The Radical and the Republican

While it is easy to point out the underlying themes and arguments that abound in The Radical and the Republican, in many regards, the book eschews symbols and motifs for direct quotation and historical fact. Oakes does not couch anything in this book in terms of the abstract. Rather, he offers the reader everything at face value so that they might meet the issues, already complex and convoluted enough, head-on and without future obfuscation.

However, one may argue that the Constitution of the United States of America is the one and only symbol present in The Radical and the Republican. The foundational document of the United States Government, the Constitution sets out the rules and regulations by which the government can and must operate. It enshrines the citizenry with certain freedoms that the government cannot infringe upon and it limits the powers and actions of each government branch so as to prevent one from becoming more powerful than the other. Despite this, while the intent of the Constitution might have been clear to its framers and the Founding Fathers of America, through time the meaning and nuances of what is both written and not written in the document has led to much debate between scholars, lawyers, and politicians alike, for the way in which this document is interpreted leads to the way in which government will act in the future.

For the purposes of The Radical and the Republican, the central issue facing both the reader and the politicians of mid-19th century America is and was: “What did the Constitution say about slavery?” How one interpreted this idea would inform whether or not one supported or opposed abolition as well as affect the way in which people went about ending it. Subsequently, a number of questions arose: Who had the power to end slavery? Was it an issue of the state, the local populace, the judiciary, or the Office of the President? Was the rule of law higher than a moral code that might only be practiced by some? Who had the right to impose one mode of thinking on another group?

While seemingly overly complicated legalize to some, these questions strike to the heart of many policy debates in America to this day. It is the answers to these questions that men like Lincoln and Douglass struggled with because their answers would fundamentally shape how future generations view the tole of the American government and what it meant to be an American citizen both at home and abroad.