This is the final installment of a four-part series on historian William Dunning.
While the recent rise of the so-called Alt-Right has been a sad reminder of the persistence of White Supremacy in the United States, William Dunning hailed the 1860s-1870s fight against what he called “Black Supremacy.” If you are not familiar with that term, it is because you have been fortunate enough not to have read deeply in the Dunning School literature. What it means is that if black people vote, they are unlikely to vote for White Supremacist candidates. This free exercise of the right of suffrage by African Americans made it hard for Klan-backed candidates to get elected in states like Mississippi and South Carolina where blacks made up a majority of the electorate. The way that “Black Supremacy” could be challenged was through white supremacist terrorism.
Dunning described the paramilitary organization of the white Southern population as a challenge to blacks engaging in what we would think of as normal political behavior. By the late 1869s, a bloody showdown seemed inevitable. The one remaining chance for a peaceful resolution was if blacks accepted political subservience to their old masters. Dunning wrote:
But a solitary chance presented itself of escape from the disasters of negro political supremacy: if the freedmen could be won to look for guidance in their new duties to their old masters, all might yet be well. In some localities systematic attempts were made to persuade the blacks that their best interest lay in harmony with the native whites ; but the results were pathetically insignificant. To the emancipated race all the as tounding changes of the recent wonder years had come through other sources, and the vague but in toxicating delights of political privilege must, they felt, be enjoyed under the same auspices that had brought them freedom, schools, and the unlimited in dulgence of those weird emotions which they called religion. But it was not unguided instinct alone that kept the blacks apart politically from the native whites. From the Union soldiers, from the northern mission aries and school-teachers, and from bureau agents of every grade the freedmen had heard proclaimed for years now, in all the changes from mysterious allusion to intemperate asseveration, the virtues of the Union and Republican party which controlled the North, and the vices and heresies of the Democrats which had brought ruin to the South. Without a clear comprehension as to what it all meant, the mass of the freedmen were sure that they must be Union men and Republicans. [Dunning, William Archibald (2015-07-29). Reconstruction, political and economic, 1865-1877 (Kindle Locations 1403-1405). . Kindle Edition.]
When new Southern state constitutions were proposed protecting the civil rights of blacks, Dunning says that Southern white Democrats initiated campaigns to oppose them;
the dominant tone in the campaign was that which sounded with defiant resonance in the resolutions of conservative conventions touching the relations of the races. Witness the reference in Louisiana to the “lapse of Caucasian civilization into African barbarism”; the Mississippi denunciation of the “nefarious design” of the Republicans to “degrade the Caucasian race as the inferiors of the African negro”; and the unequivocal declaration in South Carolina that “the white people of our state will never quietly submit to negro rule.”
As states were restored to full rights within the Union, armed opposition to the black population intensified;
The inevitable extra-legal protest of the former political people against their subjection to the freed-men and northerners was manifesting itself in many places by the time the seven states were restored in 1868. Pari passu with the organization of the freed-men in Union Leagues the whites of various localities formed bands for purposes sometimes of defence from, sometimes of aggression upon, the blacks. The membership of these bands was generally recruited from the less sober and substantial classes of the whites, and their activity consisted in pro ceedings designed to terrify or coerce the freedmen into conduct that should manifest respect for the persons and property of the superior race. With the approach of negro enfranchisement, however, the white societies were transformed in member ship, spirit, and purpose.
The deep dread of negro domination under the auspices of invincible national power impelled thousands of serious and respectable whites to look for some means of mitigation, if not complete salvation, in the methods of the secret societies. In the spring of 1867 elaborate organi zations were effected by the Ku-Klux Klan, or In visible Empire, at Nashville, and the Knights of the White Camelia at New Orleans. The explicit purpose of these organizations was to preserve the social and political ascendency of the white race. The means to be employed are not dilated upon in the documents of the societies that have come to light; but many other records of the reconstruction time indicate that the means were of but slight con sequence compared with the end, in the minds of those who made the names of the societies of such ominous significance throughout the land. The operations of the Ku-Klux were conspicuous features, in the South, of the presidential elections of 1868.
Reports of the proceedings through which both blacks and whites were visited with the wrath of the secret orders for supporting the radicals ex cited wide-spread interest and comment. The chief of the Invisible Empire became alarmed at the spirit and proportions of the association which he headed, and in 1869 sent forth the order to disband it; but though he surrendered his functions, the local so cieties long continued to employ familiar methods in asserting the supremacy of their race. The moral suasion to which the leaders would limit the move ment against the radicals never ceased to be sup plemented by the merciless physical suasion in which rested the confidence of the. rank and file. Dunning, William Archibald (2015-07-29). Reconstruction, political and economic, 1865-1877 (Kindle Locations 1490-1515).
Dunning considered the lead-up to the passage and ratification of the XV Amendment giving black men the right to vote as the ultimate provocation:
To render absolutely secure the right of the negro to vote in the South was not an easy task. The right was already con ferred by every reconstructed constitution; and every state but Tennessee had been declared “en- titled and admitted to representation in Congress” upon the “fundamental condition” that its consti tution should ” never be so amended or changed as to deprive any citizen or class of citizens of the United States of the right to vote . . . who are en titled to vote by the constitution . . . herein recog nized.” But the validity of such a fundamental condition was very doubtful, and the purpose of the southern whites to use any available means to dis franchise the blacks was beyond all doubt. Hence the determination of the Republicans to meet this purpose with an explicit prohibition in the Federal Constitution.
A major source of anger among Southern whites was the expenditure of public money to educate former slaves. Dunning writes:
One of the largest items in the budgets of reconstruction was the schools. Free public education existed in only a rudimentary and sporadic form in the South before the war, but the new constitutions provided generally for complete systems on advanced north ern models. The financial burden of these enterprises was very great, and the irritation thus caused was increased by the fact that the blacks were the chief beneficiaries of the new systems, while many of the white tax-payers considered the education of the negro, as carried on in the public schools, to be either useless or positively dangerous to society. Dunning, William Archibald (2015-07-29). Reconstruction, political and economic, 1865-1877 (Kindle Location 2528). . Kindle Edition
Dunning stresses the importance of race in setting the battle lines for the conflict:
the antithesis and antipathy of race and color were crucial and ineradicable. Intelligence and political capacity were, indeed,, almost exclusively in the one race… Dunning, William Archibald (2015-07-29). Reconstruction, political and economic, 1865-1877 (Kindle Locations 2598-2599).
Whites, Dunning writes, particularly feared talented blacks:
The negroes were disliked and feared almost in exact proportion to their manifestation of intelligence and capacity. What animated the whites was pride in their race as such and a dread, partly instinctive, partly rational, lest their institutions, traditions, and ideals were to be appropriated or submerged. Whether or not this feeling and spirit were abstractly preferable to those which animated the northern idealist who preached equality, the fact that such feeling and spirit were at work must be taken squarely into account by the historian. The negro had no pride of race and no aspiration or ideals save to be like the whites. With civil rights and political power, not won, but almost forced upon
him, he came gradually to understand and crave those more elusive privileges that con stitute social equality. A more intimate associa- tion with the other race than that which business and politics involved was the end towards which the ambition of the blacks tended consciously or unconsciously to direct itself. The manifestations of this ambition were infinite in their diversity. It played a part in the demand for mixed schools, in the legislative prohibition of discrimination between the races in hotels and theatres, and even in the hideous crime against white womanhood which now assumed new meaning in the annals of outrage. But every form and suggestion of social equality was resented and resisted by the whites with the energy of despair. The dread of it justified in their eyes modes of lawlessness which were wholly sub versive of civilization. Dunning, William Archibald (2015-07-29). Reconstruction, political and economic, 1865-1877 (Kindle Locations 2608-2614).
In 1874 and 1875 whites made important gains in the racial conflict:
The movement for white supremacy, having met with entire success in Alabama and Arkansas, and with qualified success in Louisiana, manifested itself next in the state which adjoined all of these—Mis sissippi. This was, next to South Carolina, the most thoroughly Africanized of the southern states.
Whites resorted to organized violence to intimidate black South Carolinians:
The aggressive and violent element among the whites entered early and with ardor into the work of the contest. Armed clubs on the model of the Louisiana White Leagues were organized in all the counties where the negroes were most numerous and by boisterous parades, miscellaneous firing, and other demonstrations, half sportive and half serious, they impressed the blacks with a sense of impend ing danger. Actual violence was rare, but early in September, 1875, serious collisions between the races occurred at Yazoo City and Clinton, with the usual excess of colored casualties.
Dunning writes that peace was finally restored to the nation with the compromise in the 1876 Hayes/Tilden election:
Though the Wormley agreement was not generally known when Hayes was inaugurated, the substance of it was in the thoughts of many men. Generalized, this famous bargain meant: Let the reforming Republicans direct the national govern ment and the southern whites may rule the negroes. Such were the terms on which the new administra tion took up its task. They precisely and con sciously reversed the principles of reconstruction as followed under Grant, and hence they ended an era. Grant in 1868 had cried peace, but in his time, with the radicals and carpet-baggers in the saddle, there was no peace; with Hayes peace came. Dunning, William Archibald (2015-07-29). Reconstruction, political and economic, 1865-1877 (Kindle Locations 4178-4182).
In reading Dunning’s two volumes, I was struck by a few things in terms of his view of Reconstruction:
1. The books assume that white dominance of blacks is the natural state of things. White cannot accept black dominance of government even when blacks are in the majority, but blacks will accept white dominance even when whites are the minority.
2. Blacks had no independent political agenda. Enfranchised blacks were merely the tools of white Northerners and white Southern “tories”.
3. The most radical measure taken by the Republicans was the enfranchisement of blacks.
4. Dunning’s story of Reconstruction is never told from the perspective of blacks. They are depicted merely as lazy, dissolute, and invincibly ignorant.
In an interview with The Nation magazine, a liberal political weekly, modern Reconstruction historian Eric Foner said of the Dunning School’s impact:
The traditional or Dunning School of Reconstruction was not just an interpretation of history. It was part of the edifice of the Jim CrowSystem. It was an explanation for and justification of taking the right to vote away from black people on the grounds that they completely abused it during Reconstruction. It was a justification for the white South resisting outside efforts in changing race relations because of the worry of having another Reconstruction.
All of the alleged horrors of Reconstruction helped to freeze the minds of the white South in resistance to any change whatsoever. And it was only after the Civil Rights revolution swept away the racist underpinnings of that old view—i.e., that black people are incapable of taking part in American democracy—that you could get a new view of Reconstruction widely accepted. For a long time it was an intellectual straitjacket for much of the white South, and historians have a lot to answer for in helping to propagate a racist system in this country.
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