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

4. Ulrich B. Phillips: Dunningite or Phillipsian Sui Generis?

133 4 Ulrich B. Phillips Dunningite or Phillipsian Sui Generis? John David Smith The Georgia native Ulrich Bonnell Phillips (1877–1934), along with his Columbia University mentor, William A. Dunning, set the standard for early twentieth-century scholarship on plantation slavery and the Civil War and Reconstruction, respectively. Contextualizing the work of Phillips, Dunning, and others of their era, the historian Steven Hahn notes that such “early scholars saw the dynamics of national development in the transmission of Anglo-Saxon ideals and institutions, in the conflicts between different white interest groups and classes, and in the Anglo conquest of the frontier.” Southern historians of Phillips and Dunning’s time in particular maintained “that the regional struggle for white supremacy over what they regarded as a backward and inferior race ultimately became the foundation upon which a bitterly divided nation could reconcile.”1 In 1907 Phillips framed the Civil War era in terms of what he later would call the “central theme” of southern history: Southerners’ recurring preoccupation with maintaining white supremacy. Secession signified their response to “the world’s problem of equity in human relationships,” he said. White Southerners’ commitment to slave labor “clashed with the predominant idea of the period”—free labor. Though defeated in civil war, whites never surrendered their commitment to racial hegemony over blacks. “Facts of human nature and the law of civilized social welfare are too stubborn for the theories of negrophiles as well as of negrophobes,” Phillips added. “The slave labor problem has disappeared, but the negro problem remains.”2 Phillips espoused these ideas and, because of the lasting importance of his two landmark books, American Negro Slavery (1918) and Life and Labor 134 John David Smith in the Old South (1929), he became the preeminent historian of slavery and the Old South until the late 1950s.3 Despite efforts by revisionists to contextualize and explain the importance of Phillips’s writings, his reputation as a historian nonetheless declined expeditiously in the post–civil rights decades. In a typical dismissive reference to Phillips, in 2011 a historian referred to him as “the father of the proslavery school of Southern history,” who, “at Columbia, professionalized the study of the South in the 1920s by defending slavery, calling it a system of ‘gentleness, kind-hearted friendship and mutual loyalty,’ concepts which guided several generations of historians .”4 Years before, writing in the New York Times, the esteemed African American literary critic and historian Saunders Redding blasted “the notoriously biased Columbia school of historians, led by Ulrich B. Phillips.”5 Despite these and numerous other negative evaluations of Phillips’s significance , he nevertheless ranked as the foremost southern historian of his day and had a distinguished career during the first three decades of the twentieth century, including professorships at Wisconsin, Tulane, Michigan , and Yale. In 1928 Phillips received Little, Brown and Company’s $2,500 prize for the best unpublished manuscript in American history for that year. The following year an Albert Kahn Traveling Fellowship enabled Phillips to study plantations comparatively worldwide. Writing in 1925, the University of Chicago historian William E. Dodd described Phillips as “one of the best scholars in the country.” He added, however, “But, like nearly all historians of our day, I think he has a strong tendency [to] plead a cause—in his case that of the old South.”6 Phillips was one of only a handful of Dunning’s students who did not focus his research on constitutional, institutional, or political history, especially the history of Reconstruction. That is not to say, however, that Phillips lacked interest in, knowledge of, and strong passions about what white Southerners of his day considered the most tumultuous period in American history. Though like other contemporary white Southerners Phillips identified with the New South’s Confederate forebears, he never glorified the war, referring to it instead as a “cataclysm.” In 1925 he wrote that “many folk of the old regime were destroyed by the war—not merely soldiers on the battlefield, but civilians white and black, driven or lured from shelter , sustenance, and sanitation.” He recounted how slaves by the thousands died during the war and how the conflict left many slave owners “utterly broken.” Those who survived the war had to begin their lives anew “under conditions of general derangement and almost universal poverty. The land- Ulrich B. Phillips 135 holders possessed land and managerial experience—and worthless Confederate currency. The freedmen...