CIVIL WAR HISTORIOGRAPHY

Michaela Crawford Reaves, Ph.D.

“Traditional” Interpretations

• Late 19th century• Radical Republicans dominated southern life• Unscrupulous carpetbaggers and scalawags

exploited the poor South; graft rampant!• Black supremacy oppressed poor white

Southerners; nothing but barbaric!• Argues race the major issue, • Reconstruction A BIG failure!• Interpretation is now considered racist.

William Archibald Dunning

• From New Jersey• 1857-1922• Defined first decades

of Reconstruction history

• Condoned KKK• Poor abused South• Evil scheming North• Child-like Negroes

Claude Bowers

• 1878-1958• Mass culture absorbed

Dunning’s ideas through The Tragic Era (fiction)

• Racial inequality necessary

Progressive Historians

• Early 20th century• Second American Revolution• Largest issue: ECONOMICS• Dominant northern capitalists exploit

defeated South• South still exploited, but for different

reasons, evil plot nonetheless.• A handful of scholars dispute this view.

Charles A. Beard

• 1874-1948• Dominant northern

capitalists exploit defeated South

• Economic interpretation beginning in 1923

• Focused on material self interest, not ideology

W.E.B. DuBois

• 1868-1963• Brought African

American experience to the table

• Wrote Black Reconstruction

• Communist• Reconstruction had a

good side, benefits.

Vernon Parrington

• 1871-1929• Saw everything in

terms of culture and American idealism

• Jeffersonian• Wanted to separate

states’ rights from slavery issue

Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

• 1877-1934• Emphasis on race

overshadowed by Beardians

• Contended slaves were treated well

• Examined class in South

James G. Randall

• 1881-1953• Argued Civil War a

result of failed statesmanship

• Analyzed administration and constitutional issues

• Wrote Lincoln and the South

Avery O. Craven

• 1885-1980• Believed Civil War

unavoidable• Lincoln too

conservative. Failed to provide adequate punishment for “rebels,” and did not offer sufficient guaranty of Black rights

Alrutheus A. Taylor

• 1893-1955

• African American historian

• Academic dean at Fisk

• Study of African-Americans

• Destroying stereotypes of 'sambo,' the ignorant of the carpetbaggers."

Francis Butler Simkins

• 1897-1966

• Helped lay foundation for modern Civil Rights movement

• First revisionist on Reconstruction 1931

• With Robert Woody examined South Carolina in Reconstruction

Revisionist Historians

• Second Reconstruction Era: 1950’s and 1960’s

• African-Americans at center of issue

• Andrew Johnson now a pig-headed racist

• Radical Republicans are GOOD guys!

• Reconstruction had positive effects!

• Revolutionary impulse thwarted

Howard K. Beale

• 1899-1959

• A successful attempt by northern moneyed industrialists using the Republican party for their own ends.

• Remove southern ruling class

• Beardian self-interest• Tends to disregard

issues of Civil Rights

LaWanda F. Cox

• 1909-2005 • Moderate Republicans

spearheaded Reconstruction

• Not economics but race relations the major issue

• Genuine conviction for legal equality

Kenneth Stampp

• 1912-• Refutes Dunning• Reconstruction a

success• Last “great crusade of

19th century reformers.”

• Issue: too many secondary sources

C. Vann Woodward

• 1908-1999• Reconstruction was

not revolutionary • Very conservative• Strange Career of Jim

Crow (1955)• Dissertation advisor:

Howard K. Beale

John Hope Franklin

• 1915-• Focused on African-

American contribution• “And what historians

have written tells as much about their own generation as about the Reconstruction period itself.”

• Civil Rights influence

Post-revisionism

• 1970’s

• Racial prejudice compromised efforts to aid freedmen.

• Reconstruction was “superficial”

• New South just continuation of Old South

• Reconstruction was conservative and not revolutionary at all!

Leon Litwack

• 1929• Been in the Storm So

Long• Whites indifferent• Freedmen succeeded• Focus on black-white

relations analyzing tensions and dependence

Michael Les Benedict

• No Radical Reconstruction, a misnomer

• Preserve the Constitution, first and foremost

• Neo-Abolitionist• Political science

interpretation

Michael Perman

• Moderate Republicans sought cooperation with southern whites

• Vulnerable to Southern obstructionism

• Southern leaders disenfranchised blacks and poor whites with complicity of northern Republican Progressives

Cultural History

• Late 80’s into 90’s• Emphasis on what certain groups did• Did Blacks in power ignore Black issues?• Issue not integration/segregation, but land.• Need comparative studies• Alienation ignored in favor of nationalism• Class formation and transformation, not race

Joel Williamson

• Reconstruction a time of progress for African Americans

• The Crucible of Race (1984)

• Freedmen in South Carolina did amazingly well

• Currently at Chapel Hill, North Carolina

James McPherson

• Argues Reconstruction does not end in 1877, but 1890 with last “bloody shirt” bill

• Sectional and racial issues ceased to be a national event.

Eric Foner

• Marxist• Issue is changing class

relationships• Use of law to preserve

plantation system and control of labor

• Economic role pertained to labor control

• http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/reconstruction/index.html

The End