Who the Hell Is William Dunning? The Man Behind the Distortion of Reconstruction

During the first half of the 20th Century William Dunning of Columbia University was the seminal figure in the study of the Reconstruction Era. Dunning, who was from New Jersey, became a hero to aspiring historians from the South. Vanderbilt University Professor Frank Lawrence Owsley applauded Dunning because, he wrote in 1920, Dunning “scorned the injustice and hypocrisy of the condemnation of the South,” and challenged “the holiness of the Northern legend.”

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 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 writing 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. (Id. Kindle Locations 142-144).

According to Smith, the Dunning School came to see four phases of Reconstruction:

First, following President Abraham Lincoln’s death and against his plans for quickly and mildly restoring the Union, the Radical wing of his Republican Party, for reasons of economic greed and political gain, grasped control of Reconstruction, eager to prolong the process and to humiliate the former southern insurgents. Second, after Southerners willingly accepted emancipation and the war’s outcome, Lincoln’s successor, President Andrew Johnson, expeditiously organized new state governments, supervised elections, and proclaimed the nation restored. The Radicals, however, accepted none of this, repudiating the southern state governments, refusing to seat the Southerners’ elected representatives to Congress, and launching a vituperative campaign against Johnson that garnered an overwhelming victory in the 1866 congressional elections.

Congressional Radicals, in the third phase of the Dunning story of Reconstruction, took control of Reconstruction by overriding Johnson’s vetoes, placing the southern states under military rule, disfranchising whites and enfranchising the freedmen. Under Radical and military rule they formed new southern state governments led by corrupt, despicable, and vindictive whites and blacks… Finally, during the 1870s, Democrats in one former Confederate state after another, peacefully or by force, wrested control from the freedmen and their carpetbag and scalawag allies.

The views of the Dunning School were transmitted through elementary and high school textbooks. In some Southern colleges, Dunningite volumes became the acceptable histories of Reconstruction. But the Dunning School scholars attracted an audience 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 popular 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 the fact. Smith writes that:

white historians at the turn of the century almost uniformly believed in what they termed Anglo-Saxon superiority, a mythic belief in Aryanism that they found confirmed through respected science of their day and the social philosophy of Scientific Darwinism. Employing a circular logic, most white Americans of the Jim Crow era believed that the depressed economic condition of contemporary African Americans— a product of their discrimination and proscription by whites— proved their innate inferiority. (Id. Kindle Locations 203-205)

Although Dunning never imposed a unitary view of the Civil War and Reconstruction on his students, some themes ran through most of their dissertations. According to Smith, the Dunning School described the cooperation of white and black Republicans as the manipulation of blacks by white Republicans for their own pecuniary interests. Smith writes that::

The Dunning historians objected most loudly to what they considered the unnatural elevation of African American males to civil and political equality. They charged that the Radical Republicans enfranchised blacks to humiliate the defeated Confederates….white Southerners never would accept blacks as their political and social equals. Dunning’s students underscored what they considered the indignities of “Negro rule,” a concept that for them signified a saturnalia of corruption and fiscal excess by black, carpetbag, and scalawag state governments and the tyranny of U.S. Army occupation forces… The authors emphasized black inferiority generally, describing the former slaves as barbarous, childlike, often criminal, deluded, ignorant, and controlled by their white friends. (Id. Kindle Locations 611-612, 617-618)

While Dunning is remembered now for his work on Reconstruction, most of his books were on political theory. His two main volumes dealing with the Reconstruction Era are:

Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction and Related Topics (1897)

Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865–1877 (1907)

 

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