nterested in the Negroes at that time wrote eulogistic
biographies of distinguished Negroes and of white persons who had
devoted their lives to the uplift of the despised race. The attitude
in most cases was that the Negroes had been a very much oppressed
people and that their enslavement was a disgrace of which the whole
country should be made to feel ashamed. As it was the people of the
South who had to bear the onus of this criticism and they were not at
that time sufficiently enlightened to produce historians like
Hildreth, Bancroft, Prescott, Redpath and Parkman, the world largely
accepted the opinions of those historians who sympathized with the
formerly persecuted Negroes.

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, however, there came
about a change in the attitude of American scholarship effected
largely by political movements. Because of the unpopularity and the
blunders of the southern States reconstructed on the basis of
universal suffrage and mainly under the dictation of white adventurers
from the North, the majority of the influential men of the country
reached the conclusion that the southern white man, in spite of his
faults as a slaveholder, had not been properly treated. This
unsatisfactory regime, therefore, was speedily overthrown and the
freedman was gradually reduced to the status of the free Negro prior
to the Civil War on the grounds that it had been proved that he was
not a white man with a black skin.

Following immediately thereupon came a new day for education in the
South. Many of its ambitious young men went North to study in the
leading universities then devoting much attention to the preparation
of scholars for scientific investigation. The investigators from the
South directed their attention primarily toward the vindication of the
slavery regime and the overthrow of the Reconstruction governments. As
a result there have appeared a number of studies on slavery and the
Reconstruction. All of this task was not done by southerners and was
not altogether confined to the universities, but resulted no doubt
largely from the impetus given it in these centers, especially at
Johns Hopkins and Columbia. It was influenced to a great extent by the
attitude of southern scholars. Ingle, Weeks, Bassett, Cooley, Steiner,
Munford, Trexler, Bracket, Ballagh, Tremain, McCrady, Henry, and
Russell directed their attention to the study of slavery. With the
works of Deane, Moore, Needles, Harris, Wa