Black Reconstruction In America

In the 19th century, the United States became home to many white European immigrants who saw it as a place where they could rise up from the working class (someone paid a wage) to become a member of the capitalist class (someone who exploits workers for profit). Du Bois argues that these white workers saw Black enslaved people and Black workers more generally as competition who undercut their wages and took jobs. This led to race riots. 

In the 1840s, English and German trade unionists began to organize white workers in the US while largely ignoring the question of enslavement. Du Bois argues that white labor leadership did not understand that “slave labor […] tended to reduce all labor toward slavery” (16). At the same time, the Abolition movement gained steam. However, the trade union movement and the Abolition movements did not unite, despite being two parts of the same labor movement to improve the lives of working people. Abolitionists did not conceive of their movement as a labor movement; they advocated for abolition on the capitalist, liberal basis that people deserved the freedom within a labor market where they could sell their labor as they wished. Du Bois quotes a number of white trade unionists who either failed to argue against enslavement or actively advocated on its behalf, including Karl Marx’s ally Hermann Kriege. In the 1840s, the Chartists, a radical liberal labor movement in England, critiqued enslavement. This position was not quickly adopted by existing labor movements in the US.

Du Bois then describes how poor white people in the South, like Black Americans, were also not included in industrial labor organizing at the time. Poor white people largely suffered under the planter class, although some rose to middle-class positions as overseers or merchants. Poor white people did not see Black people as allies in their fight against the exploitative planter class because they desired to collaborate with the system in the hopes they would one day advance to these capitalist class positions.

Many Southern poor white people, like Northern workers, migrated West. They saw the free land of the West as an opportunity for economic advancement. In Kansas, the question of how the US economy and labor system was to be organized came to a head: It was a debate centered on whether capitalists would own the laborer or whether the laborer would be free to pursue economic advancement through land ownership. This question led to the outbreak of the Civil War. 



Du Bois argues that after the Civil War ended and enslaved people were emancipated, “the whole weight of America was thrown to color caste” (26) as a way for white capital to continue to discipline “colored labor,” resulting in a “new slavery.”

Du Bois describes how political and economic power in the antebellum South was concentrated in the hands of white enslavers, the plantation owners who made up 7% of the population of the South. The planters held onto their political power in part through the “three-fifths” compromise, which held that three-fifths of an enslaved person would be counted for proportional representation without having suffrage, giving the Southern planters disproportionate political power in the states and nationally.

The Southern planter class had more in common with the European gentry in their culture, manners, and lavish expenditures than their Northern American counterparts. Du Bois argues that Northerners’ fascination with, and deference to, this Southern high society impeded the Abolitionist movement.

The planters used their profits from the enslavement-powered agrarian society to consume lavishly rather than produce more efficiently at greater volume. They relied on middle managers and therefore did not understand the details of their industry. They resisted improving their production efficiency through “intelligent labor, machinery, and modern methods” (32) because it was costly. Thus, as the North industrialized and modernized, the South remained a low-efficiency agrarian economy built upon enslaved labor.

Southern white people asserted that Black people were naturally less capable than white people, and they backed up this claim with pseudoscience. They used this rationalization to justify maintaining Black chattel enslavement.

As they had rejected more efficient production methods, planters could only increase their profits through reducing labor costs. Since the abolition of the international trade in enslaved persons, the price of enslaved people had increased. To reduce these costs through increased supply, enslaved people were “bred” in the Border States such as Virginia and then sold to planters in the South and West. Planters largely denied doing this as it was considered morally abhorrent to permit sexual promiscuity and to break up families.

In 1860, the Southern states seceded from the Union because they feared the abolition of enslavement. Southern political leaders were clear that they were seceding to protect and maintain enslavement. They argued that enslavement was no different than labor exploitation in the industrialized North. Du Bois argues that having absolute power over other people led the Southern planters to act like petty tyrants; he feels their aristocracy was destined to “disintegrate of its own weight” (47). In the Civil War, the planter class disappeared and was replaced with a new Southern upper-class which had an “insensibility to the finer things of civilization” (48).