Neoabolitionism - Early 20th Century: Dunning School Historians Hostile To Abolition

Early 20th Century: Dunning School Historians Hostile To Abolition

Early 20th century historical treatments of the abolitionists and of the era of Reconstruction were negative. Historians like James G. Randall and Avery Craven labeled abolitionists as fanatics who caused a "needless war" that they argued should have been resolved by compromise. Most textbooks in the first half of the 20th century followed the early 20th century Dunning School narrative, later in the 20th century widely condemned by contemporary historians as deeply racist. It endorsed former white southern Confederates who called themselves "Redeemers". To regain political power, whites murdered and terrorized thousands of African Americans, favored White Power after the Civil War ended to stop African Americans from voting, and to keep African-American people in inferior and unequal status.

After the Civil War, former abolitionists, especially African-American historians, such as Frederick Douglass, and much later, Harvard-trained historian W. E. B. Du Bois, presented positive views of the achievements of Reconstruction: for its advocacy of civil rights for African Americans and expanded suffrage to include poor whites. They held that the desire of Southern slave states to preserve the long-term future of slavery was the primary cause of Southern secession and the Civil War, and that the nation had a moral debt to abolish slavery, and to guarantee equal rights for former slaves, especially to guarantee voting rights.

W.E.B. Du Bois, a founder of the NAACP, observed that economic equality among black and white people would lead to equality for all. Fisk University historian Alrutheus Taylor described the period of Reconstruction in North Carolina and Tennessee in several books and articles. The Dunning School of white historians discounted the memoirs of John R. Lynch, one of the first African-American members of Congress during Reconstruction, in favor of their own narratives that claimed African Americans were incompetent to vote or to participate in government.

In the mid-1870s, the Redeemers (the Southern wing of the Democratic Party) overthrew the Republican coalition that had controlled the southern states for a brief period after 1867. The Redeemers replaced the civil rights reforms of Reconstruction with Jim Crow laws that legalized racial segregation in public places. Through murder, terror and procedural barriers, the Redeemers curtailed or eliminated African-American voting rights. They replaced the short period when African Americans enjoyed some legal rights with segregation laws that reduced African-Americans civil rights socially, politically, and economically for the next 80 years or more. Public opinion, among northern whites, and most opinion by white scholars, accepted or applauded the Redeemers, but some clung to the abolitionist viewpoint. James McPherson reports that 15 of 24 ex-abolitionists who wrote about Reconstruction called it a "qualified success."