Eric Foner Quote
The fundamental underpinning of this interpretation was the conviction, to quote one member of the Dunning School, of negro incapacity. The childlike blacks, these scholars insisted, were unprepared for freedom and incapable of properly exercising the political rights Northerners had thrust upon them. The fact that blacks took part in government, wrote E. Merton Coulter in the last full-scale history of Reconstruction written entirely within the Dunning tradition, was a diabolical development, to be remembered, shuddered at, and execrated. Yet while these works abounded in horrified references to negro rule and negro government, blacks in fact played little role in the narratives. Their aspirations, if mentioned at all, were ridiculed, and their role in shaping the course of events during Reconstruction ignored. When these writers spoke of the South or the people, they meant whites. Blacks appeared either as passive victims of white manipulation or as an unthinking people whose animal natures threatened the stability of civilized society.2
The fundamental underpinning of this interpretation was the conviction, to quote one member of the Dunning School, of negro incapacity. The childlike blacks, these scholars insisted, were unprepared for freedom and incapable of properly exercising the political rights Northerners had thrust upon them. The fact that blacks took part in government, wrote E. Merton Coulter in the last full-scale history of Reconstruction written entirely within the Dunning tradition, was a diabolical development, to be remembered, shuddered at, and execrated. Yet while these works abounded in horrified references to negro rule and negro government, blacks in fact played little role in the narratives. Their aspirations, if mentioned at all, were ridiculed, and their role in shaping the course of events during Reconstruction ignored. When these writers spoke of the South or the people, they meant whites. Blacks appeared either as passive victims of white manipulation or as an unthinking people whose animal natures threatened the stability of civilized society.2
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About Eric Foner
Foner has published several books on the Reconstruction period, starting with
Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 in 1988. His online courses on "The Civil War and Reconstruction", published in 2014, are available from Columbia University on ColumbiaX.
In 2011, Foner's The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2010) won the Pulitzer Prize for History, the Lincoln Prize, and the Bancroft Prize. Foner previously won the Bancroft Prize in 1989 for his book Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution - 1863–1877. In 2000, he was elected president of the American Historical Association. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018.