Black Reconstruction in America

Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880

W. E. B. Du Bois

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351376617
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

After four centuries of bondage, the nineteenth century marked the long-awaited release of millions of black slaves. Subsequently, these former slaves attempted to reconstruct the basis of American democracy. W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the greatest intellectual leaders in United States history, evaluates the twenty years of fateful history that followed the Civil War, with special reference to the efforts and experiences of African Americans.

Du Bois's words best indicate the broader parameters of his work: "the attitude of any person toward this book will be distinctly influenced by his theories of the Negro race. If he believes that the Negro in America and in general is an average and ordinary human being, who under given environment develops like other human beings, then he will read this story and judge it by the facts adduced."

The plight of the white working class throughout the world is directly traceable to American slavery, on which modern commerce and industry was founded, Du Bois argues. Moreover, the resulting color caste was adopted, forwarded, and approved by white labor, and resulted in the subordination of colored labor throughout the world. As a result, the majority of the world's laborers became part of a system of industry that destroyed democracy and led to World War I and the Great Depression. This book tells that story.

VIII Transubstantiation of a Poor White

How Andrew Johnson, unexpectedly raised to the Presidency, was suddenly set between a democracy which included poor whites and black men, and an autocracy that included Big Business and slave barons; and how torn between impossible allegiances, he ended in forcing a hesitant nation to choose between the increased political power of a restored Southern oligarchy and votes for Negroes.

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. If Northern industry before the war had secured a monopoly of the raw material raised in the South for its new manufactures; and if Northern and Western labor could have maintained their wage scale against slave competition, the North would not have touched the slave system. But this the South had frustrated. It had threatened labor with nation-wide slave competition and had sent its cotton abroad to buy cheap manufactures, and had resisted the protective tariff demanded by the North.

It was this specific situation that had given the voice of freedom a chance to be heard: freedom for new-come peasants who feared the competition of slave labor; peasants from Europe, New England and the poor white South; freedom for all men black and white through that dream of democracy in which the best of the nation still believed.

The result was war because of the moral wrong, the economic disaster and the democratic contradiction of making human labor real estate; war, because the South was determined to make free white labor compete with black slaves, monopolize land and raw material in the hands of a political aristocracy, and extend the scope of that power; war, because the industrial North refused to surrender its raw material and one of its chief markets to Europe; war, because white American labor, while it refused to recognize black labor as equal and human, had to fight to maintain its own humanity and ideal of equality.

The result of the war left four million human beings just as valuable for the production of cotton and sugar as they had been before the war—but during the war, as laborers and soldiers, these Negroes had made it possible for the North to win, and without their actual and possible aid, the South would never have surrendered; and not least, these four million free men formed in the end the only possible moral justification for an otherwise sordid and selfish orgy of murder, arson and theft.

Now, early in 1865, the war is over. The North does not especially want free Negroes; it wants trade and wealth. The South does not want a particular interpretation of the Constitution. It wants cheap Negro labor and the political and social power based on it. Had there been no Negroes, there would have been no war. Had no Negroes survived the war, peace would have been difficult because of hatred, loss and bitter grief. But its logical path would have been straight.

The South would have returned to its place in Congress with less than its former representation because of the growing North and West. These areas of growing manufacture and agriculture, railroad building and corporations, would have held the political power over the South until the South united with the new insurgency of the West or the old Eastern democratic ideals. Industrialization might even have brought a third party representing labor and raised the proletariat to dominance.

Of this, in 1865 there were only vague signs, and in any case, the former Southern aristocracy would not easily have allied itself with immigrant labor, while the Southern poor whites would have needed long experience and teaching. Thus, the North in the absence of the Negro would have had a vast debt, a problem of charity, distress and relief, such reasonable amnesty as would prevent the old Southern leaders from returning immediately to power, the recognition of the reorganized states, and then work and forgetting.

“Let us have peace.” But there was the black man looming like a dark ghost on the horizon. He was the child of force and greed, and the father of wealth and war. His labor was indispensable, and the loss of it would have cost many times the cost of the war. If the Negro had been silent, his very presence would have announced his plight. He was not silent. He was in unusual evidence. He was writing petitions, making speeches, parading with returned soldiers, reciting his adventures as slave and freeman. Even dumb and still, he must be noticed. His poverty had to be relieved, and emancipation in his case had to mean poverty. If he had to work, he had to have land and tools. If his labor was in reality to be free labor, he had to have legal freedom and civil rights. His ignorance could only be removed by that very education which the law of the South had long denied him and the custom of the North had made exceedingly difficult. Thus civil status and legal freedom, food, clothes and tools, access to land and help to education, were the minimum demands of four million laborers, and these demands no man could ignore, Northerner or Southerner, Abolitionist or Copperhead, laborer or captain of industry. How did the nation face this paradox and dilemma?

Led by Abraham Lincoln, the nation had looked back to the status before the war in order to find a path to which the new nation and the new condition of the freedmen could be guided. Only one forward step President Lincoln insisted upon and that was the real continued freedom of the emancipated slave; but the abolition-democracy went beyond this because it was convinced that here was no logical stopping place; and it looked forward to civil and political rights, education and land, as the only complete guarantee of freedom, in the face of a dominant South which hoped from the first, to abolish slavery only in name.

In the North, a new and tremendous dictatorship of capital was arising. There was only one way to curb and direct what promised to become the greatest plutocratic government which the world had ever known. This way was first to implement public opinion by the weapon of universal suffrage—a weapon which the nation already had in part, but which had been virtually impotent in the South because of slavery, and which was at least weakened in the North by the disfranchisement of an unending mass of foreign-born laborers. Once universal suffrage was achieved, the next step was to use it with such intelligence and power that it would function in the interest of the mass of working men.

To accomplish this end there should have been in the country and represented in Congress a union between the champions of universal suffrage and the rights of the freedmen, together with the leaders of labor, the small landholders of the West, and logically, the poor whites of the South. Against these would have been arrayed the Northern industrial oligarchy, and eventually, when they were re-admitted to Congress, the representatives of the former Southern oligarchy.

This union of democratic forces never took place. On the contrary, they were torn apart by artificial lines of division. The old anti-Negro labor rivalry between white and black workers kept the labor elements after the war from ever really uniting in a demand to increase labor power by Negro suffrage and Negro economic stability. The West was seduced from a vision of peasant- proprietors, recruited from a laboring class, into a vision of labor-exploiting farmers and land speculation which tended to transform the Western farmers into a petty bourgeoisie fighting not to overcome but to share spoils with the large land speculators, the monopolists of transportation, and the financiers. Wherever a liberal and democratic party started to differentiate itself from this group, the only alliance offered was the broken oligarchy of the South, with its determination to reenslave Negro labor.

The effective combination which ensued was both curious and contradictory. The masters of industry, the financiers and monopolists, had in self-defense to join with abolition-democracy in forcing universal suffrage on the South, or submit to the reassertion of the old land-slave feudalism with increased political power.

Such a situation demanded an economic guardianship of freedmen, and the first step to this meant at least the beginning of a dictatorship by labor. This, however, had to be but temporary union and was bound to break up before long. The break was begun by the extraordinary corruption, graft and theft that became more and more evident in the country from 1868 on, as a result of the wild idea that industry and progress for the people of the United States were compatible with the selfish sequestration of profit for private individuals and powerful corporations.

But those who revolted from the party of exploitation and high finance did not see allies in the dictatorship of labor in the South. Rather they were entirely misled by the complaint of property from the Southern oligarchy. They failed to become a real party of economic reform and became a reaction of small property-holders against corporations; of a petty bourgeoisie against a new economic monarchy. They immediately joined Big Business in coming to an understanding with the South in 1876, so that by force and fraud the South overthrew the dictatorship of the workers.

But this was only the immediate cause. If there had been no widespread political corruption, North and South, there would still have arisen an absolute difference between those who were trying to conduct the new Southern state governments in the interest of the mass of laborers, black and white, and those North and South who were determined to exploit labor, both in agriculture and industry, for the benefit of an oligarchy. Such an oligarchy was in effect back of the military dictatorship which supported these very Southern labor governments, and which had to support them either as laborers or by developing among them a capitalist class. But as soon as there was understanding between the Southern exploiter of labor and the Northern exploiter, this military support would be withdrawn; and the labor governments, in spite of what they had accomplished for the education of the masses, and in spite of the movements against waste and graft which they had inaugurated, would fail. Under such circumstances, they had to fail, and in a large sense the immediate hope of American democracy failed with them.

Let us now follow this development more in detail. In 1863 and 1864, Abraham Lincoln had made his tentative proposals for reconstructing the South. He had left many things unsaid. The loyalminded, consisting of as few as one-tenth of the voters whom Lincoln proposed to regard as a state, must naturally, to survive, be supported by the United States Army, until a majority of the inhabitants acquiesced in the new arrangements. It was Lincoln’s fond hope that this acquiescence might be swift and clear, but no one knew better than he that it might not.

He was careful to say that Congress would certainly have voice as to the terms on which they would recognize the newly elected Senators and Representatives. This proposal met the general approval of the country, but Congress saw danger and enacted the Wade-Davis Bill. This did not recognize Negro suffrage, and was not radically different from the Lincoln plan, except that the final power and assent of Congress were more prominently set forth.

Lincoln did not oppose it. He simply did not want his hands permanently tied. The bill failed, leaving Lincoln making a careful study of the situation, and promising another statement. He was going forward carefully, hoping for some liberal movement to show itself in the South, and delicately urging it. In the election of 1864, the country stood squarely back of him. The Northern democracy carried only New Jersey, Delaware and Kentucky. But he died, and Andrew Johnson took his place.

Thus, suddenly, April 15, 1865, Andrew Johnson found himself President of the United States, six days after Lee’s surrender, and a month and a half after the 38th Congress had adjourned, March 3.

It was the drear destiny of the Poor White South that, deserting its economic class and itself, it became the instrument by which democracy in the nation was done to death, race provincialism deified, and the world delivered to plutocracy. The man who led the way with unconscious paradox and contradiction was Andrew Johnson.

Lately the early life and character of Andrew Johnson have been abundantly studied. He was a fanatical hater of aristocracy.

Through every public act of his runs one consistent, unifying thread of purpose—the advancement of the power, prosperity and liberty of the masses at the expense of intrenched privilege. The slaveholding aristocracy he hated with a bitter, enduring hatred born of envy and ambition. “If Johnson were a snake" said his rival, the well-born Isham G. Harris, “he would lie in the grass to bite the heels of the rich men’s children" The very thought of an aristocrat caused him to emit venom and lash about him in fury.¹

His political methods were those of the barn-storming demagogue.

Johnson’s speeches were tissues of misstatement, misrepresentation, and insulting personalities, directed to the passions and unreasoning impulses of the ignorant voters; assaults upon aristocrats combined with vaunting of his own low origin and the dignity of manual labor.²

Yet a biographer says that Johnson was

the only President who practiced what he preached, drawing no distinction between rich and poor, or high and low. . . .

Do not these facts furnish an explanation of Johnson’s life? Do they not show why he had the courage to go up against caste and cheap aristocracy, why he dared to stand for the under-dog, whether Catholic, Hebrew, foreigner, mechanic, or child; and to cling like death to the old flag and the Union? . . .

“Gladly I would lay down my life" he wrote, “if I could so engraft democracy into our general government that it would be permanent"³

To all this there is one great qualification. Andrew Johnson could not include Negroes in any conceivable democracy. He tried to, but as a poor white, steeped in the limitations, prejudices, and ambitions of his social class, he could not; and this is the key to his career.

Johnson sat in Congress from 1843 to 1853, and was Senator from 1857 to 1862. He favored the annexation of Texas as a gateway for Negro emigration. He was against a high tariff, championed free Western lands for white labor, and favored the annexation of Cuba for black slave labor.

McConnell introduced a homestead bill into Congress in January, 1846. Johnson’s bill came in March. He returned to Tennessee as Governor, but induced the legislature to instruct members of Congress to vote for his bill. The bill finally passed the House but was defeated in the Senate, and this was repeated for several sessions. Meantime, Johnson found himself in curious company. He was linked on the one hand to the Free Soilers, and in 1851 went to New York to address a Land Reform Association. On the other hand, the South called him socialistic and Wigfall of Texas dubbed him: “The vilest of Republicans, the reddest of Reds, a sans-culotte, for four years past he has been trying to please the North with his Homestead and other bills"⁴ The Abolitionists meanwhile looked askance because Johnson favored the bill for annexing Cuba.

He voted against the Pacific railroad, owned eight slaves and said at one time: “You won’t get rid of the Negro expect by holding him in slavery"⁵ In the midst of such vacillation and contradiction, small wonder that Lane referred to Johnson’s “triumphant ignorance and exulting stupidity." Yet Johnson hewed doggedly to certain lines. In 1860, he was advocating his homestead bill again. It finally passed both House and Senate, but Buchanan vetoed it as unconstitutional. Johnson called the message “monstrous and absurd" At last, in June, 1862, after the South had withdrawn from Congress, Johnson’s bill was passed and Lincoln signed it.

Yet it was this same Johnson who said in the 36th Congress that if the Abolitionists freed the slaves and let them loose on the South, “the nonslaveholder would join with the slave-owner and extirpate them" and “if one should be more ready to join than another it would be myself."

Johnson early became a follower of Hinton Helper and used his figures. The Impending Crisis was “Andrew Johnson’s vade mecum—his arsenal of facts"⁶

Johnson made two violent speeches against secession in 1860-61, with bitter personalities against Jefferson Davis, Judah Benjamin and their fellows. He called them rebels and traitors; the galleries yelled and the presiding officers threatened to clear them. Johnson shouted:

I would have them arrested, and if convicted, within the meaning and scope of the Constitution, by the Eternal God, I would execute them; Sir, treason must be punished; its enormity and the extent and depth of the offense must be made known!

Clingman of North Carolina said that Johnson’s speech brought on the Civil War. Alexander Stephens said that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• To the Reader
• I The Black Worker
• II The White Worker
• III The Planter
• IV The General Strike
• V The Coming of the Lord
• VI Looking Backward
• VII Looking Forward
• VIII Transubstantiation of a Poor White
• IX The Price of Disaster
• X The Black Proletariat in South Carolina
• XI The Black Proletariat in Mississippi and Louisiana
• XII The White Proletariat in Alabama, Georgia, and Florida
• XIII The Duel for Labor Control on Border and Frontier
• XIV Counter-Revolution of Property
• XV Founding the Public School
• XVI Back Toward Slavery
• XVII The Propaganda of History
• Bibliography