Earlier we discussed William, Dunning, a Columbia University professor who so shaped 20th Century understanding of Reconstruction that the field was dominated by the “Dunning School” of historians.
Dunning’s Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction and Related Topics begins with a discussion of the Civil War that covers little military history, but a lot on the Constitution. Since I am looking at Dunning’s views on Reconstruction, I’ll not comment on his view of the Civil War.
Dunning assessment of the forces arrayed against Andrew Johnson’s presidential Reconstruction plan in the Spring and Summer of 1865 divides the opposition into three groups of Republicans. Dunning writes that the three opposition groups were:
first, the extreme negrophiles, who, on abstract grounds of human equality and natural rights, demanded full civil and political privileges for the freedmen; second, the partisan politicians, who viewed the elevation of the blacks mainly as a means of humbling the Democrats and maintaining the existing supremacy of the Republican Party; and third, the representatives of an exalted statesmanship, who saw in the existing situation an opportunity for decisively fixing in our system a broader and more national principle of civil rights and political privilege. Archibald Dunning, William (2011-11-02). Essays On The Civil War And Reconstruction And Related Topics (Kindle Locations 931-938).
It sounds strange today that someone who wanted “full civil and political privileges” for African Americans was described by Dunning as an “extreme negrophile,” but readers of a certain age may recall that white civil rights activists were denounced as “N*gg*r Lovers,” the less academic version of Dunning’s term.
The basic argument of Dunning was that Radical Republican insistence on giving Black men the right to vote essentially doomed any hope of a successful reconstruction of the South. Successful, and peaceful reconstruction, could have only have been achieved by governments wholly run by white Southerners. Dunning wrote:
To stand the social pyramid on its apex was not the surest way to restore the shattered equilibrium in the South. The enfranchisement of the freedmen and their enthronement in political power was as reckless a species of statecraft as that which marked “the blind hysterics of the Celt “in 1789-95. But the resort to negro suffrage was not determined to any great extent by abstract theories of equality. Though Charles Sumner and the lesser lights of his school solemnly proclaimed, in season and out, the trite generalities of the Rights of Man, it was a very practical dilemma that played the chief part in giving the ballot to the blacks. By 1867 it seemed clear that there were three ways available for settling the issues of the war in the South: first, to…permit the Southern whites themselves, through the Democratic Party, to determine either chiefly or wholly the solution of existing problems; second, to maintain Northern and Republican control through military government; and third, to maintain Northern and Republican control through negro suffrage. The first expedient, however defensible as to social and economic readjustment in the South itself, was from the standpoint of the great national issues demanding settlement grotesquely impossible. The choice had to be made between indefinite military rule and negro suffrage. It was a cruel dilemma. The traditional antipathy of the English race toward military power determined resort to the second alternative. It was proved by the sequel that the choice was unwise. The enfranchisement of the blacks, so far from removing, only increased, the necessity for military power. The two expedients were not alternative, but indissolubly united. On March 30, 1870, the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment had been proclaimed, and just two months later the first enforcement act became law. By the policy thus expressed the issue was definitely made up which ended in the undoing of reconstruction. Seven unwholesome years were required to demonstrate that not even the government which had quelled the greatest rebellion in history could maintain the freedmen in both security and comfort on the necks of their former masters. The demonstration was slow, but it was effective and permanent. Archibald Dunning, William (2011-11-02). Essays On The Civil War And Reconstruction And Related Topics (Kindle Locations 2782-2792). Double D. Kindle Edition.
This single paragraph was loaded with significance for the ways white people of the first half of the 20th Century would understand Reconstruction. Dunning believed that successful Reconstruction could have only have been achieved by white Southerners re-building the post-Civil War South. Enfranchisement of blacks doomed Reconstruction because it attempted to provide for African Americans’ “comfort on the necks of their former masters.” In this analysis, giving blacks voting rights signified a supreme act of oppression against whites. Whites, Dunning writes, experienced “bitterness” caused “by the consciousness that the issue was indisputably that of race domination.” At the height of Radical Reconstruction, Dunning claimed, “the negroes exercised an influence in political affairs out of all relation to their intelligence or property.”
So, Dunning believed that that “the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment” giving Blacks the right to vote, began the “undoing of reconstruction.” In the next article into this Deep Dive into the work of William Dunning we will look at how Dunning described that undoing, including the role of the Ku Klux Klan.
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