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A review by ethanhedman
Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 by W.E.B. Du Bois
slow-paced
4.5
"Reconstruction was a vast labor movement of ignorant, muddled and bewildered white men who had been disinherited of land and labor and fought a long battle with sheer subsistence, hanging on the edge of poverty, eating clay and chasing slaves and now lurching up to manhood. Reconstruction was the turn of white Northern migration southward to new and sudden economic opportunity which followed the disaster and dislocation of war, and an attempt to organize capital and labor on a new pattern and build a new economy. Finally Reconstruction was a desperate effort of a dislodged, maimed, impoverished and ruined oligarchy and monopoly to restore an anachronism in economic organization by force, fraud and slander, in defiance of law and order, and in the face of a great labor movement of white and black, and in bitter strife with a new capitalism and a new political framework."
Du Bois pulls off a Herculean task in this book. He spends the majority laying the foundation for his argument of the history of America from 1860-1880, which Du Bois correctly perceived as being as much of a labor revolution as it is the emancipation proclamation or just the American Civil War. Du Bois throughout the book mates his argument with primary sources ranging from radical abolitionists to reactionary Lost Cause-ers. By applying the perspective he does, he chronicles the defeat of the South as only possible without the defection, arming, and disobedience of Black folks, then the Reconstruction government built as one that was able to take half measures that improved hundreds of thousands of lives, but half measures that would be erased by the counter-revolution of property.
Du Bois pulls off a Herculean task in this book. He spends the majority laying the foundation for his argument of the history of America from 1860-1880, which Du Bois correctly perceived as being as much of a labor revolution as it is the emancipation proclamation or just the American Civil War. Du Bois throughout the book mates his argument with primary sources ranging from radical abolitionists to reactionary Lost Cause-ers. By applying the perspective he does, he chronicles the defeat of the South as only possible without the defection, arming, and disobedience of Black folks, then the Reconstruction government built as one that was able to take half measures that improved hundreds of thousands of lives, but half measures that would be erased by the counter-revolution of property.