Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

by Kate Masur

CONGRESSIONAL REPUBLICANS GREW increasingly frustrated as they observed events in the former Confederacy during the summer and fall of 1865. They were dismayed by President Johnson’s generous pardons of former Confederates and reports of unrepentant white southerners and gruesome violence against freedpeople and white Unionists. Many also believed that Congress, not the president, was entitled to decide how and when the rebel states would return to the Union. Republican politicians of that era are often categorized as conservatives, moderates, or radicals, depending on their views on racial equality, with “radicals”—people like Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner—most strongly in favor of immediate enfranchisement for Black men.