Black Reconstruction In America

Du Bois examines the political economy of Reconstruction in South Carolina with an emphasis on the role of Black people in government and labor. The chapter opens with a lengthy quote from John Burgess’s Reconstruction and the Constitution which claims that “it was a great wrong to civilization to put the white race of the South under the domination of the Negro race” (339). In this and subsequent chapters, Du Bois argues against Burgess and his colleagues’ racist claims. Du Bois illustrates that not only did Black people not “dominate” Reconstruction state governments, but that the contributions Black legislators made benefited the state as a whole.

During the Civil War, South Carolina, like many Confederate states, was economically devastated. South Carolina had a large Black majority in the state. As the war drew to a close in 1864, Black people began organizing to demand suffrage.

After the war, the former Confederates hated Black people and the “Yankees” from the North sent to rebuild the state after the war. The federal government, as in other states, established a military dictatorship and appointed an interim governor. This interim state government held a constitutional convention to create a new state constitution which was broadly compliant with the Reconstruction amendments (the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments) and racial equality in order to be readmitted to the Union.