Talk:Moderate Republicans (Reconstruction era)

Manifold linked bold alt-titles
'The "Moderate Republicans" or "Conservative Republicans," also known as the Liberal Republicans, (later also known as "Half-Breeds"...' That's a lot of bold, and a lot of links.   Ideally each should be one or the other, but not both -- for stylistic reason (see MOS:BOLDLINKAVOID)) -- and for logical ones, too. If these topics are essentially largely similar, such that each does indeed properly serve as an alt-title for the page, then they (or those of them for which that applies) would be merged to a single, more comprehensive page. If they're largely distinct, they they need a little bit more context for the shades of meaning between them for the link (and to not be in bold). 109.255.211.6 (talk) 20:35, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

Changing "Moderate" to lower case
With "Radical Republicans," the convention among Civil War scholars is to capitalize "Radical," as if the Radical Republicans were a distinct political party. The same is not true with respect to "moderate Republicans." Rather, any Republicans who were not Radical Republicans were moderate Republicans, with "moderate" used as an adjective rather than as a proper noun. I searched in Google Books for "moderate republicans" in Foner's Reconstruction book cited in note 2 and got no hits. So I searched in Foner's "The Fiery Trial" and got about a dozen hits, all with "moderate" in lower case (except of course when it was the first word of a sentence). Other prominent authors whom I checked and who use lower case are Michael Burlingame in his two-volume biography of Lincoln, Walter Stahr in his biography of Salmon Chase, and others. Maurice Magnus (talk) 23:09, 30 December 2023 (UTC)