The Dunning School, named for Columbia University historian William Archibald Dunning and dominant in American historiography from roughly the 1900s through the mid-twentieth century, characterized Reconstruction governments as radical impositions by carpetbaggers and scalawags on a South that was being unfairly punished, propped up by uneducated and corrupt Black voters and officeholders who were incapable of governing. This narrative was not simply a historical interpretation; it was the intellectual foundation of the Jim Crow system’s self-justification and of the political resistance to Black civil rights that persisted through the twentieth century.
The scholarly demolition of this narrative has been proceeding since at least W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, published in 1935, and has continued through the work of Eric Foner, John Hope Franklin, and a generation of subsequent historians who examined the actual records of Reconstruction governments rather than the characterizations of their opponents.
What the records show is that Reconstruction governments in South Carolina and other states accomplished significant work: they built public school systems, reformed legal codes, established charitable institutions, improved infrastructure, and in South Carolina specifically, passed legislation that benefited poor white residents as well as Black residents. The corruption that existed — and some corruption did exist, as it existed in state governments across the country in the same period, including Northern states run entirely by white politicians — was not exceptional by the standards of the Gilded Age. The Tweed Ring’s corruption in New York was more extensive than anything documented in South Carolina’s Reconstruction government.