William Archibald Dunning - Historical Influence

Historical Influence

The interpretation of post-Civil War Reconstruction in the United States that Dunning and his students propounded was the dominant theory taught in American schools for the first half of the 20th century.

Dunning and his followers also criticized white Southerners who did not stand with the Confederacy during the Civil War and who joined the Republican Party after the war. Former Confederate leaders referred to the white Southern Republicans who had been Unionists during the war as Scalawags. They also referred to Northern whites who moved to the South after the war as Carpetbaggers. Both were derisive terms that Dunning and his followers popularized.

Reconstruction's caricatures include the "carpetbaggers", whom southern whites portrayed as greedy interlopers exploiting the South; the "scalawags", who were traitorous southern whites collaborating with the Yankees; the freedmen, whom the Dunning School portrayed as sometimes violent and depraved and at other times ignorant and lost; "copperheads" who were Northerners who promoted peace and opposed war measures taken by President Abraham Lincoln and who were given that moniker by their Republican opponents; and former Confederates, who were the heroes of the story told by the Dunning School of historians. Dunning and his followers portrayed former plantation owners as honorable people with the South's best interests in mind, according to a historical essay on myths of Reconstruction.

Dunning was a Democrat who like most historians denounced the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. Dunning wrote from the point of view of the northern Democrats and painted the Radical Republicans as villains. The Dunning viewpoint saturated public memory in history textbooks until the dawn of the modern civil rights era. Dunning School influence is evident in John F. Kennedy's book Profiles in Courage, which admired Edmund G. Ross, the Kansas Republican senator who cast the vote that acquitted Johnson.