part-1 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-CivWar

Their stories were piling up into the hundreds of pages, and I had promised my editors a volume suitable for course adoptions. I cut it short at war’s end, making the point that much of the most Radical content of the Reconstruction Era had had its preview in the Civil War itself: black citizenship, voting, confiscation of rebel property, and land reform.

Reconstruction has so many Radical Republican activists that a B-Side roster such as I assembled for When It Was Grand’s cast of characters would have to be limited by location, I think. If I write another book I am considering a focus on twelve key Reconstruction sites around the South.

That sounds like a very interesting idea. I interviewed Rachel Sheldon a few weeks ago and she suggested that often there is a break in who is a radical in the Antebellum may no longer be so in Reconstruction, did you notice any inconsistencies in people and their views during the long Civil War era based on your two books?

LAK: In When It Was Grand I outlined eight major Radical Republican initiatives (1854-1865) and held that you were a Radical if you took part in one or more of these causes and also voted, held office, campaigned, participated in conventions, and conducted party business and lobbying in correspondence as a Republican.

Most Radicals in my study fought for racial justice for the duration of their careers, with most but not all staying true to their ideals even after Reconstruction ended. A couple of stout-hearted Radicals of the 1850s became conservatives during and after the war – Allan Pinkerton and Eli Thayer, both of whom took the side of capital versus labor and supported Democrats in the Gilded Age. Those who came to call themselves Liberal Republicans in 1872 (Horace Greeley, Anna Dickinson, Frederick Law Olmsted) I largely omitted from my study. That label denoted a kind of distaste for solidarity with African Americans.

For clarity, could you briefly define what you mean with Radical Republicans and how you distinguish them from Liberal Republicans and other branches of Republicans?

LAK: In my book, to be Radical meant to support the armed colonization of Kansas after 1854; to join in resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act; to defend against and defy Dred Scott and other proslavery federal policies and to reject compromise in the lead-up to war; to embrace the idea of hard war in 1861 and afterward, imagining it would take a lot of suffering to turn the North against slavery; to advocate and implement military emancipation; to create black military units; to advocate for black citizenship and voting rights; and to work to confiscate the estates of rebels and redistribute their worldly goods to the formerly enslaved population of the South. That’s eight ways to be ultra in the period 1854-1865.

By the end of the war, the Radicals had become a well-known political faction, and my understanding of what makes a Reconstruction Radical does not vary much from the popular notion then and historians’ consensus now. Reconstruction Radicals took control of southern elections and made alliances with black voters and officeholders; they sought to protect southern Republicans by federal law enforcement using the Ku Klux Klan acts and other authorities. Many Republicans dedicated themselves to enlarging equity and inclusion in the public sphere, supporting education, integration, and mutual respect. Confiscation proved kind of a dead letter during Reconstruction, having reached

Then, boom -- George L. Stearns, Thaddeus Stevens, James D. Lynch, Charles Sumner have died. The collaboration with women that had made the 1850s and 1860s movement so much more fully human falls apart in the dispute over expanding the suffrage. Promising Radical figures were assassinated (Octavius Catto, James A. Garfield) and others such as President Grant experienced embarrassments that stifled their political crusades. The decline of Radicalism in the Republican Party in the 1870s is a textbook illustration of the way white people have been able to exercise the option of stepping away from black alliances. They looked away from the South and to white voters in the West, as Heather Cox Richardson says. The Liberal Republican point of view carried the day, as Andrew Slap says, and the party started its slow but apparently never-ending move to the right on race relations.

What is striking about your list is that there is one very prominent person who does not fit a few of those policies--Abraham Lincoln. How does a party that has such a strong radical base determine to run for president and then in the war, work with such moderate candidate like Lincoln?

LAK: Lincoln once called the Radicals “the unhandiest devils in the world,” which is an apt description. They never gave him credit, even when he worked with them solicitously. You may know that I came to the subject of the Civil War and Reconstruction midcareer, having studied the 1960s and U.S. foreign policy before changing fields almost twenty years ago. The Radicals received Lincoln much in the way that the Best and Brightest Kennedy family boosters engaged with Lyndon B. Johnson, as if the president was too country-fied to be progressive.

I cite a number of examples of Lincoln acting and speaking for Radical politics, starting with what I call the House Divided metaphor debacle, in which he predicted a Civil War in 1858, and continuing throughout his presidency. I suggest that Honest Abe was a careful manipulator of opinion and stimulator of dialogue during the high stakes years, and that he made constant overtures to Radicals along with other political factions in the name of the public good. Lincoln’s own estimate, shared with Charles Sumner, with whom he had an unlikely friendship, was that the Radicals had been only “six weeks ahead” of him on policy matters, and he boasted that he had not only helped to enact their agenda but had done so in a way to make it last.

Lincoln offers a familiar example to help us understand that one could act as a Radical and yet still be in thrall to racist ideas. Even as he “grew,” as Eric Foner says, during the war, Lincoln still referenced colonization and other racist themes during his presidency. He also demonstrated a notably gracious way of interacting with African American men and women in White House encounters, as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Martin Delany all testified. Such tact was a skill-set sorely lacking in most establishment Radical Republicans, some of whom I depict in my book as race-discourse buffoons.