The only period in American history in which a major party was genuinely radical. FP.
Just finished an advanced Civil War class, and I have to take issue with this assertion. The Republican Party was simply founded on the belief that slavery should be halted and not allowed to expand to the West, in other words to strangle it from without ... this was a very popular sentiment in the North by the 1850s. The party (and not even all of the party) didn't support abolition until the middle of the Civil War as a wartime measure, and by then most records show that the war had spurred popular support in the North for abolition; it was definitely not fringe by that point, and not even all of said "fringe" party supported it. Though there were several Republicans who wanted slavery stopped on moral grounds (and, to be fair, several Northern Democrats, too...), but there was also a significant faction who saw it as equally economically impractical. Cheap slave labor was not exactly popular among Northern business elites, and several Republican politicians were more than influenced by that complaint.
As a proud Republican whose favorite president is Abraham Lincoln and who feels immense pride about the abolition of slavery, I am not trying to take anything away from things like the Emancipation Proclamation or the Thirteenth Amendment; I'm just pointing out that history isn't simple, and it's probably generous (I think, in this sense?) to declare the Republican Party of the 1850s "radical," especially if you mean it in the sense that they were all morally superior freedom fighters completely set on elevating American Blacks to complete equality, a fairy tale version of history quite prevalent in elementary school coloring books...
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