This is the final installment of our Dunning Deep Dive. William Dunning was the leading academic writer on Reconstruction during the first half of the 20th Century. In this article we will look at Dunning’s explanation of the great unravelling of Reconstruction.
Dunning admits that one factor that shortened the life of Reconstruction was white terrorism. The Ku Klux Klan and groups similar to it committed acts of violence, Dunning acknowledges. He writes that “the Ku Klux movement was to some extent the expression of a purpose not to submit to the political domination of the blacks,” but he says that attempts to quell Klan violence contributed to the flow of “respectable” whites towards the extremists. Dunning is particularly critical of the Republicans allowing black men into the state militias as part of the counter-terrorism operation. (Archibald Dunning, William (2011-11-02). Essays On The Civil War And Reconstruction And Related Topics Kindle Location 3946-3951)
“Respectable whites,” Dunning wrote, “would not serve with the blacks in the militia.” He also writes that the mission of the counter-terrorism operation was too broad. Initially the militias were only to protect blacks in the exercise of the right to vote. Soon, however, the militias were protecting blacks “civil rights” and even their “social rights.”
This led to the conservatives to devise a strategy of appealing to Northern whites to aid their fellow white people in the South as the victims of military oppression. Dunning says” the policy of the Southern whites was directed especially so as to bring odium upon the use of the military forces in the states yet to be wrested from black control.”
In 1875, conservatives in Mississippi adopted the “Mississippi Plan” whereby whites in that state would wage an underground campaign of intimidation against blacks, while denouncing the military control of the white population by the Federal government ten years after Lee’s surrender. Dunning writes, “Though strenuously denied at the time, it was no deep secret that the great negro majority in the state was overcome in this campaign by a quiet but general exertion of every possible form of pressure to keep the blacks from the polls.”
Dunning says that the intimidation was so pervasive that it rarely had to emerge into the light of day. He describes the Mississippi Plan:
H”ere was relatively little “Ku-Kluxing” or open violence, but in countless ways the negroes were impressed with the idea that there would be peril for them in voting. “Intimidation” was the word that had vogue at the time, in describing such methods, and intimidation was illegal. But if a party of white men, with ropes conspicuous on their saddlebows, rode up to a polling place and announced that hanging would begin in fifteen minutes, though without any more definite reference to anybody, and a group of blacks who had assembled to vote heard the remark and promptly disappeared, votes were lost, but a conviction on a charge of intimidation was difficult. Or if an untraceable rumor that trouble was impending over the blacks was followed by the mysterious appearance of bodies of horsemen on the roads at midnight, firing guns and yelling at nobody in particular, votes again were lost, but no crime or misdemeanor could be brought home to any one. Devices like these were familiar in the South, but on this occasion they were accompanied by many other evidences of a purpose on the part of the whites to carry their point at all hazards. The negroes, though numerically much in excess of the whites, were very definitely demoralized by the aggressiveness and unanimity of the latter, and in the ultimate test of race strength the weaker gave way. The “Mississippi plan” was enthusiastically applied in the remaining three states, Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida, in the elections of 1876.”
The Compromise of 1877, which installed Hayes as president in exchange for an end to the occupation of the South, returned the region to its natural order. Dunning recounts that “the inauguration of President Hayes was followed by the withdrawal of the troops from the support of the last radical governments, and the peaceful lapse of the whole South into the control of the whites.” Of course things were not so peaceful for African Americans.
Although you might expect that the favorite historian of modern Neo-Confederates would be coy about the racist focus of the restoration of whites-only government in the South. In fact, Dunning was writing at a time when assertions of white supremacy were not considered to be in bad taste. Dunning writes that; “Southern whites had made enormous positive advances in the suppression of the other race. In a very general way the process in this period, as contrasted with the earlier, may be said to have rested, in last resort, on legislation and fraud rather than on intimidation and force.” Dunning said that the white Redeemers used laws “remorselessly to the extinction of black preponderance” in government.
Where blacks formed an overwhelming majority, white conservatives still found ways to triumph. Dunning said that “the fact remained that in many localities the negroes so greatly outnumbered the whites as to render the political ascendency of the latter impossible, except through some radical changes in the laws touching the suffrage and the elections; and in respect to these two points the sensitiveness of Northern feeling rendered open and decided action highly inexpedient. Before 1880 the anticipation, and after that year the realization, of a “solid South” played a prominent part in national politics. The permanence of white dominion in the South seemed, in view of the past, to depend as much on the exclusion of the Republicans from power at Washington as on the maintenance of white power at the state capitals. Under all the circumstances, therefore, extra-legal devices had still to be used in the “black belt.” The state legislation which contributed to confirm white control included many ingenious and exaggerated applications of the gerrymander and the prescription of various electoral regulations that were designedly too intricate for the average negro intelligence.”
Gerrymandering proliferated:
“In Mississippi appeared the “shoestring district,” three hundred miles long and about twenty wide, including within its boundaries nearly all the densest black communities of the state. In South Carolina, the requirement that, with eight or more ballot boxes before him, the voter must select the proper one for each ballot, in order to insure its being counted, furnished an effective means of neutralizing the ignorant black vote; for though the negroes, unable to read the lettering on the boxes, might acquire, am by proper coaching, the power to discriminate among them by their relative positions, a moment’s work by the whites in transposing the boxes would render useless an hour’s laborious instruction. For the efficient working of this method of suppression, it was indispensable, however, that the officers of election should be whites. This suggests at once the enormous advantage gained by securing control of the state government. In the hot days of negro supremacy the electoral machinery had been ruthlessly used for partisan purposes, and when conditions were reversed the practice was by no means abandoned. It was, indeed, through their exclusive and carefully maintained control of the voting and the count that the whites found the best opportunities for illegal methods.” (Kindle 4060-4080)
Racial violence decreased as the African American population became steadily less powerful. The was no need to murder men and women who already had lost their voice. “Because of these opportunities the resort to bulldozing and other violence steadily decreased. It penetrated gradually to the consciousness of the most brutal white politicians that the whipping or murder of a negro, no matter for what cause, was likely to become at once the occasion of a great outcry at the North, while by an unobtrusive manipulation of the balloting or the count very encouraging results could be obtained with little or no commotion.”
Dunning details some of the non-violent ways whites prevented blacks from voting once they were in charge of the electoral machinery:
Polling places were established at points so remote from the densest black communities that a journey of from twenty to forty miles was necessary in order to vote; and where the roads were interrupted by ferries, the resolute negroes who attempted to make the journey were very likely to find the boats laid up for repairs. The number of polling places was kept so small as to make rapid voting indispensable to a full vote; and then the whites, by challenges and carefully premeditated quarrels among themselves, would amuse the blacks and consume time, till only enough remained for the casting of their own votes. The situation of the polls was changed without notice to the negroes, or, conversely, the report of a change was industriously circulated when none had been made.
These methods of suppressing the black vote were based, Dunning writes, on the “exploitation of the poverty, ignorance, credulity, and general childishness of the blacks…” Dunning says that in the years right after the end of Reconstruction, whites had explained the declining black vote by claiming that blacks no longer supported the Republican Party. By the 1890s, with the final removal of all Federal protections of black voters, whites in the South had replaced that excuse with;
the candid avowal that the whites are determined to rule, concedes that the elimination of the blacks from politics has been effected by intimidation, fraud, or any other means, legal or illegal, that would promote the desired end. This admission has been accompanied by expressions of sincere regret that illegal means were necessary, and by a general movement toward clothing with the forms of law the disfranchisement which has been made a fact without them.
In order to eliminate the need for political violence against blacks, Dunning writes, Mississippi whites imposed a literacy test in 1890. The test was not in place to make sure that only intelligent men voted:
But the peculiar form of this particular provision was confessedly adopted, not from any consideration of its abstract excellence, but in order to vest in the election officers the power to disfranchise illiterate blacks without disfranchising illiterate whites. In practice, the white must be stupid indeed who cannot satisfy the official demand for a “reasonable interpretation,” while the negro who can satisfy it must be a miracle of brilliancy.
Dunning described this literacy test as: “Mississippi’s bold and undisguised attack on negro suffrage”
Northerners, Dunning writes, accepted the Literacy Test because many of them had also come to the conclusion that blacks were incapable of governing:
And at the North, public opinion, accepting with a certain satirical complacency the confession of the Southerners that their earlier explanations of conditions had been false, acknowledged in turn that its views as to the political capacity of the blacks had been irrational, and manifested no disposition for a new crusade in favor of negro equality. The action of Mississippi raised certain questions of constitutional law which had to be tested before her solution of the race problem could be regarded as final. Like all the other seceded states, save Tennessee, she had been readmitted to representation in Congress, after reconstruction, on the express condition that her constitution should never be so amended as to disfranchise any who were entitled to vote under the existing provisions. The new amendment was a most explicit violation of this condition. Further, so far as the new clause could be
shown to be directed against the negroes as a race, it was in contravention of the Fifteenth Amendment. These legal points had been elaborately discussed in the state convention, and the opinion had been adopted that, since neither race, color nor previous condition of servitude was made the basis of discrimination in the suffrage, the Fifteenth Amendment had no application, and that the prohibition to modify the constitution was entirely beyond the powers of Congress, and was therefore void.
By 1900 the works of Reconstruction had nearly all been destroyed, and seemingly rightly so in Dunning’s opinion. He wrote:
With the enactment of these constitutional amendments by the various states, the political equality of the negro is becoming as extinct in law as it has long been in fact, and the undoing of reconstruction is nearing completion…
During the two generations of debate and bloodshed over slavery in the United States, certain of our statesmen consistently held that the mere chattel relationship of man to man was not the whole of the question at issue…But in the frenzy of the war time public opinion fell into the train of the emotionalists, and accepted the teachings of Garrison and Sumner and Phillips and Chase, that abolition and negro suffrage would remove the last drag on our national progress. Slavery was abolished, and reconstruction gave the freedmen the franchise. But with all the guarantees that the source of every evil was removed, it became obvious enough that the results were not what had been expected…the ultimate root of the trouble in the South had been, not the institution of slavery, but the coexistence in one society of two races so distinct in characteristics as to render coalescence impossible; that slavery had been a modus vivendi through which social life was possible; and that, after its disappearance, its place must be taken by some set of conditions which, if more humane and beneficent in accidents, must in essence express the same fact of racial inequality. The progress in the acceptance of this idea in the North has measured the progress in the South of the undoing of reconstruction. In view of the questions which have been raised by our lately established relations with other races, it seems most improbable that the historian will soon, or ever, have to record a reversal of the conditions which this process has established.
The North had come to accept that the source of the problem was not slavery, but black people!
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