Reading William Dunning, Founder of the Dunning School: A Deep Dive Into Scholarly Supremacism

While William Dunning is often discussed in Reconstruction Era Studies, he is little read today except by academic historians and Neo-Confederates. I think that it is important to look closely at Dunning’s two works on Reconstruction to see how they helped shape how Americans thought about Reconstruction well into the 1960s.

One of Dunning’s 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.

In Dunning’s telling, blacks were negligent in not performing the tasks they had performed as slaves after they were emancipated, as though keeping the old plantations going was the responsibility of African Americans. His description of freedpeople hanging around the camps of Union soldiers for “delight” ignores the fact that these Union soldiers were often their only protection against vengeful Southern whites.

White Confederate veterans are described by Dunning as struggling to provide for both white and black:

While the negro population, whose labor was so indispensable a factor in the productive system, was thus occupied, the returning Confederate soldiers and the rest of the white population devoted themselves with desperate energy to the procurement of what must sustain the life of both themselves and their former slaves. From many a family that had lived in luxury came pitiful cries for the humblest food; and in many regions where nature would have responded bounteously to slight human effort, the only thing that interposed between the population and famine was the commissary department of the Union army. Dunning, William Archibald (2015-07-29). Reconstruction, political and economic, 1865-1877 (Kindle Locations 150-161).

Soon after the defeat of the Confederacy, white controlled governments in the South enacted Black Codes tying blacks to the plantations on which they had been slaves. These Black Codes reduced blacks to a status near that of slavery. Dunning saw the Black Codes as a realistic legal approach to the inferiority of blacks. According to Dunning:

To a distrustful northern mind such legislation could very easily take the form of a systematic at tempt to relegate the freedmen to a subjection only less complete than that from which the war had set them free. The radicals sounded a shrill note of alarm. “We tell the white men of Mississippi,” said the Chicago Tribune, “that the men of the North will convert the state of Mississippi into a frog-pond before they will allow any such laws to disgrace one foot of soil over which the flag of freedom waves.”…The “black codes” were represented to be the expression of a deliberate purpose by the southerners to nullify the result of the war and to re-establish slavery, and this impression gained wide prevalence in the North. Yet, as a matter of fact, this legislation, far from embodying any spirit of defiance towards the North or any purpose to evade the conditions which the victors had imposed, was in the main a conscientious and straightforward attempt to bring some sort of order out of the social and economic chaos which a full acceptance of the results of war and emancipation involved. In its general principle it corresponded very closely to the actual facts of the situation. The freedmen were not, and in the nature of the case could not for generations be, on the same social, moral, and intellectual plane with the whites; and this fact was recognized by constituting them a separate class in the civil order. As in general principles, so in details, the legislation was faithful on the whole to the actual conditions with which it had to deal.

 Incredibly, Dunning describes 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 expresses 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 se cured 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 fulness 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.

Senator Charles Sumner of Mass. was a particular enemy of reason because he insisted that the rights of former Confederate officers not be restored until those of blacks were raised up to the level of the white man, according to Dunning:

Sumner, in the Senate, made himself felt in a far different way. His forte was exalted moral fervor and humanita rian idealism. He lived in the empyrean, and de scended thence upon his colleagues with dogmas which he discovered there. However remote his doctrines from any relation to the realities of human affairs, he preached them without intermission and forced his colleagues by mere iteration to give them a place in law. He would shed tears at the bare thought of refusing to freedmen rights of which they had no comprehension, but would filibuster to the end of the session to prevent the restoration to the southern whites of rights which were essential to their whole conception of life. 

White Southerners were resentful of the imposition of civil rights protections for blacks, Dunning says, because:

Under all these circumstances the southerners felt that the policy of Congress had no real cause save the purpose of radical politicians to prolong and extend their party power by means of negro suffrage…and to compel the white people to recognize the blacks as their equals wherever the stern word of military command could reach. It was as inconceivable to the southerners that rational men of the North should seriously approve of negro suffrage per se as it had been in 1860 to the northerners that rational men of the South should approve of secession per se. 

Dunning writes that the United States military intervened in the states to ensure the ability of blacks to register and vote:

The process of creating a new electorate and through it a new government in each of the ten states was carried on by the district commanders in close conformity with the radical spirit of the reconstruction acts. The registration of voters was so directed as to insure beyond all peradventure the fullest enrolment of the blacks and the completest exclusion of disfranchised whites. 1 When the re turns were all in it appeared that the negroes were in the majority in
South Carolina, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and the whites in Vir ginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Texas, while in Georgia the numbers were about equal. 1 The first exercise by the newly enfranchised alass of their high privilege was in the elections for the various con stitutional conventions. 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:

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

Dunning saw the extension of rights to blacks as dooming any chance of real sectional reconciliation:

The passage of the reconstruction acts by Congress terminated abruptly and forever the political prospects of that moderate, anti-secession, Whiggish element of the whites which Johnson’s policy had brought to the front. To the great majority of these men negro suffrage was as intolerable, as unthinkable as it was to the most extreme of the ex-Confederates.

Always remember that when someone says that Radical Reconstruction was extreme, they mean that it allowed African Americans to vote on an equal basis with whites.

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