Black Reconstruction In America

“Out of the exploitation of the dark proletariat comes the Surplus Value filched from human beasts which, in cultured lands, the Machine and harnessed Power veil and conceal. The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown and black.”

Du Bois was deeply involved in the Pan African Movement, an international movement around Black heritage and political economy. In this quote, he connects the experience of the Black proletariat and its exploitation as “human beasts” under enslavement to the exploitation of people of color throughout the Global South. He describes this exploitation using terms from Marxist economic analysis such as “surplus value” and “the emancipation of labor,” introducing The Civil War and Reconstruction as a Form of Class Struggle.

“If black labor could be expelled from the United States or eventually exterminated, then the fight against the planter could take place. But the poor whites and their leaders could not for a moment contemplate a fight of united white and black labor against the exploiters.”

Du Bois here describes the point of view of the white proletariat in the South. It is illustrative of how anti-Black prejudice impacted The Civil War and Reconstruction as a Form of Class Struggle.

“Indeed, the plight of the white working class throughout the world today is directly traceable to Negro slavery in America, on which modern commerce and industry was founded, and which persisted to threaten free labor until it was partially overthrown in 1863. The resulting color caste founded and retained by capitalism was adopted, forwarded and approved by white labor, and resulted in subordination of colored labor to white profits the world over. Thus the majority of the world’s laborers, by the insistence of white labor, became the basis of a system of industry which ruined democracy and showed its perfect fruit in World War and Depression. And this book seeks to tell that story.”

Du Bois here summarizes how the aborted Reconstruction process left behind a legacy of capital exploitation of the proletariat which continued to impact American political economy through the 1930s. He describes the “World War,” meaning World War I, and the Depression, meaning the Great Depression, as the “perfect fruit,” or apotheosis, of the acceleration of these processes.

“The espousal of the doctrine of Negro inferiority by the South was primarily because of economic motives and the inter-connected political urge necessary to support slave industry; but to the watching world it sounded like the carefully thought out result of experience and reason; and because of this it was singularly disastrous for modern civilization in science and religion, in art and government, as well as in industry.”

In keeping with the principles of Marxist analysis, Du Bois believes that racial prejudice generated by the bourgeoisie is strongly connected with their “economic motives.” He chastises those who take these racial prejudices seriously as “the carefully thought out result of experience and reason.” Toward the end of the book, Du Bois points to himself as a direct repudiation of the racist assumptions that Black people are inherently ignorant or uncivilized, drawing attention to The Importance of Challenging the “Propaganda of History.”

“When Northern armies entered the South they became armies of emancipation. It was the last thing they planned to be. The North did not propose to attack property. It did not propose to free slaves. This was to be a white man’s war to preserve the Union, and the Union must be preserved.”

Du Bois’s key focus is dismantling myths and advocating for The Importance of Challenging the “Propaganda of History”  as propagated by right-wing sources like Confederate sympathizers and white supremacists. However, he also briefly addresses key Northern or Union-friendly myths, such as the notion that the Union fought the Civil War to emancipate the enslaved Black Americans. Here, he states explicitly that the Union did not join the conflict with this goal in mind.

“Emancipation had thus two ulterior objects. It was designed to make easier the replacement of unwilling Northern white soldiers with black soldiers; and it sought to put behind the war a new push toward Northern victory by the mighty impact of a great moral ideal, both in the North and in Europe.

This national right-about-face had been gradually and carefully accomplished only by the consummate tact of a leader of men who went no faster than his nation marched but just as fast; and also by the unwearying will of the Abolitionists, who forced the nation onward.”

In this quote, Du Bois offers a measured assessment of President Abraham Lincoln, noting that he had “consummate tact” but that he was led by Abolitionists to advocate for “a great moral ideal,” or emancipation. In depicting Lincoln as responding to Abolitionist pressure, Du Bois acknowledges The Role of Black Americans in the Civil War and Reconstruction, as many leading Abolitionists like Frederick Douglass were Black Americans.

“How extraordinary, and what a tribute to ignorance and religious hypocrisy, is the fact that in the minds of most people, even those of liberals, only murder makes men. The slave pleaded; he was humble; he protected the women of the South, and the world ignored him. The slave killed white men; and behold, he was a man!”

This is an example of how Du Bois uses poetic language to highlight his most strident arguments. Here, he uses ironic language such as “how extraordinary” to emphasize his dismay that Black Americans were not considered fully human by “even […] liberals” until they showed their ability to fight on the battlefield.

“Almost unanimously, following the reaction of such leaders as Andrew Johnson and Hinton Helper, the poor white clung frantically to the planter and his ideals; and although ignorant and impoverished, maimed and discouraged, victims of a war fought largely by the poor white for the benefit of the rich planter, they sought redress by demanding unity of white against black, and not unity of poor against rich, or of worker against exploiter […] He regarded the process as the exploitation of black folk by white, not of labor by capital.”

A key focus of Du Bois’s class analysis of the Reconstruction era is a discussion of the false consciousness of the white proletariat in the South who were led to ally with their oppressors—the white planter class—instead of unifying with the Black proletariat due to race-hatred cultivated by those same upper classes. Du Bois characterizes this as an elite-led rather than grassroots movement, wherein the white proletariat “follow[ed]” the examples of leaders like Andrew Johnson. This passage speaks to The Civil War and Reconstruction as a Form of Class Struggle.

“A printer and a carpenter, a rail-splitter and a tailor—Garrison, Christ, Lincoln and Johnson, were the tools of the greatest moral awakening America ever knew, chosen to challenge capital invested in the bodies of men and annual the private profit of slavery.”

Here, Du Bois uses soaring praise and religious language to connect Jesus Christ with the efforts of leading Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and Presidents Lincoln and Johnson to emancipate enslaved Black people in America. He then situates these figures within the context of class struggle, describing their actions as a challenge to “capital invested in the bodies of men.” This statement neatly connects the moral and religious language contemporary to the abolition movement to the Marxist language of class struggle adopted by Du Bois and his contemporaries on the left.

“In all this reported opposition to Negro suffrage, the grounds given were racial and social animosity, and never the determination of land and capital to restrict the political power of labor. Yet this last reason was the fundamental one.”

The language used by those who opposed extending the right to vote to Black men was entirely couched in white supremacist arguments defined by racial resentment. Du Bois argues that this language obscures the true reason white supremacists sought to prevent Black suffrage: They did not want to cede political power and thereby economic power. In other words, they worried that Black people could use political power to improve conditions for both Black and white working people.

“Like Nemesis of Greek tragedy, the central problem of America after the Civil War, as before, was the black man: those four million souls whom the nation had used and degraded, and on whom the South had built an oligarchy similar to the colonial imperialism of today, erected on cheap colored labor and raising raw material for manufacture.”

As noted elsewhere, Du Bois was deeply connected to the Pan African movement which militated against the system of “colonial imperialism” in Africa and throughout the world, wherein capitalists in the Global North exploit people in the Global South. He connects the exploitation of Black Americans under enslavement to the then-ongoing colonial exploitation around the world. He describes Black enslaved people as the “Nemesis of Greek tragedy,” or a figure who demands that the scales of justice be balanced through reparations.

“There was only one defense against the power of the South and while that was revolutionary and hitherto undreamed of, it was the only way, and it could not be stopped by the stubbornness of one narrow-minded man. That was Negro suffrage.”

Here, du Bois describes his assessment of the reasoning of white Northern capital interests in their temporary support for Black suffrage. They wanted to use Black votes to limit Southern, that is Democratic, political power to ensure that their protective tariffs remained in place. Du Bois here characterizes President Andrew Johnson as a “narrow-minded man,” illustrating how Johnson’s position had changed since he supported emancipation along with the other great men described in Important Quote #10.

“The difficulty with this theory was the failure to realize that such dictatorship must last long enough really to put the mass of workers in power; that this would be in fact a dictatorship of the proletariat which must endure until the proletariat or at least a leading united group, with clear objects and effective method, had education and experience and had taken firm control of the economic organization of the South. Unfortunately, the power set to begin this dictatorship was the military arm of a government which more and more was falling into the hands of organized wealth, and of wealth organized on a scale never before seen in modern civilization.”

Du Bois critiques the “theory” that the federal government could withdraw military support for Reconstruction once they were satisfied that Black Americans had been emancipated and granted suffrage without making provisions for what we now call reparations, or capital Black Americans could use to establish themselves independently. He argues that the early withdrawal of support for Reconstruction without this redistribution of capital was motivated by the increasingly monopolistic control of Northern capitalists and industrialists over the government.

“The whole history of Reconstruction has with few exceptions been written by passionate believers in the inferiority of the Negro. The whole body of facts concerning what the Negro actually said and did, how he worked, what he wanted, for whom he voted, is masked in such a cloud of charges, exaggeration and biased testimony, that most students have given up all attempt at new material or new evaluation of the old, and simply repeated perfunctorily all the current legends of black buffoons in legislature, golden spittoons for fieldhands, bribery and extravagance on an unheard-of scale, and the collapse of civilization until an outraged nation rose in wrath and ended the ridiculous travesty.

And yet there are certain quite well-known facts that are irreconcilable with this theory of history.”

In this quote, Du Bois ironizes the absurdity of the “exaggerat[ed] and biased” claims that white supremacist historians make about Reconstruction era governments, speaking to The Importance of Challenging the “Propaganda of History.” He accuses of his contemporary historians of failing to take into account the actual evidence in favor of the fantasies like “golden spittoons for fieldhands,” resulting in historical propaganda rather than a factual account of events.

“The real fight that developed in Louisiana was between the planters, on the one hand, and the newcomers, Northern and Southern, on the other. And these two factions fought to dominate both the poor whites and the Negroes, usually by characteristically different methods.”

Du Bois argues that the true conflict in the Reconstruction South was not between the Black freedmen and the planters, but between the planters, the carpetbaggers from the North, and the scalawags in the South who were all attempting to seize control of capital control by “dominat[ing] the white and Black proletariat.” This is in keeping with his analysis of The Civil War and Reconstruction as a Form of Class Struggle.

“While it is often stated that the great mass of white people were debarred by the Reconstruction Acts, it is notable in Georgia that the average vote, before the war, was 102,585, while the registration of whites was 95,214. Thus those debarred from registering were estimated at between 7,000 and 10,000.”

Throughout Black Reconstruction, Du Bois uses data from government records and financial documents to bolster his argument with primary source facts and figures. He argues in the concluding chapter that government records are more reliable than the secondary sources used by other historians. This sentence is exemplary of how du Bois uses data to counter common myths about Reconstruction, reflecting The Importance of Challenging the “Propaganda of History.” In this instance, he argues that only between 7,000 to 10,000 white former Confederates were “debarred” or lost their right to vote.

“Many things show that in North Carolina land and capital were bidding for the black and white labor vote. Capital with universal suffrage outbid the landed interests. The landholders had one recourse, and that was to draw the color line and convince the native-born white voter that his interests lay with the planter-class and were opposed to those of the Northern interloper and the Negro. […] the strategy of North Carolina became increasingly clear: to drive out Northerners who dared to take political leadership of Negroes and to unite all whites against Negroes on a basis of race prejudice and mob law. Thus under “race” they camouflaged a dictatorship of land and capital over black labor and indirectly over white labor.”

In this quote, Du Bois describes his view of the approach the planter class took in North Carolina to reinforce their power over the proletariat. He emphasizes how they used propaganda to “convince” white people that the real threat was Black Americans rather than the oligarchs who control the state and its land.

“Naturally, in this case, as in the Southern states, the harm and dishonesty of the Shepherd régime was charged to the colored voter, while the beauty and accomplishment of the re-born city was put to the credit of white civilization. There was about as much sense in one charge as in the other. Disfranchisement in the District came at the demand of overtaxed real estate and of reactionary property interests hiding behind the color bar.”

Although this statement directly references the Reconstruction era government in Washington, D.C., Du Bois’s argument about it neatly encapsulates his objection to how Reconstruction-era state governments more generally are described in mainstream historical accounts. The accomplishments of that era are attributed to white leaders like Alexander Shepherd while the failures are attributed to Black politicians. Du Bois seeks to redress this imbalance by emphasizing The Role of Black Americans in Reconstruction.

“To the student of government who fastens his attention chiefly on politics, the years 1866 to 1876 were years when the power of the national government remained exclusively democratic, with ultimate control in the hands of the mass of citizens who had the right to vote. But the student who realizes that human activity is chiefly exercised in earning a living and, thus, particularly in the present industrial age, the actions of groups and governments have to do mainly with income—this student will see that the Civil War brought anarchy in the basic economic activities which were gradually hammered and forced into a new and vast monarchy of tremendous power and almost miraculous accomplishment.”

This quote is an example of how Du Bois tacitly criticizes other academics their historical analysis without mentioning them by name. Here he notes that “the student of government who fastens his attention chiefly on politics” misses key aspects of the historical record. This is a reference to John Burgess, a white supremacist and pioneer in the field of political science, a field that focuses on political rather than economic forces, who founded the graduate school in Political Science at Columbia and wrote a key text about Reconstruction in 1902.

“The abolition-democracy itself was largely based on property, believed in capital and formed in effect a powerful petty bourgeoisie. It believed in democratic government but only under a general dictatorship of property. Most of the leaders of the revolt of 1872 in the North lived on investments or received salaries from investments. They did not believe in a democratic movement which would confiscate and redistribute property, except possibly in an extreme case like slavery. But even here, while they seized stolen property in human bodies, they never could bring themselves to countenance the redistribution of property in land and tools, which rested in fact on no less defensible basis.”

Du Bois characterizes the abolition movement of the 19th century as “a powerful petty bourgeoisie” or capitalists who owned their means of production but did not have the same monopoly power as industrialists. He attributes their lack of dedication to the redistribution he feels would have been necessary to achieve Reconstruction to their capitalism. This is one way he draws parallels between the Civil War and Reconstruction era and the French Revolution, which was also an incomplete revolution led by the petty bourgeoisie.

“God wept; but that mattered little to an unbelieving age; what mattered most was that the world wept and still is weeping and blind with tears and blood. For there began to rise in America in 1876 a new capitalism and a new enslavement of labor […] The immense profit from this new exploitation and world-wide commerce enabled a guild of millionaires to engage the greatest engineers, the wisest men of science, as well as pay high wage to the more intelligent labor and at the same time to have left enough surplus to make more thorough the dictatorship of capital over the state and over the popular vote, not only in Europe and America but in Asia and Africa.”

Du Bois uses the image of the world “weeping and blind with tears and blood” to characterize both the oppression of Black people by capital interests at the close of Reconstruction and the ongoing oppression of people throughout the world under the consolidated capital control of the state that resulted. He describes the world as “blind,” implying that people are unaware of the forces that make them “weep[].” This reflects his interest in The Civil War and Reconstruction as a Form of Class Struggle.

“If a poor, degraded, disadvantaged horde achieves sudden freedom and power, what could we ask of them in ten years? To develop some, but surely not all, necessary social leadership; to seek the right sort of leadership from other groups; to strive for increase of knowledge, so as to teach themselves wisdom and the rhythm of united effort. This latter accomplishment crowns the work of Reconstruction.”

Du Bois sees the creation of public schools for Black Americans and, in particular, the creation of normal schools or Black teacher training colleges, as the “crown[ing]” accomplishment of Reconstruction. This is a rare moment where du Bois celebrates the enduring legacy of Reconstruction and illustrates the importance of education to the Black community historically. He is also drawing attention to The Role of Black Americans in Reconstruction.

“It must be remembered and never forgotten that the civil war in the South which overthrew Reconstruction was a determined effort to reduce black labor as nearly as possible to a condition of unlimited exploitation and build a new class of capitalists on this foundation. The wage of the Negro worker, despite the war amendments, was to be reduced to the level of bare subsistence by taxation, peonage, caste, and every method of discrimination. This program had to be carried out in open defiance of the clear letter of the law.”

In Black Reconstruction, Du Bois commits to The Importance of Challenging the “Propaganda of History” with his own narrative of this historical period. He signals this goal in this quotation here with the opening phrase “It must be remembered and never forgotten,” suggesting that he hopes future historians will incorporate his interpretation of how white capitalists used their political control to oppress Black proletariats following Reconstruction.