In his scholarly study of Reconstruction, Dunning did Rhodes one better: he blamed the northern armies for the poverty and violence in the South after the war, and he maintained that everything would have been fine if only southerners—“black as well as white”—“could have resumed at once the familiar methods of production.” Dunning’s version of the postwar years, published in 1907 as Reconstruction: Political and Economic, 1865–1977, echoed entirely the southern Democrats’ version of the immediate postwar era: southern white men were hardworking individuals who just wanted to make a living, and
...more
