The era of Reconstruction has proved to be both troublesome and fascinating for historians and novelists alike. Historians have never agreed upon what life in the South was like during Reconstruction, nor are they likely to. One group has looked upon the era as the rape of the South, in which a coalition of armed soldiers, illiterate blacks, unscrupulous whites from both North and South, and irresponsible Radical politicians stripped native white Southerners of their property and their votes, turning the area into a lawless wasteland. Others have found admirable motives in the various members of that coalition and have suggested that their era was progressive. Economic considerations were more important than moral convictions, some have argued; the South experienced both accomplishments and setbacks under the Reconstruction governments. Others have emphasized the brevity of the era, its significance in a national context, and even its relationship to the racial problems in the United States in the mid-twentieth century.¹

The ten years between 1895 and 1905, an era of social ferment in the South that recalled some of the problems of Reconstruction, coincided with a kind of renaissance in Southern letters. A study of the six novelists who wrote about Reconstruction during this decade reveals the variety and even progression of attitudes among Southerners toward a most complex period in their history. For a generation George W. Cable had been blending the real and the fanciful in his stories about life in New Orleans, but realism in Southern literature began in earnest with the publication of Ellen Glasgow's first novel in 1897. Thomas Nelson Page attempted to defend the aristocrats whose defeat at the end of the century was more imminent than it had been at the end of the war, whereas Thomas Dixon, Jr., and Joel Chandler Harris emerged with two very different messages about the role of black people in Southern society. John S. Wise, the son of a governor of Virginia, used the era of Reconstruction as a background against which he spoke out in behalf of the Republican Party in the South. No two of these authors agreed in their interpretations, and no two wrote from precisely the same motives. Yet all were natives of the South, and all, with the exception of Ellen Glasgow, lived during the Reconstruction years.

The proliferation of Southern writers after 1895 is only one of the factors that account for this sudden interest and variety of opinion about Reconstruction. The whole political, social, and economic atmosphere of the South was in a state of turmoil. Industrialism was finally coming to Dixie, and with the advent of the Spanish-American War the South once again began to think of herself as a part of the United States. Artists felt the need to justify the ways of the South to the life of the nation; the psychic hurt left in the hearts of a defeated people sought expression in their literature. The day of the aristocrat yielded to the day of the large landowners who had been outside the aristocratic planter group and their “redneck” followers. On the heels of Populism the representatives of a white man's democracy were swept into the Southern state capitols. Beginning in Mississippi in 1890, some Southern states began to write new constitutions to replace those that had been drawn up during Reconstruction. The most obvious victim was the black man, whose vote was denied him by imaginative clauses deliberately written into the new documents. Prior to 1890, the racial problem, though unsettled, did not occupy the minds of white Southerners so completely as it did after 1890.² With the new breed of politicians interested in totally eliminating the black electorate, disfranchisement triumphed, and Jim Crow laws gradually began to appear among Southern statutes. …

An apostle of racial hatred [appeared] … in the person of a Baptist minister from North Carolina who burned with a blind passion to tell the “true” story of Reconstruction. Thomas Dixon, Jr., was a man obsessed. In his prefaces, speeches, and letters, he made more elaborate claims to historical truth than any of the other novelists, and he fell shorter of the mark. Eloquent as a speaker and dramatic as a writer, he penned a trilogy about Reconstruction that became a popular expression of the worst aspects of racism in the early part of the twentieth century. The Leopard's Spots, The Clansman, and The Traitor made more history than they recorded.

Born in Shelby, North Carolina, near the end of the Civil War, Dixon grew up in abject poverty during Reconstruction and was impressed as a child by the uncertain movements of the freedmen, a terrifying midnight appearance of the Ku Klux Klan, and the bizarre assortment of lawmakers he saw when he visited the South Carolina legislature. He attended Wake Forest College, the Baptist institution of higher learning in North Carolina, where he established an outstanding record but graduated as an agnostic. Little more than a drifter who was uncannily successful at almost everything he attempted, he was a graduate student at the Johns Hopkins University, an actor in New York City, and a very young state representative in North Carolina, before he finally yielded to internal and familial pressures to become a Baptist minister, a career which took him to Boston and New York for almost a decade. Eventually he turned from the Baptist church and became non-sectarian. Infuriated by a lecture he heard in Boston in 1887 on “The Southern Problem,” Dixon began to study the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction, determined to tell the world the “truth” about the South.³

Fifteen years later, The Leopard's Spots became the first volume of his incendiary trilogy about Reconstruction. Subtitled “A Romance of the White Man's Burden, 1865-1900,” the novel assumed an uncompromising stance of white supremacy and treated life in the Piedmont section of North Carolina as typical of the entire South. The theme of the story—expressed time and again, always in italics, and taken straight out of proslavery apologias—is that the black and white races cannot live together as equals in a free society: “In a Democracy you cannot build a nation inside of a nation of two antagonistic races; and therefore the future American must be either an Anglo-Saxon or a Mulatto. And if a Mulatto, will the future be worth discussing?” The Negro is described as “a possible Beast” and “a veritable Black Death” which was released during Reconstruction to pollute the Anglo-Saxon race. Reconstruction brought about “the complete alienation of the white and black races as compared with the old familiar trust of domestic life.” Without hope for reconciliation, according to Dixon, the only solution was total and absolute separation of the races. “The only serious liberty I have taken with history,” Dixon alleged in a “Historical Note” at the beginning of his novel, “is to tone down the facts to make them credible in fiction.”⁴

Dixon was writing when the United States was trying to subdue the people of the Philippine Islands, an experience which seemed to deaden the American conscience to the rights of people of color and whetted the public appetite for literature about “the white man's burden.”⁵ This may be one reason The Leopard's Spots was so popular; eventually it sold more than one million copies and was translated into numerous foreign languages. Reviewers either praised or condemned it; they were rarely indifferent. Those who liked it gleefully suggested that it was an answer to Uncle Tom's Cabin. But one hostile reviewer said of Dixon: “Humanity claims him not as one of her children.” Another dared to suggest that Dixon might learn something from studying the lives and works of W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington.⁶ Dixon did not learn anything, however; The Leopard's Spots was little more than a preview to the second and most notorious volume of the trilogy, The Clansman, published in 1904.

Dixon claimed that The Clansman contained “both the letter and the spirit of this remarkable period” from 1865 through 1870. The subtitle is “An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan,” and the thesis is that the Klan saved the South in her darkest hour in what was “one of the most dramatic chapters in the history of the Aryan race.”⁷ Black rule was the order of the day in the South. Negro troops arrested and abused whites and exuded their “African odour” in the “open air” of the town square. They even persecuted their fellow blacks who attempted to remain faithful to the old masters. When Jake, a faithful freedman, was denied the privilege of voting, he asked the black judge, “Ain't I er nigger?” The judge replied, “But yer ain't de right kin' er nigger. 'Res' dat man fer 'sturbin' de peace.”⁸ Even more dramatically than in the earlier novel, black men are presented as rapists, and one white victim of such an attack committed suicide rather than attempt to live with the humiliation. The rapist was identified in a most bizarre manner, and the Ku Klux Klan quickly murdered him.

To give the Klan dignity, Dixon related it to the ancient Scottish clan whose members stuck together fiercely in the face of a common foe. Scottish blood flowed in Dixon's veins, and many of the settlers in the Carolina back country had been fighting Calvinists. Dixon elevated the Klan to religious significance; it was the powerful agent of the good, the pure, and the just, engaged in combat to the death with evil in what Dixon freely described as the “war of races.” The existence and techniques of the Klan were wholly justified, according to Dixon, if whites were to be protected from atrocities “too monstrous for belief.”⁹ In the third volume of his trilogy, The Traitor, published in 1907 and subtitled “A Story of the Fall of the Invisible Empire,” Dixon again defended the Klan as “the sole guardian of white civilization.”¹⁰ Yet the tone was more subdued than in the earlier novels, and Dixon argued that justification for the existence of the Klan ended with the collapse of “black rule” in the South.

Notes

1. Arthur S. Link and Rembert W. Patrick, Writing Southern History (Baton Rouge, 1965), pp. 295-315, contains a comprehensive essay on Reconstruction historiography by Vernon L. Wharton; see also Rembert W. Patrick, The Reconstruction of the Nation (New York, 1967), and C. Vann Woodward, “From the First Reconstruction to the Second,” Harper's Magazine, 230 (April 1965), 127-33.

2. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 2d rev. ed. (New York, 1966), pp. 31-44.

3. Raymond Allen Cook, Fire from the Flint: The Amazing Careers of Thomas Dixon (Winston-Salem, 1968), pp. 9-34, 58, 71.

4. The Leopard's Spots (New York), pp. 333 (see also pp. 242, 382, 390, 409, 433), and 5, 3, 200, x.

5. W. A. Johnson, “The Case of the Negro,” Dial, 34 (1 May 1903), 301.

6. Cook, pp. 112, 114; Sutton E. Griggs, The Hindered Hand; or, The Reign of the Repressionist, 3d ed. rev. (Nashville, 1905), pp. 332-33; cited in Cook, p. 115; Johnson, p. 301.

7. The Clansman (New York, 1907 [1905]), Preface.

8. Ibid., pp. 218, 219, 229, 246, 251.

9. Ibid., pp. 342, 357, 290.

10. The Traitor (New York, 1907), p. 230.