"The fundamental underpinning of this interpretation was the conviction, to quote one member of the Dunning School, of "negro incapacity." The childlike blacks, these scholars insisted, were unprepared for freedom and incapable of properly exercising the political rights Northerners had thrust upon them. The fact that blacks took part in government, wrote E. Merton Coulter in the last full-scale history of Reconstruction written entirely within the Dunning tradition, was a "diabolical" development, "to be remembered, shuddered at, and execrated." Yet while these works abounded in horrified references to "negro rule" and "negro government," blacks in fact played little role in the narratives. Their aspirations, if mentioned at all, were ridiculed, and their role in shaping the course of events during Reconstruction ignored. When these writers spoke of "the South" or "the people," they meant whites. Blacks appeared either as passive victims of white manipulation or as an unthinking people whose "animal natures" threatened the stability of civilized society.2"