How a Group of 19th-Century Historians Helped Relativize the Violent Legacy of Slavery

The man who ultimately did the most to make American slavery a subject of southern social and economic history was Frederick Jackson Turner’s student and colleague Ulrich Bonnell Phillips. During his career, Phillips became the first professional historian of American slavery, writing books and articles in the early decades of the twentieth century that redefined the way the subject was studied. Despite, or perhaps because of, their frank statements about Black inferiority and the beneficence of slavery, they stood as the standard histories until the 1950s. Even today, their influence lingers.

Phillips first met Turner in the summer of 1898, when Phillips was a twenty-year-old student working on a master’s degree in history at the University of Georgia. Upon learning that Turner was offering a course of lectures at the University of Chicago, he rushed off to listen. It was probably his first trip outside the South, and it proved to be a life-changing experience.

Phillips had been born in 1877 in Troup County, Georgia, in a region that W. E. B. Du Bois once called “the centre of the Negro problem,—the centre of those nine million men who are America’s dark heritage from slavery and the slave-trade.” His parents originally named him Ulysses, but at some point he decided that his given name was too closely associated with Ulysses S. Grant and had it changed. Before the Civil War, the Phillips family had owned some two dozen slaves along with fifteen hundred acres of land. After the war, with slavery over, the family had trouble making ends meet. Phillips’s father worked odd jobs, and his mother had to earn money as a seamstress.

In the fall of 1893, the gangly, fifteen-year-old Phillips arrived at the University of Georgia and soon came under the influence of a professor named John McPherson. Educated at Hopkins, where he wrote a dissertation on the African colonization movement, McPherson was now busily making Georgia’s History Department into a replica of what he had experienced in Baltimore, complete with spacious history rooms, research alcoves, and a departmental library.

Phillips walked into those rooms during his second year and absorbed a passion for history. He was soon allowed to teach the freshmen and to serve as assistant librarian, helping to collect and catalogue historical documents. He pored over so many faded manuscripts and newspapers that he had to spend a semester recovering from eyestrain—a semester he spent on a cotton plantation. This devotion to research in original sources stuck with him all his life.

It may have been McPherson who first alerted Phillips to Turner’s summer course of lectures at Chicago in 1898: McPherson and Turner had attended Hopkins together a decade earlier. Little evidence from the initial encounter between Phillips and Turner survives, but the men must have made an immediate impression on each other. The following year, they corresponded about Phillips’s master’s thesis, “State Rights in Georgia.” Turner encouraged Phillips to focus on “social origins and economic characteristics” rather than pure politics. Phillips diligently mapped elections county by county to figure out the social and economic fault lines across the state.

Turner and Phillips also discussed where Phillips should go for his PhD. A generation earlier, a person in his position would have sailed for Germany without hesitation. But by the late 1890s, the prestige of US universities had begun to eclipse those in Germany. Johns Hopkins had entered a period of decline, but John William Burgess at Columbia had built up the best department in the country, one that would go on to produce more history doctorates than any other school over the next three decades. Moreover, one of Burgess’s younger associates, William Dunning, had just made a name for himself with his Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction. Phillips chose Columbia and headed to New York to work with Dunning.

Today, Dunning has become synonymous with historical racism for his negative portrayal of Reconstruction, and perhaps even more for the way his students—the so-called Dunning School—demonized northerners and Blacks while lionizing white southerners. In his own lifetime, however, Dunning was known as a pragmatist and a joker who cultivated a healthy skepticism of all historical accounts. Older historians like von Holst and Burgess may have felt the need, as Dunning once wrote, to be “tendenziös (I think that’s it) for affect on the rising generation; so that the citizens of the U.S. should not go to cutting one another’s throats again too soon.” But more than a generation since the Civil War, he believed that those considerations no longer applied. “We kids are living in the time of calm reflection,” as he cheerfully put it, “when ‘What’s the use?’ sums up the creed of all true philosophical historical students.”

This attitude was not just a pose. Later on, Dunning would become president of the American Historical Association. In his presidential address, called “Truth in History,” he provided the philosophical justification for his easygoing attitude of acceptance. Characteristically, he cared most about the jokes—“All the jokes caught on,” he told his wife after his talk—but he also made an important point about his pragmatic approach to history. He believed that it was not the historian’s job to congratulate himself for showing people in the past to have been mistaken, or to celebrate the supposed moral superiority of the present. Instead, the historian’s task was simply to uncover how people had lived and what beliefs had motivated their actions. “Whether these ideas were true or were false, according to the standards of any other period, has nothing to do with the matter,” Dunning declared. “That they were the ideas which underlay the activities of the men of this time, is all that concerns the work of the historian.” In other words, the historian should not care whether past practices and beliefs—the enslavement of human beings, say, or the theory of Black inferiority—were right or wrong. That was beside the point.

Dunning was generally regarded as the most intelligent man in any room—but he often wished to escape the room. He had been expelled from the first college he attended, Dartmouth, for participating in freshman pranks, but then graduated from Columbia with nearly perfect marks in every subject. “In my inmost heart,” he wrote in his journal during graduate school, “I think I should like to retire from this quest of learning, take a refined & congenial girl, & settle down in life.” It would help, he added, if the girl had “a little—only a little—money.”

Dunning buckled down, finished his degree, and then remained at Columbia for the rest of his life, receiving his PhD in 1885 and an academic appointment in 1886, after a year’s sojourn in Germany. By the 1890s, he had become an established scholar. He was starting work on what he considered his magnum opus, a massive, three-volume History of Political Theories that took him twenty years and covered everything from Plato to the present. “I have been so exclusively devoted to Kant lately,” he once wrote, “that I don’t even feel sure there ever was a Civil War or Reconstruction.”

Yet it was Dunning’s Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction that defined his career and his reputation. One of the first scholarly attempts to delve into the constitutional and political history of the Civil War and its aftermath, the book described Reconstruction as misguided and claimed that it ended in disaster. Dunning believed that it was “reckless” to give political power to Black southerners, but his essays were not devoted entirely to denouncing the Negro-loving North. He also showed genuine admiration for the complex political and administrative work of Reconstruction, calling it “one of the most remarkable achievements in the history of government.”

On the whole, however, the keynote of Dunning’s collection was that Reconstruction failed because it attempted to legislate equality between races that he saw as unequal. A few years later, he wrote a new essay, “The Undoing of Reconstruction,” which appeared in the Atlantic in 1901 and was included as the final chapter in future editions of his Essays. In the brief time since Dunning had completed the first version of his Essays, in 1897, the United States had fought the Spanish-American War and acquired new overseas territories in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam. It had quickly become apparent that governing these territories would not be easy, especially in the Philippines, where warfare continued for years as the United States attempted to subdue an independence movement. This suggested to Dunning an instructive parallel with the South.

In the Philippines and other overseas territories, he thought, the United States was encountering the same problem the South had faced throughout its history: “the coexistence in one society of two races so distinct in characteristics as to render coalescence impossible.” In the South, he explained, slavery had provided a solution to that problem, but slavery was not its source—a distinction that was forgotten, he believed, during “the abolitionist fever.” With slavery gone, he went on, “its place must be taken by some set of conditions which, if more humane and beneficent in accidents, must in essence express the same fact of racial inequality.” This was what white southerners had accomplished in rolling back Reconstruction and implementing white supremacy. In the wake of the country’s resort to similar solutions abroad, Dunning believed that the North would now be more willing to endorse them at home as well.

Dunning’s work helped turn the Faculty of Political Science at Columbia into a center for scholarship sympathetic to the South. Droves of white southerners, including Phillips, came to study with him. According to Dunning’s pragmatic view of history, these southerners could write as if from Charleston while northerners wrote as if from Boston, and capital-T Truth (if such a thing existed) would work its way out somewhere in the middle. Was this an abdication of moral responsibility? Absolutely.

The work of Dunning and his students, which demonstrated the supposedly deplorable effects of allowing Black Americans to wield political power, would be used to prop up Jim Crow for years to come. But it’s important to remember that Dunning and his students largely reflected the common sense of the South and to some extent the nation in the decades after Reconstruction ended; they did not create it. As Dunning joked to a friend in 1901, “The only way in which a man can attract any attention now” in writing about Reconstruction would be to “take the ground that the whole business was ethically, socially, and politically right.”

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Excerpted from Making Sense of Slavery: America’s Long Reckoning, from the Founding Era to Today by Scott Spillman. Copyright © 2025. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.