James Shepherd Pike

James Shepherd Pike was a Maine journalist who wrote a first-hand account of Reconstruction in South Carolina. His enemies declared it grossly distorted, at best, and false in major aspects. Hundreds have historians have, however, treated the book as reliable.

Pike's book

In his book The Prostrate State: South Carolina Under Negro Government, Pike painted a lurid picture accusing black lawmakers with a lack of decorum in the management of public affairs, and complained that they favored public schools and opposed the Ku Klux Klan. The latter facts were true although Pike dismissed their viewpoints, using the racial slur "Sambo."

Untruths and distortions in Pike's report are examined by the historian Robert Franklin Durden in his book Shepherd Pike. Republicanism and the American Negro, 1850–1882.

In his 1979 presidential address to the American Historical Association, Duke University historian John Hope Franklin observed of Pike that "By picking and choosing from his notes those events and incidents that supported his argument, he sought to place responsibility for the failure of Reconstruction on the U.S. Grant administration and on the freedmen, whom he despised with equal passion."[1]

References

• Durden, James Shepherd Pike. Republicanism and the American Negro, 1850–1882 pp. 214—19. (Durham, N.C., 1957) ISBN 0313201684
• Historian John Hope Franklin discusses Pike's distortions of the Reconstruction era.
• Franklin, John Hope. Race and History: Selected Essays 1938-1988, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, c1989.
• Pike, James Shepherd, The Prostrate State: South Carolina Under Negro Government(New York, 1873).