William Archibald Dunning

William Archibald Dunning was one of the most prominent American historians of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. His arguments that freedmen were incapable of ruling themselves and that segregation during Reconstruction was necessary shaped historical writings on the era until the 1960s, when John Hope Franklin and other revisionist historians started to argue against Dunning’s claims.

In his seminal work, Reconstruction, Political and Economic: 1865–1877, Dunning argues that Reconstruction was a time of great demoralization among southern whites. According to Dunning, white despair and animosity toward blacks can be attributed to the chaos created by the newly established state governments, administrations run primarily by freedmen and white Republicans who had emigrated from the North (also known as carpetbaggers). Dunning asserts that the Republican administrations of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Louisiana were beset by bribery...