Black Reconstruction In America

Black Codes is the term for the legislation passed throughout the former Confederate states which “virtually reenacted slavery” (405). These laws severely limited the rights of Black Americans to demand a fair wage, advocate against discriminatory workplace practices, and otherwise be treated equally under the law. Although many of these Black Codes were repealed during the Reconstruction era, they were brought back in slightly modified forms during the Jim Crow era following Reconstruction.

During the Civil War, Confederate pro-enslavement states which bordered the Union were referred to as Border States. The Border States were Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and (later) West Virginia.

A capitalist is someone who owns the means of production. Instead of working for a wage, capitalists exploit proletariat labor to accumulate capital through profit which they can then invest or hoard. This process is known as capitalistic accumulation. Capital is, broadly speaking, resources that can be used to generate wealth. The term “capital” is also used as shorthand to denote the capitalist class in Black Reconstruction, as in the phrase “Northern capital.”

Carpetbagger is a pejorative term for a white Northerner or “Yankee” who came to the South during Reconstruction seeking political and/or economic opportunities. They were often strategically aligned with Black Americans. Du Bois argues that the carpetbaggers’ true alliance was with “Northern capital,” as they came to the South seeking to exploit newly free Black labor and industrial development opportunities.

In common use, dictatorship is used pejoratively to describe a monopoly on state power. In Black Reconstruction, Du Bois uses the term more objectively to describe a monopoly on power. He views contemporary American democracy as a “dictatorship of capital” (533) where democracy is controlled by capital interests. He believes a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” where the workers hold a monopoly on state power, would be better for the masses (567).

During Reconstruction, a key debate was around “disabilities” for former Confederates. In this era, the term “disabilities” refers to the barring of former Confederates from voting or ascending to public office, along with other restrictions on their public activity.

Freedmen is a term that describes escaped or freed formerly enslaved Black Americans. In some instances in the work, “free men,” with a space between the terms, denotes a group more often called “free born” Black Americans who were not born into enslavement.

The Freedmen’s Bureau was a government agency that supported recently freed Black Americans in the South from 1865 to 1872. It provided a variety of services, including loans for land and business development, legal support, the establishment of schools for Black Americans, and voter registration and protection. Du Bois details the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau and highlights how important its contributions were to Southern government and Black Americans, even as he acknowledges that it “never had a real chance to organize and function properly” (313).

“Peculiar institution” is a euphemistic term to describe the institution of enslavement in the South. The term was popularized by Confederate leader John C. Calhoun. It is used by Du Bois in a sardonic way to ironize the way the term attempts to distance Southern planters from the horrors of the enslavement system.

The planter class was the small group of white Southerners who owned plantations worked by enslaved Black people. Du Bois characterizes this class as an “oligarchy” who maintained an antiquated system of agrarianism that led to poor outcomes economically, both for the enslaved Black Americans and the white working class in the South.

Proletariat is a term used in Marxist discourse to collectively denote working-class people, or people who use their labor to earn a wage. Du Bois’s historical intervention in Black Reconstruction is to analyze enslaved or recently freed Black Americans as members of the proletariat.

Reactionary politics is a right-wing counter-revolutionary ideology that seeks to reinstate the political system overthrown in a revolution. In the context of Reconstruction, reactionaries like John McEntry sought to reinstate the oppression of Black people under an oligarchy of the planter class after the abolition of enslavement.

Reconstruction is the period in the United States following the end of the Civil War in 1865 where enslavement was abolished and Southern state governments were reformed to rejoin the Union. The process was overseen by the federal government, which installed military dictatorships throughout former Confederate states to oversee the restructuring of government and to ensure Black civil rights. Reconstruction ended at different times in different states, but its final year is generally accepted to be 1877.