Ohio History Journal

James Ford Rhodes And the Negro A STUDY IN THE PROBLEM OF OBJECTIVITY

by ROBERT CRUDEN The continuing debate among historians as to the scientific nature of their discipline involves, as a basic element, the problem of objectivity. Is it possible for history to be objective in the sense that the physical and biologi- cal sciences are objective: namely, that its findings "do not depend in any important sense on the personal idiosyncrasies or private feelings of those who reach them, but are marked by a process in which complete abstraction is made from these"?1 If so, by what standards may we determine its objectivity? The purpose of this article is to examine some of the factors involved in these questions as they emerge from a study of the work of one of America's most noted historians, James Ford Rhodes. To pinpoint the issue, discussion is limited to that aspect of Rhodes's writings in which the problems are most clearly delineated: namely, Rhodes's treatment of the role of the Negro in the period of which he wrote, 1850 to 1877. Rhodes, it may be recalled, was the prosperous Cleveland businessman (one of his partners was his brother-in-law, Mark Hanna) who, in middle NOTES ARE ON PAGES 198-199

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age, turned to the writing of history with such success that his interpretations

of the Civil War and Reconstruction strongly influenced American thought

in the generation prior to World War I. Even today, two of the most eminent

of American historians, Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager,

believe that his seven-volume History of the United States from the Com-

promise of 1850 to the Final Restoration of Home Rule at the South in

18772 "is still the best detailed history of that period although shot full of

holes by the research of the last fifty years." They commend his treatment

of Reconstruction as "notably impartial."3

That phrase admirably sums up Rhodes's own appraisal of his work.

Although he thought of himself as a literary rather than scientific historian,

he insisted that in writing his History he sought "to get rid so far as possible

of all preconceived notions and theories," for, as he said,

 

such is the constitution of the human mind, or at any rate my own, that as I

went through the mass of my material I would have seized upon all the facts

that made for my theory and marshalled them in its support while those that

told against it I would have unconsciously and undoubtedly quite honestly

neglected.4

He was persuaded that in dealing with the Negro, he was, as he put it, "an

earnest seeker after truth, . . . trying to hold a judicial balance and to tell

the story without fear, favor or prejudice."5

In this belief Rhodes was confirmed by the almost unanimous verdict of

his contemporaries, both lay and scholarly. When Albert Shaw, editor of

the Review of Reviews, praised Rhodes's work as "like finality itself" he

summarized similar comments by such diverse figures as Theodore Roose-

velt, Gamaliel Bradford, and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and by

such disparate publications as The World's Work and the International

Socialist Review.⁶ Woodrow Wilson's judgment that Rhodes's History was

"perhaps the finest piece of historical writing yet done by an American,"

represented, in extreme degree, the conclusions of other historians, including

Albert Bushnell Hart, Edward Channing, William E. Dodd, and Frederic

L. Paxson.⁷ The awesome confidence of the American public in Rhodes's

fairness, objectivity, and integrity is demonstrated with almost embarrassing

frankness in a letter to Rhodes from John T. Morse, Jr., the editor of the

American Statesmen series:

 

You are absolutely the most fair-minded man who ever dealt with matters of

controversy. . . . Of course you manage to infuse a certain kindliness and

gentle mercy into your justice, as we are told that God does--(though I would

rather trust you than him).8

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Much the same opinion of Rhodes's work was entertained by such distin-

guished English historians as Samuel R. Gardiner, W. E. H. Lecky, and

Charles Harding Firth.⁹

Yet Rhodes it was who set it down as "scientific truth" that Negroes

constituted "one of the most inferior races of mankind."¹⁰ Capable of only

limited mental development, they early in life turned aside from intellectual

to sensual pursuits; incapable of love or affection, they showed that a lack

of chastity was "a natural inclination of the African race."¹¹ Much of the

horror of slavery was mitigated by the fact that the griefs of the Negro were

transient.¹² As to public morality, wherever the Negro had been given

political freedom he had shown himself "greedy for office and emolument,"

while demonstrating both indifference to movements for political reform

and incapacity for matters of government.13 The history of the race indicated

that it had contributed little to human progress.¹⁴

It followed, then, that Reconstruction was not only a failure but also "an

attack upon civilization," for it was essentially an effort to impose upon a

highly developed Anglo-Saxon culture the rule of this "ignorant mass of

an alien race," a rule made all the worse because it embraced also "knavish

white natives and the vulturous adventurers who flocked from the North."15

As Rhodes saw it, "Intelligence and property stood bound and helpless

under negro-carpet-bag rule" while Negro legislators and their depraved

white allies wrote a "sickening tale of extravagance, waste, corruption and

fraud."16 Despite the frequently devious and violent means used by the

enemies of the Reconstruction governments, the eventual overthrow of such

governments was a development at which "all lovers of good government

must rejoice."¹⁷ This interpretation became almost standard among his-

torians, and, as has been noted, even in our own day some historians find it

"notably impartial."

Use of the racial formula led Rhodes to quite different conclusions about

Anglo-Saxons. American greatness, he wrote, was due basically to the

energetic and independent character of the people, deriving from their

Protestant Anglo-Saxon forbears.¹⁸ During the Civil War, northern Demo-

crats showed the Anglo-Saxon sense of political responsibility; the Union

troops at Gettysburg displayed Anglo-Saxon zeal in defense of the home-

land.¹⁹ The Anglo-Saxon spirit of resistance to oppression helped explain

why the Confederacy fought so courageously,²⁰ Anglo-Saxon respect for

law, on the other hand, was symbolized in the career of Abraham Lincoln.²¹

Lincoln's plan for reconstruction displayed Anglo-Saxon practicality, while

that of Senator Sumner "smacked of the logic of the French."²² As for

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southern Anglo-Saxons, Rhodes fully endorsed the description of them by

Senator George F. Hoar of Massachusetts:

 

They are a noble race. . . . Their love of home; their chivalrous respect for

women; their courage; their delicate sense of honor; their constancy . . . are

things by which the people of the more mercurial North may take a lesson.

And there is another thing--covetousness, corruption, the low temptation of

money has not yet found any place in our Southern politics.²³

 

So much for the racial content of Rhodes's History. Let us briefly

examine Rhodes's use of sources.

First, he relied almost entirely on white sources for his treatment of the

role of the Negro: white scientists, white magazines (particularly The

Nation), and white newspapers. To be sure, the Negro press of the day was

not the extensive enterprise that it is today, but there were some Negro

newspapers available for the period, and certainly after 1870 there was a

steady growth in the number of such newspapers.²⁴ Rhodes showed no

familiarity with them at all. Likewise, he paid no attention to the proceed-

ings of the various public bodies of the Reconstruction governments, pre-

ferring to rely on second-hand accounts by unsympathetic white observers.²⁵

When Negro sources were called to his attention, such as the works of

John R. Lynch and Kelly Miller, he refused to read them on the grounds

that they were partisan and controversial.²⁶

Second, Rhodes chose to accept only certain types of white testimony.

Thus in the conflict between the reports of U. S. Grant and Carl Schurz on

conditions in the postwar South, he believed Grant rather than Schurz

because the general "possessed one of those minds which often attain to

correct judgments without knowing the how and the why."²⁷ Likewise, in

the conflict between the majority and minority reports of the Ku Klux Klan

committee he chose to accept that of the Democratic minority, for, as he

put it,

 

the minority report comes nearer to the truth. At many points the Republican

document halts and boggles. . . . Consciousness of a bad cause may be read

between the lines. . . . While the Democrats attempt to prove too much, . . .

they are straightforward and aggressive with the consciousness of a cause based

on the eternal principles of nature and justice.²⁸

 

Much of Rhodes's treatment of Reconstruction in South Carolina was

based on The Prostrate State by James S. Pike, although one might expect

an historian "trying to hold a judicial balance" to exercise caution in

accepting uncritically the reports of a newspaperman who believed that "a

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large majority of all the voting citizens of the state are habitually guilty of

thieving and of concubinage."²⁹ Also, had Rhodes been more careful, he

might have discovered that Pike, a year before he set foot in South Carolina,

had written for the New York Tribune an article which "made practically

every major point he made" in the book, which, of course, purported to be

a first-hand eyewitness account.30 In any case, Pike's testimony was flatly

contradicted by General Oliver O. Howard, head of the freedmen's bureau

and a man with some experience in the postwar South. Rhodes, however,

rejected Howard's testimony as "another of these extraordinary apologies

for ignorance when covered by a black skin."³¹ Perhaps the same reasoning

explains his passing over James G. Blaine's tribute to the integrity of Negro

congressmen and senators, although otherwise he drew heavily upon Blaine

for his discussion of postwar politics.³²

These examples have been cited, not to discredit Rhodes, but to point up

the problems raised in this article: How could an historian who honestly

strove to tell the story without fear, favor, or prejudice have fallen so far

short of what we conceive to be basic standards of objectivity? And perhaps

even more important, how can one account for the tribute paid to his work

by historical scholars on the grounds that it was almost godlike in its

objectivity?

There are many explanations why Rhodes fell short of his own ideal of

objectivity. He lacked professional historical training, and indeed, appar-

ently believed that if a person possessed such attributes as diligence, accur-

acy, love of truth, and impartiality, training was not really necessary.³³

It is not surprising, then, that he showed only dim awareness of problems

of methodology and interpretation.

Also, and perhaps more important, Rhodes did not possess a keen,

inquiring mind. Study of his work, as well as the testimony of those who

knew him personally, shows that he shrank from analysis of the personal

feelings and attitudes of people, including his own.³⁴  It is hardly to be

wondered at, then, that he did not succeed as well as he believed in divesting

himself of "preconceived notions and theories," particularly since he did

not fully appreciate the various influences which shaped his conscious

thought.

Paramount among these was his father, Daniel P. Rhodes, who played a

decisive role in determining James's upbringing, education, and choice of

business vocation.35 Daniel was a militant Democrat in the Civil War period,

a political campaigner for Clement L. Vallandigham, a man who objected

to Mark Hanna because, in his view, young Hanna was "a damned screecher

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for freedom."³⁶ James said he drank in his father's opinions "eagerly."37

In this context it is easy to understand why young James, on a trip to the

South in 1872, had only to look at the "faces and manners" of the Negroes

to understand why southern whites were fearful of "robbery, killing, burn-

ing and rape."38

On a more conscious level, Rhodes, like most middle-class Americans of

his day, was deeply influenced by Herbert Spencer. He himself explained

that he was not "emancipated" from Spencer until he was in his forties, but

Rhodes's emancipation was more fancied than real.³⁹ He accepted Spencer's

basic concepts of survival of the fittest and of racial evolution which pro-

duced superior and inferior varieties of the human race, and in his History

he frequently cited Spencer as an authority.⁴⁰

Of equal significance, perhaps, was the influence of Edwin L. Godkin,

editor of The Nation, a journal which Rhodes read religiously from youth

to old age.⁴¹ As Rhodes put it, "his influence was abiding. . . . Godkin

preached to us every week a timely and cogent sermon."42 For his treat-

ment of Reconstruction, Rhodes relied heavily upon The Nation, which, he

said, provided "excellent historical material."⁴³ Godkin's attitudes may

be gathered from his reference to leaders of Reconstruction governments as

"rogues" and "ignorant thieves" and his endorsement of segregation in

schools, together with his recommendation to Negroes that they earn the

respect of white men while reconciling themselves to the fact that "most of

the work has to be done by the lower class."44

Apart from such specific influences, Rhodes's approach to matters of

race was deeply colored by the accepted opinion of his own day, that period

which Rayford Logan has so aptly named the nadir of the Negro in Ameri-

can life and thought. Rhodes matured in a society the dominant cultural

theme of which he himself outlined: "It was an age of science--the era of

Darwin and Spencer, of Huxley and Tyndall. The influence of heredity and

the great fact of race was better understood than ever before."⁴⁵ Rhodes

was especially impressed by the arguments of Louis Agassiz, who testified

that "from the very character of the negro race" social equality with whites

was a "natural impossibility." Historically, wrote Agassiz, the Negroes had

remained at a low sensual level; they "groped in barbarism and never

originated a regular organization among themselves."46 To this Rhodes

added: "What the whole country has only learned through years of costly

and bitter experience was known to this leader of scientific thought before

we ventured on the policy of trying to make negroes intelligent by legislative

acts."47

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JAMES FORD RHODES AND THE NEGRO                                  135

 

Such attitudes explain in part Rhodes's cavalier treatment of sources

favorable to the Negro; it must be added that his treatment also sprang from

his conception of the historian as judge rather than inquiring scholar.

In his opinion, the most important quality of the historian was the judicial,

not the inquiring, mind.⁴⁸ As judge, the historian evaluated the evidence

placed before him--and in Rhodes's case this was literally true, for much

of his research was done by others.⁴⁹ Evidence which the judge deemed false

or prejudiced, he rejected; the honest testimony of honest men, he accepted.

It did not occur to him that such testimony, when rooted in preconceptions

as to race shared by the judge, might also be false or prejudiced or only

partly true.

Further, the historian, as judge, was not to go beyond the valid testimony

presented; he was under no obligation to scour the most unlikely places for

data without considerations of race or color. Since it was generally agreed

that the Negro was the most inferior of human beings, responsive only to

sensual stimuli, why should his testimony be admitted in a court governed

by the rules of reason? As to white sources favorable to the Negro, it was

obvious to Rhodes that they were tainted by either interest or emotion, and

were thus inadmissible. In short, just as Rhodes believed that the antislavery

historian could best write objective history of the Civil War,⁵⁰ so he assumed

that the white historian with Anglo-Saxon sympathies could best write

objective history of the Reconstruction period.

Finally, it should be noted that Rhodes believed that history had a

didactic purpose: quoting Tacitus, he declared that purpose to be, "to let no

worthy action be uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of

posterity as a terror to evil words and deeds."51 Within the framework of

American history, the purpose was to inculcate patriotism and to encourage

the young to "follow in the path of the distinguished."⁵² It is indicative of

the unreflective character of Rhodes's mind that he saw no apparent contra-

diction between such attitudes and his avowal that he tried to write history

without fear, favor, or prejudice.

So much for Rhodes himself. How are we to explain his reputation

among historians for sound, critical scholarship?

First, so far as scholars of his day checked his sources they found them

generally to be accurately cited. Indeed, this was a source of considerable

praise by scholarly reviewers.⁵³ As to his use of purely white sources, and

then only white sources unsympathetic with the Negro, Rhodes's judgments

seemed so consonant with obvious "truths" in relation to race that the issue

of bias rarely arose. Belief in his fairness was strengthened also by his

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frequent avowal that there was room for difference of opinion and by his

stated willingness to make corrections of fact in future editions of his work.⁵⁴

His failure to include Negro opinion within this framework naturally elicited

little objection from a scholarly community predominantly Anglo-Saxon in

origin and attitude which shared the general belief in Negro inferiority.

Acceptance of Rhodes as a model of objectivity rested also on the fact

that he and his public, lay and scholarly, shared a set of assumptions about

race which they believed to be scientific truths. Rhodes's effort to buttress

the accepted notion of Negro inferiority with the weight of scientific opinion

seemed to prove once again his conscientious effort to be fair and objective.

His exclusion of testimony favorable to the Negro, whether from white or

Negro sources, seemed so much in the nature of things as to pass almost

unnoticed. In this respect, Rhodes differed little from other historians of

the early part of the twentieth century, as may be seen from examination of

the works on Reconstruction which appeared at that time.⁵⁵

Finally, Rhodes, in his role of didactic historian, handed down not only

historical but also moral judgments. These judgments, stated explicitly

throughout the seven volumes which appeared in that fateful period between

1892 and 1906, validated the traditional middle-class virtues of hard work,

thrift, and sobriety; and the traditional beliefs in "hard money," laissez

faire, and Anglo-Saxon supremacy.⁵⁶ To a middle class shaken by the

panic of 1893 and its consequences, such as the Pullman strike and the

Populist revolt, the intoning of the ancient litanies in the calm, authoritative

accents of the historian brought comfort and reassurance. To the reawakened

spirit of nationalism which marked the sectional reconciliation of the 1890's,

Rhodes supplied reinterpretations of the Civil War and Reconstruction which

brought a glow of satisfaction to readers in both North and South. To the

confident, expansive America of the early twentieth century, Rhodes carried

the message that the American people were sound at the core, representing,

indeed, one of the foremost civilizing influences of the period. Scholars as

well as laymen responded warmly to such genial assurance. As John T.

Morse, Jr., put it: "Precisely such a book had been keenly desired, but by

whom it should be written no one had been able to suggest. Now this secret

was made known. . . . There was one universal acclaim of praise."57

What does all this have to do with discussion of the scientific nature of

history?

It has been shown that Rhodes strove to write objectively and indeed quite

honestly believed that he had done so. It has been noted that the scholarly

critics of his day shared the opinion that he was a model of objectivity.

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JAMES FORD RHODES AND THE NEGRO                                          137

 

It has also been indicated that from the vantage point of our own day it

appears that Rhodes fell far short of that ideal. This study of an individual

historian, therefore, suggests the following conclusion:

That until we have devised some means whereby the historian may isolate

his judgments as historian from the influence of his own past and his own

cultural milieu; and, perhaps more importantly, some means whereby the

community of historical scholars may abstract its critical judgments from

the unexamined assumptions which it makes about the nature of knowledge,

of man, and of society, it seems premature to talk of history as a genuinely

scientific discipline. Until that happy day, the historian will have to con-

tinue to beware of the lies of honest men--including his own.

 

 

THE AUTHOR: Robert Cruden is an associ-

ate professor of history at Baldwin-Wallace Col-

lege. He is the author of a recent life of James

Ford Rhodes (reviewed in this issue). His article

was first given as a paper at the annual meet-

ing of the Ohio Academy of History in 1960.

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