The Radical Voting Dimension in the U.S. Senate during the Civil War

The Radical Voting Dimension in the U.S. Senate During the Civil War To some members of the discipline, historians of the American Civil War have seemed inexplicably or unfortunately obsessed with categorizing the persona of their period as Radicals or Nonradicals. Indeed, historians have developed appropriate synonyms, as for instance Jacobins or Nonvindictives, further subdivided each species as deemed appropriate, and have even identified an interesting hybrid, the Conservative Radical.I Actually such efforts have not been sterile exercises in taxonomy. The game of attaching labels began during the Civil War itself, and we can hardly blame the historians of that great conflict for using terms that were an accepted part of the political vocabulary of the I86os.2 More important, historians have believed that radicalism was a powerful and fateful determinant of political behavior. Radical Republicans, they have suggested, came to dominate their party and used their power in Congress to foil, pervert, or modify the plans of the Chief Executive.3 Or conversely, as a recent writer suggests, the wily Abraham Lincoln used the blundering strength of the Radicals to

Dimension (graph theory · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Voting · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Law · Mathematics · Race, History, and American Society

• Toward a Diachronic Analysis of Congress

  Open Access•Joseph Cooper, D Brady et al.•American Political Science Review•1981

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