Civil War History - Secession and PoliticsWas it Slavery, or was it States Rights? Perhaps it was the election of Lincoln? What were the real reasons for Southern Secession and what were the political issues in this time of war? Find your answers here in the Secession and Politics Disussion.
It was named after Columbia University professor William Archibald Dunning (1857-1922), whose works and teachings in the early 20th century on Reconstruction were influential. He supported the idea that the South had been ruined by Reconstruction. He contended that freedmen had proved incapable of self-government and thus had made segregation necessary. Dunning believed that allowing blacks to vote and hold office had been "a serious error".[1] As a professor, he taught generations of scholars, many of whom expanded his views of the evils of Reconstruction. The Dunning School and similar historians dominated the version of Reconstruction-era history in textbooks into the 1960s. Their generalized adoption of deprecatory terms such as scalawags for southern-white Republicans and carpetbaggers for northerners who worked and settled in the South, have persisted in historical works.
While he did not study with Dunning or at Columbia University, the southern historian E. Merton Coulter represented some typical views. According to the New Georgia Encyclopedia, he "framed his literary corpus to praise the Old South, glorify Confederate heroes, vilify northerners, and denigrate southern blacks." He taught at the University of Georgia for six decades, founded the Southern Historical Association, and edited the Georgia Historical Quarterly for 50 years, so had many avenues of influence. [2]
"No sooner was revisionism launched, however, than E. Merton Coulter insisted that 'no amount of revision can write away the grievous mistakes made in this abnormal period of American history.' He then declared that he had not attempted to do so, and with that he subscribed to virtually all of the views that had been set forth by the students of Dunning. And he added a few observations of his own, such as 'education soon lost its novelty for most of the Negroes'; they would 'spend their last piece of money for a drink of whisky'; and, being 'by nature highly emotional and excitable…, they carried their religious exercises to extreme lengths.'" [3][4]
In the 1940s Howard K. Beale began to define a different approach. Beale's analysis combined an assumption of "racial egalitarianism and an insistence on the centrality of class". He claimed that some of the more progressive southern historians continued to propose "that their race must bar Negroes from social and economic equality." Beale indicated other southern historians' making more positive contributions were "southern liberals" such as C. Vann Woodward and Francis Simkins.[5]
I took the opening part of this thread off WIKI:
I have always wonder who or what gave us the false impression of Reconstruction years. I was surprise to find Mr. Dunning was born and raise a Yankee. Columbia is a Ivy league school in the North so what brought Mr. Dunning and Columbia U. to give us this false picture of the Reconstruction years that portraits the Southern Whites as Heroic victims. I do not understand the relationship between him and those southern historians for it seems they fed off each other. I have found the evil of false truth the Dunning school of thought...
I offer it to the board for judgement.....
The Scalawags will have revenge!!
__________________
"States Rights are about States Wrongs" - Jesse Jackson
The interpretation of post-Civil WarReconstruction in the United States that Dunning and his students propounded was the dominant theory taught in American schools for the first half of the 20th century. The viewpoint of Dunning and his followers was warmly sympathetic to former slave owners who had led some southern states to secede from the United States.
Dunning and his followers also condemned white Southerners who did not stand with the Confederacy during the Civil War and who joined the Republican Party after the war. Former Confederate leaders referred to the largest group of white Southern Republicans who did not identify with the goals of former plantation owners as Scalawags. They also referred to Northern whites who moved to the southern part of the United States after the war as Carpetbaggers. Both were derisive terms that Dunning and his followers popularized.
Reconstruction's mythic cast of characters includes the "carpetbaggers", whom southern whites portrayed as greedy interlopers exploiting the South; the "scalawags", who were traitorous southern whites collaborating with the Yankees; the freedmen, who were sometimes seen as violent and depraved in the myth but mostly seemed ignorant and lost; and the former Confederates, who were the heroes of the story, all honorable, decent people with the South's best interests in mind.[McCrary, Peyton, "The Reconstruction Myth" in Encyclopedia of Southern Culture] Our contemporary understanding of the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson traces back to the early twentieth century, when Columbia University's William Dunning lent academic respectability to a popular version of Reconstruction history pioneered by segregationist Southern Democrats and slavery apologists. Dunning wrote from the point of view of the defeated South and painted the Radical Republicans as villains. His interpretation served the ideological purposes of a majority-white country eager to put the divisions of the nineteenth century behind it, and it thus came to saturate public memory until the very dawn of the civil rights era. Indeed, its indirect influence is visible even in John F. Kennedy's book Profiles in Courage, which admired... Edmund G. Ross, the Kansas Republican senator who cast the vote that acquitted Johnson.[Joshua Zeitz The New Republic, 18 January 1999, pp. 13-15]
Here is a little bio on Mr. Dunning from WIKI:
I have found the Evil Doer so he can be judge for his misinterpretation of history. I will bring vignettes to my fellow Scalawags..
Judge harshly Hopefully....unless you are one of them...
__________________
"States Rights are about States Wrongs" - Jesse Jackson
Among its many virtues, Kenneth M. Stampp's The Era of Reconstruction 1865-1877 contains a fine summary of the historiography of Reconstruction focusing on Dunning and other, similar writers.
If I may, let me once again recommend Professor Stampp's book. There is no finer introduction to the period. In just over 200 pages, Professor Stampp, one of the great historians of the last century, provides a careful, well-written review of the period that abounds with insights. I have mentioned before, for example, that his discussion of the Andrew Johnson "problem" is the best I have read.
__________________ "The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery." Frederick Douglass
"Loyalty to our ancestors does not include loyalty to their mistakes." George Santayana
First, I will be ordering your book suggestion this week...
I surprise that no one is offended by the work of Mr. Dunning and his Dunning school because they distorted history to suit their needs. I do not know their desire or motivation to misrepresented the Reconstruction period. The easy answer would to be say he was racial motivated buy maybe the Romantic image of the south as a victim sells better...
Maybe I am whining over spilled mike..
__________________
"States Rights are about States Wrongs" - Jesse Jackson
I believe that mike takes exception to being spilled.
Quote:
I surprise that no one is offended by the work of Mr. Dunning and his Dunning school because they distorted history to suit their needs. I do not know their desire or motivation to misrepresented the Reconstruction period. The easy answer would to be say he was racial motivated buy maybe the Romantic image of the south as a victim sells better...
I'd be more willing to accept racially motived as the first. "Sells better" runs a close second.
Dunning, Coulter, et al., were highly regarded historians. They espoused their version of history in a time when their views were greedily lapped up; i.e., they played to the balconey. (Just thinking out loud here: Which came first? Did they want to show that the south had the right idea by keeping the black man down? Or was their racial bias the motivator for their support of the south? Does history cater to society? Is society influenced by history?)
The pendulum swings in academia as well -- we even name the schools of thought as they come and go. Some will gratefully retain the thoughts of one school while living in a time when two or three different schools have risen and receded. Guess that's human.
ole
__________________ I never knew a man who wished to be himself a slave. Consider if you know any good thing that no man desires for himself. A. Lincoln
The pendulum swings in academia as well -- we even name the schools of thought as they come and go. Some will gratefully retain the thoughts of one school while living in a time when two or three different schools have risen and receded. Guess that's human.
ole
[/quote]
It looks like Dunning gave us a picture of Reconstruction that suited his vision not reality. It is not the first time this has happen in academia it will not be the last.
__________________
"States Rights are about States Wrongs" - Jesse Jackson
Among its many virtues, Kenneth M. Stampp's The Era of Reconstruction 1865-1877 contains a fine summary of the historiography of Reconstruction focusing on Dunning and other, similar writers.
If I may, let me once again recommend Professor Stampp's book. There is no finer introduction to the period. In just over 200 pages, Professor Stampp, one of the great historians of the last century, provides a careful, well-written review of the period that abounds with insights. I have mentioned before, for example, that his discussion of the Andrew Johnson "problem" is the best I have read.
I am reading the book you mention above and it is an eye opener. He gives an overview Lincoln's ideas of Reconstruction and it did not include equality for X-slaves. He was willing to except a caste system for X-slaves after the war with limited rights to vote, schooling, to hold political office and giving states a wide girth on managing the affairs of X-Slaves..
His big goal was to built a Republican majority in the south form X-Whigs.....something like 86 Senate and House seats available in the south after the war and Lincoln wanted them Republican..
If Lincoln had stayed in office there would have been no 14th and 15 amendments to the Constitution..
Some thoughts....
__________________
"States Rights are about States Wrongs" - Jesse Jackson
I am reading the book you mention above and it is an eye opener. He gives an overview Lincoln's ideas of Reconstruction and it did not include equality for X-slaves. He was willing to except a caste system for X-slaves after the war with limited rights to vote, schooling, to hold political office and giving states a wide girth on managing the affairs of X-Slaves..
His big goal was to built a Republican majority in the south form X-Whigs.....something like 86 Senate and House seats available in the south after the war and Lincoln wanted them Republican..
If Lincoln had stayed in office there would have been no 14th and 15 amendments to the Constitution..
Some thoughts....
Very, very hard to say how things would have turned out if Lincoln had lived. His thoughts on reconstruction were tentative and he had shown indications of a willingness to be flexible. Perceptions about equality were evolving very rapidly among Republicans in 1864-66. The first section of the Fourteenth Amendment was not politically viable a year earlier. Who's to say that Lincoln's thinking would not have evolved similarly had he lived?
Very, very hard to say how things would have turned out if Lincoln had lived. His thoughts on reconstruction were tentative and he had shown indications of a willingness to be flexible. Perceptions about equality were evolving very rapidly among Republicans in 1864-66. The first section of the Fourteenth Amendment was not politically viable a year earlier. Who's to say that Lincoln's thinking would not have evolved similarly had he lived?
If lincoln had lived, he may have not missed manage setting up those appointed Governments and the action taken by them as Johnson did. If Lincoln had pulled off his vision for the south I see no 14th and 15th amendments even being put forth by the Radicals.
__________________
"States Rights are about States Wrongs" - Jesse Jackson
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