The Dunning School: Historians, Race, and the Meaning of Reconstruction

3. James Wilford Garner and the Dream of a Two-Party South

107 3 James Wilford Garner and the Dream of a Two-Party South W. Bland Whitley James W. Garner has long been characterized as the most balanced and least strident of William A. Dunning’s students. Although in its general outlines Garner’s view of Reconstruction differed little from most of his Dunningite peers’, his tone, approach, and in some cases findings were strikingly discordant. In private Garner even went so far as to praise James L. Alcorn, Mississippi’s first elected Republican governor under Reconstruction, who had embraced the political conditions of Reconstruction in the hopes of taking charge of a biracial political coalition. In a letter to Alcorn’s widow, Garner admitted that Alcorn had “pursued the wise course” and regretted “that his white fellow citizens did not follow his leadership.” Garner may not have been completely sincere on this point. He was no doubt ingratiating himself to an elderly woman, and his statement certainly did not point toward a favorable judgment of the congressional policy that had resulted in Alcorn’s election. Indeed, Garner’s treatment of Alcorn’s tenure as Mississippi governor was brief and relatively uncomplimentary, his portrait of Alcorn himself dismissive and even sarcastic. Still, his willingness to contact would-be ideological adversaries bespoke his tendency to negate political passions in favor of a detached and cooperative research mentality. Comfortable in the North and among Northerners, Garner spent much of his career rejecting parochial concerns for a political perspective that seemed to owe more to Mugwumpish liberalism than to neo-Confederate partisanship.1 A sketch of Garner’s career underscores his journey from local to international concerns. He was born on November 22, 1871, in Pike County, 108 W. Bland Whitley which borders Louisiana in southwestern Mississippi. Garner’s family had deep roots in the area, his great-grandfather James Garner having settled there in 1811. Although the Garners were not wealthy, several members of the family had filled positions in local government. Garner’s father was a farmer, and Garner’s early exposure to farm life probably informed his determination to become something other than, in his words, “a knot on a log.” Much of Pike County consisted of poor pine land, but some of it was better suited to plantation agriculture. Before the Civil War close to half of the population had been enslaved, and throughout the postbellum era racial percentages remained consistent; whites held a slight majority over African Americans. Such a ratio made for a volatile political dynamic. Garner would have undoubtedly grown up hearing stories about the turmoil that pervaded the Louisiana-Mississippi border region, where armed gangs conducted a violent challenge to the Reconstruction regime. Pike was controlled by Republicans for much of the period, and although political differences were handled more calmly than elsewhere, it did experience a good deal of violence spilling over from neighboring Amite, an extraordinarily disorderly county. One of Garner’s uncles was elected, as a DemocratConservative , mayor of the town of Summit during the Redemption campaign of 1875.2 In addition to political conflict, Pike was the scene of a notable attempt at economic modernization when the president of the New Orleans, Jackson , and Great Northern Railroad (later the Illinois Central) decided in 1872 to relocate the line’s train maintenance yards from New Orleans to the county, where he incorporated McComb. The town attracted skilled workers from the North and also became a center for the region’s nascent timber industry. Although it never became the industrial powerhouse that its founder envisioned, McComb offered a different vista for an area still defined largely by a hardscrabble, rural economic and social structure.3 Garner worked his way through Mississippi Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Mississippi State University), graduating in 1892, and taught high school for a few years. On December 24, 1895, he married Therese Leggett, daughter of a Pike County planter. The following fall he entered the graduate school at the University of Chicago, from which he received a master’s degree in political science in 1900. His instructors included Henry Pratt Judson and Hermann E. von Holst, who chaired the History Department. Von Holst taught the American history seminar that Garner took in 1898 and was an interesting mentor for a young scholar James Wilford Garner and the Dream of a Two-Party South 109 from Mississippi interested in Reconstruction. The first fully trained academic historian to make...