This week I continue to look at the period following the Civil War known as Reconstruction. Last week I presented a defense of Reconstruction, though noting that it offered far more than it accomplished. Today I address the issue of how the history of Reconstruction was shaped and molded from the beginning almost exclusively by Confederate sympathizers.
I was taking Arkansas history in the seventh grade in 1960 when I was introduced to the history of Reconstruction. My textbook, which I still own, was The Story of Arkansas by Hazel Presson, my revised edition having been published in Little Rock in 1948. Mrs. Presson certainly had no sympathy with Reconstruction or the newly freed black citizens.
Here is how Presson described the creation of the Ku Klux Klan: "The people of Arkansas had no legal way of stopping these lawless bands of Negroes, and the horrible deeds continued. In most of the Southern States the carpetbaggers had secured control of the government by unfair elections and had aroused the colored people to villainy. Finally, the citizens of the States formed an organization to try to scare the Negroes and carpetbaggers into being good. This organization was called the Ku-Klux Klan ..."
At age 13, I was too young to question Presson's textbook, but as my study of Arkansas history deepened through the years, I discovered that Hazel Presson was merely one in a flood of Southern textbook authors who painted Reconstruction in starkly biased ways. It turns out that Clio, the muse of history, wore a laurel of cotton blossoms.
In 1996, Professor Fred A. Bailey of Abilene Christian University published an article in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly which detailed the means employed by upper class whites in Arkansas and throughout the south to shape the telling of Reconstruction history. Bailey described "a grand Southern scheme to secure in the hearts and minds of the region's youth the victories denied in the military defeat of 1865 and to immunize these future voters against democratic reforms which threatened the South's ruling class."
Various Confederate "patriotic societies" played huge roles in building this cult of the Lost Cause. The United Confederate Veterans, and later the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans, promoted the writing of histories, erecting monuments and statues, and sponsoring reunions.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy [UDC] were especially active in Arkansas in shaping public perception of the Civil War and Reconstruction. One leader of the Arkansas UDC wrote in 1904: "It devolves upon us to examine and know what sort of history and history teachers are influencing our children." She urged that children be "guarded from false shame as to the political actions of their ancestors."
Perhaps the most prominent Arkansas historian to adopt the lost cause was Dallas T. Herndon, the long-tenured founding director of the Arkansas History Commission -- and prolific author of two multi-volume histories of Arkansas. Herndon was hired in part because he was "a southern man." His ancestors had been wealthy landowners with many enslaved servants. Herndon served as state historian and director of the History Commission from its founding in 1911 to 1953.
Herndon contacted the Arkansas Division of the United Confederate Veterans within weeks of his employment, acknowledging his belief in the "heroic deeds of our fathers." He also formed a close working relationship with the UDC.
By 1923, the Daughters were able to leverage their considerable political clout to get a state appropriation of $2,500 to publish "a true history of the war." They chose University of Arkansas professor of history David Y. Thomas to do the work. Thomas was a highly regarded historian who had studied under William A. Dunning at Columbia University. Dunning's pro-Confederate sympathies were inculcated into a phalanx of young students, including D.Y. Thomas.
Regardless of his intellectual assumptions, Thomas was a principled and experienced historian, and he chaffed under the constant oversight by the UDC. In December 1923 he complained to the UDC President that despite her assurance "I was to have a free hand in writing...I understand that this [oversight] committee is to supervise the work, perhaps censor it."
Among the directives from the UDC was this: "I would like to say, in the beginning that the expression 'Civil War' cannot be used." She said the issue had been settled since the UDC "has decided that for us, and we are to say 'war between the states,' whether we like it or not." It is not surprising that Thomas' book Arkansas in War and Reconstruction, 1861-1874 (published by the UDC in 1926) viewed Reconstruction as "the nightmare of carpetbag-negro rule."
After his retirement from the University of Arkansas, in 1942 Thomas collaborated with Hazel Presson to write the first edition of The Story of Arkansas -- the same textbook which taught me in 1960 that the KKK was established during Reconstruction to "scare the Negroes and carpetbaggers into being good."
Tom Dillard is a historian and retired archivist living in rural Hot Spring County. Email him at Arktopia.td@gmail.com.
Editorial on 08/02/2015