American History: A Survey (Brinkley), 13th Edition

Where Historians Disagree - Reconstruction

Debate over the nature of Reconstruction—not only among historians, but among the public at large—has created so much controversy over the decades that one scholar, writing in 1959, described the issue as a "dark and bloody ground." Among historians, the passions of the debate have to some extent subsided since then; but in the popular mind, Reconstruction continues to raise "dark and bloody" images.

For many years, a relatively uniform and highly critical view of Reconstruction prevailed among historians, a reflection of broad currents in popular thought. By the late nineteenth century, most white Americans in both the North and the South had come to believe that few real differences any longer divided the sections, that the nation should strive for a genuine reconciliation.

And most white Americans believed as well in the superiority of their race, in the inherent unfitness of African Americans for political or social equality. Out of this mentality was born the first major historical interpretation of Reconstruction, through the work of William A. Dunning. In Reconstruction, Political and Economic (1907), Dunning portrayed Reconstruction as a corrupt outrage perpetrated on the prostrate South by a vicious and vindictive cabal of Northern Republican Radicals. Reconstruction governments were based on "bayonet rule." Unscrupulous and self-aggrandizing carpetbaggers flooded the South to profit from the misery of the defeated region. Ignorant, illiterate blacks were thrust into positions of power for which they were entirely unfit. The Reconstruction experiment, a moral

abomination from its first moments, survived only because of the determination of the Republican Party to keep itself in power. (Some later writers, notably Howard K. Beale, added an economic motive—to protect Northern business interests.) Dunning and his many students (who together formed what became known as the "Dunning school") compiled state-by-state evidence to show that the legacy of Reconstruction was corruption, ruinous taxation, and astronomical increases in the public debt.

The Dunning school not only shaped the views of several generations of historians. It also reflected and helped to shape the views of much of the public. Popular depictions of Reconstruction for years to come (as first the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation and then the 1936 book and 1939 movie Gone with the Wind illustrated) portrayed the era as one of tragic exploitation of the South by the North. Even today, many white southerners and others continue to accept the basic premises of the Dunning interpretation. Among historians, however, the old view of Reconstruction has gradually lost credibility.

The great African-American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois was among the first to challenge the Dunning view in a 1910 article and, later, in a 1935 book, Black Reconstruction. To him, Reconstruction politics in the Southern states had been an effort on the part of the masses, black and white, to create a more democratic society. The misdeeds of the Reconstruction governments, he claimed, had been greatly exaggerated, and their achievements overlooked. The governments had been expensive, he insisted, because they had tried to provide public education and other public services on a scale never before attempted in the South. But Du Bois' use of Marxist theory in his work caused many historians to dismiss his argument; and it remained for a group of less radical, white historians to shatter the Dunning image of Reconstruction.

In the 1940s, historians such as C. Vann Woodward, David Herbert Donald, Thomas B. Alexander, and others began to reexamine the Reconstruction governments in the South and to suggest that their records were not nearly as bad as most historians had previously assumed. They also looked at the Radical Republicans in Congress and suggested that they had not been motivated by vindictiveness and partisanship alone.

By the early 1960s, a new view of Reconstruction was emerging from these efforts, a view whose appeal to historians grew stronger with the emergence of the "Second Reconstruction," the civil rights movement. The revisionist approach was summarized by John Hope Franklin in Reconstruction After the Civil War (1961) and Kenneth Stampp in The Era of Reconstruction (1965), who claimed that the postwar Republicans had been engaged in a genuine, if flawed, effort to solve the problem of race in the South by providing much-needed protection to the freedmen. The Reconstruction governments, for all their faults, had been bold experiments in interracial politics.

The congressional Radicals were not saints, but they had displayed a genuine concern for the rights of slaves. Andrew Johnson was not a martyred defender of the Constitution, but an inept, racist politician who resisted reasonable compromise and brought the government to a crisis. There had been no such thing as "bayonet rule" or "Negro rule" in the South. African Americans had played only a small part in Reconstruction governments and had generally acquitted themselves well. The Reconstruction regimes had, in fact, brought important progress to the South, establishing the region's first public school system and other important social changes. Corruption in the South had been no worse than corruption in the North at that time. What was tragic about Reconstruction, the revisionist view claimed, was not what it did to Southern whites but what it did not do for Southern blacks. By stopping short of the reforms necessary to ensure blacks genuine equality, Reconstruction had consigned them to more than a century of injustice and discrimination.

In later years, scholars began to question the revisionist view—not in an effort to revive the old Dunning interpretation but, rather, in an attempt to draw attention to those things Reconstruction in fact achieved. Eric Foner, in Nothing but Freedom (1983) and Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution (1988), concluded that what is striking about the American experience in this period is not how little was accomplished, but how far the former slaves moved toward freedom and independence in a short time, and how large a role African Americans themselves played in shaping Reconstruction. During Reconstruction, blacks won a certain amount of legal and political power in the South; and even though they held that power only temporarily, they used it for a time to strengthen their economic and social positions and to win a position of limited but genuine independence. Through Reconstruction they won, if not equality, a measure of individual and community autonomy, building blocks of the freedom that emancipation alone had not guaranteed.

Historians writing from the perspective of African-American and women's history have made related arguments. Leon Litwack's Been in the Storm So Long (1979) maintained that former slaves used the relative latitude they enjoyed under Reconstruction to build a certain independence for themselves within Southern society. They strengthened their churches; they reunited their families; they refused to work in the "gang-labor" system of the plantations and forced the creation of a new labor system in which they had more control over their own lives. Amy Dru Stanley and Jacqueline Jones have both argued that the freed slaves displayed considerable independence in constructing their households on their own terms and asserting their control over family life, reproduction, and work. Women in particular sought the opportunity, according to Jacqueline Jones in Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow (1985), "to labor on behalf of their own families and kin within the protected spheres of household and community."

But Reconstruction, some historians have begun to argue, was not restricted to the South alone. Heather Richardson, in West from Appomattox (2007) and The Death of Reconstruction (2001), shows how the entire nation changed during and as a result of the Civil War and Reconstruction—with the South, perhaps, changing least of all. The age of Reconstruction was also the age of western expansion and industrialization.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/reconstruction/kkk/sf_klan.html - Reconstruction: The Second Civil War – White Men Unite: Special Features, Q & A: White Southern Responses to Black Emancipation

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/reconstruction/activism/sf_rights.html - Reconstruction: The Second Civil War – Black Legislators: Special Features, Q & A: Civil Rights During Reconstruction

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/reconstruction/schools/sf_postwar.html - Reconstruction: The Second Civil War – Access to Learning: Special Features, Q & A: Schools and Education During Reconstruction

1			Read the Q & A sections on the PBS site. The historians who participated in these discussions are some of the leading scholars of U.S. Reconstruction. After reading the sections, what is your opinion of how white southerners responded to emancipation, the evolution of civil rights, and the changes in American education during Reconstruction? Do the historians quoted here seem to agree with the trends in Reconstruction historiography discussed in the text?

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/segregation.html - The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow

2			Explore this PBS site dedicated to the full history of segregation in the U.S. Summarize the viewpoint the site presents. With which of the historians presented in the text does the site most agree? Remember, it is not only individual historians who ascribe to historical theories.