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

10. C. Mildred Thompson: A Liberal among the Dunningites

281 10 C. Mildred Thompson A Liberal among the Dunningites William Harris Bragg On February 16, 1975, the last surviving student of Professor William A. Dunning’s fabled Reconstruction seminar died, only six years short of her hundredth birthday. C. Mildred Thompson left the world where she had entered it: Atlanta, Georgia, whose history was entwined with the subject of her only book, Reconstruction in Georgia: Economic, Social, Political, 1865– 1872. She had been born in 1881, the year that the last Reconstruction president had left office, and only a few years after America’s centennial. Now death had come the year before two other events Thompson would have welcomed: the nation’s bicentennial celebration and the election to the U.S. presidency of the first Georgian to hold that office—a southern liberal much like herself. Indeed, Thompson’s traditional liberalism would form the truest, most continuous thread in the richly textured tapestry of a long life well and productively lived. Nonetheless, her liberalism, in both life and works, would not prevent her from being most commonly remembered by later academics as a “Dunningite,” a member of the “Dunning School” of Reconstruction historiography, a group portrayed by critics as not only illiberal but profoundly racist.1 During a lifetime literally “full of years and honors,” Thompson worked primarily in the northeast, far from her native city, but not nearly the distance her father, Robert Galbraith Thompson, had traveled. He had arrived in America in 1851, aboard one of the last “famine ships” from Ireland . Anglican, not Catholic, he had by 1861 married Alice Gray Wood, daughter of a tanner and currier of Brooklyn, New York, himself an English 282 William Harris Bragg immigrant. Though the couple arrived in the South during the 1860s, there is no hint that Robert Thompson ever served in the Confederate army.2 One critic (reducing the Dunningites to the southern-born authors of the southern state studies, a common practice) suggested that most of the Dunning scholars were children of the Lost Cause, similar in ancestry, rural background, and outlook. Obviously, Thompson never fit this stereotype . Her parents (an immigrant and a first-generation American) had settled permanently in urban Atlanta’s political and commercial center in the late 1860s. While raising six children, the Thompsons made their living operating small businesses, including billiard halls, confectionaries, family restaurants, and, ultimately, a small hotel. Rather than a devotion to the Lost Cause, Robert Thompson had the enterprising immigrant’s appreciative love of a land of freedom and opportunity.3 Nonetheless, where Georgia Reconstruction was concerned, Robert Thompson served as a primary source for his daughter’s knowledge. Some of his anecdotes, she later said, formed the core of her book.4 As an Atlanta public school girl, Mildred Thompson learned eagerly in an environment reflecting less a preoccupation with the Lost Cause than pride in her birthplace, described by the journalist-orator Henry W. Grady as a “brave and beautiful city,” the capital of a reconciled and forward -looking New South. Mirroring on a smaller scale Grady’s distinction between the old Atlanta and the new, Thompson distinguished herself not only academically, but personally, through a signal act of self-identification. Christened Clara Mildred (and always known as Mildred to family and friends), she countered the classroom presence of another Mildred Thompson by renaming herself C. Mildred Thompson. From that time until it was carved into her small memorial stone in Atlanta’s Oakland Cemetery, this would be her name of record.5 After high school graduation in 1899, Thompson, only seventeen, departed for Vassar College, near Poughkeepsie, New York. Already famous for offering a superior education to young women, the college was symbolized by its impressive Main Building, a grand exercise in Second Empire style. During most of the next half century, Thompson would remain happily at Vassar, successively as student, professor, and dean, only an occasional visitor to Atlanta.6 Excelling as a Vassar student, Thompson acquired her first mentor, the redoubtable Lucy Maynard Salmon. She introduced Thompson to the historical profession, hardly older than Thompson herself and then repre- C. Mildred Thompson 283 sented by the American Historical Association (AHA), founded in 1884, and the American Historical Review (AHR), established in 1895. “Scientific history” reigned, with its emphasis on creating a factual record based on the truth as ascertained through deep, objective research in the original sources. After Thompson earned...