Historiography of Reconstruction - 2009

RECONSTRUCTION RECONSIDERED: A HISTORIOGRAPHY OF
RECONSTRUCTION, FROM THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY TO

THE 1960S.
Claire Parfait
Klincksieck | « Études anglaises »
2009/4 Vol. 62 | pages 440 à 454

ISSN 0014-195X
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Claire PARFAIT
Reconstruction Reconsidered: A Historiography of Reconstruction,

From the Late Nineteenth Century to the 1960s.
The withdrawal of the last federal troops from the South in 1877 marked the end
of Reconstruction. Redemption, namely the return of Democrats to power in

Southern States, was already well under way by then. During the last decades of the
nineteenth century, economic exploitation, segregation, and racial violence, reduced
many African Americans to near slavery while gradual disfranchisement made them
second-class citizens. The North had lost interest in the plight of former slaves and
acquiesced in this policy for the sake of national reconciliation. The history of
Reconstruction was rewritten from a Southern point of view as a tragic episode in

which whites had been the victims of incompetent blacks and their corrupt white
allies. In spite of a few dissenting voices, this interpretation, which justified the
inferior status of African Americans, was to prevail until the civil rights movement
of the 1950s and 1960s, and the “Second Reconstruction.”
La période de la Reconstruction, qui suivit la guerre de Sécession, s’acheva en

1877, lorsque les dernières troupes fédérales quittèrent le Sud. Ce que les Sudistes
appelèrent la « Rédemption » avait déjà commencé avec le retour au pouvoir du
parti Démocrate dans la majorité des États du Sud. Elle se poursuivit avec une
politique de ségrégation, où la violence raciale, l’exploitation économique et la
perte de pouvoir politique renvoyèrent les nouveaux citoyens à un statut proche
de l’esclavage. Le Nord s’était largement désintéressé de la situation des anciens
esclaves, et la réconciliation Nord-Sud de la fin du XIXe siècle passa par une écri-
ture de la Reconstruction qui adoptait le point de vue du Sud. Dans cette inter-
prétation, la Reconstruction avait représenté une période tragique pour les blancs
du Sud, soumis à la domination de noirs ignorants alliés à des blancs corrompus.
Malgré quelques voix dissonantes, cette écriture de la Reconstruction, qui permet-
tait de justifier le traitement des Africains Américains, allait perdurer jusqu’à ce que
l’on a appelé la « seconde Reconstruction », le mouvement pour les droits civiques
des années 1950 et 1960.
Claire PARFAIT, Reconstruction Reconsidered: A Historiography of Reconstruction,

From the Late Nineteenth Century to the 1960s., ÉA 62-4 (2009): 440-454. © Klinck-
sieck.
EA 4-2009.indb 440 17/12/09 12:54:33

Reconstruction Reconsidered 441
Like the history of the Civil War and slavery itself, the history of
Reconstruction (1865-1877),1 that brief period when “the country experi-
mented with genuine interracial democracy” (Foner Forever Free XX),
proved a contested terrain from the first. The mainstream narrative which
gradually emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries held
that Reconstruction had been a time of chaos and corruption, when igno-
rant newly-freed men, supported by the bayonets of the federal govern-
ment, had been allowed to rule over the South. Redemption restored society
to its presumed natural order and put an end to the unholy alliance of freed
slaves, adventurers from the North (“carpetbaggers”) and Southern white
traitors (“scalawags”). The elaboration and continuation of the overarch-
ing narrative of Reconstruction served to justify, among a host of other
acts, the removal of the recently-won rights of African Americans. This
totalizing discourse—and the treatment of blacks in the South—did not go

unchallenged. Dissenting voices remained largely unheard, however, before
the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. This article aims to
retrace and contextualize “The Dark and Bloody Ground of Reconstruction
Historiography” (Weisberger) until the beginning of what C. Vann
Woodward called the “Second Reconstruction” (Woodward 8).

The fight over the writing of Reconstruction arguably began during
Reconstruction itself, and the contentious debates over the various laws and
amendments which turned freedmen into full citizens and allowed them to
play an active role in the political life of the South. Contemporary peri-
odicals, which both echoed and tried to influence those debates, provide
today’s reader with the seeds of two very different interpretations of the
Reconstruction then underway. Thus Harper’s Weekly staunchly defended
radical Reconstruction and the enfranchisement of freedmen as the only
means to protect them from their former masters. The New York-based
weekly provided its readers with positive pictures of African Americans tak-
ing on their new responsibilities as citizens, lawmakers and the like. It also
exposed, in word and image, the violence of the Ku Klux Klan and other
terrorist groups, in order to emphasize the continued need for the federal
government—and the Republican Party—to keep close watch on events in
the South. On the other hand, Southern magazines such as DeBow’s Review
warned that the South was falling victim to “negro domination,” a conten-
1. I am adopting here the periodization used by most of the historians of Reconstruction.

However, Foner sees Reconstruction as having begun in 1863 with the Emancipation
Proclamation (Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877), while
Du Bois includes the Civil War and the years immediately following the withdrawal
of the last federal troops from the South in his Black Reconstruction in America: An
Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to
Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880. Today, many historians tend to
enlarge the periodization to include at least part of the Civil War and the end of the
nineteenth century, sometimes extending as far as World War I. (See Thomas
J. Brown 7.)
EA 4-2009.indb 441 17/12/09 12:54:34

442 Études Anglaises — 62-4 (2009)
tion supported by some accounts of conditions in the South by Northerners,

perhaps most notably James S. Pike. Pike, a journalist, was dispatched to
South Carolina by the New York Tribune in 1873 and charged with assess-
ing the results of Reconstruction.2 The series of articles that he produced was
published in book format the following year, and the title of the work, The
Prostrate State: South Carolina under Negro Government (1874), left little
doubt as to his interpretation of events. The Prostrate State posits blacks as
an “inferior race” (69) and tells the tragic story of a Southern aristocracy
ruined by war and trampled upon by its former servants. Pike denounced
the “Africanization” of South Carolina (4), the “spectacle of a society sud-
denly turned bottom-side up,” (12) in which corruption ruled (the headings
of at least 8 of the 34 chapters include the word “fraud”). In respect to the
State government, he declared, “It is barbarism overwhelming civilization
by physical force. It is the slave rioting in the halls of his master, and putting

that master under his feet” (12).
Pike’s reading of Reconstruction was far from unique. By the early
1870s, a certain lassitude on the part of Northerners could be detected in
even the most vigorous proponents of radical Reconstruction, and Harper’s
Weekly provides a case in point. The famed political cartoonist Thomas

Nast, who supported radical Reconstruction, produced as early as 1874 a
critical portrait of Reconstruction governments: entitled “Colored Rule in
a Reconstructed (?) State,” and printed on the front page, it depicted coarse,
thick-lipped black legislators engaged in a boisterous quarrel, suggesting
that at least some African Americans were unfit to occupy political posi-
tions (Harper’s Weekly, March 14, 1874: 229). Even before the end of the
1860s, a few articles in the same weekly had voiced doubts respecting the
ability of former slaves to take their fate into their own hands. Slavery, it
was sometimes argued, left a permanent imprint on the former slave, in the
form of laziness, improvidence, or a love of subordination. After the 1876
compromise and the end of Reconstruction, Harper’s, which approved of
the compromise, began expressing sympathy for the plight of Southerners
under Reconstruction, described as an “apparent reversal of a rational
order of society” (“A Southern Duty,” September 21, 1878: 747).3
Post-Reconstruction Accounts
Not all contemporaries viewed Reconstruction in such unfavorable

light, and this was especially true of those who had played a role in it. Thus
in his three-volume History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in
2. While the New York Tribune had long defended black rights, it had since the early
1870s become increasingly critical of Reconstruction governments (Foner 1988,
503).
3. The shift in the weekly’s slant cannot be accounted for by a change in editors, since
George William Curtis continued in that role until 1892.
EA 4-2009.indb 442 17/12/09 12:54:35

America (1877), Vice President Henry Wilson singled out the abolition of
slavery and the enfranchisement of freedmen as the most memorable
achievements of Reconstruction. He was less sanguine over the current
situation, however, contending that the defeated South still defended the
“lost cause” and was determined to exclude freedmen from Southern gov-
ernments, by violence and fraud if necessary (Wilson 736). Albion Tourgée,
a “carpetbagger” who fought for the Union before settling in Greensboro,
North Carolina, where he served as a state superior court judge, produced
a sobering account of the end of Reconstruction in his 1879 A Fool’s
Errand, a novel based on his personal experiences in North Carolina.
Reconstruction, he argued, had failed because it had secured the rights of
freedmen on paper only. African Americans were now reduced to unofficial
serfdom (Tourgée 337-44).
Former slaves Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown, two of the

most famous anti-slavery speakers before the Civil War, sought both to
vindicate the achievements of Reconstruction and denounce the violence
exerted against the now unprotected freedmen. In the early 1880s, Douglass
noted that the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments had represented con-
siderable achievements, but that they had been made a “mockery” of inas-
much as the old master class triumphed while the economic exploitation of
freedmen reduced them to a state hardly better than slavery (Douglass 511-
13). In My Southern Home (1880), Brown called upon readers to marvel at
millions of slaves who, “set at liberty in a single day. . . reconstructed the
State Governments that their masters had destroyed; became Legislators,
held State offices, and with all their blunders, surpassed the whites that had
preceded them” (W. W. Brown 245). While Brown acknowledged that
Reconstruction governments had been corrupt, he attributed that corrup-
tion to the freedmen’s want of education owing to slavery and to the “white
adventurers” from the North (W. W. Brown 244).
African American amateur historian George Washington Williams took
Brown’s mildly apologetic tone a step further in his monumental History of
the Negro Race in America, 1619-1880 (1883). For Williams, Reconstruction
had failed (he singled out education as the exception to the rule), a failure
largely due to the federal government having delivered power into hands
too feeble to hold it: “The Government gave him [the freedman] the stat-
ute-book when he ought to have had the spelling-book; placed him in the
Legislature when he ought to have been in the school-house” (Williams vol.
2 527). According to Williams, this made the removal of “Negro govern-
ments” inevitable. That Williams used the phrase “Negro govern-
ments”— whereas African Americans in fact controlled none of the
Reconstruction governments4—amply demonstrates that he too subscribed
4. McPherson notes that blacks held no more than 15 or 20% of the offices during
Reconstruction (McPherson 599) ; for Foner, “by and large, the most important
political decisions in every state were made by whites” (Foner 1988, 354).
EA 4-2009.indb 443 17/12/09 12:54:37

to the hostile vision of Reconstruction that was beginning to gain ground

in the nation as a whole. In addition, Williams seemed to give in to the
pervasive racism of his time when he noted that “An ignorant majority
without competent leaders, could not rule an intelligent Caucasian minor-
ity” (Franklin 1998, 112).
This was precisely the point that Southerners wanted to make. Two
years after Williams’s book was issued, Henry Grady, editor of the Atlanta
Constitution and a wholehearted proponent of the New South, published a
lengthy essay entitled “In Plain Black and White” (The Century Magazine,
April 1885), in which he described Reconstruction as chaos, and Redemption
as “the reassertion of the moral power that overthrew the scandalous
reconstruction governments, even though, to the shame of the republic be
it said, they were supported by the bayonets of the General Government.”
By opposition, Grady painted an ideal picture of the contemporaneous

racial harmony in a segregated South, where each race knew its place and
was satisfied with it, and he asserted the right of the South to “home rule”
based on white supremacy.
That the nation was gradually moving toward a Southern interpretation
of the recent past is evidenced in widely circulated periodicals such as

Harper’s Weekly. The magazine occasionally rued the sad plight of black
Americans in the South, and underlined the latter’s anger and sense of
injustice at economic exploitation and racial violence.5 Yet, like Grady, the
weekly’s commentators advised the government to let the South “work out
her own salvation.” Rather than call upon federal action to eradicate the
race problem—after all, it had already proved ineffective in this regard—
the paper relied on the “healing influence of time” and advised African
Americans to be patient (Parfait 2003).
Reconciliation
As Grady’s 1885 essay makes clear, advancing a horrific picture of

Reconstruction as a time of chaos and misrule enabled many white
Southerners to claim that freedmen could not be entrusted with political
responsibilities. Such a position was then used to justify the gradual dis-
franchisement of freedmen. The interpretation of the role of the federal
government during Reconstruction as having constituted an abuse of power
enforced by military rule, was supported by a series of Supreme Court deci-
sions that removed federal control over the status of freedmen. The 1883
invalidation of the 1875 Civil Rights Act which prohibited racial discrimi-
nation in public places is just one of many such examples. Similar rulings
by the High Court also paved the way for Jim Crow laws and systematic
segregation in the wake of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).
5. See, for instance, the series of articles entitled “Inside Southern Cabins,” published
in November and December 1880.
EA 4-2009.indb 444 17/12/09 12:54:38

The trend toward national reconciliation was one reason why the
Southern interpretation of Reconstruction gained ground. As David Blight
and others have demonstrated, the Gilded Age witnessed a wave of nostal-
gia for the Antebellum days. The feeling was partly due to the momentous
changes the nation was undergoing, especially the fast pace of industriali-
zation and urbanization, as well as the massive waves of immigrants that
began to arrive in the last decades of the nineteenth century. This nostalgic
trend could already be seen in the early 1870s in the nation’s periodicals,
highlighting the affection that linked slaves to their masters—in a reminder
of old pro-slavery arguments—, thereby hinting that the system could not
have been utterly bad. The trend accelerated as the war grew more remote,
and found its ultimate expression in the works of Joel Chandler Harris and
the plantation stories of Thomas Nelson Page. This “literature of reunion”
which celebrated the old plantation South, had pride of place in the nation’s

magazines, many of them published in the North (Blight 216-17).
The Spanish-American War of 1898 found former Union and Confederate
officers fighting side by side, helping to cement a reconciliation that was
largely achieved at the expense of African Americans. The growing consen-
sus was that slavery indeed had to disappear, but that the Civil War—with
heroes on both sides—had not been about slavery itself, but rather the right
to secede. Reconstruction had been a mistake.6
Early twentieth-century historians played a central role in the negotia-
tion over a consensual “usable past” for the nation, a negotiation made
possible by “the pervasive racism which—across regions, classes, and polit-
ical persuasions—dominated the thought of the period” (Novick 74).
Indeed, at a time when much if not most of the nation subscribed to social
Darwinism and “scientific” racism, the degraded status of African
Americans—both real and symbolic—was evidenced in the systematic use
of stereotypes, textual and iconographic, in the nation’s periodicals, many
of them published in the North. In this literature, blacks were consistently
portrayed as buffoons who loved watermelon, and evinced a marked pro-
pensity for stealing chickens and fighting with razors, a people whose
skewered grammar was but one sign of inferiority (Logan 242-75).
Early Twentieth Century: Popular and Scholarly Accounts of Reconstruc-

tion
The interpretation of Reconstruction as a tragic period for white

Southerners received a wide audience thanks to the success of works such
6. Reconciliation was a narrative more than a fact, and it was always challenged by
competing narratives. Yet the “reconciliationist” narrative achieved dominance over
the “emancipationist” one. For a discussion of the recent historiography on reconci-
liation, see Thomas J. Brown, “Civil War Remembrance as Reconstruction,” in his
Reconstructions, 206-36.
EA 4-2009.indb 445 17/12/09 12:54:39

as The Clansman (1905), by Thomas Dixon Jr. The note “To the Reader”
which opened the novel was an unabashed celebration of the Ku Klux
Klan, an organization understood to have “saved” the South from the
“the bold attempt of Thaddeus Stevens to Africanise ten great states of
the American Union.” The Clansman, which was to serve as the basis for
David W. Griffith’s enormously popular movie Birth of a Nation (1915),
became a massive bestseller, while a very different novelistic depiction of
Reconstruction by African American writer Charles W. Chesnutt, The
Marrow of Tradition (1901), hardly created a ripple on the American pub-
lishing scene.
Like Chesnutt, black scholar W. E. B. Du Bois offered his own interpre-
tation of Reconstruction while also denouncing the plight of African
Americans in the South. In the second essay of The Souls of Black Folk
(1903), entitled “Of the Dawn of Freedom,” Du Bois argued that the grant-

ing of the franchise to the freedmen was indispensable to protect the freed-
men themselves; necessary too in order to force the South to accept its
defeat. At the same time, however, Du Bois somberly concluded that “Negro
suffrage ended a civil war by beginning a race feud” (Du Bois 1903, 76).
For Du Bois, Reconstruction represented a tragedy whose main protago-

nists were an embittered South and a bewildered freedman. It was doomed
to fail— though there were successes, especially in education—, and that
failure was evidenced by the situation of African Americans in the South at
the turn of the century: “. . . despite compromise, war, and struggle, the
Negro is not free” (Du Bois 1903, 77). The scholar/activist provided a
short list of the problems that beset Southern African Americans: economic
exploitation in the form of peonage, segregation, absence of political power,
and racial violence (Du Bois 1903, 78). The number of lynchings had in
fact peaked in the 1890s, a trend which the contemporary press ascribed to
an increase in black criminality.
Thus, depending on its author, the narrative of Reconstruction read as
a tragedy for whites or for blacks. In 1907, Booker T. Washington noted
that African Americans had been “less the instigators than the victims of
the mistakes of Reconstruction” (Washington 387). The Southern take on
Reconstruction, however, unambiguously ascribed victimhood to Southern
whites, and essentially blamed the federal government and carpetbaggers
for what was seen as the tragedy of Reconstruction. Inasmuch as freedmen
were considered totally ignorant, they were regarded as less culpable in the
tragedy, serving merely as unwitting instruments of Northern whites. This
version of history, already pervasive in the press and popular literature of
the time, received scholarly legitimacy in a series of works published in the
early decades of the twentieth century.
The Dunning School
Although history was becoming increasing “professional” at the turn of

the twentieth century, one of the most influential works on Reconstruction
EA 4-2009.indb 446 17/12/09 12:54:41

was drafted by an amateur historian, James Ford Rhodes, a businessman

from Ohio who had retired at an early age to devote his time to the study
of American history. The two volumes (6 and 7) of his History of the United
States from the Compromise of 1850 to the McKinley-Bryan Campaign of
1896 which dealt with Reconstruction were issued in 1906. Rhodes firmly
believed that blacks were inferior and that giving them the franchise had
been a grievous mistake (Taylor 18-20).
A similar reading of Reconstruction was propounded by John W.
Burgess and William A. Dunning, whose works were to exert a lasting
influence on Reconstruction historiography, giving birth to the “Dunning
school.” An anecdote related by Peter Novick reveals the ideological sub-
text of these writings of history. John W. Burgess, a Tennessean who taught
political science at Columbia University, was approached by a publisher
who thought the time had come for a complete reconciliation between the

two sections opposed in the Civil War. Such a reconciliation could be
achieved through a better understanding of the points of view of North and
South on the war and its aftermath. Burgess undertook to write a history
of the period, a task which he saw as a “sacred duty” to his country (Novick
74). In the preface to his 1902 Reconstruction and the Constitution, Burgess
made clear that secession had been a mistake, but that it was time for the
North finally to acknowledge that the means taken to achieve Reconstruction
had been a failure as well. For Burgess, Reconstruction constituted a “blun-
der-crime against civilization” (Burgess 252), in which the federal govern-
ment vastly exceeded its constitutional powers, and Congress placed
freedmen— “ignorant barbarians”—in control of the South (Burgess 252).
Burgess also argued that the experience of the recent Spanish-American
War and of the “imperial enterprises” undertaken by the country under the
leadership of the Republican party, had brought the North to a closer
understanding of the Southern attitude toward African Americans: “. . . the
North is learning every day by valuable experiences that there are vast dif-
ferences in political capacity between the races, and that it is the white
man’s mission, his duty and his right, to hold the reins of political power in
his own hands for the civilization of the world and the welfare of man-
kind” (Burgess viii-ix).
In 1907, another Columbia University professor, historian William
Archibald Dunning, a Northerner who had studied under Burgess, pub-
lished Reconstruction, Political and Economic, which formed volume 22 of
the series The American Nation: A History. In his introduction to the
volume, Albert Bushnell Hart, Professor of history at Harvard University
and editor of the series, summarized Dunning’s thesis: “The purpose of this
volume is to show that Reconstruction, with all its hardships and inequi-
ties, was not deliberately planned as a punishment and humiliation for
those formerly in rebellion, though the spirit of retribution had its part. It
was an effort, clumsy and partisan, yet in the main honestly meant to make
provision for the inevitable consequences of the Civil War; though it failed
it left a state of things out of which has slowly grown the consciousness of
EA 4-2009.indb 447 17/12/09 12:54:42

a national harmony far stronger and more lasting than that before the war”
(xiv). In his preface, Dunning explained that his account of the period
focused on the nation at large, rather than merely “the struggle through
which the southern whites, subjugated by adversaries of their own race,
thwarted the scheme which threatened permanent subjection to another
race” (xv). According to Dunning, radical Republicans deliberately mis-
construed the black codes passed by Southern provisional governments in
the winter of 1865-1866 as an attempt to re-establish slavery, whereas they
in truth represented “in the main a conscientious and straightforward
attempt to bring some sort of order out of the social and economic chaos
which a full acceptance of the results of war and emancipation involved”
(58). The black codes allowed the radicals to push for their plan for
Reconstruction, leading to new Southern governments headed by freed-
men, carpetbaggers and scalawags, governments stained by rampant cor-

ruption. Dunning emphasized the despair of white Southerners under these
governments, while maintaining that propaganda in respect to alleged
racial violence exerted by former rebels on blacks and on white Republicans
ensured the North’s continued acquiescence to radical Reconstruction.
The Dunning school was all the more influential as its findings were
based on meticulous and thorough research work, even if its interpretation
was biased by racism (T. Brown 3-4). Furthermore, the audience of Dunning
and his students was not confined to the small readership of scholarly mono-
graphs. In 1929, Claude Bowers, a journalist and amateur historian, whose
ideas of Reconstruction were largely derived from the Dunning school
(Tyrrell 56), published The Tragic Era: The Revolution after Lincoln. This
bestselling work was, according to John Hope Franklin, the most widely
read book on Reconstruction for more than a generation (Race and History
22). The Tragic Era described the white Southerners’ “dramatic struggle for
the preservation of Southern civilization and the redemption of their peo-
ple” (Bowers vi). According to Bowers, freedmen, children really, had fallen
under the influence of demagogues—soldiers, Freedmen’s Bureau agents,
and carpetbaggers—, although “Left to themselves,” Bowers contended,
“the negroes would have turned for leadership to the native whites, who
understood them best” (Bowers 198). Bower’s narrative pits good and sen-
sible men, like Andrew Johnson, against an array of vengeful and uncom-
promising villains, with Thaddeus Stevens at their head. Bowers’s depiction
of the black members of the South Carolina legislature could have been
lifted straight from Griffith’s Birth of a Nation7: “. . . the members’ feet
upon their desks, their faces hidden behind their soles. Chuckles, guffaws,
the noisy cracking of peanuts, and raucous voices disturb the parliamentary
dignity of the scene” (Bowers 353). The “tragic era” ended on the 1876
7. Franklin considered the 1915 film the single greatest force in shaping the view of
Reconstruction as a tragedy for white Southerners (Franklin 1989, 23).
EA 4-2009.indb 448 17/12/09 12:54:43

election, which struck the hour of “the South’s redemption from military
despotism” (Bowers 538).
Dissenting Voices
In the 1940s, historian E. Merton Coulter explained that the South

“had lost on the fields of carnage, but she was determined to win in the
Battle of the Records” (Coulter 181). Indeed, in the struggle over the his-
tory and memory of Reconstruction, the Dunning school emerged as the
clear victor and its interpretation held sway for several decades, thus pro-
viding the justification for the continued second-class citizenship of African
Americans. There were, however, dissenting voices. Most issued from
trained historians, but with a few notable exceptions. One of these was
John R. Lynch. Lynch had been born under slavery and held political office

in Mississippi during Reconstruction before his election to the U.S. House
of Representatives. In 1913, his The Facts of Reconstruction attempted to
revise the mainstream history of the period, defend the enfranchisement of
freedmen, and correct the perception of Reconstruction governments as
ineffective and corrupt.

In the following decades, several African American scholars also set out
to revise the accepted wisdom on Reconstruction. In A Social History of the
American Negro, Benjamin Brawley rejected the commonly held idea that
“the Negro was primarily to blame for the corruption of the day” (Brawley
271). Corruption, Brawley contended, had little or nothing to do with race
or region; it was widespread in both North and South, as exemplified by the
Tweed Ring and Crédit Mobilier scandals. In addition, Brawley defended
the legacy of Reconstruction governments, and the many “excellent mod-
els” of constitutions framed by such governments (Brawley 271). Carter G.
Woodson, who had founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and
History in 1915, dismissed the Dunning school interpretation as “biased
and inadequate” in The Negro in Our History (Woodson 239, n. 1).
The voices of dissent were predominantly black but some white histori-
ans also produced more balanced views of Reconstruction, for instance
Francis B. Simkins and Robert H. Woody, whose South Carolina During
Reconstruction was issued in 1933. In a review for The American Historical
Review, Howard K. Beale noted how, “[w]ith refreshing freedom from
prejudice and special pleading, the authors picture honest, unselfish carpet-
baggers, respectable, well-meaning scalawags, and Negroes with intelli-
gence and political ability” (Beale 1933, 345).
The most important revisionist account of the 1930s was W. E. B. Du
Bois’s monumental Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a
History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct
Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (1935). Du Bois contended that, far
from serving simply as ignorant puppets of manipulative whites, freedmen
had risen to the challenge of Reconstruction. They had, Du Bois insisted, in
effect restored democracy to the South and, among other achievements,
EA 4-2009.indb 449 17/12/09 12:54:45

had given the South its first public school system. Black Reconstruction
concluded with a bibliographical essay aptly entitled “The Propaganda of
History,” in which Du Bois vigorously denounced biased writings of his-
tory that laid the blame on freedmen for the failure of Reconstruction. This
seminal work was widely reviewed in the contemporary press and often
positively, even if its Marxist slant was criticized. And yet, like the Simkins
and Woody study, Du Bois’s interpretation exerted little immediate influ-
ence on subsequent writings of Reconstruction, partly it seemed because
neither the majority of historians nor the nation at large were quite ready
for such new readings (Parfait 2009). After all, and in spite of the Harlem
Renaissance, the plantation myth still flourished in the 1930s, as evidenced
by the success of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1936).
The Uphill Battle of Revisionist Historians

Beginning in the 1930s and continuing for several decades, a number of
historians rued the slow progress of revisionist Reconstruction historians. In
a 1938 essay, Alrutheus A. Taylor, himself a historian of Reconstruction,
lamented that partisan historians dominated the field of Reconstruction his-

toriography while the works of African American scholars were usually
ignored (Taylor 32). The following year, Francis Simkins also railed against
the continued misinterpretation of the period (Simkins 51). Because tradi-
tional histories of Reconstruction posited the inferiority of African Americans,
Simkins called on historians to acknowledge the findings of modern anthro-
pology, which cast “grave doubts on the innate inferiority of the blacks”
(Simkins 58). He established, moreover, a clear link between Reconstruction
historiography and contemporary American society. Historians, he argued,
had a civic duty to discharge, inasmuch as a better understanding of
Reconstruction could help solve “the South’s great race problem” (Simkins
61). For Howard K. Beale, assessing Reconstruction historiography in 1940,
the unquestioning use of the words “carpetbaggers” and “scalawags,” for
example, demonstrated that historians as a whole had accepted the biased
writing of Reconstruction history embodied by the Dunning school, and that
the new revisionists had not yet become “classics” in the way their predeces-
sors had.8 For his part, Beale drew a blueprint for the new generation of
historians: “Is it not time that we studied the history of Reconstruction with-
out first assuming, at least subconsciously, that carpetbaggers and Southern
8. Beale considered the Dunning school historians as the first revisionists; until then, he
argued, the history of Reconstruction had been written from a sectional point of
view, by men who were essentially concerned with justifying their own positions.
The Dunning school, on the other hand, did meticulous research work. Its interpre-
tation was, however, carried too far in Bowers’s Tragic Era, thus launching a new
revision of the period (“On Rewriting” 807-808). Today, the word “revisionist,”
however, usually refers to the historians who over several generations challenged the
Dunning school, reaching a climax with Foner’s 1988 Reconstruction (T. Brown 4).
EA 4-2009.indb 450 17/12/09 12:54:46

white Republicans were wicked, that Negroes were illiterate incompetents,

and that the whole white South owes a debt of gratitude to the restorers of
‘white supremacy’?” (“On Rewriting Reconstruction History” 808). Beale
recommended a more complex reading of Reconstruction, one that would
look at the period from economic, political, social and cultural angles, and
argued for an examination of Southern history not in isolation but as part
and parcel of the nation’s larger history.
Beale’s assessment of Reconstruction historiography came out in 1940.
After World War II, the continuation of second-class citizenship and segre-
gation based on race became a moral and political liability for a nation that
had fought Nazi racism. Yet, in a 1946 article entitled “An Analysis of
Some Reconstruction Attitudes,” T. Harry Williams, while acknowledging
the welcome changes revisionists had made to traditional Reconstruction
history, still advanced the old view that in many Southern States, “Negro

rule” had been a reality (Williams 479). And the following year, volume 8
of A History of the South, entitled The South During Reconstruction,
1865-1877, offered an interpretation that did not essentially differ from
that of the Dunning school. Its author, E. Merton Coulter, summarily dis-
missed the findings of revisionists: “The author of this work feels that there
can be no sensible departure from the well-known facts of the Reconstruction
program as it was applied to the South. No amount of revision can write
away the grievous mistakes made in this abnormal period of American his-
tory” (xi). The Southern bias of the University of Georgia professor was
unambiguously set forth from the first lines of his work: “The Civil War
was not worth its cost. It freed the slaves, upset a social and economic
order, strengthened the powers of the national government, and riveted
tighter upon the South a colonial status under which it had long suffered.
What good the war produced would have come with time in an orderly
way; the bad would not have come at all” (1). Coulter’s book was glaringly
racist, and described freedmen as improvident, lazy, spendthrift and gulli-
ble, with “no keen conception of right and wrong” (49). Reconstruction
had not been entirely negative, however, since it had given birth to the Solid
South: “Reconstruction created as great a revolution in politics as in social
and economic life. It forced the South into one party and made it solid
politically—to maintain white supremacy and home rule” (377). In a dev-
astating review, African American historian John Hope Franklin suggested
that, although Coulter’s work garnered praise in both mainstream and
scholarly periodicals, it was marred by, among other things, a biased selec-
tion of sources and sweeping generalizations, which resulted in a one-sided
interpretation. This, Franklin held, could be ascribed to plain racism
(Franklin “Whither Reconstruction Historiography?”).
Over a decade later, appraising “The Dark and Bloody Ground of
Historiography” in The Journal of Southern History, Bernard Weisberger
noted that the tide of revision had “not fully set in” yet (428-29), and that,
as late as 1959, Reconstruction remained “a challenge not met by academic
historians” (Weisberger 447). On the other hand, as he admitted, the works
EA 4-2009.indb 451 17/12/09 12:54:48

of C. Vann Woodward and other scholars had deeply altered the reading of
Reconstruction. Thus most historians now accepted that Reconstruction
governments had achieved a number of substantial reforms and that
Radicals were not the unified group of conspirators they had long been
made to appear. Although the picture was now more balanced as well as
more complex, a good general history of the period had yet to be written,
and many textbooks continued to proffer the “‘Carpetbag-bayonet rule-
Negro domination’ legend” (436). Weisberger pointed out that part of the
problem was that the sources used were almost exclusively white. Another
problem, one that Du Bois had already identified in Black Reconstruction,
was the general dislike of American historians for the ideas of failure or
conflict, neither of which accommodated itself to the national narrative of
unity and progress (Du Bois 438-39).
Although the publication in 1961 of John Hope Franklin’s Reconstruction:

After the Civil War was interpreted by some as a sign that the “Dunning
dragon” had finally been slain (Gray 84), Kenneth Stampp was in 1965 to
reaffirm the need for a more general acceptance of the findings of revision-
ists. In The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877, Stampp warned that the
“Tragic legend of Reconstruction” still lived on—it had in fact recently

been used by leaders of the resistance to civil rights legislation to support
their cause (vii).9 Stampp’s final assessment of Reconstruction is all the
more significant when compared to an assessment of the period by one
who lived through it. In 1879, Tourgée concluded that Reconstruction had
failed African Americans because the rights they had gained were on paper
only. For Stampp, writing during the “Second Reconstruction,” radical
Reconstruction did fail African Americans in the short run, since they had
become second-class citizens. Yet, it had written the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Amendments into the Constitution, thus giving blacks “the ulti-
mate promise of equal civil and political rights” (Stampp 214-15).
The advent of the civil rights movement promoted fresh readings of
slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, revisions that were soon to take
pride of place in American historiography. The “legend” of Reconstruction
was finally debunked, and its failures and successes were more objectively
and forthrightly reassessed. Over a century after the end of Reconstruction,
Eric Foner, whose Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-
1877 garnered a series of awards, could rightly claim, “American history
has been remade” (Foner 1990, vii).10
Claire PARFAIT
Université de Paris XIII
9. This clearly speaks to the link between Reconstruction historiography and the status
of African Americans.
10. For postrevisionist scholarship, and new trends in Reconstruction historiography,
see among others, Thomas Brown’s Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the
Postbellum United States.
EA 4-2009.indb 452 17/12/09 12:54:49

Bibliography
Beale, Howard K. “South Carolina during Reconstruction. By Francis Butler

Simkins and Robert Hilliard Woody.” The American Historical Review 38/2
(Jan. 1933): 345-47.
—. “On Rewriting Reconstruction History.” The American Historical Review 45/4
(July 1940): 807-27.
Blight, David. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge,
MA: The Belknap P of Harvard UP, 2001.
Bowers, Claude G. The Tragic Era: The Revolution after Lincoln. Cambridge, MA:
The Houghton Mifflin, 1929.
Brawley, Benjamin. A Social History of the American Negro. New York: Macmillan,
1921.
Brown, Thomas J., ed. Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United
States. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006.

Brown, William Wells. My Southern Home. [1880]. In From Fugitive Slave to Free
Man: The Autobiographies of William Wells Brown. [1993]. Ed. William L.
Andrews. Columbia, MO: U of Missouri P, 2003.
Burgess, John W. Reconstruction and the Constitution. 1866-1876. New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902.
Coulter, E. Merton, The South During Reconstruction, 1865-1877. Baton Rouge,

LA: Louisiana State UP, 1947.
Dixon, Thomas Jr. The Clansman, an Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan.
New York: Doubleday, 1905.
Douglass, Frederick. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. Hartford, CT: Park
Publishing, 1881.
Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. [1903]. New York: Signet, 1995.
—. Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which
Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-
1880. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935.
Dunning, William Archibald. Reconstruction, Political and Economic. 1865-1877.
New York: Harper, 1907.
Foner, Eric. Reconstruction. America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. New
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—. The New American History. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1990.
—. “Foreword.” David A. Lincove. Reconstruction in the United States. An
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—. Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction. New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 2005.
Franklin, John Hope. George Washington Williams: A Biography. [1985]. Durham,
NC: Duke UP, 1998.
—. Race and History: Selected Essays 1938-1988. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana
State UP, 1989.
—. “Whither Reconstruction Historiography?” The Journal of Negro Education
17/4 (Fall 1948). Rpt in Franklin, Race and History: 24-42.
Gray, Daniel Savage. “Bibliographical Essay: Black Views on Reconstruction.” The
Journal of Negro History 58/1 (Jan. 1973): 73-85.
Logan, Rayford W. The Betrayal of the Negro, from Rutherford B. Hayes to
Woodrow Wilson. Originally published in 1954 as The Negro in American Life
and Thought: The Nadir, 1877-1901. New, enlarged ed. New York: Collier
Books, 1965.
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Lynch, John R. The Facts of Reconstruction. New York: Neale P Company, 1913.
McPherson, James M. Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction. [1982].
New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001.
Novick, Peter. That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American
Historical Profession. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP, 1988.
Parfait, Claire. “From Heroic to Comic Death: Representations of African
Americans in Harper’s Weekly from the Civil War to the Early Twentieth
Century.” Racial, Ethnic and Homophobic Violence: Killing in the Name of
Otherness. Eds. Michel Prum, Bénédicte Deschamps and Marie-Claude Barbier.
Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007: 43-55.
—. “Rewriting History: The Publication of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction
in America (1935). Book History 12 (2009): 266-94.
Simkins, Francis B. “New Viewpoints of Southern Reconstruction.” The Journal of
Southern History 5 (Feb-Nov. 1939): 49-61.
Stampp, Kenneth M. The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877. New York: Vintage
Books, 1965.

Taylor, A. A. “Historians of the Reconstruction.” The Journal of Negro History
23/1 (Jan. 1938): 16-34.
Tourgée, Albion W. A Fool’s Errand, by One of the Fools. New York: Fords,
Howard and Hulbert, 1879.
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of Southern History 12/4 (Nov. 1946): 469-86.
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EA 4-2009.indb 454 17/12/09 12:54:51

Historiography of Reconstruction - 2009

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RECONSTRUCTION RECONSIDERED: A HISTORIOGRAPHY OF

RECONSTRUCTION, FROM THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY TO

Klincksieck | « Études anglaises »

2009/4 Vol. 62 | pages 440 à 454

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Pour citer cet article :

Claire Parfait, « Reconstruction Reconsidered: A Historiography of Reconstruction,

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Reconstruction Reconsidered: A Historiography of Reconstruction,

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Reconstruction was rewritten from a Southern point of view as a tragic episode in

La période de la Reconstruction, qui suivit la guerre de Sécession, s’acheva en

Claire PARFAIT, Reconstruction Reconsidered: A Historiography of Reconstruction,

EA 4-2009.indb 440 17/12/09 12:54:33

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Woodward called the “Second Reconstruction” (Woodward 8).

1. I am adopting here the periodization used by most of the historians of Reconstruction.

EA 4-2009.indb 441 17/12/09 12:54:34

tion supported by some accounts of conditions in the South by Northerners,

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Weekly provides a case in point. The famed political cartoonist Thomas

Not all contemporaries viewed Reconstruction in such unfavorable

EA 4-2009.indb 442 17/12/09 12:54:35

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EA 4-2009.indb 443 17/12/09 12:54:37

to the hostile vision of Reconstruction that was beginning to gain ground

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of the recent past is evidenced in widely circulated periodicals such as

As Grady’s 1885 essay makes clear, advancing a horrific picture of

EA 4-2009.indb 444 17/12/09 12:54:38

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Early Twentieth Century: Popular and Scholarly Accounts of Reconstruc-

The interpretation of Reconstruction as a tragic period for white

EA 4-2009.indb 445 17/12/09 12:54:39

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For Du Bois, Reconstruction represented a tragedy whose main protago-

The Dunning School

Although history was becoming increasing “professional” at the turn of

EA 4-2009.indb 446 17/12/09 12:54:41

was drafted by an amateur historian, James Ford Rhodes, a businessman

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EA 4-2009.indb 447 17/12/09 12:54:42

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EA 4-2009.indb 448 17/12/09 12:54:43

In the 1940s, historian E. Merton Coulter explained that the South

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ineffective and corrupt.

EA 4-2009.indb 449 17/12/09 12:54:45

The Uphill Battle of Revisionist Historians

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lamented that partisan historians dominated the field of Reconstruction his-

EA 4-2009.indb 450 17/12/09 12:54:46

white Republicans were wicked, that Negroes were illiterate incompetents,

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EA 4-2009.indb 451 17/12/09 12:54:48

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“Tragic legend of Reconstruction” still lived on—it had in fact recently

EA 4-2009.indb 452 17/12/09 12:54:49

Beale, Howard K. “South Carolina during Reconstruction. By Francis Butler

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Coulter, E. Merton, The South During Reconstruction, 1865-1877. Baton Rouge,

EA 4-2009.indb 453 17/12/09 12:54:50