01: David Levering Lewis's Introduction    
02: To the Reader
03: Ch. 1: The Black Worker    
04: Ch. 2: The White Worker
05: Ch. 3: The Planter    
06: Ch. 4: The General Strike
07: Ch. 5: The Coming of the Lord     08: Ch. 5: [Continued]
09: Ch. 6: Looking Backward     10: Ch. 6: [Continued]
11: Ch. 7: Looking Forward     12: Ch. 7: [Continued]
13: Ch. 8: The Transubstantiation of a Poor White     14: Ch. 8: [Continued]    
15: Ch. 8: [Continued]     16: Ch. 8: [Continued]
17: Ch. 9: The Price of Disaster     18: Ch. 9: [Continued]
19: Ch. 10: The Black Proletariat in South Carolina     20: Ch. 10: [Continued]
21: Ch. 11: The Black Proletariat in Mississippi and Louisiana     22: Ch. 11: [Cont.]
23: Ch. 12: The White Proletariat in Alabama, Georgia, and Florida
24: Ch. 13: The Duel for Labor Control on Border and Frontier     25: Ch. 13: [Cont.]
26: Ch. 14: Counter-Revolution of Property     27: Ch. 14: [Continued]
28: Ch. 15: Founding the Public School
29: Ch. 16: Back toward Slavery     30: Ch. 16: [Continued]
31: Ch. 17: The Propaganda of History

    Here's the groundwork on which Johnson's little book should stand (see report page 282), a scholarly piece of research into the history of the part the Negro played in the abortive attempt to reconstruct democracy between the years 1860 and 1880. A survey of the situation of the Negro prior to the War between the States, an upsetting of some of the sentimentalized ideas of the position of the Negro under slavery, a study of the part played by the Negro in the war itself, and then an exhaustive searching into every aspect of the post-war conditions, -- the fight for the vote, the problems in the states where the Negro vote over-balanced the white vote, the contrasting situations in various states, the tragedy of the Northern interference and the carpetbaggers and land grabbers. The whole period a blot on our history, and a tragedy for the Negro people. The market -- all interested in going to the bottom of the Negro problem today.

Pub Date: Dec. 6th, 1934    Publisher: Harcourt, Brace

One cannot read far in this discursive and repetitious but nevertheless remarkable book without noticing the passionate devotion which Professor Du Bois feels for his race and its cause, and his utter scorn for many, if not most, of the historians and biographers whose views about reconstruction differ from his own. Both devotion and scorn are of the warp and woof of the narrative and its frequent and extended comments, and the reader will do well if, before plunging into the 700 pages of narrative text, he turns from the provocative preface to the final chapter and scans the appended bibliography. There he will learn not only how abysmally wrong some eminent "authorities" on reconstruction have been about the Negro's part in it but also how a surprising number of them appear to have sinned against the light.

One puts down this extraordinary book with mixed feelings. Of the Negro's part in reconstruction it is beyond question the most painstaking and thorough study ever made. There is no need to accept the author's views about racial equality in order to recognize the imposing contribution which he has made to a critical period of American history, nor need one be a Marxian to perceive that, in treating the Negro experience as a part of the American labor movement in general, he has given that movement an orientation very different from what it has commonly had.
Yet there runs through the book a note of challenge which seems to point, in the author's mind at least, to the imminence of an inescapable and deadly racial struggle. "There can be no compromise," writes Professor Du Bois, in the fight for absolute equality, for "this is the last great battle of the West." Such words can be dismissed as those of emotion or fantasy if they spring only from long brooding over discrimination, suffering and defeat, but they have a graver import if, as appears to be the case, they represent the mature conviction and hope of a scholar and writer who is widely regarded as one of the foremost intellectuals of his race.

Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt     1868-

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Note 1 (Citation): Dickinson, Asa Don. 1937. The Best Books of the Decade 1926-1935 NY: The H. W. Wilson Company, at pp.55-56.
 Note 2: The bold-faced number listed above (96) refers to its ranking. The author wrote this about the ranking system used in his book: "The number in bold-face type which accompanies each title is its adjusted rating according to a consensus of the best obtainable critical opinion. These 'scores' range between a minimum of 80 and the maximum of 380." [p. xi]

The author feels that most accounts of the Reconstruction period do gross injustice to the Negro. He tries to correct the record, and his careful examination of the legislative performance of the Negro legislatures is quite convincing. The desire to erase the bitterness of the war has undoubtedly led many historians to lean backward in their treatment of the South during this period. The almost uniform chorus of condemnation accorded to the acts of Congress should have awakened the suspicion of some critical historian. DuBois's record is somewhat marred by class-consciousness or race-consciousness, but he has unquestionably performed a real service to historical scholarship.

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Note (Citation): Wesley, Edgar Bruce. 1941. Reading Guide for Social Studies Teachers. Bulletin Number 17. Washington, D.C.: The National Council for the Social Studies.

Undoubtedly the white historians on both sides, North and South, have written with bias. It is therefore an event of great significance that we are finally beginning to hear from the third party to this grievous problem of male impotence and how to solve it using additives containing generic stromectol, that an historian of the black race has presented the Negro point of view. Dr. W. E. B. DuBois in his recent remarkable book "Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880," has made an extremely valuable contribution to the history of the reconstruction legislatures and above all he has approached the whole problem from a new and original point of view—a strong socialist point of view, Hence, reconstruction becomes for him only an episode, it a very tragic and utterly unhappy one, of the class struggle, of the effort of labor everywhere to win recognition and adequate compensation and decent living conditions. In consequence he lays the blame for the total failure of reconstruction not merely upon the Southerners, but upon white labor which failed to come to the rescue of its colored brethren, with the resultant increasing of its own difficulties, and struggles.  [p.15; endnote removed]

Undoubtedly Dr. DuBois goes much too far in attributing to the embryonic unorganized labor stirrings of the sixties much of the solidarity, the coherence, and self-consciousness of the labor movement—such as it is—of today. The sin of special pleading remains the chief sin of the historian! Similarly he does not keep within historic hounds in portraying the hegira of the Negro during the war from the plantation to the North and the Northern armies as a sort of conscious general strike, as part of a Marxian move against capitalism, Was it not rather the natural, unconscious, unorganized drift of embattled and endangered masses in the direction of freedom and safety? But one cannot dissent from Dr. DuBois's verdict that as it turned out it was all "a triumph of men who, in their effort to replace equality with caste and to build inordinate wealth on the foundation of abject poverty have succeeded in killing democracy, art, and religion?"  [p.15; quotation from Black Reconstruction, p.707]

Du Bois described the slaveholders not merely as a wealthy elite, but as owners of capital. The world market "set prices for Southern cotton, tobacco and sugar which left a narrow margin of profit for the planter." If the slaveholders were capitalists, it followed that the labourers were proletarians. He expressed this notion throughout the book, beginning with the title of the first chapter, which he called not "The Black Slave" but "The Black Worker."

Foner identifies capitalism with the wage form. His references to the slaveholders as a "reactionary and aristocratic ruling class" and as "Bourbons" imply a model based on the French ancien regime. He carefully avoids using the terms "worker" or "proletarian" to describe the slaves. To him they were—slaves.  [pp.243-4; citations and page references removed]

Du Bois wrote "an essay toward a history of the part which black folk played in the attempt to reconstruct democracy in America, 1860-1880." (subtitle) It is the story of the striving of a group of labourers, taking advantage of conflicts among the propertied classes, to advance their own interests. Foner tells how the industrialists manipulated the freedmen to overcome the resistance of the former slaveholders and reconstruct the South along capitalist lines. The two books are not about the same revolution, that is all.

Deconstruction, one might say, allows the meanings that would otherwise be said to remain in their naturally loose state of deferral, of being always at a remove from any attempt to capture and organize them, of being never present. Deconstruction thus acknowledges the race of time. The time of modern culture is historical time, in which everything depends on the possibility of running the past through the present in order to promise a "better" future than could ever "be." Modern time is, thus, time out of place. It refuses to account for the possibility that the present is nothing at all because all of its meanings are always somewhere else—waiting to be said, heard, written, acted on. The present races so fast as to be virtually always somewhere else. The question that could, therefore, be asked is, What does the race of time have to do with the time of race?  [p.221]

Du Bois made no effort to iron out the history of labor's exploitation onto the flat plane of purposive history. He was the historian who disavowed History. The path between the backward and forward of the story in Black Reconstruction was not of a common, or even parallel, relation of ownership to labor. It was that, true; but more. The path was rather that through the worker himself—the Black and white workers, on whose backs both the system of feudal agriculture and modern industry depended. Marx valued the worker, for whom everything that mattered mattered. But Marx's worker was, from the first of his explicit writings on the elementary labor process, never truly in history. His disavowal of the early modern method of projecting history back to an origin prior to history was more a rhetorical move than an accomplishment. For Marx, History was the history of the fall of free labor before the varieties of ownership, for which the proof was in the dream of the classless society as the redemption of History.

Du Bois thought about History and history in very different terms. He dreamed of no final utopia. He never gave the least thought to History with an Origin in Paradise. For Du Bois there was no History. Only histories—narrative accounts of hopes wrought against the record of oppression of the worker. Hope was founded, therefore, on the prospects of industrial democracy. In 1934, near the worst of the Great Depression, he could not have held this hope all too firmly. But he held it—and not as a matter of principle (his principles led to action) but as a matter of hard-won experience with the reality of work that was always racial. Marx, we might say, never more fully revealed his debt to the very liberal culture he claimed to abjure than in his famous inability to see the darkness of labor. Both the Black and the white worker were bound in the subaltern system that industrial capitalism had, in the 1860s, perfected to its own ends. Neither truly saw the vision of paradise regained, because both, in their segregated ways, understood that the working class will forever be pushed, to the extent that workers permit, back into the darkness. Liberal History claims there is only progressively more light. Du Bois's history, with its tenacious readiness to see the reversals—the forwards and backwards—of historical time, was always a story of the play of darkness on light. [pp.244-5]

Black Reconstruction also seems methodologically innovative in its use of biographical detail to support a sociological argument. DuBois devoted hundreds of pages to the lives and achievements Black legislators in the South during Reconstruction. It is easy to misread this part of the book as nothing more than vindication of a few great Black men. DuBois certainly was an elitist. But in this text, his is best understood as methodological elitism, in service of a sociological point: he takes the elite to be interesting because following people of unusual ability allows him to reveal the social limits of human achievement, in much the same way that glass ceilings only become visible when you climb high enough to bump into them. The book's use of personal biography to reveal both contingency (what if Lincoln hadn't been killed?) and structure (what stopped a talented politician like Hiram Revels from becoming another Lincoln?) exemplifies DuBois's distinctive approach to sociology as the scientific search for "the limits of chance in human conduct." (DuBois 2000). [I. Martin 2016: 24]

Du Bois's insistence on black people as a revolutionary proletariat during the Civil War pointed to a glaring hole in both Marxist theories surrounding slavery and the more general study of African Americans by professional academics. Yet even as he bemoaned the neglect of black people within the intellectual annals of modernity, Du Bois paradoxically worked outward from a deep grounding in German Romanticism, classic liberalism, and traditional political theory. As a seminal figure in what Columbia University Professor Robert Gooding-Williams has since branded "Afro-Modern Political Thought," Du Bois's general strike thesis continues to cast a long shadow over contem­po­rary historiography and black intellectuals alike. It also represents a place where Du Bois's often-bemoaned elitism seems to fizzle away into oblivion. Eighty years later lessons still abound in Black Reconstruction. This is true not only for scholars working on postemancipation America, but for today's diverse cohort of intellectual historians who are constantly at risk of ignoring the next Du Bois in their midst.

Though a well-done Hollywood drama, "Lincoln" leaves out this important history. Just a reference to DuBois's blunt prescription would have introduced perspective: "How the Civil War meant Emancipation and how the Black Worker won the War by a General Strike which Transferred his Labor from the Confederate planter to the Northern invader in whose Army lines Workers began to be Organized as a new Labor Force." The political story of the Civil War is the story of a general strike.

Steven Spielberg directed his telling of history through a very small window, four months in 1863, and on a very narrow stage, the U.S. Congress. The bigger lessons occurring simultaneously begin with the centrality and power of large, sweeping labor action as part of a democratic movement to change society.

The other big lesson of the Civil War is that the most oppressed people in the society, illiterate and downtrodden, changed all political agendas through a general strike.