Black Reconstruction In America

Du Bois analyzes the American Civil War, its causes, and the role of Black Americans in the war. Du Bois argues that at the outbreak of the war in 1861, the Union Army had no intention of emancipating enslaved Black Americans. They were fighting to save the Union for economic reasons: They wanted the “great market for goods […] with all its possibilities of agriculture, manufacture, trade and profit” (50). Both the North and the South expected the poor white working class to fight willingly in the war, which they thought would be over quickly. They did not expect Black people to participate in the conflict as soldiers. The South thought that their economy would not suffer during the war, as enslaved Black people could continue to work the fields while the white men went off to fight.

As the war dragged on, by 1862, the South began to use enslaved people to support the war effort as laborers, servants, and cooks. Southern whites attempted to prevent enslaved people from fleeing through propaganda efforts that warned Northerners would mistreat them. Nevertheless, enslaved people began to gradually flee to the North or to the Union Army. Initially, many Union leaders returned these “fugitive slaves,” insisting that the Union Army were not Abolitionists.