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

8. Charles W. Ramsdell: Reconstruction and the Affirmation of a Closed Society

229 8 Charles W. Ramsdell Reconstruction and the Affirmation of a Closed Society Fred Arthur Bailey University of Texas Professor Charles W. Ramsdell stood to deliver his presidential address before the third annual convention of the Southern Historical Association on November 20, 1936. The scholars assembled before him in Nashville represented the history academy’s dedication to strict professionalism in general and the specific application of its principles to southern chronicles in particular. Earlier generations of would-be historians fell short of a commitment to the absolute veracity of the past, Ramsdell explained to his audience. Their predecessors—some from the North, others from the South—looked on the southern region blinded by the trauma of the lamentable Civil War. “Since the conflict was primarily sectional,” he observed, “mass opinion in each section, reinforced by common memories and prejudices, hardened into a tradition which was all but impervious to criticism.” The professional historian’s duty was to divorce himself from such intransigence, to rigorously investigate and judge primary documents , to embrace the intricate confluence of political, social, religious, and economic themes, and to produce an assessment of the past untainted by cultural biases. If the historian could attain that ideal, he concluded, then perhaps the same approach would enable contemporary scholars “to attack our present [social] problems with less of emotion and more of cool reason than we frequently display. That, at any rate, should be one of the lessons of History.”1 The beneficiary of major renovations in the standards of historical 230 Fred Arthur Bailey scholarship, Ramsdell set before his peers a historiographic rigor that neither he nor they could easily achieve. He fully appreciated that he was the fortunate product of the dramatic intellectual innovations that late in the nineteenth century shifted the domain of history writing from the amateur and the antiquarian to the trained professional possessed of exacting skills and high standards. By 1900, he reflected in his Nashville address, “the growth of the great graduate schools had reached the point at which the historical seminars were beginning to force the rewriting of American history .” At such first-tier institutions as Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, and Columbia, dedicated instructors trained “young men and women . . . in the techniques of historical investigation and writing and . . . introduced [them] to profitable fields of research.”2 Ramsdell happily counted himself among those who matriculated in William Dunning’s famed Columbia University seminars. There the young Texan learned the new “techniques of historical investigation and writing,” and from there he became one of those drawn to the call of “rewriting of American history.” His mentor thoroughly inculcated in him the ethics of “scientific history,” applying them especially to the study of the Civil War and Reconstruction era. “Few episodes in recorded history more urgently invite thorough analysis and extended reflection” than Reconstruction, Dunning admonished his disciples. It was an epoch in which “southern whites, subjugated by adversaries of their own race, thwarted the scheme which threatened permanent subjection to another race.”3 Ramsdell acknowledged the inevitability that many of those drawn to Columbia were “Southerners [filled] with a consuming desire to study their own section,” eager to dig “out new materials in the fertile and unworked field” of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and thrilled that their discoveries overturned the “theories and assumptions” of earlier northern-biased historians. Having drunk deeply of the new standards of professionalism, Ramsdell boasted that the Dunning-trained historians “searched through dusty and forgotten official archives, examined old files of long neglected newspapers, and unearthed hitherto unknown collections of private papers. It is not surprising that they found many of the assumptions of the elder historians defective through lack of accurate or sufficient information.”4 Emboldened by his sense of superior training, Ramsdell marched through his career supremely confident in his scholarly objectivity and never questioned whether his own judgment might also be defective. He spent his entire academic tenure at the University of Texas influencing gen- Charles W. Ramsdell 231 erations of soon-to-be public school teachers and university professors and in them perpetuating ideas that had matured in the American South well before they were born. Ramsdell immersed himself in the political economy of southern historiography, in the polity of a closed society whose overlords rewarded conforming intellectuals who repeated the essential elements of a patrician-commanded southern history and severely punished other men of thought who refused to conform. He...