Walter Lynwood Fleming (1874–1932) was an American historian of the South and Reconstruction. He was a leader of the Dunning School of scholars in the early 20th century, who addressed Reconstruction era history using historiographical technique. He was a professor at Vanderbilt University from 1917 through his career, also serving as Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, and Director of the Graduate School. A prolific writer, he published ten books and 166 articles and reviews. The son of a plantation owner who had slaves, Fleming was sympathetic to White supremacist arguments and Democratic Party positions of his era while critical of Republicans and Reconstruction.
Biography
Walter Lynwood Fleming was born on a plantation at Brundidge, Alabama, on April 8, 1874, the son of William LeRoy and Mary Love (Edwards) Fleming. Both his parents were born in Georgia and had migrated west with their families to Alabama in the ante-bellum period as cotton was developed as the area's commodity crop. His father, a well-to-do planter and slave owner, served in the Civil War as a cavalryman. He was not politically prominent during Reconstruction.
Fleming attended Alabama Polytechnic Institute, now known as Auburn University, taking the B.S. degree, with honors, in 1896, and the M.S. degree in 1897. He taught in the public schools of Alabama in 1894–1896. He became an instructor in History and English at his alma mater in 1896–1897. He was assistant librarian from 1897 to 1898, and an instructor in English from 1899 to 1900.
In 1898 Fleming enlisted in the Second Alabama Volunteers as a private; was promoted to lieutenant, and fought in the Spanish–American War.
Fleming began graduate work in history at Columbia University in New York in 1900, taking the PhD in 1904. In his studies, he was influenced especially by Professor George Petrie of Alabama Polytechnic Institute and Professor William Archibald Dunning of Columbia.
Academic career
In his early career from 1903 to 1907, Fleming taught history at West Virginia University, and from 1907 to 1917 at Louisiana State University. While Woodrow Wilson was president of Princeton University, he tried to attract Fleming from Louisiana to his institution, offering him a professorship, which the latter declined.
In 1917, Fleming was called to a chair in history at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He taught undergraduate and graduate students, mentoring numerous PhDs. Many of them later led history programs at colleges across the South. He became Dean of the Vanderbilt College of Arts and Sciences in 1923 and later Director of the Graduate School.
Fleming was close to the Nashville Agrarians, some of whom also taught at Vanderbilt. They dedicated their influential manifesto, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930), to Fleming.
Historical research
Fleming helped edit and contribute to numerous reference works, including The Historians' History of the World, 25 volumes (1904); volumes XI and XII of The South in the Building of the Nation, (1909); The Photographic History of the Civil War, 10 volumes (1911); the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, (1911) and 14th edition (1929); and the Dictionary of American Biography, 20 volumes (1928–36).
He was among the Dunning School historians who argued that Northerners had spoiled Reconstruction by trampling the rights of Southern whites. Fleming based his studies of Reconstruction in his knowledge of the ante-bellum period.
More than other historians of this period, he drew from the writings of African Americans and studied their political activities. He wrote
The negro is the central figure in the reconstruction of the South. Without the negro there would have been no Civil War. Granting a war fought for any other cause, the task of reconstruction would, without him, have been comparatively simple.
More than any white historian of Reconstruction before the 1960s, Fleming gave extensive attention to the roles of the Blacks, including economic and social conditions. Fleming was the first scholar to examine the Black exodus to Kansas, in "'Pap' Singleton, the Moses of the Colored Exodus" (1909). His study, The Freedmen's Savings Bank: A Chapter in the Economic History of the Negro Race (1927), was reprinted by Negro Universities Press in 1970.
Along with Frederick Jackson Turner, Fleming was one of a few historians to publish in sociology journals. This new field was being established. Fleming was among the first to emphasize the social, religious and economic dimensions of Reconstruction and its complexity.