Historians Interpretations of Reconstruction

John W. Burgess, Reconstruction and the Constitution, 1866 1876, 1902

Burgess was a member of the Dunning School of Reconstruction, believing in the
scholarly consensus from the era that blacks were inferior to whites. He specifically
believed that people with dark skin were incapable of separating passion from
reason and had therefore never created anything akin to modern civilization.
It was the most soul-sickening spectacle that America had ever been called upon to
behold. Every principle of the old American polity [political system] was here
reversed. In place of government by the most intelligent and virtuous part of the
people for the benefit of the governed, here was government by the most ignorant
and vicious part of the population for the benefit, the vulgar, materialistic, brutal
benefit of the governing set.
W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1935
After becoming the first African American to receive a doctorate from Harvard
University, and also partially based on his experiences growing up in an integrated
community in Massachusetts, DuBois openly advocated for the equal rights of
blacks across the United States. He was a leader of the Niagara Movement and a co
founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
In South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana, the proportion of Negroes was so large,
their leaders of sufficient power, and the Federal control so effective that for the
years 1868-1874 the will of black labor was powerful; and so far as it was
intelligently led, and had definite goals, it took perceptible steps toward public
education, confiscation of large incomes, betterment of labor conditions, universal
suffrage, and in some cases distribution of land to the peasant.
J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton, Reconstruction in North Carolina, 1914
Considered one of the great historians in North Carolinas history, J. G. de Roulhac
Hamilton developed his knowledge and understanding of Reconstruction from
William Archibald Dunning of Columbia University.
Reconstruction was an attempt to Africanize the Southern States and an attempt to
deprive the people through misrule and oppression of most that life held dear.
Kenneth M. Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction, 1865 1877, 1965
Considered one of the Americas great historians of slavery, the Civil War, and
Reconstruction, Stampp overtly rejected the Dunning Schools perception of
Reconstruction in his writings.
Radical Republicans refused to believe that Negroes were innately inferior. . . . This
radical idealism was in part responsible for two of the most momentous enactments
of the Reconstruction years: the Fourteenth Amendment and the Fifteenth
Amendment. . . . The fact that these amendments could not have been adopted

under any other circumstances, or at any other time, may suggest the crucial
importance of the Reconstruction era in American history.

John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction after the Civil War, 1961

Born in Oklahoma to a former slave, Franklin attended Fisk University and Harvard
University in the early twentieth century. He has stated that his focus on history
was to illustrate the importance of the presence of blacks so that the story of
America could be told adequately and fairly.
... Reconstruction governments . . . controlled by carpetbaggers tried to stabilize
southern economics by providing tax exemptions to encourage industrial
development. The governments established public education, universal suffrage
and public works. . . . Many carpetbaggers moved to the south for political and
economic gain, but most had high motives.
E. Merton Coulter, The South During Reconstruction, 1947
A student of J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton and a remarkably influential author of the
mid twentieth century, Coulter has been described by late twentieth century
historians as an apologist for Southern secession, a defender of the Confederate
cause, and a condemner of Reconstruction.
Radical Reconstruction was doomed to fail. With a crass, materialistic design, it was
cloaked in the garb of high idealistic justice, but its rulers were inexperienced,
ignorant and corrupt. They forgot what the world had learned and experienced
during the preceding two thousand years. Millenniums and Utopias might be written
about, but intelligent people knew that they were never to be realized in this life.
C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 1955
Considered by his colleagues and the public alike to be among the most influential
historians of the mid twentieth century, Woodwards work, which is excerpted
here, was proclaimed by Martin Luther King, Jr. as the historical Bible of the Civil
Rights Movement.
I have noticed among Negro intellectuals a tendency to look back upon the First
Reconstruction as if it were in some ways a sort of Golden Age. In this nostalgic view
that period takes the shape of the races finest hour, a time of heroic leaders and
deed, of high faith and firm resolution, a time of forthright and passionate action,
with no bowing to compromises of deliberate speed. I think I understand their
feeling. Reconstruction will always have a special and powerful meaning for the
Negro. It is undoubtedly a period full of rich and tragic and meaningful history, a
period that should be studiously searched for its meanings, a period that has many
meanings yet to yield. But I seriously doubt that it will ever serve satisfactorily as a
Golden Age for anybody. Theres too much irony mixed with tragedy.