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

2. William Archibald Dunning: Flawed Colossus of American Letters

77 2 William Archibald Dunning Flawed Colossus of American Letters James S. Humphreys The influence of the American historian William Archibald Dunning hovers over the study of United States history and political science like a ghostly apparition, one that modern scholars have found impossible to avoid. Dunning arguably contributed more than any other scholar to those two fields, when both were in their nascent stages in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His scholarly corpus of writing included forty-three articles on history and political science topics, two books on the Reconstruction era, and three works on Western political theory.1 Dunning also played a major role in the development of the American Historical Association (AHA) and the American Political Science Association (APSA) and served as mentor to a legion of history and political science graduate students at Columbia University. Many of his students went on to outstanding careers in their fields after leaving Columbia. Although his arduous scholarly activities and teaching responsibilities often drained his energy, Dunning reveled in his work, approaching it with a zeal uncommon even for historians. Yet present-day scholars remember Dunning primarily as the founder of the school of Reconstruction thought that bears his name: the Dunning School. This approach stands out as the first coherent, overarching theory of the study of Reconstruction, a theory that shaped both scholarly and popular attitudes toward the subject for half a century and one that, though misguided, remains influential. The Dunning School portrayed Radical Reconstruction as an abject failure, cast blacks as ill-equipped for the responsibilities of freedom, and described southern whites as hapless victims of the Reconstruction poli- 78 James S. Humphreys cies of the federal government. Few challenges to the Dunning view, from either scholars or nonspecialists, arose during Dunning’s lifetime, as the pervasive racism in American society and the widespread desire to promote sectional reconciliation created a congenial environment for the acceptance of a prowhite southern view of Reconstruction.2 Later, however, twentiethcentury scholars eviscerated Dunning’s work for its racial biases and other excesses, dismantling his reputation as an outstanding scholar that he had worked assiduously to gain. Dunning’s anti-Radical view of Reconstruction developed in spite of his northern birth. That is not to say he was unique; many Americans in the North in the nineteenth century held a jaundiced view toward Radical Reconstruction and toward blacks. John H. Dunning and Catherine D. Trelease were married in 1849. In 1855 their two-year-old son, William Archibald, died of an illness, and on May 12, 1857, the couple welcomed another son, whom they also named William Archibald. The child was born in the Dunning family’s weathered but stately home in Plainfield, New Jersey.3 Dunning and his sister, Matilde, or “Willie and Tillie,” as family members called them, grew up surrounded by stable, intelligent, and productive individuals. The scholar Anne W. Chapman described William Dunning’s father as “a carriage manufacturer, amateur painter, and art critic.” “John Dunning,” she wrote “was a man of wide intellectual interests, which he passed on to his son.” William’s uncle Elijah Trelease died while serving in the Union Army during the Civil War. Typhoid took his life in 1862. Another uncle, William Trelease, an ardent opponent of slavery and a staunch supporter of the Union cause, served in a New Jersey regiment that fought in Virginia. “I think Willie does remarkably well at writing for one of his age,” he explained in a letter to Catherine Dunning. “I hope both of your children will get a good education. I see the use of it. at my age.” “Tillie ,” William Trelease wrote in a letter to Matilda Dunning, “do your best now while you have a chance and learn all that you can for you won[’t] go to school always and I shall fell [sic] proud of you if you excel.” William and Matilda Dunning surpassed their family’s expectations. Matilda enrolled in the New Jersey State Normal School and in 1873 received a teacher’s certificate qualifying her to work in the New Jersey public schools. William Dunning finished first in his high school class.4 The history of the Reconstruction era possibly began to interest Dunning as a young boy. He was eleven years old in 1868, the year Radical William Archibald Dunning 79 Reconstruction reached its culmination with the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. As...