The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

Stevens wanted the franchise extended to black men, and he wanted to grant them a share of the Southern property that their labor had created. His egalitarianism went only so far. Women would remain outside the electoral process. The fixation of some Republican reforms on racial injustice could blind them to a staggering array of other problems emerging in an American society that denied women many of the rights Stevens wanted for black men. Those reformers who saw the inequities of gender and class most clearly, however, were, in turn, often aggressively racist in anchoring reform in the defense of white manhood and the white home. There was also an undeniable smugness in the Radicals’ assumption that blacks, Southern whites, Indians, and poor Northerners all needed to turn themselves into replicas of successful and independent Northern white men. Still, Stevens’s position was a brave and remarkable one in 1865.