Docents, the interpretive team, and consultants understood before opening that the last bedroom, devoted to historical memory, would be the most taxing for docents and visitors alike. Education consultant Daniella Cook warned that the space, centered on memories of Reconstruction and Wilson, required more than any of the other rooms on the tour a clear transition to explain artifacts and central themes. Many visitors, she cautioned Historic Columbia, would be both physically and intellectually fatigued, especially while still “processing the content and imagery” of racial violence shown in the Red Shirt room. She recommended “explicit staging directions.” Standing near the mantle by Wilson’s quote about Reconstruction would allow docents to speak of “Wilson’s uniqueness as a president of firsts”—the first historian, the first doctorate holder, and the first southern president elected Page 173 →since James Buchanan—and how these firsts “shaped his understanding of Reconstruction.”³

The previous bedroom devoted to the election of 1876 and the Red Shirts was both a blessing and a curse when it came to transitioning. Weekend docent Casey Lee believed the space to be the strongest in the home because it elicited the best responses from visitors. Conversation between the docent and guests often spilled into the last room on memory or resurfaced while the tour group walked back to the gift shop.⁴ One interpretive challenge for docents was conveying the continuity between Reconstruction and Jim Crow. Heather Bacon-Rogers drew connections between Black Codes and Jim Crow and then let visitors explore.⁵ Three docents reminded visitors that the antebellum white elites coordinated their violent revolt to resume power. Essentially, weekend docent Halie Brazier explained, “the South hadn’t learned any lessons.”⁶ But volunteer John Clark thought the longer process of redemption, the term given to the period following Reconstruction when white Democrats returned to power, got lost. The “Black base” of the Republican Party did not disappear overnight. It took years to consolidate white control. Black congressmen such as Robert Smalls served as late as 1885. Furthermore, he wondered how active the Klan was and remained unsure of the extent of lynchings post-Reconstruction.⁷

For three trained public historians, the final space opened a dialogue about the craft of history to help visitors understand why interpretation changes over time, either because of new primary sources or asking new questions of the material. This conversation made the house special in Brazier’s eyes. Other HHMs missed the opportunity to show “how historians can really do their craft and what it means to be a historian and what interpretation means.” For Lee the transition was easy, because she framed it in terms of “who writes history, what narratives get passed along and why the legacy of Reconstruction” was initially viewed as an abuse of federal power and a disaster in granting the rights of Black citizenship. Jennifer Gunter introduced herself to visitors as a historian, which helped validate her tour narrative. She conveyed her love for the time period but could also cite historians from the Dunning School, who framed Reconstruction as a failure in the early twentieth century, through the current era.⁸ These guided exchanges helped visitors understand both why they had learned Reconstruction was a fiasco and why modern historians framed the period as the first civil rights movement.

Prior to their arrival to the house, visitors knew little of Woodrow Wilson’s life as an academic or that he wrote history akin to that produced by other white scholars interpreting Reconstruction as a colossal failure. Wilson wielded academic and political power that placed him at the center of this Page 174 →discussion. Nonetheless, a concise explanation of his role proved difficult for the interpretive team and for docents not trained in historiography. Wilson was among the first generation of southern students and historians “scientifically” trained in history and politics. A leader in the professionalization of history and a founding member of the American Historical Association, German-trained scholar Herbert Baxter Adams launched his seminar on historical and political science at the Johns Hopkins University in 1880. Wilson was one of Adams’s students and received one of the university’s first history doctorates. Professionalized history drew intellectual men that might have otherwise joined the ministry, certainly a fate that could have easily plucked Wilson from politics given his family’s professional ties with the church. This cadre of well-respected, professionally trained historians, including Wilson’s professor J. Franklin Jameson and the distinguished Frederick Jackson Turner, not only believed that national unity drove American history and the story of freedom but also drew on this unity to promote regional reconciliation following the Civil War. Wilson and his generation of historians, and white southerners in general, cemented the Lost Cause and a white supremacist narrative of Reconstruction during this era. Part of the work of the MoRE is overturning this narrative that professional history, with its scientific methodology, appropriated, canonizing Reconstruction as a catastrophe and depicting Black southerners as inferior. Part of this generation were John W. Burgess and his protégé William A. Dunning, founders of the Dunning School. Burgess helped found the field of political science, while Dunning established the fields of southern and Reconstruction history, drawing New South students to Columbia University.⁹

The history of Reconstruction scholarship is complex and difficult for MoRE docents to concisely and clearly deliver at the end of intricate tour. Both docents and visitors are in what Ed Ayers called “the Bermuda Triangle of American History, a place where we lose our bearings, where the usual American stories of progress and success simply do not work.”¹⁰ Seduced by the Lost Cause, Dunning and like-minded historians varied only by degrees. The Dunning School scholars were not unique in their belief in white superiority and social Darwinism. Their scholarship reflected attitudes about race and Jim Crow held by white academics and many in the white community, all of which were attempts to reconcile new immigration patterns, imperialism, and urbanization.¹¹ Similar to Adams, who pedagogically colonized colleges with the placement of his graduate students, the Dunning School transformed the popular memory of Reconstruction as a tragedy into scholarship, many tenets of which endure. Though the school is dismissed as racist today, it played a formidable role in professionalizing history on the graduate level in the United States.¹² With Dunning at the helm at Columbia, his followers Page 175 →and the state studies they produced warned of the dangers of Black men, controlled by Republican carpetbaggers and scalawags, who were ill prepared for citizenship. This alliance elevated racial discord and bred corruption until white political terrorism restored order. This interpretation fueled national reconciliation. According to Grace Hale, a “culture of segregation” first commandeered Reconstruction and its historiography to construct a “common whiteness” born out of the period’s failures that could heal a fifty-year old-wound following the Civil War and promote a new American empire. For half a century, white southerners and historians considered the Dunning School gospel. The interpretation influenced Mary Simms Oliphant’s South Carolina textbooks and Louise Jones DuBose’s WPA South Carolina state guidebook, as discussed in chapters 3 and 5. The Dunning School’s infiltration of public history and popular memory, via novels like Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman and the blockbuster film adaptation The Birth of a Nation, ensured that Reconstruction would represent the “darkest days” of American history, not just in scholarship but also in the public’s imagination as well. Marking the period as a deviation in the American experiment rather than the beginning of centralized, expanded government, citizenship for Black Americans, and the Republican Party, these narratives strengthened white supremacy and Jim Crow.¹³ A newer historical turn argues that the Dunning School was not as impactful on shaping public memory as the field contends. It did not create the myths and tragedy of Reconstruction; rather it gave scholarly weight to an accepted white narrative and forged national consensus. Woodrow Wilson, a scholarly product of the same social and education system, gave the same weight and approval to The Birth of a Nation when he screened it in the White House, which had a far more lasting impact on the white supremacist memory of Reconstruction among white Americans than anything produced by the Dunning School.¹⁴

Five significant works that shaped Reconstruction in South Carolina historiography are on display in the final bedrooms of the home: James Shepherd Pike’s The Prostrate State (1874), Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman (1905), John S. Reynolds’s Reconstruction in South Carolina: 1865–1867 (1905), William Sinclair’s The Aftermath of Slavery (1905), and Albert B. Williams’s popular personal account Hampton and His Red Shirts: South Carolina’s Deliverance in 1876 (1935). All but The Prostrate State are in the Wilson bedroom. Before the 1890s Reconstruction historiography consisted only of partisan political writings. This was the case for Reconstruction historiography in South Carolina as well. The first was Pike’s The Prostrate State in 1874, a contemporary account that originally appeared as a New York Tribune series. The MoRE panel “Politics and the Press” discusses the book, noting that Pike “spoke almost exclusively with Reconstruction opponents” in his Page 176 →“Republican critique.”¹⁵ The second book, Governor Chamberlain’s Administration in South Carolina: A Chapter of Reconstruction in the Southern States, was a defense of the governor’s administration written by his friend Walter Allen. A 1901 essay Chamberlain penned for an Atlantic Monthly series on Reconstruction rebuked Republican rule for its corruption, ineptness, and dependence on Black votes. Though he denounced the methods of redemption, he sympathized with white southerners’ responses to Republican rule.¹⁶

The Dunning School first established general facts about Reconstruction, emphasizing religious division and hardships. It also praised some aspects of Reconstruction, like education and rebuilding. Dunning approached Reconstruction generally with a national lens. He saw it as key to fostering reunion and accelerating nationalism, even if the federal government overreached, and cast corruption in a national framework. Dunning students, unlike their mentor, focused on local or sectional issues, which resulted in what revisionist historian Kenneth M. Stampp concluded in the 1960s was a tragic narrative with four acts. First, Radical Republicans abandoned President Abraham Lincoln’s plans for a quick reunification in order to punish secessionists and maintain economic and political power. Second, though white southerners acknowledged the demise of slavery and the Confederacy, Radical Republicans refused to except President Andrew Johnson’s Reconstruction and rejected new state governments and the southerners elected to Congress. Third, with control of Congress after the 1866 elections, Radical Republicans initiated their version of Reconstruction by vetoing Johnson and ultimately impeaching him and, during Ulysses S. Grant’s two terms, militarily occupying the South and granting suffrage to freedmen while denying it to whites. This resulted in corrupt state governments run by scalawags and carpetbaggers. Lastly, Democrats brought redemption and the return of “honest government” in the 1870s legally or by force, which was cemented in the disputed election of 1876 that ended Reconstruction.¹⁷

In 1905 two academically trained historians from Johns Hopkins University, Thomas Dixon and John Porter Hollis, joined the conversation on Reconstruction in South Carolina. Dixon’s contribution was the novel The Clansman, a copy of which is on display at the MoRE; Hollis’s was his dissertation, The Early Period of Reconstruction in South Carolina, a work of the Dunning School. Hollis’s interpretations of race relied less on sound evidentiary analysis and more on oral traditions. By contrast, John S. Reynolds’s Reconstruction in South Carolina: 1865–1867 (1905), first published in the State newspaper as a weekly series, moved away from narrative knowledge to scientific knowledge, minus footnotes and citations, as the first book to cover the period’s entire chronology in a detailed manner. Though the tone of the book mirrored Dunning and exhibited some professional historical technique, Page 177 →Reynolds was a South Carolina Supreme Court librarian with no direct association with the Dunning School. A copy of his book is also on exhibit in the MoRE.¹⁸ One notable Dunning student, Paul Leland Haworth, did contest the arguments of his New South peers. An Indiana Quaker, Haworth’s more moderate thoughts on Black citizenship and condemnation of violence and fraud thwarted his career and prestige. He denounced white South Carolinians’ acceptance and use of brutal domestic terror, including the Hamburg and Ellenton massacres, and blamed Democratic fraud for South Carolina’s 1876 election results, which had national implications in the federal election. He made an implicit argument to return Black Americans’ rights by giving historical context to their present-day plight and exposing the culpability of white South Carolinians.¹⁹

Woodrow Wilson, before becoming president, also contributed to the scholarly literature on Reconstruction, which needed to be addressed by the MoRE. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Wilson published what was at that time a moderate, reconciliationist southern interpretation of the Civil War and Reconstruction. His Division and Reunion (1893), a supposedly unbiased war history that placed blame on both sides, and A History of the American People (1902) promoted a dominant, familiar narrative of carpetbagger villains, southern victims, and Klan rescuers, although the latter were not always righteous in their activities.²⁰ A MoRE panel contextualizes Wilson’s place within the historiography. It includes a caption about his 1901 essay “The Reconstruction of the Southern States,” which Wilson wrote for the same Atlantic series as Chamberlain’s Republican rebuke. The panel notes that the essay “reflected the scholarship that prevailed at colleges throughout the nation during this time” and “focused primarily on the forging of a new nationalist spirit.” Though Wilson was less reluctant than his predecessors to “glorify the violence of the time,” he was guilty of presenting a “romanticized … relationship between the North and the South.”²¹ His interpretation was far more developed and derogatory with respect to Black citizenship than the panel could convey. He wrote that the Civil War made Americans fully conscious for the first time of a “national spirit” and unity that had been building. Thirty years after Reconstruction’s end, he argued, the United States had moved on, “lost its passion, forgot its anxieties.” Historians, without partisanship, could finally discuss this “dark chapter,” which was constitutionally significant. First, the Union was legally indestructible. Only people seceded. More important, a “change of air” allowed a radical Republican Congress to usurp executive power by latching onto the failure of the first state constitutional conventions to protect the rights of recently freed people. Uncontrollable and devoid of a basic understanding of liberty and freedom, Black Americans “had the full advantage of the federal power” Page 178 →through the Freedman’s Bureau, which promised education and property, and the forced ratification of the Reconstruction Amendments, which legally recognized the freedom, citizenship, and suffrage already being granted. The “dangerous intoxication of an absolute triumph” yielded generals who ruled the military districts. But far worse were Republican rule and “negro majorities” in states like South Carolina, made possible by disenfranchising the “better whites.” Wilson wrote that thankfully the “traces of Reconstruction ha[d] worn away,” allowing several southern states to reform education and suffrage laws in what became Jim Crow.²²

Outside the Dunning School, white authors writing on Reconstruction in South Carolina spent three decades debating the merits and importance of Gen. Martin Gary to the 1876 campaign.²³ However, in the 1930s an economic turn in interpreting Reconstruction that also included Marxists like W. E. B Du Bois dramatically shifted the historiography and competed with the blockbuster book and movie Gone with the Wind. Within this economic turn, South Carolina during Reconstruction (1932) by Francis Butler Simkins and Robert Hilliard Woody was not only the first complete state study by professional historians but also the first book by white scholars to chip away at the Dunning School. In what could be considered an ironic turn, it won the American Historical Association’s prestigious John H. Dunning Prize. Though not as sympathetic to freed people as historical assessments by Black scholars, the book penned by two white men from the Carolinas was a marked improvement for white academia. Simkins, who befriended a Brazilian historian and had some training with Dunning while at Columbia, demonstrated the changing nature of the field as new ideas on race and class emerged. The economic turn also included an intellectual field of radicals’ Reconstruction, a component of the biracial Southern Popular Front, that marked the first effort to apply a biracial, class-based lens to the historical analysis of Reconstruction. Other radicals’ Reconstruction interpretations were the commercially successful novel Freedom Road by Howard Fast, depicting a South Carolina plantation turned cooperative farm with white and Black workers, and James S. Allen’s broader study Reconstruction: The Battle for Democracy, which like Du Bois’s writing gave agency to freed people, who were a new addition to the proletariat and would be targeted by the industrial bourgeoisie.²⁴

Although the revisionism was already underway, in 1947 the tragic narrative of the Dunning School came to an end with E. Merton Coulter’s The South during Reconstruction, which failed to incorporate more recent scholarship from Simkins and Woody and Du Bois. What distinguished the Dunning School from revisionist historians who dismantled them was not so much the sources and methodology but their views not only on race but Page 179 →also class and state power. In fact, the revisionists used the primary sources identified and published by the Dunning School. Bruce Baker identifies Howard K. Beale’s 1940 article “On Rewriting Reconstruction History” as “the clear beginning of a revisionist school of Reconstruction historiography,” which was an acceleration of Simkins and Woody’s work. In 1955 Beale’s student C. Vann Woodward, an early member of Southern Front and an activist historian, published The Strange Career of Jim Crow, a takedown of Dunning that argued the contemporary mid-century civil rights movement, a second Reconstruction, would be more fruitful. The white supremacist narrative of Reconstruction, even if southern whites clung desperately to it, made no sense to others whose perceptions of racism changed.²⁵ Revisionists presented the merits of Radical Republican Reconstruction and argued that it remained, as Eric Foner would say, unfinished. Reconstruction historiography flourished for three decades following the publication of his synthetic “dominant narrative,” Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution.²⁶

More recent scholarship by post-revisionists contends that Reconstruction was overturned, not incomplete, and failed. The mid-1990s brought women’s history to Reconstruction, illuminating households and sexual violence. Historiography expanded knowledge of state-sanctioned violence in general and the centrality of sexual violence to terrorism. The first two decades of the twenty-first century significantly increased awareness of educational history, particularly for Black students and teachers. Economic questions about Reconstruction’s place in merchant and industrial capitalism and workers as feudal peasants or wage laborers advanced the field until the early 1990s. Historians now have a better understanding of white coalition building among Republicans at the expense of Black members and physical and economic challenges faced by veterans of the United States Colored Troops during Reconstruction, who struggled to receive military pay, gain civilian unemployment, apply for pensions, and deal with disabilities.²⁷ The scholarship spread beyond the South’s imagined borders to Indian Territory and abroad, though like memory and Reconstruction, far slower than the Civil War field; yet this turn improved our knowledge of American foreign policy, imperialism, and settler colonialism. Ayers warned that the global perception of the United States is that it is a “carpetbagger nation” that should heed the lessons of post–Civil War Reconstruction “as we look out upon a world we are tempted to remake.” These lessons concern the South’s size and varied geography, race, armed resistance and local power dynamics, religion, and how a popular opposition narrative can overwhelm an outside force. US policy in the age of New Imperialism determined that areas such as the Philippines inhabited by people of color, as with freed Black men and women, were incapable of running democratic governments. World War I Page 180 →provided Wilson and the United States with the opportunity to rebuild democracy and white civilization. For a brief moment in the Western Hemisphere, Reconstruction foreign policy implemented a new Monroe Doctrine to challenge empire and expel slavery. Brazilian abolitionists in the 1880s disseminated a “romantic narrative” of Reconstruction’s success as part of its argument. The narrative served as a foil to both contemporary economic, social, and political problems in Brazil and planter narratives that warned of the further disorder emancipation would generate. However, colonizers in England, Canada, Brazil, South Africa, and Australia, like the Jim Crow South, employed a white supremacist narrative of Reconstruction to defend not only white supremacy but also their empires.²⁸

Today Reconstruction historiography continues to grow, expanding the beginning and end of the era’s chronology to the Civil War and Gilded Age and exploring multiple freedoms, both macro and micro, and multiple Reconstructions.²⁹ Digitization has provided primary sources, such as Freedmen’s Bureau records, and new methodology, which has also benefited South Carolina’s Reconstruction historiography. For example, Elaine Frantz’s use of network analysis and legal records uncovered the origin and membership of the Klan in Union County, and the interactive digital humanities web and mobile site Reconstruction 360 provides primary sources and concise engagement tools to teach the public.³⁰ Unfortunately, the public’s knowledge of Reconstruction lags behind modern historical understanding. Historiography alone will not ignite a new revolution or finish a long civil rights movement that continues to fight for the enforcement of the Reconstruction Amendments. It will need public-facing sites and projects like the MoRE.³¹

That the second generation of post–World War II historians articulating Reconstruction fell short was not a new idea. The Black backlash to the white supremacist interpretation of Reconstruction in universities and popular culture was immediate and unremitting though less impactful in the academy. The MoRE thus curated the literature ignored by white scholars. Black journalists, historians, and filmmakers countered Dunning School narratives whenever they could. Excluded from white mainstream memory making in South Carolina, the progressive Black perspective emerged alongside the Dunning interpretation as a credible counternarrative that combined oral traditions with traditional documentary sources neglected by white historians.³² A MoRE panel introduced visitors to William Sinclair, a former University of South Carolina student when it was temporarily integrated during Reconstruction, who protested Woodrow Wilson’s support of racial segregation in federal workplaces. The exhibit also includes Sinclair’s historical counternarrative The Aftermath of Slavery (1905), which he published while serving a foundational role in the NAACP and as a critical member of the Niagara Movement. The book “answered” Dixon’s depiction of Reconstruction and the racist rhetoric of his novels like The Clansman.³³ John Lynch’s memoir The Facts of Reconstruction, published in 1913, the year Wilson took office, constructed a memory based on his experiences as a Reconstruction-era state legislator in Mississippi and US representative to counter biased accounts. Disputing the myth of “Negro domination,” Lynch argued that the South created a biracial democracy and that Black suffrage and the Fifteenth Amendment were good for democracy. Furthermore, Republican control was a success, while white Democrats exacerbated racial tensions that led to Jim Crow. He directly countered the Dunning School and James Ford Rhodes, whose History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the Final Restoration of Home Rule at the South in 1877 influenced Burgess and Dunning. Lynch hoped that rectifying the historical record would lead to Black social and political gains. The Black press, including the Chicago Defender and the NAACP’s Crisis, endorsed works like Lynch’s. Carter G. Woodson and the newly founded Journal of Negro History continued publishing positive interpretations of Reconstruction. Woodson’s Association for the Study of Negro Life and History hired Black scholar and social worker Alrutheus Ambush Taylor, whose research led to his publishing The Negro in South Carolina during Reconstruction in 1924. Part of the first generation of South Carolina–focused historians, Taylor centered Black Americans and emphasized the cooperation between both races in daily life and labor. Works like these, but particularly Taylor’s, made contrasting memories available to the first white historians undermining the Dunning School in the 1930s, such as Woody and Simkins. However, W. E. B. Du Bois was the most well-known critic. He sustained an indictment of white historians of Reconstruction for over three decades.³⁴

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Page 182 →Black scholars like Taylor were outnumbered in academia until the civil rights movement, but Du Bois published extensively on the subject all the same. He penned an essay for the same 1901 Atlantic Monthly series that featured Wilson’s and Chamberlain’s essay and a restrained concluding essay by Dunning, and his Souls of Black Folk (1903) positively interpreted Reconstruction. In December 1909, at the AHA’s annual meeting in New York City, Du Bois took up the gauntlet and challenged white historians’ interpretations of Reconstruction, appearing at a session along with Dunning. White historians, Du Bois insisted, had overlooked how quickly freed people learned and engaged in citizenship with little support from the federal government. They were not bystanders. Black voters and legislators, via legislation and state constitutions, ushered in democratic government, free public schools, and revolutionary social legislation. Du Bois reported that Dunning praised the paper, which was later published in the American Historical Review. Though largely Page 183 →ignored by white historians, Du Bois’s arguments culminated in the 1935 book Black Reconstruction in America, which synthesized the work of Taylor, Simkins, and Woody in his reinterpreted response.³⁵

Though no tour could distill Reconstruction’s historiographical turns to the extent detailed above, docents could draw from the historiographical well in the last room on the MoRE tour to contest the public’s perception of Reconstruction shaped by education and popular culture. For example, Brazier pointed out Hillary Clinton’s Reconstruction gaffe on the presidential campaign trail in January 2016. In response to a question, Clinton named Abraham Lincoln as the president she most admired. She then launched into a defense of her answer that could have come from Dixon, Dunning, or Wilson. Wilson speculated in “Reconstruction of the Southern States” that “had Mr. Lincoln lived, perhaps the whole of the delicate business might have been through with dignity, good temper, and simplicity of method.” Lincoln and Johnson, had they remained architects of Reconstruction and not been thwarted by assassination and congressional obstruction, would have provided a smoother transition and kept white rule. Johnson simply lacked Lincoln’s pragmatism, charm, and leadership skills.³⁶ For Wilson, in fashioning the memory of the executive and legislative branches pitted against one another for control of Reconstruction, Lincoln had to be right if congressional Reconstruction was to be remembered as so wrong. Furthermore, Reconstruction had to be wrong to defend Jim Crow. Wilson’s interpretation lived on in Clinton’s gaffe as well as comments MoRE visitors also made about Lincoln’s untimely death. For Clinton, America might have been “a little less rancorous, a little more forgiving and tolerant,” and reunited more quickly had Lincoln lived, she claimed. Instead the United States got Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and some “totally discouraged and defiant” southerners. She believed Lincoln “could have very well put us on a different path.” The only difference between Clinton and Wilson was a negative connotation of Jim Crow. Her team quickly clarified that America might have been in a “better place” if the federal government had not abandoned Reconstruction before achieving “equality, justice, and reconciliation,” paving the way for the “disgraceful era of Jim Crow.” The legacy of “racist efforts against Reconstruction,” her team explained, could still be seen in modern voter suppression.³⁷

Wilson grew up in an environment hostile to Lincoln yet fashioned a positive historical interpretation as an academic to indict congressional Reconstruction. The MoRE does not detail this transformation of Lincoln from villain to martyr in its exhibit; however, a panel illustrating the city hall and opera house building and supplemental information in the script offer docents a local anecdote to explain the mythical Reconstruction narrative that Page 184 →Lincoln’s death ensured Reconstruction would fail and that white southerners believed he would have treated them fairly. The Birth of a Nation devoted an entire scene to this interpretation and Lincoln’s assassination. White Democrats pointed to the opera house’s construction as an example of lavish Republic spending, but this did not stop them from flocking to it in droves to catch a glimpse of the most popular Shakespearean actor in the nation.³⁸ As momentum was building among Democrats to overturn Reconstruction, Edwin Booth came to Columbia’s opera house on January 26, 1876, for a one-day engagement of Hamlet. White Columbians, so excited to see the brother of the man who shot Lincoln, literally stampeded the ticket agent within several minutes of sales opening. The show sold out quickly, prompting locals’ unsuccessful attempts to scalp tickets for five times their value. Booth privately confessed that he hoped to never return to the South, for his fanatical welcome stemmed as much from his brother John’s infamy as his own critical fame.³⁹

Public historians trained in historiography are comfortable discussing complex and conflicting interpretations of history in museum settings, making them incredibly valuable as frontline staff. Volunteer docents at Historic Columbia, however, demonstrate the need for institutions to clarify the nature of the historical discipline not only to visitors but also to guides less familiar with how history is crafted and its interpretive turns. Cook advised docents to set the stage immediately for framing the complexity of both Wilson’s legacy and Reconstruction memory further explored in the exhibit film, panels, and exhibit cases.⁴⁰ The interpretive team continuously reworked the transition statement to bind the two memories of Reconstruction and Wilson together, to explain how both facilitated national reconciliation and acknowledge Wilson’s racial views and discriminatory policies. This connected thematically to panel text on how “especially proud” white Democratic southerners were of Wilson. Not only was he the first southern president elected since the Civil War, but his “academic laurels and progressive policies” worked to combat “stereotypes of regional backwardness.” The script countered that, though many white Americans thought like Wilson, some of his contemporaries worked to promote racial equality and fight discrimination. Some fatigued visitors who spent less time with the room’s exhibit panels might miss that local Black citizens “vigorously protested” showings of Birth or that the “Columbia City Council asked a theatre to cancel” a World War I–era showing of the film “in recognition of black contributions” to the war effort.⁴¹ Ultimately, months of giving tours revealed that the transition statement was better suited to conclude the tour. A basic transition statement emerged that empowered docents to select the evidence they wanted to use: “As we enter this next bedroom, we see that memories of Reconstruction Page 185 →and of Woodrow Wilson as President have been formulated and evolved over several generations.”⁴² Pinpointing a successful transition proved difficult, because it set up the last exhibit film. The film sparked the greatest interpretive battles in the room and the tour, which are discussed in the next chapter.

MoRE docents’ attempts to transition from voter suppression and white violence to the historical memory of Reconstruction provide examples of how HHMs can employ both tragic narrative and the craft of history to make meaningful connections for visitors. In the May 2015 issue of the Public Historian that focused on the plight and future of HHMs, Hilary Iris Lowe called for more narrative storytelling in house museums and asked how they might incorporate method and historiography. These narrative-centered tours engage visitors with emotional content and strengthen historical interpretation, giving audiences the ability to make correlations between the tour, the past and the present, and their lives. Though Lowe disputes Hayden White’s contention that, like all stories, historical narratives are fiction, she adopts his premise that historians depend on narratives and employ one of four plot categories: romance, satire, comedy, or tragedy. White’s provocative argument emerged when Freeman Tilden’s Interpreting Our Heritage (1957) was at its peak in terms of its impact on living history and HHM interpretation. Both insisted that crafting narrative is an artistic, not scientific, endeavor. Lowe analyzes tour narratives at four literary house museums and classifies each home based on White’s four categories. Lowe claims public historians using storytelling driven by history and narrative will be cognizant of narrative modes influencing interpretation and “draw attention to the process, the choices, and … [the] historian’s craft.” The MoRE demonstrates this by asking audiences to complicate their understanding of Reconstruction and interpret the past like a modern historian does, to draw their own conclusions based on the tour narrative.⁴³

Lowe makes a compelling case that the successful homes of literary giants not only provide visitors with space for reflection, speak to multigenerational audiences, maximize university and school partnerships, and address the history of race, gender, and sexuality, but also, most significantly, use fiction to present diverse perspectives of the past. She argues that the narrative modes of tragedy and satire work in academic monographs but remain off-putting to museums whose audience expect infotainment or that are not at sites of violence, such as the internment camp Manzanar, where the visitor anticipates a tragic narrative. The tragic narrative is one example of melodrama, which became a popular literary and theatrical form in the nineteenth century. Melodrama in theater studies also encompasses comedy, tragedy, and tragicomedy. By mid-century melodrama in the United States shifted toward sentimentality and courted middle-class audiences, though critics disparaged Page 186 →its important role in providing public discourse on cultural, political, and economic transformations ranging from gender to nationalism and imperialism. A “drama of excess,” melodrama often included spectacular sets and settings, a complicated plot, and thrills. They were popular with women, a moral drama between good heroes and evil villains. The MoRE is a rare HHM that offers a tragic narrative, though literary house museums and artists’ homes often do. Similarly public historians can employ tragic characters and their impending doom to illuminate limitations and the real conditions of the past. The MoRE, in abandoning its shrine to Woodrow Wilson, shattered the HHM’s conventional romantic mode and prepared visitors to think judiciously about Reconstruction and contest their previous assumptions about the period framed by the Dunning School and popular culture.⁴⁴

Lowe’s research on literary house museums revealed that these sites surpassed HHMs in elucidating how complex the craft of composing history is, including methodology and constructing narrative. Historians take comfort in the idea that their analysis is scientific—a legacy of the professionalization of the field in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This process supposedly protected historians from bias and speculation. However, the work of the Dunning School and scholars such as Eric Foner, considered the preeminent contemporary Reconstruction expert, prove that language choices and the interpretation of the same primary sources result in different narrative modes and stories. Reconstruction failed, for sure, but not because it lacked promise or because freed people were not prepared for citizenship, as the Dunning School asserted. Foner argues that Reconstruction was a failure because as a civil rights movement it remains unrealized.⁴⁵ Literary houses use history as well as, and in some cases better than, HHMs. Literary historians devour historical monographs to situate close textual study of a writer’s work within the context of cultural and historical forces in that writer’s life.⁴⁶ HHMs too can incorporate historical monographs into their tours to demonstrate interpretive change over time.

Lowe’s four literary house examples provide fodder for understanding how docents at the MoRE were able to use fiction, historical monographs, and memoir to unpack the scholarly literature on Reconstruction. The Amherst, Massachusetts, house of Emily Dickinson uses drafts of her poetry in an interactive to facilitate guest exploration of her poems and how they were constructed. Dickinson often drafted three different word choices at different times in her poetry drafts. The wall in her bedroom lets visitors play with these word variations to craft their own version of her poems and explore multiple meanings. The exercise reinforces the fluidity of her poetry, an interpretation of Dickinson scholars, and how historical understanding is framed by time, which can expand or revise knowledge. The invention of Emily Page 187 →Dickinson in the classroom and by editors is not unlike the Reconstruction narrative constructed by the Dunning School, the textbooks of Mary Sims Oliphant discussed in chapter 3, and films like The Birth of a Nation. Both the MoRE and Dickinson home help visitors dismantle and reconstruct its most famous occupants. Both museums’ interpretations benefited from a relationship between scholars, staff, and exhibit designers that extended beyond consultants to collaborators. Dickinson scholars and the University of South Carolina historians and educators helped their respective sites explain that the interpretation of historical figures and events evolve and are susceptible to myth. Dickinson’s isolated life in popular culture often frames her story as a tragedy, but her HHM works to challenge this narrative by highlighting Dickinson’s romantic feelings for her brother’s wife, Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, who lived next door. Most recently, the HHM screened composer Dana Kaufman’s a cappella pop opera Emily and Sue (dir. Ron Bashford, 2022), which was filmed at the museum.⁴⁷ Though the end of Reconstruction is a tragedy similar to Dickinson’s narrative, the limited triumphs of the Black community are presented so as to provide romance to balance the tragic mode. Notably, in her assessment Lowe too wondered why similar methods had not been implemented at presidential sites.⁴⁸

Before visiting the House of the Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts, Lowe read Tami Christopher’s analysis of eleven tour scripts from 1910–99 delivered at the HHM. Christopher’s work offered me a framework for mining the drafts of the MoRE tour scripts for examples of HHM best practices.⁴⁹ The site had modified the home to convey elements of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The House of the Seven Gables but also remade its tours to meet the politics of the present, responding to immigration, civil rights, globalization, and its own economic power in the heritage tourism market. The evolving scripts also confirmed and nullified historical narratives the house told in the past.⁵⁰ Both the MoRE and the House of the Seven Gables illuminate once-popular artistic works for modern audiences and explain why each is significant to the house. Today Hawthorne’s book and The Birth of a Nation need to be explained by docents to visitors unfamiliar with the work beyond name recognition.⁵¹ The next and final chapter discusses how the MoRE tour explained the relationship of Griffith’s film to Reconstruction and Woodrow Wilson. Other similarities between the MoRE and the House of the Seven Gables include providing space in the script for docents to tailor their tour to meet their own interests, to respond to visitor inquiries, and, most important, to incorporate updated research and thereby present new ideas, overturn misconceptions, and corroborate contemporary historical scholarship. However, Christopher cautions public historians that audiences must be receptive to new information, which in turn must be culturally Page 188 →relevant before being implemented into a tour.⁵² The MoRE’s subject of Reconstruction is culturally, socially, and politically relevant as the nation faces modern-day citizenship and equity issues that Michelle Alexander dubbed the New Jim Crow: the end of affirmative action, police brutality, mass incarceration, voter suppression, and ruinous student loans.⁵³ Though Historic Columbia worried there could be a backlash to new Reconstruction information, the responses of 645 visitors to a post-tour survey dispelled this concern. Eighty-eight percent of visitors indicated that they learned new information, and 87 percent were interested in the information being presented. Visitors’ comments corroborate, month after month, what especially resonated with them was how much new, interesting history they were absorbing.⁵⁴

Over two decades ago, the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum changed its interpretation from one primarily focused on Tom Sawyer to expand on Clemens’s life and Hannibal, Missouri, roots. Not unlike the MoRE, which weaves a Reconstruction narrative with one about the Wilson family, the Mark Twain site blends Clemens’s history with his fictional works. Both homes ask how Wilson’s and Clemens’s childhood homes and communities shaped their professional lives. Lowe argued that the Mark Twain House interpretation forces visitors to question: “Whose house is this? Whose version of the past is on display? Which story is ‘the truth’?” These same questions could be levied at the MoRE. Whose version of Reconstruction history is exhibited? What is the “truth” about Reconstruction? The MoRE’s interpretation was more radical in that the Mark Twain House initially whitewashed slavery, including within Clemens’s home. The attempt to share the story of an enslaved boy Sandy, who was leased to the family, fell flat. The effort improved on that of HHMs that erase Black labor, but the introductory museum panels and a floor pallet in both the museum and home were far less challenging interpretively than the Wilson tour offered in Staunton, Virginia, discussed in chapter 4. From the beginning and throughout the first floor, the tour of Wilson’s birthplace incorporated enslaved people leased by the Presbyterian Church to provide domestic labor for the family. The Mark Twain Home’s romantic and satiric interpretation included a range of voices, both historical and fictional. While the MoRE privileges Black voices during Reconstruction, fictional narratives of Reconstruction as a disaster are also addressed.⁵⁵

Mark Twain’s boyhood home and the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center provide settings that use the authors’ novels for unconventional interpretations. Unfortunately, Mark Twain’s house in Hartford, Connecticut, next door to Stowe’s home, fell short of Clemens’s boyhood HHM, which focused more on the beauty of restoration and furnishing period rooms. I started the Twain tour in 2019 while attending the National Council on Page 189 →Public History’s annual meeting. Having seen similar HHMs an uncountable number of times before, I left after the bottom floor. I jumped on the tour of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center and discovered one of my favorite unconventional HHMs.

The Stowe Center scrapped the traditional HHM model to create a space for conversation about social justice and collaboration with educators and scholars. When Lowe visited the site while researching her 2015 essay, docents did not explain anything about Stowe’s novels or Uncle Tom’s Cabin, despite current exhibit cases filled with the novel published in dozens of languages.⁵⁶ I even stumbled on a VHS copy of a forgotten film adaption starring Phylicia Rashad, Samuel L Jackson, and Bruce Dern. Since a 2017 renovation, the Stowe Center uses her house, its collections, and her work to facilitate a dialogue on social justice and positive change. They warn on their website: “Don’t expect a traditional historic house museum! Expect a conversational, interactive tour where you can participate along with your guide.” The site uses Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the historical moment that inspired Stowe to write the novel to connect past and present. Topics of discussion range from slavery, women’s history, racism, mass incarceration, immigration, and equal pay to how the name “Uncle Tom” became a racial slur.⁵⁷ The center also packages its mission into a ninety-minute program for businesses, libraries, and community groups. Other programs, such as Her Words Changed the World, help participants take action on a contemporary issue. Modern audiences can also join a nineteenth-century salon to discuss bias, racism, and white privilege.⁵⁸ The Stowe Center also benefits from scholarly collaboration, as did the Emily Dickinson Museum and the MoRE. Over a third of the center’s board are university scholars and college teachers. The board includes Jane Wald of the Emily Dickinson Museum, indicating a pattern of literary houses utilizing narrative modes that challenge the visitor to connect a writer’s works with the present.⁵⁹ Both the Stowe Center and the MoRE ask visitors to consider how tragic fictional works like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Clansman can impact the public’s understanding of contemporary issues related to social justice. Similar to the Dickinson HHM and the Stowe Center, the MoRE’s narrative provoking conversation with visitors about the modern legacy of Reconstruction and interaction with historical scholarship fuel the HHM’s partnership with the scholarly community. Historic Columbia’s director of research, Kat Allen, asserted that the MoRE was the “catalyst” that made the public and scholars at University of South Carolina see that the organization aspired to “do good stuff” and want to collaborate. Tom Brown, who led the first scholarly lecture on Reconstruction during the first training session, covered in chapter 3, continues to participate in programming.⁶⁰

Page 190 →In addition to the literary houses’ success in using narrative modes and engagement with authors’ work, MoRE visitor evaluations also substantiate that HHMs need not shy away from subjects that are controversial or exclude tragic moments. MoRE docents facilitating the visitor’s journey through a twenty-first-century exhibit filled with abundant panels but limited objects and a dual narrative introducing new information were vital to visitor reception. They held the full attention of more than two-thirds of evaluators and engaged nearly every visitor. As a result more than four-fifths of evaluators thought sensitive issues were handled extremely well. Arousing negative emotions such as anger, fear, and sadness promotes interest because they are vivid and easier to remember, particularly if positive emotions eventually supplant the negative ones. Take, for example, the traveling exhibit “Goose Bumps: The Science of Fear,” designed to be an “emotionally arousing experience” for visitors. Facing common fears, from falling to bugs, appeared to improve visitors’ short-term and long-term understanding of fear and promote reflection on their experience, phobias, and fears individually and in conversation with their loved ones.⁶¹ If exposure to everyday fears elicits such a response, a crash course in the resilience displayed and tragedy experienced during Reconstruction may forever change the way the visitor to the MoRE remembers and talks about the most misunderstood period in American history.

Combined with the interpretation of domestics in the parlors described in chapter 4, unveiling how the historical sausage of Reconstruction scholarship is made in the final exhibit space of the MoRE demonstrates that illuminating the historical process and methodology is a best practice and critical to helping visitors understand modern scholarship and the period of Reconstruction. The conversation on how Reconstruction’s memory was constructed can dismantle antiquated historical assessments that shape popular understanding of the period. Because this interpretation has been circulating for 150 years, built through the historical profession, HHM shrines, textbooks, films like A Birth of a Nation, and pro-Confederate monuments and markers across the landscape, it will take time and scholarly collaboration with the public to overturn and must be challenged in the same spaces that the outdated interpretation of Reconstruction was fabricated. Lastly, the interactive poetry and queer history at the Emily Dickinson Home and the MoRE demonstrate that public historians and HHMs have nothing to fear in incorporating the tragic mode of narrative in their interpretations to tell important and often absent stories in US history.