Concept

Radical Republicans

Northern Republicans in Congress who rejected Lincoln's and Johnson's lenient terms for the South and demanded stronger guarantees of Black civil and political rights.

Northern Republicans who contested Lincoln's treatment of Confederate states and proposed harsher punishments. Led in Congress by figures like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens, they pushed for the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the Reconstruction Acts, and (unsuccessfully) Andrew Johnson's removal from office.