He was a leader of the Dunning School of scholars in the early 20th century, who addressed Reconstruction era history using historiographical technique.
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.
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.
Fleming began graduate work in history at Columbia University in New York in 1900, taking the PhD in 1904.
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.
He was among the Dunning School historians who argued that Northerners had spoiled Reconstruction by trampling the rights of Southern whites.
[2]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.
Du Bois wrote that Fleming's works were "anti-Negro in spirit," but admitted they have "a certain fairness and sense of historic honesty.
He was a member of the Executive Council of the AHA for two terms and served twice as chairman of the John H. Dunning Prize Committee.
In his 1979 presidential address to the American History Association, historian John Hope Franklin contrasted Fleming's treatment of black Alabama Congressman James T. Rapier with William L. Yancey, a white Confederate who had also been educated in the North.
The difference was that instead of stopping in the northern part of the United States, as, for example, (the pro-slavery advocate) William L. Yancey did, Rapier went on to Canada.
Rapier's contemporaries did not regard him as a Canadian; and, if some were not precisely clear about where he was born (as was the Alabama State Journal, which referred to his birthplace as Montgomery rather than Florence), they did not misplace him altogether.
Franklin wrote: In 1905 Fleming made Rapier a Canadian because it suited his purposes to have a bold, aggressive, "impertinent" Negro in Alabama Reconstruction come from some non-Southern, contaminating environment like Canada.