LAUSR

William Dunning has a great deal to answer for. He trained generations of historians to view Reconstruction as misguided: vengeful in its policies toward the Southern states and foolhardy in its attempts to treat black men and women as equal to white. In doing so, he licensed even more negative conceptions of the period in popular culture and in the popular mind: the idea of Reconstruction as a time when white men were prohibited from voting while black men were encouraged to vote twice; when African American legislators cracked peanuts and sipped whiskey on the statehouse floor as they passed laws legalizing interracial marriage; when carpetbaggers seduced ignorant freedmen to join the Republican Party with promises of 40 acres and a mule. Unwittingly, Dunning also encouraged literary scholars to ignore Reconstruction almost entirely. The first literary histories were published on the occasion of the nation’s centenary, and it’s not surprising that they had little, as yet, to say about the recently fought Civil War and the recently concluded Reconstruction. By the time literary histories were ready to consider the latter part of the nineteenth century, then, the Dunning School had become dominant. Literary scholars took it for granted that Reconstruction had been a mistake—and that little of value was published during those years. The Cambridge History of American Literature (1907–1921) was typical in proclaiming that “[t]he conditions of Reconstruction were inimical to the production of literature” (Miles 313). One consequence of this was a long series of literary histories, including such important ones as Robert E. Spiller’s Literary History of the United States (1948) and Emory Elliott’s Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988), that either dismiss the period or fail to mention it at all. Another consequence was a tendency to divide the