What was the war actually over?

I agree with your statement insofar that it contributes to a better understanding of a subject under discussion. There is no question that racism was rampant in both North and South during 1he 19th century and much of the 20th Century, but I don’t think racism alone explains the failure of radical reconstruction in the South. It is true that white Southerners had no intention of submitting to black domination or domination by anybody as far as that goes.

In fact, there was no real black domination during Reconstruction as some in the Dunning School might suggest. Then again, except for scalawags doing the bidding of the Republican Party, there was no real Southern white domination during Reconstruction as some schools of historiography might suggest –especially vociferous among those of leftist or Marxist persuasion.

The fact is real power rested in the hands of whites associated with the Northern supported Republican Party. The only Southern legislature with a black majority was South Carolina and, even there the real power rested with the white governor. The real power in the South lay with the governor (the were all white and all carpetbaggers or scalawags) as long as he had the blessing of Grant and his Union League henchmen kept rivals at bay. Wartime North Carolina governor Zebulon Vance did become the governor in 1876, but only Grant after withdrew support from scalawag William Holden and only then when his excesses cause consternation in Northern newspapers.

Unfortunately, the black freedmen were merely dupes of the radical Republican Party, and abandoned when political expediency arose. Too bad the Freedmen Bureau and their muscle—the Union League didn’t to stick to the original purpose of creating schools for black children and preparing their people in a more positive way. No, Southern whites were not going to suddenly accept them as social equals no matter what they did, but a concentration on something more positive than creating armed bands of marauders would have stood them in better stead once they were abandoned by their erstwhile Northern liberators.

“I have always been struck by the intensity of the feelings generated against slavery and slaveholders in men who had no direct or first-hand contact with either. Yet there was much about their actions and reactions which suggested something more real and personal. I have suggested the possibility that behind the determination to (put) slavery on the road to ultimate extinction there may have lain drives that had little to do with Negro slavery or the American South…”
Avery O. Craven

Does anyone know what ended or brought about the end of Reconstruction?

I wonder.

Did Dunning actually state for himself in any of his works, of what was the war actually over?

Just curious,
Unionblue

The last paragraph was a quote from historian Avery Craven. Northern born Avery Craven sometimes leaned toward the South in his in his historical interpretations, but he was not a member f the Dunning School. The closest historian to Cravens interpretations that I can think of would be James G. Randall who once stated his intentions to be “fair to the South.”

“I have always been struck by the intensity of the feelings generated against slavery and slaveholders in men who had no direct or first-hand contact with either. Yet there was much about their actions and reactions which suggested something more real and personal. I have suggested the possibility that behind the determination to (put) slavery on the road to ultimate extinction there may have lain drives that had little to do with Negro slavery or the American South…”

Avery O. Craven

The deadlocked election of 1876 when three Southern states made a deal with the Republicans to cast their electoral votes for their presidential candidate Rutherford Hayes. In return, the Republican Party agreed to withdraw Federal troops -- among other compensations. Without Federal troops, the white carpetbagger and scalawag regimes were doomed and thus an end to Reconstruction in the South.

"Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have."

Richard Salent, former president, CBS News

Just to repeat - this is exactly the school of thought that is rejected by modern day historians. Including a scholar from Columbia University named Eric Foner, who is recognized as a leading scholar in this area. Not that being from a particular school necessarily means anything.

- Alan

ForeverFree,


I think all schools of historiography should mean something. I have in my library Eric Foner’s, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

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

J. G. Randall and David Donald, The Civil War and Reconstruction

I think it best to get different views from such disparate opinion, Coulter’s conservatism to Foner’s Marxism. I use all three books for reference but most often Randall and Donald since those historians trend somewhat in the middle of the two extremes.

“As George W. Bush famously asked, "Is our children learning?"

There is little, if any, historical evidence that would tend to prove that there would have been secession without slavery. Check out the issues involved in the creation and acceptance of the Compromise of 1829 and the Compromise of 1850. More, importantly, in reference to this thread, check out what crisis' was supposed to be forestalled by both those legislations.

I would only note that, it's interesting that you cite Foner as being one of the "extremes" in terms of Reconstruction thought. Today, Foner's ideas are considered mainstream, whether influenced by Marxism or not.

I would certainly recommend WEB DuBois' book Black Reconstruction, to get a perspective from the view of an African American. I don't know if that counts as "extreme," but it might be offer an interesting counterpoint to Coulter, who is described in wiki:

Ellis Merton Coulter (1890–1981) was an American historian of the South, author, and a founding member of the Southern Historical Association. He believed in segregation and white supremacy. For four decades, he was a professor at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, where he was chair of the History Department for 18 years. He was editor of the Georgia Historical Quarterly for 50 years, and published 26 books on the American Civil War and Reconstruction.

According to the New Georgia Encyclopedia, "Coulter emerged as a leader of that generation of white southern historians who viewed the South's past with pride and defended its racist policies and practices. He framed his literary corpus to praise the Old South, glorify Confederate heroes, vilify northerners, and denigrate southern blacks."

Late 20th century historians have described Coulter's books as "historical apologies justifying Southern secession, defending the Confederate cause, and condemning Reconstruction." In this he had absorbed ideas of his professor J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton at UNC, as well as views commonly shared by whites in the South. In the mid-20th century, people used Coulter's "intellectual paradigm" about southern black failures as justification for maintaining Jim Crow segregation and opposing civil rights reform.

Historian Eric Foner wrote: "Anti-Reconstruction scholars faithfully echoed Democratic propaganda of the post-Civil War years. 'The Negroes,' wrote E. Merton Coulter in 1947, 'were fearfully unprepared to occupy positions of rulership,' and black officeholding was 'the most spectacular and exotic development in government in the history of white civilization...(and the) longest to be remembered, shuddered at, and execrated.'"

Foner also noted that as late as 1968, Coulter, "The last wholly antagonistic scholar of the era, described Georgia's most prominent Reconstruction black officials as swindlers and 'scamps', and suggested that whatever positive qualities they possessed were inherited from white ancestors."

- Alan

ForeverFree,

I would very much like to get back with you on this subject later this week or early next week. I am fairly new to this forum and have some problem keeping track, especially when a thread leaves page one so please feel free to remind me if I appear to not respond in a timely fashion.

“As a rule of thumb, if the government wants you to know it, it probably isn't true. “
Craig Murray

Racism certainly explains the Dunning School, which was my point. As to the failure of Radical Reconstruction, I agree that while racism played a role it was one factor and doesn't by itself explain the failure of RR.

The failure of Reconstruction is that it ended before it could really take hold. But what Foner, among others, explains is that this failure was not the fault of displaced white southerner planters, or the newly enfranchised southern blacks. Ironically it was the result of the moderate Republican backlash in Congress, signaled by the election of President Grant in November 1868, against the Radical Republicans who instituted the program. As the party of Business and Finance in the North, most Republicans were eager to get back to business as usual (antebellum) with their former business partners in the textile industry, the great cotton plantations. Reconstruction's programs made this all but impossible.

First of all the workforce required to cultivate the labor intensive cotton crop was "gone with the wind." So two years after being instituted, funding for the Freedman's Bureau was cut, all redistribution of land (40 acres and a mule) among the former slaves was stopped and in most cases reversed, and the Union Occupation Army began strictly enforcing state and local vagrancy laws. Vagrants were routinely sentenced to a year on a local plantation. When much of the Southern population was homeless and jobless, work gangs filled quickly.

Accusations of graft and corruption by the carpetbaggers, scallywags and white and black Republican officeholders in the southern states, particularly in relation to railroad projects, severly undermined the electability of those officeholders in the desparate economic times of post Civil War America. To be fair, the incidents of graft and corruption were just as high, if not higher in the North, especially in connection with all rail routes west of the Mississippi, including the Credit Mobilier scheme of the TransContinental Railroad completed in 1869.

By 1877, Reconstruction's programs had been so eroded by 'post war realities' that the deal to formally end it, (and make Hayes President) hardly caused a ripple beyond the editorial pages of the newspapers.