Jacobin’s symposium on “American Jacobins” is a provocative reminder that the US Civil War and Reconstruction was a radical revolution. Indeed, in emancipating the slaves, it entailed the largest expropriation of private property the world would see before the Russian Revolution of 1917.

The contributors to the symposium, however, make a number of historical claims that compel a response. James Oakes is absolutely correct to argue that the war cannot be understood without reference to the existence and expansion of plantation slavery. However, his claim that the Republicans — including Abraham Lincoln — came to power in 1861 with the intention of ending slavery is questionable. In fact, the Republican slogan of “free soil” meant the containment of slavery where it existed in the South. While the Radicals sought to hasten the end of slavery (by excluding it from the western territories, repealing the fugitive slave laws, and abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, etc.), moderates saw the process as much more gradual and prolonged. As Lincoln (an exemplary moderate) hoped, the Republicans might at best put slavery on the “road to eventual extinction.”

When the war began in April 1861, the Republicans were divided along just these lines. The Radicals hoped to use the war to expedite the abolition of Southern slavery. Conversely, Lincoln and the dominant wing of the Republican Party refused to turn the force of the Federal government against slavery in the South. (This position was manifest in official instructions ordering Union military commanders to return escaped slaves to their masters.) These moderates aimed only to restore the Union and force the Southern planters to accept the legitimacy of the Federal government. In the end, it was military exigency and the mass flight of the slaves from the plantations — what W. E. B. DuBois called the “general strike against slavery” — that compelled Lincoln and the Republicans to embrace the Radical program between late 1862 and early 1863.