Lincoln and the Radicals

I first read this book in graduate school twenty-five years ago, and while recently rereading it I was impressed anew with its scintillating but remarkably dated analysis. T. Harry Williams argued a very interesting thesis about Abraham Lincoln in this benchmark work in the historiography of the subject. He found that in spite of his personal antipathy toward slavery, Lincoln was moderate in his public statements because he could not afford to compromise his questionable popular base of support as president. Lincoln recognized that his administration's ability to hold the rest of the nation together in the wake of southern secession was dependent upon his walking a narrow path of acceptability to a coalition of factions with sometimes divergent beliefs upon the slavery issue, that without enough support his position as president would be undermined and he would never be able to accomplish anything worthwhile. In spite of personal desires, it was a question for Lincoln of first things first. In the end Lincoln was prompted to end slavery by executive order by radicals within his own party who pressed for emancipation. Lincoln demonstrated, according to Williams, a spirit of pragmatism. To demonstrate this he once compared government to a machine. If something goes wrong with the machine, what should one do? The reactionary might say, "Don't fool with it, you'll ruin it?" The radical might say, "It's no good, get rid of it and find a new one." The pragmatist would try to fix the machine, to remove the defective part and add a new one, but only after carefully scrutinizing the situation to ensure that his action was correct (T. Harry Williams, "Abraham Lincoln: Pragmatic Democrat," in Norman A. Graebner, ed., "The Enduring Lincoln: Lincoln Sesquicentennial Lectures at the University of Illinois" [University of Illinois Press, 1959], pp. 26 27). In this book Lincoln's moderation is very much admired by Williams, while the radicals were "Jacobin" revolutionaries intent on destroying the fabric of the nation. This position essentially embraces the larger thesis present about the Civil War in the 1930s and 1940s; that it was a "repressible conflict" that could have been avoided had extremists on both sides been willing to compromise. Williams viewed the radicals as dogmatic and inflexible in dealing with a significant problem in American history, while Lincoln was a pragmatist. Such people as the radicals in Congress, led by old antislavery Whigs such as Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner, argued for a ruthless prosecution of the war and a punishment of the South for its rebellion. They established a Committee on the Conduct of the War that pressed Lincoln daily about the aggressive prosecution of the war with Republican rather than Democratic Party generals and punishment of the South. They were all opposed to slavery but the manner in which it would be eliminated--gradually or immediately, with owners paid off or not, and the status of the freed s