The Dunning School

 

Echoes of Reconstruction: Who the Hell Was William Dunning & Did He Distort Reconstruction History?

by Chris Mackowski 

Posted on January 28, 2023

Emerging Civil War is pleased to welcome back Patrick Young, author of The Reconstruction Era blog. 

A year ago I wrote a Martin Luther King Day essay on the critique the great Civil Rights leader had of the way the history of Reconstruction had been distorted by a number of white historians of the first half of the 20th Century. While the article was met with a number of supportive comments and an equal number of derogations, there were several questions raised about the “Dunning School” historians who directed the distortion. Shortly after the article went up, I was hospitalized and was not able to get back to responding to the inquiries from readers. 

In his speech commemorating the 100th Birthday of African American historian W.E.B. DuBois, King spoke about how the Dunning School manipulated the history of Reconstruction and how DuBois’s book Black Reconstruction had challenged that white consensus. Dunning School history systematically altered the history of Reconstruction along lines pioneered by adherents of the Lost Cause a quarter century earlier. But the Dunningites were not ex-Confederates trying to justify their struggle against the United States, they were academics with doctorates from fine universities in the South and North.

The Dunning School is named after its founding father, Professor William Dunning. William A. Dunning was a Northerner born in Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1857. A true Columbia man, he received his bachelor’s degree there in 1881, his master’s there in 1884, and his doctorate there in 1885. In 1885 he began teaching at Columbia University and in 1904 he was chaired as the Francis Lieber Professor. He later served as the president of both the American Historical Association and the American Political Science Association. This was no obscure historian.

Dunning’s writings led many Southern students to enroll at Columbia to study under him. His doctoral students would take on a decades-long program of creating Reconstruction studies of most of the Confederate states. They would also create primary source collections that are still important today. The Dunning School’s work was disseminated in popular media. According to historian John Smith:

For decades it dominated the popular understanding of Reconstruction thanks to its dissemination in David W. Griffith’s film The Birth of the Nation (1915), Claude G. Bowers’s The Tragic Era: The Revolution after Lincoln (1929), George Fort Milton’s The Age of Hate: Andrew Johnson and the Radicals (1930), and Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone With the Wind (1936) and the film of the same title that appeared three years later. (The Dunning School: Historians, Race, and the Meaning of Reconstruction ed. by  John Smith Kindle Locations 142-144). 

According to the Dunning School, Reconstruction history followed this timeline:

1. Lincoln had planned on a mild restoration of the Union without any fundamental changes in Southern society apart from the ending of slavery. His death removed his powerful guiding hand from restoration of the Union.
2. Southern whites accepted emancipation and hoped to restore orderly and peaceful state governments after the war.
3. Andrew Johnson organized new state governments after the war, mobilizing moderate white Southerners to assume the offices of the reconstructed state and local governments.
4. Radical Republicans, seeking profits and power, fought against Johnson’s efforts at reconciliation, going so far as to illegally impeach him.
5. Radicals cynically gave Black men the right to vote in order to maintain control of the South.
6. Blacks lacked the mental capacity to see that their real allies were Southern whites and that they themselves were mentally and morally incapable of participating in government.
7. The governments set up by the Radicals encouraged Black indolence and allowed the Radicals to steal the region’s wealth.
8. White leaders redeemed the Southern states from Black and Radical rule and installed fair governments in which all were protected, even though Blacks were disenfranchised.

The views of the Dunning School were transmitted through elementary and high school textbooks in the early 20th Century. In some Southern colleges, Dunningite volumes became the acceptable histories of Reconstruction. But the Dunning School scholars attracted an audience well beyond the South. When they were writing, white Americans were coming to terms with the emergence of the United States as a world power, controlling non-white peoples in places like Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The role of whites as a world-wide ruling race was more a popular proposition in 1900 than perhaps at any other time in American history. The “unnaturalness” of “imposing Black rule” over white Southerners seemed apparent to many Northern whites four decades after Reconstruction.

One of Dunning’s most influential books was Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865–1877  (1907). Hopefully you can stand a Deep Dive into this paragon of distortion.

Dunning begins the book in the days after Emancipation. African Americans, who frequently left the plantations of their former enslavers when they were freed to look for sold-off family members, are described as “aimless” wanderers by Dunning:

With the collapse of the Confederacy all the slaves became free, and the strange and unsettling tidings of emancipation were carried to the remotest corners of the land. As the full meaning of this news was grasped by the freedmen, great numbers of them abandoned their old homes, and, regardless of crops to be cultivated, stock to be cared for, or food to be provided, gave themselves up to testing their freedom. They wandered aimless but happy through the country, found endless delight in hanging about the towns and Union camps, and were fascinated by the pursuit of the white man’s culture in the schools which optimistic northern philanthropy was establishing wherever it was possible.

Right after the war, former Confederate States under all-white government elected by all-white voters passed the Black Codes. These were designed to control the bodies and labor of Black people.  Incredibly, Dunning described the severe disabilities placed on Black freedom as a sensible response to the inferiority of blacks:

The restrictions in respect to bearing arms, testifying in court, and keeping labor contracts were justified by well-established traits and habits of the negroes; and the vagrancy laws dealt with problems of destitution, idleness, and vice.… A few of the enactments, such as that of Mississippi excluding the blacks from leasing agricultural land, were clearly animated by a spirit of oppression, reflecting the antipathy of the lower-class whites to the negroes; and others doubtless were lacking in practical sagacity and in the nicest adaptation to the purpose in hand; but, after all, the greatest fault of the southern law-makers was, not that their procedure was unwise per se, but that, when legislating as a conquered people, they failed adequately to consider and be guided by the prejudices of their conquerors. Sagacious southerners warned the legislators that some of their acts would produce a dangerous effect in the North. But the personnel of the new governments did not include the most shrewd and experienced politicians of the states, and the legislatures, in yielding to the tremendous pressure of social and economic distress, set lightly aside some very urgent considerations of political expediency. (Kindle Locations 710-726)

Dunning expressed a lot of sympathy for racist President Andrew Johnson who opposed the Civil Rights Act passed by Congress in 1866. The bill simply declared that non-white people born in the United States were citizens and that they were entitled to certain civil rights. Dunning wrote:

Johnson was soon obliged to confront another measure which was much more subversive than the Freedmen’s Bureau bill of his most cherished constitutional convictions. This was the Civil Rights bill, designed to secure to the freedmen through the normal action of the courts the same protection against discriminating state legislation that was secured in the earlier bill by military power. It declared the freedmen to be citizens of the United States, and as such to have the same civil rights ‘ and to be subject to the same criminal penalties as white persons; and it provided with great fullness for the punishment of any one who, under color of state laws, should discriminate against the blacks. It was a plain announcement to the southern legislatures that, as against their project of setting the freedmen apart as a special class, with a status at law corresponding to their status in fact, the North would insist on exact equality between the races in civil status, regardless of any consideration of fact. The constitutional questions involved in this measure were of the most profound and intricate nature, and the theory of citizenship which it embodied was such as to make conservative constitutional lawyers stare and gasp.

Later in the book, Dunning related that the reaction of Southern whites against the enfranchisement of Blacks was the imposition of Black Rule because in some jurisdictions most people were Black! The occupation military forces prevented violence against Black voters, which apparently gave Blacks an undeserved advantage. Here is how Dunning described this:

In these elections, as in the registration, the military authorities assumed the duty of promoting in every way participation by the blacks, and of counteracting every influence tending to keep them from the polls. The result of the elections was a group of constituent assemblies whose unfitness for their task was pitiful. 

The principal problem with the new constitutions was, according to Dunning was:

the guarantee of entire equality, civil and political, among the citizens regardless of race…

The rest of the book is filled with similar sympathies and prejudices presented as scientific history. This view would dominate popular understanding of the period for three-quarters of a century and still maintains a hold on the minds of some.