A key theme of Black Reconstruction in America is the role Black Americans played both in winning the Civil War and in Reconstruction governments. In mainstream accounts of this era in the 1930s, the contributions of Black Americans are either overlooked or denigrated. Black Americans were blamed for the failures of Reconstruction while their positive contributions were largely erased from the historical narrative. Du Bois seeks to counter this narrative by illustrating how Black Americans contributed to the Union’s victory and positively impacted Reconstruction government. He also argues that Black Reconstruction politicians were not more corrupt than their white counterparts and that, often, graft was led by white planters, scalawags, and carpetbaggers.

Du Bois provides immense detail about the role of Black Americans during the Civil War era. In the South, Black Americans played two important roles in supporting Union victory. First, during the war, many enslaved Black Americans escaped to the North or to Union-controlled territory. This deprived the South of the agricultural labor they required to support the war effort, while supplementing the Union Army’s efforts through building roads, growing crops, and other support. As Du Bois writes, “this withdrawal and bestowal of his labor decided the war” (51). 

Second, Black Americans were essential to supporting the Union war effort as soldiers. When Lincoln attempted to institute a draft in the North to replace the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who had been killed or wounded in the war, there were riots. He then turned to arming Black Americans, both free-born and freedmen. Du Bois notes, “Black men were repeatedly and deliberately used as shock troops” (96) and he doubts that without their use as reinforcements that the Union would have had as decisive of a military victory.

After the war, Black Americans were extended the franchise and given the opportunity to vote en masse for the first time in American history. Black Americans had the opportunity to run and win political office for the first time in the American South. Du Bois uses archival materials to describe in great detail the contributions of these Black Americans to the constitutional conventions and state governance of the Reconstruction era. He provides brief profiles of the leading Black figures of this period, such as Francis Cardozo of South Carolina and Representative Joseph Rainey of South Carolina, and quotes at length their legislative history and political speeches. This mass of detail illustrates that Black Americans made significant contributions to Reconstruction-era government. He argues that Black American politicians were especially instrumental in the creation of the Southern public school system.

Despite these significant contributions, Du Bois uses government records to show that Black Americans did not hold the majority in state governments even in places where they were the majority of the population, like South Carolina, illustrating that they had only limited control. He then uses public finance records to show that while public debt did increase in Southern states during the Reconstruction era, it was not overly out of proportion with the needs of the states following five years of destructive warfare and the need to industrialize through the introduction of railroads. 

Finally, he quotes white politicians from the era who admit that graft and corruption were widespread in both the North and the South at the time. Du Bois uses this collective evidence to argue that, “the wilder charges [against Black American leadership] have all the stigmata of propaganda and are in some respects intrinsically unbelievable” (375). He claims that Black American politicians were no more corrupt than their white counterparts and that the failures of Reconstruction cannot solely be attributed to their actions.