Radical Repubicanism

The decisive vote came on April 9, 1866. Radical Republicans in the House and Senate, led by Thaddeus Stevens 1814, had recruited enough votes to override President Andrew Johnson's veto of a recently passed civil-rights bill. Thanks to Stevens's new coalition, it was now possible for Congress to control all national policy. It did so for the next three years the only period in American history when the nation's President had virtually no power.

Stevens and the Radical Republicans had insisted through-out the Civil War that slaves in the South be granted not only personal liberty but equal suffrage, free schools, and 40 acres. Their larger hope was that blacks would be fully integrated with whites in both the northern and southern states. Stevens was responsible for the passage of the Reconstruction Act of 1868, which declared die "pretended State governments" in the South to be illegal. The entire South was divided into five military districts, each governed by an army general appointed by the President. All local governments were declared "provisional only" and were subject to the authority of the United States. All black men were given the right to vote and hold office; many white men, including the entire former ruling class of the South, were not. This did not go down well with much of the white population. By the time of Stevens's death, the Ku Klux Klan had grown to more than 500,000 members in the southern states.

Stevens was also the chief instigator of the impeachment proceedings against President Johnson in 1868. The Radical Republicans' strategy had been to turn the impeachment into a political rather than a legal proceeding an effort that threatened to subvert the balance of power among the three branches of the federal government. Only one vote saved Johnson from impeachment, a result that prompted Stevens to declare, "The country is going to the devil!"

Stevens was too far ahead of his time for the white-sheet set.