The Traditional "Dunning School" of Reconstruction Scholarship Has Been Attacked Since the Civil Rights Era by Marxist/Liberal Revisionists Who Label Dunning School Scholars as "Racists"

A great deal of excellent scholarship on Reconstruction was published during the early twentieth century by such historians as Claude Bowers and the Columbia University historian William Archibald Dunning and his cadre of graduate students. The historians James Ford Rhodes and James G. Randall painted a picture of Reconstruction as a vindictive, abusive, corrupt, political racket. Dunning, Rhodes, Bowers, and Randall were Northerners who documented in great detail how the Republican Party—which is to say, the federal government, since the party enjoyed a political monopoly—ignored presidential vetoes and federal court rulings, disenfranchised white Southerners while giving the vote to ex-slaves (who were instructed to vote Republican), formed new state puppet governments run by Republican Party political operatives, and used the power gained from this to plunder the taxpayers of the South for more than a decade after the war ended.

Beginning in the 1930s, and especially since the 1960s, a group of “revisionist” historians have come to the forefront to challenge what has come to be known as the “Dunning School” of Reconstruction scholarship. This group of scholars, which, according to Kenneth M. Stampp, includes “Marxists of various degrees of orthodoxy,” rarely disputes the facts that were set out by the Dunning School. They acknowledge that much of what Dunning's disciples have said about Reconstruction is true. Facts are facts. Relying heavily on Marxian class analysis, however, these revisionists have painted a more “enlightened” picture of the era. (The most prominent contemporary historian of Reconstruction is the Marxist Eric Foner, who calls Reconstruction “America's unfinished revolution.”)

These Marxist and “liberal” revisionists argue that Reconstruction wasn't all that bad compared to, say, what happened after the Japanese invaded Nanking in the 1930s, or the Nazi occupation of Europe, or the deeds of the Russian army in Germany at the end of World War II. After all, Kenneth Stampp has argued, there were not even any mass executions of former Confederates after the war. Southerners were indeed “lucky” in this regard, according to the revisionist view.

Because Dunning and his disciples provided accurate descriptions of the ex-slaves and their role in Southern politics shortly after the war, the Marxist/Liberal revisionists have sought to discredit the Dunning School's views by labeling them as racist. Dunning and his students, for example, questioned the wisdom of immediately extending to uneducated and propertyless ex-slaves the right to vote without first providing at least a couple of years of education for them. The revisionist historians have deemed this “racist.” As Kenneth Stampp remarked, “As ideas about race have changed, historians have become increasingly critical of the Dunning interpretation of Reconstruction.”

But the revisionists create a problem when they use this criterion (allegedly racist attitudes) in judging the credibility of Reconstruction scholarship. Every one of the revisionists virtually deifies Lincoln. The problem here is that Lincoln himself was a white supremacist all his life, a man who didn't believe that the two races should even mingle (see chapter 2). In their work, the Dunning School scholars, by contrast, never made the kinds of racially disparaging remarks that Lincoln did. They never proclaimed the white race to be the “superior” race as Lincoln did; they never advocated shipping all blacks back to Africa or to some other foreign land; and they never pontificated in their writing about the alleged evils of interracial marriage, as Lincoln did.

If the revisionists are to dismiss Dunning's interpretation of Reconstruction on the grounds that he and his students were insensitive to blacks, then to be consistent they should be just as skeptical of what has been written about Lincoln over the past 100 years and even reevaluate much of their own scholarship.

--Thomas J. DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003), 202-204.