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Footnotes 1315
period. However, not facts but opinions about facts determine national history. . . .
The whole attitude of the North towards the South was changed, softened. The desire
to forget the regrettable misunderstanding between the states for the sake of the unity
of the nation made it necessary to adopt the southern version of the history, at least in
part. The fait accompli of the undoing of reconstruction stamped reconstruction as a
failure and established the southern evaluation of reconstruction governments as his-
torical truth.”*
Josephus Daniels, Tar-Hcel Editor (1939), pp. 281-282. Some of them had
consistently favored the Union cause throughout the Civil War when it was extremely
unpopular to do so.
A few white historians—Louis Hacker, for example—have given a history of the
Reconstruction that corresponds with the facts. But these are far from dominant among
writers of history. Two great historians, J. W. Burgess and W. A. Dunning, set the
pattern for the dominant historical interpretation of the Reconstruction period.**
Negro writers have had a contrary need for rationalization which is equally under-
standable. W. E. B. Du Bois* Black Reconstruction (1935) is expressly written to
counterbalance the common bias in favor of the unreconstructed white Southerners.
Carter Woodson and other Negro historians have the same purpose in their books.® The
Negro authors concede that the Reconstruction governments were guilty of extravagance,
theft, and incompetence in many cases, but insist that the charges have been grossly
exaggerated. They point to the very difficult conditions in the war-ridden, poverty-
stricken Southern regions, where the former ruling aristocracy and a large portion of
the entire white population were openly hostile and obstructive and wished Negroes
to fail. They also emphasize that political corruption was widespread and common in
the whole country in this period and point particularly to the Tweed machine in New
York. They observe that the historians they criticize have not given the Reconstruction
governments their due credit for their remarkable initiative in establishing a public
school system in the South and beginning social legislation. They stress finally that
there was nowhere “black domination,” but that the Negroes were usually in a minority
among the electors, and that whites always held the great majority of the higher,
policy-making offices. There are also quixotic attempts made from the side of some
Negro writers on the period to picture the Negro legislators as great reformers and
statesmen who introduced the democratic institutions to the South.
The English observer of the South during Reconstruction, Sir George Campbell,
gives first-hand evidence that the Negroes* position is justified, that the South was no
worse off nor more corrupt during Reconstruction than was the rest of the country.**
Ralph J. Bunche is one Negro author who has probably struck a balanced picture ol
the Reconstruction period.® He points out that there was no “black domination” but
* Alien Americans (1936), pp. 1 1 2- 1 1 3.
**
For a discussion of historians of the Reconstruction by a Negro, see A. A. Taylor,
“Historians of the Reconstruction,” The Journal of Negro History (January, 1938), pp.
18-24.
*Sce, for example, Kelly Miller, Out of the House of Bondage (1914)9 pp. 116-117}
Robert R. Moton, What the Negro Thinks (1929), pp. 128-130.
^ White and Black in the United States (1879), pp. 176-1 80.
•
“The Political Status of the Negro,” unpublished manuscript prepared for this study
(1940), Vol. 1, pp. 220-240.
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