Reconsidering the Scalawags

RECONSIDERING THE SCALAWAGS OUo H. Olsen Standing as both partial cause and consequence of the renewal of this nation's commitment to racial equality has been a remarkable change in the consensus among professional historians respecting the era of reconstruction. Long maligned northern radicals have achieved a new respectability; Andrew Johnson's presidency has been more severely censured; and the consequences of emancipation and Negro suffrage have attracted careful reconsideration. Revisionism, most noticeably, has rejected white supremacist assumptions and accorded a new dignity to the motivations and accomplishments of the Radical reconstruction program. If nothing else, in the best competitive tradition , we are certainly denying the Soviets a monopoly in either the writing or rewriting of history in accordance with changing national needs and values. Once traditional interpretation of reconstruction in the South have been altered not only by changing racial attitudes but also by careful and diligent research that has drastically modified long accepted stereotypes and oversimplifications. A much more appreciative general view of the nature and accomplishments of southern reconstruction has been presented by Vernon Wharton, Horace Mann Bond, Jack B. Scroggs, Carter Goodrich, Malcolm McMillan, and others. Wharton's classic study, together with the recent accomplishments of Willie Lee Rose, Joel Williamson, and Joe Richardson, has provided a balanced and greatly changed appraisal of race relations and the Negro. Jonathan Daniel's Prince of Carpetbaggers has proved no more a rascal than many of his political opponents; indeed, Richard Current has discovered that carpetbaggers were as positive a lot of men as any. As for that final cluster of supposed scoundrels, the scalawags, they emerge in several works as respectable ex-Whigs or men of admirable Jacksonian persuasion. Little wonder that, reflecting these and other alterations, we are presently being blessed with a variety of new and admirably balanced syntheses and documentary collections on reconstruction.1 'E.g., John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction after the Civil War (Chicago, 1961); James G. Randall and David Donald, The Civil War and Reconstruction (Boston, 1961); Kenneth M. Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction (New York, 304 Nevertheless, various particulars of southern reconstruction have hardly been tapped anew, and often we are but readjusting old accounts in accordance with newer prejudices, the gist of our discoveries having been outlined by DuBois in 1910 and by a one-time carpetbagger even eighteen years before that.2 Uniquely new information , such as that provided by Frank Klingberg's study of the Claims Commission, or new topical studies, such as Otis Singletary's of the militia, have been rare. We still know little of military rule, of state politics (particularly for the years 1865 to 1867), of legal and economic history; and there is not yet one satisfactory general study of a state subjected to the Reconstruction Acts of 1867. The studies of the so-called Dunning school continue to stand as the standard accounts of reconstruction in almost every southern state and to constitute the fundamental but faulty base for evaluating the entire reconstruction epoch. Among the most original and perceptive comments upon southern reconstruction have been those relating to the Whig origins of Republicanism , a thesis ably impressed upon the profession by David Donald's article on Mississsippi and refined and extended in several areas by Thomas B. Alexander.3 But while the prominence of Whigs in scalawag ranks and the conservative and unionist logic of thenbeing there has been indubitably established, there is much doubt as to the exact extent of their presence. Donald concludes that "nearly all" of the Republican voters in Mississippi were former Whigs, al1965 ); James P. Shenton (ed.), The Reconstruction: A Documentary History of the South after the War (New York, 1963); Grady McWhiney (ed.) Reconstruction and the Freedmen (Chicago, 1963); Harvey Wish (ed.), Reconstruction in the South, 1865-1877 (New York, 1965); Harold M. Hyman (ed.), The Radical Republicans and Reconstruction Policy, 1860-1870 (Indianapolis, 1966). The first three works may be consulted for bibliography. An abbreviated version of this paper was read on April 28, 1966, at the Fifty-ninth Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians, held in Cincinnati. A Faculty Research Grant from Morgan State College facilitated research for this paper; the author is...