A Short History of Reconstruction [Updated Edition]

by Eric Foner

Most of these scholars taught that blacks were “children” incapable of appreciating the freedom that had been thrust upon them, and that the North did a “monstrous thing” in granting them the right to vote.4 The views of the Dunning School helped to freeze the white South for generations in unalterable opposition to any change in race relations, and justified decades of Northern indifference to Southern nullification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.