The American Nation A History of the United States, Combined Volume (14th Edition)

DEBATING THE PAST

Were Reconstruction

Governments Corrupt?

413

taken a moderate position: Reconstruction may have failed, but

its accomplishments under difficult circumstances of white

opposition were substantial; see, for example, Eric Foner (1988).

In recent decades, scholars have shifted from these larger

assessments to more focused work on particular regions and

on issues of class and gender. Susan Eva O’Donovan (2007), for

example, shows how slaves themselves developed survival

strategies, including women’s prominent role in devising a

“free-labor” system for sharecropping. Certain facts are beyond

argument. Black officeholders during Reconstruction were nei-

ther numerous nor inordinately influential. None was ever

elected governor of a state; fewer than a dozen and a half dur-

ing the entire period served in Congress.

Source:William A. Dunning, Reconstruction and the Constitution(1902),

W. E. B. Du Bois, Black ReconstructioninAmerica(1935), Kenneth Stampp,

The Peculiar Institution(1965), Joel Williamson, After Slavery(1965), Eric

Foner,Reconstruction(1988), Susan Eva O’Donovan, Becoming Free in the

Cotton South(2007).

R

acist depictions of Reconstruction were common. This one
by Thomas Nast was entitled “Colored Rule in a
Reconstructed (?) State” and appeared in Harper’s Weekly
(1874). In 1902 Columbia historian William A. Dunning similarly
declared that free slaves were mere children, incapable of hold-
ing office. Under Reconstruction, the South was plunged into
chaos and corruption. This view of Reconstruction prevailed in
the public mind largely as a consequence of film director D. W.
Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation(1915), a triumph of cinematic art
and racist caricature. In 1910 W. E. B. Du Bois, an African
American scholar, was the first to applaud Reconstruction for
broadening educational opportunities and democratizing gov-
ernment, but few historians concurred. In the 1960s, as the civil
rights movement was gaining momentum, more scholars
came out in support of Reconstruction. In 1965 Kenneth
Stampp emphasized the Reconstruction governments’
attempts to protect freedmen; that same year, Joel Williamson
turned Dunning’s thesis on its head and endorsed nearly all
aspects of Reconstruction. More recent scholars have generally