Echoes of Reconstruction: The Dunning School Explains the End of Democracy in Mississippi

Emerging Civil War is pleased to welcome back Patrick Young, author of The Reconstruction Era blog

William Dunning was a well-known historian who taught at Columbia University in New York at the beginning of the 20th century. Dunning himself was from New Jersey, but he created a movement among historians that reinterpreted the Reconstruction Era, and he gathered about him a number of historians born in the South who accepted his revisionist approach to history and became collectively known as “The Dunning School.” William Dunning was the leading academic writer on Reconstruction during the first half of the 20th century, and he was heartily embraced by Southern white politicians and pundits. In this article we will look at Dunning’s explanation of the great overthrow of Reconstruction.

Dunning says that one factor that shortened the life of Reconstruction was white terrorism. The Ku Klux Klan and groups similar to it committed acts of violence across the South largely designed to keep Black voices from being heard, Dunning acknowledges. He writes that “the Ku Klux movement was to some extent the expression of a purpose not to submit to the political domination of the blacks,” but he says that attempts to quell Klan violence contributed to the flow of “respectable” whites towards the extremists.

Dunning is particularly critical of the Republicans allowing Black men into the state militias as part of the counter-terrorism operation. “Respectable whites,” Dunning wrote, “would not serve with the blacks in the militia.” He also writes that the mission of the counter-terrorism operation was too broad. Initially the militias were only to protect blacks in the exercise of the right to vote. Soon, however, the militias were protecting blacks “civil rights” and even their “social rights.” This led the conservative Democrats to devise a strategy of appealing to Northern whites to aid their fellow white people in the South as the victims of military and racial oppression. Dunning said “the policy of the Southern whites was directed especially so as to bring odium upon the use of the military forces in the states yet to be wrested from black control.”

In 1875, conservatives in Mississippi adopted the “Mississippi Plan” whereby whites in that state would wage an underground campaign of intimidation against blacks, while denouncing the military control of the white population by the Federal government ten years after Lee’s surrender. Dunning writes, “Though strenuously denied at the time, it was no deep secret that the great negro majority in the state was overcome in this campaign by a quiet but general exertion of every possible form of pressure to keep the blacks from the polls.”

Dunning says that the intimidation was so pervasive that it rarely had to emerge into the light of day. He describes the Mississippi Plan:

here “was relatively little “Ku-Kluxing” or open violence, but in countless ways the negroes were impressed with the idea that there would be peril for them in voting. “Intimidation” was the word that had vogue at the time, in describing such methods, and intimidation was illegal. But if a party of white men, with ropes conspicuous on their saddlebows, rode up to a polling place and announced that hanging would begin in fifteen minutes, though without any more definite reference to anybody, and a group of blacks who had assembled to vote heard the remark and promptly disappeared, votes were lost, but a conviction on a charge of intimidation was difficult. Or if an untraceable rumor that trouble was impending over the blacks was followed by the mysterious appearance of bodies of horsemen on the roads at midnight, firing guns and yelling at nobody in particular, votes again were lost, but no crime or misdemeanor could be brought home to any one. Devices like these were familiar in the South, but on this occasion they were accompanied by many other evidences of a purpose on the part of the whites to carry their point at all hazards. The negroes, though numerically much in excess of the whites, were very definitely demoralized by the aggressiveness and unanimity of the latter, and in the ultimate test of race strength the weaker gave way. The “Mississippi plan” was enthusiastically applied in the remaining three states, Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida, in the elections of 1876.”

The Compromise of 1877, which installed Rutherford B. Hayes as president in exchange for an end to the occupation of the South, returned the region to its “natural order.” Dunning recounts that “the inauguration of President Hayes was followed by the withdrawal of the troops from the support of the last radical governments, and the peaceful lapse of the whole South into the control of the whites.” Of course things were not so peaceful for African Americans.

Over the next ten years as the “Redeemers” (former Confederate Democrats) secured white ascendancy throughout the region, violence became less pronounced. Racial violence decreased as the African American population became steadily less powerful. There was no need to murder men and women who already had lost their voice. Dunning writes that “because of these opportunities the resort to…violence steadily decreased. It penetrated gradually to the consciousness of the most brutal white politicians that the whipping or murder of a negro, no matter for what cause, was likely to become at once the occasion of a great outcry at the North, while by an unobtrusive manipulation of the balloting or the count very encouraging results could be obtained with little or no commotion.” Thus peace had at last returned to the South.

Source Cited:

Archibald Dunning, William  Essays On The Civil War And Reconstruction And Related Topics The MacMillan Company, London 1904.