William Archibald Dunning (1857-1922) was an American historian who founded the Dunning School of Reconstruction historiography at Columbia University, where he had graduated in 1881. Between 1886 and 1903 he taught history at Columbia, and was named a professor in 1904. Born in Plainfield, N. J., Dunning was among the founders of the American Historical Association and AHA president in 1913.
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Historian Howard K. Beale says the Dunning School broke new ground by escaping the political polemics of the day and used "meticulous and thorough research...in an effort to determine the truth rather than prove a thesis."[1] Beale states that, "The emphasis of the Dunning school was upon the harm done to the South by Radical Reconstruction and on the sordid political and economic motives behind Radicalism.[2] Dunning strongly opposed slavery and his essays explain the legal basis for its destruction.[3]
Dunning's views were disputed by black historians W. E. B. Du Bois beginning in 1901, and John Hope Franklin in a number of his books, including, Militant South and Reconstruction: after the Civil War. The viewpoint of Dunning and his students was sympathetic to the white Southerners. who they saw as being stripped of their rights by a vengeful North after 1865. They criticized the control over the black vote by Carpetbaggers. "Dunning admits that "The legislation of the reorganized governments, under cover of police regulations and vagrancy laws, had enacted severe discriminations against the freedmen in all the common civil rights." [4]
In Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois characterized Dunning's Reconstruction, Political and Economic as a "standard, anti-Negro" text. In turn Dunning ignored Du Bois and his Marxist interpretation of the history of Reconstruction which centered on the people freed from slavery.
The interpretation of post-Civil War Reconstruction in the United States that Dunning and his students propounded was the dominant theory taught in American schools for the first half of the 20th century.
Dunning and his followers also criticized white Southerners who did not stand with the Confederacy during the Civil War and who joined the Republican Party after the war. Former Confederate leaders referred to the white Southern Republicans who had been Unionists during the war as Scalawags. They also referred to Northern whites who moved to the South after the war as Carpetbaggers. Both were derisive terms that Dunning and his followers popularized.
Reconstruction's caricatures include the "carpetbaggers", whom southern whites portrayed as greedy interlopers exploiting the South; the "scalawags", who were traitorous southern whites collaborating with the Yankees; the freedmen, whom the Dunning School portrayed as sometimes violent and depraved and at other times ignorant and lost; "copperheads" who were Northerners who promoted peace and opposed war measures taken by President Abraham Lincoln and who were given that moniker by their Republican opponents; and former Confederates, who were the heroes of the story told by the Dunning School of historians. Dunning and his followers portrayed former plantation owners as honorable people with the South's best interests in mind, according to a historical essay on myths of Reconstruction.[McCrary, Peyton, "The Reconstruction Myth" in Encyclopedia of Southern Culture]
Dunning was a Democrat who like most historians denounced the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. Dunning wrote from the point of view of the northern Democrats and painted the Radical Republicans as villains. The Dunning viewpoint saturated public memory in history textbooks until the dawn of the modern civil rights era. Dunning School influence is evident in John F. Kennedy's book Profiles in Courage, which admired Edmund G. Ross, the Kansas Republican senator who cast the vote that acquitted Johnson.[Joshua Zeitz The New Republic, 18 January 1999, pp. 13-15]