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

1. John W. Burgess, Godfather of the Dunning School

49 1 John W. Burgess, Godfather of the Dunning School Shepherd W. McKinley One cannot fully understand the Dunning School without a working knowledge of John W. Burgess’s life, career, and publications. Part of an earlier generation, he taught William A. Dunning and helped build the foundations on which the school stood. Burgess published “scientific” scholarship that was in line with the highest international standards, and his views on the Teutonic “race” not only supported but gave intellectual credibility to a wide variety of racist views in Reconstruction histories. Hardly obsessed with race, however, he was interested in topics as diverse as international political science, national reunification, Hegelian philosophy, Germany, and educational reform. His reputation was impressive. Burgess was a founding father of graduate education in the United States and led the transformation of Columbia University into a leading institution in political science and history. Bolstered by a German pedigree, he set the standard for academic rigor at Columbia, and his scholarship was at the cutting edge in Western academia. His theories of political capability, governmental responsibility and limits, social progress, the process of civilization , and world history, and his validations of colonialism, scientific racism, immigration limits, and restricted voting, had a wide following. More specifically, Burgess contributed a number of works in political science and history that profoundly influenced the Dunning School scholars, elevating both their level of scholarship as well as their racist rhetoric. Born in 1844 in middle Tennessee to a Presbyterian, Whig, and Unionist slave owner originally from Rhode Island, Burgess remembered “intelligent , proud, and courageous slave barons,” “ignorant, slovenly, poor white trash,” and the “vast mass of African slaves.” His was an explicitly rosy view 50 Shepherd W. McKinley of slavery, dimmed only by the rare brutality of overseers and common whites. Masters fed and clothed their property well, and slaves “worked short hours and never knew what a strenuous effort meant.” Like his father, Burgess grew to view slavery as an untenable institution and blacks as an inferior race. The state’s “insane secessionists” brought on a violent “reign of universal hate born of misunderstanding and jealousy” under which the Burgess family suffered the Confederacy’s “tyranny over opinion” and “reign of terror.” These searing experiences led Burgess to lose “faith in the wisdom and goodness of the mass of men” and gain a fierce nationalism, an appreciation of constitutional law, and a fear of the “democratizing of society.” The desires to promote domestic peace, stave off mob rule, and promote reconciliation would become driving forces in his career. After a brief stay at nearby Cumberland University, Burgess joined the United States Army in 1862. His harrowing military service inspired his “life’s work”—“teaching men how to live by reason and compromise instead of by bloodshed and destruction.” War’s footprint inspired Burgess to teach nationalism over states’ rights, and order and constitutional law over chaos and revolution. Burgess fled the South in the fall of 1864 and followed friends to Amherst, Massachusetts.1 Amherst College offered another formative experience. The Hegelian L. Clark Seelye shaped Burgess’s appreciation for “universal reason as the real substance of all things,” and his duty to promote rationality in “the rules of thought and conduct, law and policy.” Edward P. Crowell related ancient Rome’s politics and law to “the present,” and Burgess later declared, “I laid the groundwork of my study of history in the reading of Tacitus with him.”2 This reference to the Roman historian is especially significant in light of Burgess’s subsequent worship of all things German, his belief in the Teutonic germ theory, and his views on race in America. Burgess subscribed to the nineteenth-century vogue of using Tacitus and his Germania to create and justify racial and national hierarchies. In addition, he seems to have reinforced the lessons of his Civil War experiences—as a southern Unionist and federal soldier—with Tacitus’s references to the allegedly free and orderly society within Teutonic tribes. After graduating from Amherst in 1867, Burgess passed the Massachusetts bar in 1869. He believed legal knowledge to be a prerequisite to mastering political science. Without such a foundation for America’s leaders , he later wrote, society would tend toward “systems of absolutism in government” and the “undervaluation of individual liberty.” Following a John W. Burgess, Godfather of the Dunning School 51 brief stint teaching at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois...