Adam Fairclough, a British historian whose expertise includes Reconstruction, summarized the Dunningite themes: All agreed that black suffrage had been a political blunder and that the Republican state governments in the South that rested upon black votes had been corrupt, extravagant, unrepresentative, and oppressive. These segments look at the influence of the Dunning School on how Americans understood, and misunderstood, the Reconstruction Era. 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. While these were at their height the Republican party was ousted from control in five of the old rebel states,—Tennessee, North Carolina, Texas, Georgia, and Virginia. Led by historian William Dunning (Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1907), this interpretation can be summarized as: “When the Civil War ended, the white South genuinely accepted the reality of military defeat, stood ready to do justice to the emancipated slaves, and desired above all a quick reintegration into the fabric of national life. But the moral effect of what was done was very great, and the evidence that the whole power of the national government could and would be exerted on the side of the blacks produced a salutary change in method among the whites. 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. This, known commonly as the Ku Klux Act, healed many technical defects in the earlier law; reformulated in most precise and far-reaching terms the conspiracy clause, which was especially designed to cover Ku Klux methods; and, finally, authorized the President, for a limited time, to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, and employ military force in the suppression of violence and crime in any given district.In addition to the punitive system thus established. Where assault or murder or other crime was committed by a private individual, even if the purpose was to deprive citizens of rights on the ground of race, the jurisdiction, and the exclusive jurisdiction, was in the state courts. It left the blacks practically at the mercy of white public sentiment in the South. Eleven years earlier, Mr. Blaine, writing of the possibility of disfranchisement by educational and property tests, declared: “But no Southern state will do this, and for two reasons: first, they will in no event consent to a reduction of representative strength; and, second, they could not make any disfranchisement of the negro that would not at the same time disfranchise an immense number of whites.” How sadly Mr. Blaine misconceived the spirit and underrated the ingenuity of the Southerners Mississippi made clear to everybody. Summarily, then, it may be said that the second period in the undoing of reconstruction ends with the political equality of the negroes still recognized in law, though not in fact, and with the Republican party, for all practical purposes, extinct in the South. Unfortunately, Dunning is considered out of step with today’s political climate, so his books and essays on Reconstruction, as well as those by his students, the Dunning School, are hard to find. Between 1872 and 1876 the Republican party split in each of the states in which it still retained control, and the fusion of one faction with the Democrats gave rise to disputed elections, general disorder, and appeals by the radical Republicans to the President for aid in suppressing domestic violence. He contended that freedmen had proved incapable of self-government and thus had made segregation necessary. The Initial Interpretation of Reconstruction. Side by side with the removal of the preventives, the Southern whites had made enormous positive advances in the suppression of the other race. From start to finish, they argued, Congressional Reconstruction—often dubbed "Radical Reconstruction"—lacked political wisdom and legitimacy.[1]. Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer quoted approvingly the southern observation that Yankees didn't understand the subject because they "had never seen a nigger except Fred Douglass." Between 1868 and 1870, when the cessation of the national military authority left the new state governments to stand by their own strength, there developed that widespread series of disorders with which the name of the KuKlux is associated. Kevin Welborn marked it as to-read Oct 24, 2013. No additional state was redeemed by the whites until 1874. “And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true” (Rogin 151). 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, … The other faction, alarmed at the prospect of almost certain defeat, availed itself of the opportunity presented by the providential advent of a circus in the neighborhood, and the posters announced that poll-tax receipts would be accepted for admission. Explaining the success of the Dunning School, historian Peter Novick noted two forces—the need to reconcile the North and the South after the Civil War and the increase in racism as Social Darwinism appeared to back the concept with science—that contributed to a "racist historiographical consensus" around the turn of the 20th century on the "criminal outrages" of Reconstruction. Here, however, the presence of the federal troops and of all the paraphernalia of the Federal Elections Laws materially stiffened the courage of the negroes, and the result of the state election became closely involved in the controversy over the presidential count. On the contrary, its interpretation of Reconstruction as a tragic mistake inflicted upon a helpless South by a vindictive North held sway over both the public and scholarly realm for much of the twentieth century. Luqdah rated it really liked it Mar 11, 2020. Whatever of soundness there may have been in any of these explanations, all have been superseded, during the last decade, by another, which, starting 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, and any other means, legal or illegal, that would promote the desired end. 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. Dunning’s interpretation of reconstruction differs from Foner’s interpretation by the Dunning school believing reconstruction was always going to fail and felt that taking the right to vote or hold office away from the whites in the south was a violation of republicanism. Along with this deterioration in the white element of the party, the negroes who rose to prominence and leadership were very frequently of a type which acquired and practiced the tricks and knavery rather than the useful arts of politics, and the vicious courses of these negroes strongly confirmed the prejudices of the whites. 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. Through the vigorous policy thus instituted by the national government the movement toward the resumption of control by the whites in the South met with a marked though temporary check.The number of convictions obtained under the Ku Klux Act was not large, and President Grant resorted in but a single instance—that of certain counties in South Carolina, in the autumn of 1871—to the extraordinary powers conferred upon him. Known as the Dunning School, these students wrote the first generation of state studies on the Reconstruction -- volumes that generally sympathized with white southerners, interpreted radical Reconstruction as a mean-spirited usurpation of federal power, and cast the Republican Party as a coalition of carpetbaggers, freedmen, scalawags, and former Unionists. Instead of competing with its rival for the black vote, the stronger faction, headed by Mr. Tillman, promptly took the ground that South Carolina must have a “white man’s government,” and put into effect the new Mississippi plan. the "Dunning School," which held that northern politicians and freedmen hurt the South politically and economically during Reconstruction. It was quickly demonstrated, however, that the time for this procedure had gone by. More deference began to be paid to the Northern sentiment hostile to the Grant administration which had been revealed in the presidential campaign of 1872, and 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. They recognize the shabby aspects of the era: the corruption was real, the failures obvious, the tragedy undeniable. William Harris, author of The Hanging of Thomas Jeremiah: A Free Black Man's Encounter with Liberty Congress at the same time instituted a rigorous preventive system through the Federal Elections Laws. In several of the states a poll-tax receipt was required as a qualification for voting. Nimene added it Sep 13, 2013. 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. "Was the Grant of Black Suffrage a Political Error? Two, indeed, of the three elements which have been mentioned as summing up reconstruction still characterized the situation : the negroes were precisely equal in rights with the other race, and the Republican party was a powerful organization in the South. Gradually there emerged again the idea of Jefferson and Clay and Lincoln, which had been hooted and hissed into obscurity during the prevalence of the abolitionist fever. Some historians have suggested that historians sympathetic to the Neo-Confederate movement are influenced by the Dunning School's interpretation of history. The new amendment was a most explicit violation of this condition. The Southern Democratic leaders fully appreciated the opportunity of their position in this controversy, and, through one of those bargains without words which are common in great crises, 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. The situation had arisen which Mr. Lamar had foreseen, but the result was as far as possible from fulfilling his prediction. By Lyndsey Collins, with comments by Adrianna Abreu and Jena Viviano [1] All history is socially constructed; the same event or time period can be interpreted in various ways depending on the individual or group. The Dunning School argued that Reconstruction was the most calamitous and corrupt period in the nation’s history because imperialistic Radical Republicans empowered riotous, sub-human blacks to rule over the respectable white South. A constitutional amendment was adopted in 1895 which applied the “understanding clause” for two years, and after that required of every elector either the ability to read and write or the ownership of property to the amount of three hundred dollars. The many morals that may be drawn from the three decades of the process it is not my purpose to suggest. The Dunning School and similar historians dominated the version of Reconstruction-era history in textbooks into the 1960s. They understood that the radical Republicans were not all selfless patriots, and that southern white men were not all Negro-hating rebels. Though the state of affairs in the South was for years a party issue of the first magnitude, the legislative deadlock had for its general result a policy of non-interference by the national government, and the whites were left to work out in their own way the ends they had in view.

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