Reassessment
Late 20th century historians have described Coulter's books as "historical apologies justifying Southern secession, defending the Confederate cause, and condemning Reconstruction." In this he had absorbed ideas of his professor J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton at UNC, as well as views commonly shared by whites in the South. In the mid-20th century, people used Coulter's "intellectual paradigm" about southern black failures as justification for maintaining Jim Crow segregation and opposing civil rights reform.
Historian Eric Foner wrote: "Anti-Reconstruction scholars faithfully echoed Democratic propaganda of the post-Civil War years. 'The Negroes,' wrote E. Merton Coulter in 1947, 'were fearfully unprepared to occupy positions of rulership,' and black officeholding was 'the most spectacular and exotic development in government in the history of white civilization...(and the) longest to be remembered, shuddered at, and execrated.'"
Foner also noted that as late as 1968, Coulter, "The last wholly antagonistic scholar of the era, described Georgia's most prominent Reconstruction black officials as swindlers and 'scamps', and suggested that whatever positive qualities they possessed were inherited from white ancestors."
Read more about this topic: E. Merton Coulter
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