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W.E.B. Du Bois-2
October 01, 2004
Black Reconstruction in America
[ 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 ]
This series will begin with some short excerpts from
Du Bois' great work, Black
Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880.
First, I'd like to introduce some historical background:
"The Planter," pp.37-44: Thus slavery
was the economic lag of the 16th century carried over into the 19th
century and bringing by contrast and by friction moral lapses and
political difficulties. It has been estimated that the Southern states
had in 1860 three billion dollars invested in slaves, which meant that
slaves and land represented the mass of their capital. Being generally
convinced that Negroes could only labor as slaves, it was easy for them
to become further persuaded that slaves were better off than white
workers and that the South had a better labor system than the North,
with extraordinary possibilities in industrial and social development.
The argument went like this: raw material like
cotton, tobacco, sugar, rice, together with other foodstuffs formed the
real wealth of the United States, and were produced by the Southern
states. These crops were sold allover the world and were in such demand
that the industry of Europe depended upon them. The trade with Europe
must be kept open so that the South might buy at the lowest prices such
manufactured goods as she wanted, and she must oppose all Northern
attempts to exalt industry at the expense of agriculture.
Du Bois begins with an attempt to explain the global
significance of the Civil War—a struggle of the industrial, centralized
interests of the north versus the decentralized, anti-state interests
of the south. Since 1865, this modality of the American Civil War has
been an endemic crisis, from Revolutionary Iran (where rural interests
ousted the "urban imperialism" of Tehran) to the international war on
drugs.
The North might argue cogently that industry
and manufacture could build up in the United States a national economy.
Writers on economics began in Germany and America to elaborate and
insist upon the advantages of such a system; but the South would have
none of it. It meant not only giving the North a new industrial
prosperity, but doing this at the expense of England and France; and
the Southern planters preferred Europe to Northern America. They not
only preferred Europe for social reasons and for economic advantages,
but they sensed that the new power of monopolizing and distributing
capital through a national banking system; if permitted in the North in
an expanding industry, would make the North an even greater financial
dictator of the South than it was at the time.
The South voiced for the Southern farmer, in 1850,
words almost identical with those of the Western farmer, seventy-five
years later. . All industry," declared one Southerner, "is getting
legislative support against agriculture, and thus the profits are going
to manufacture and trade, and these concentrated in the North stand
against the interests of the South.
Observe Du Bois is writing just after the creation of
the Agricultural Adjustment Act (FDR Administration, '34). Since that
time, farming in the First World has become a ward of industry, or an
industry itself. In the Third World, the urban economy typically
encroaches upon, subsidizes itself at the expense of, and strives to
contain, agriculture. However, in most cases the farmer is a
smallholder; the great plantations of the south, owned by an
aristocratic oligarch, is something else. Such agrarian organization
survives today in much of the Middle East, especially in Pakistan. The
oligarchs resent the way manufacturing is nurtured and they—the
oligarchs—are despised as lazy reactionaries, but since they really
cannot continue as oligarchs without their plantations, they are indeed
reactionaries.
But it is certain that an enlightened and
far-seeing agrarianism under the peculiar economic circumstances of the
United States during the first half of the nineteenth century could
have essentially modified the economic trend of the world.
The South, with free rich land and cheap labor, had
the monopoly of cotton, a material in universal demand. If the leaders
of the South, while keeping the consumer in mind, had turned more
thoughtfully to the problem of the American producer, and had guided
the production of cotton and food so as to take every advantage of new
machinery and modern methods in agriculture, they might have moved
forward with manufacture and been able to secure an approximately large
amount of profit. But this would have involved yielding to the demands
of modern labor: opportunity for education, legal protection of women
and children, regulation of the hours of work, steadily increasing
wages and the right to some voice in the administration of the state if
not in the conduct of industry.
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The South had but one argument against following
modern civilization in this yielding to the demand of laboring
humanity: it insisted on the efficiency of Negro labor for ordinary
toil and on its essential equality in physical condition with the
average labor of Europe and America. But in order to maintain its
income without sacrifice or exertion, the South fell back on a doctrine
of racial differences which it asserted made higher intelligence and
increased efficiency impossible for Negro labor. Wishing such an excuse
for lazy indulgence, the planter easily found, invented and proved it.
His subservient religious leaders reverted to the "Curse of Canaan";
his pseudo-scientists gathered and supplemented all available doctrines
of race inferiority; his scattered schools and pedantic periodicals
repeated these legends, until for the average planter born after 1840
it was impossible not to believe that all valid laws in psychology,
economics and politics stopped with the Negro race.
The espousal of the doctrine of Negro inferiority
by the South was primarily because of economic motives and the
inter-connected political urge necessary to support slave industry; but
to the watching world it sounded like the carefully thought out result
of experience and reason; and because of this it was singularly
disastrous for modern civilization in science and religion, in art and
government, as well as in industry. The South could say that the Negro,
even when brought into modern civilization, could not be civilized, and
that, therefore, he and the other colored peoples of the world were so
far inferior to the whites that the white world had a right to rule
mankind for their own selfish interests.
Never in modern times has a large section of a
nation so used its combined energies to the degradation of mankind. The
hurt to the Negro in this era was not only his treatment in slavery; it
was the wound dealt to his reputation as a human being. Nothing was
left; nothing was sacred; and while the best and more cultivated and
more humane of the planters did not themselves always repeat the
calumny, if they stood by, consenting by silence, while blatherskites
said things about Negroes too cruelly untrue to be the word of
civilized men. Not only then in the forties and fifties did the word
"Negro" lose its or capital letter, but African history became the tale
of degraded animals and sub-human savages, where no vestige of human
culture found foothold.
As I will attempt to explain later, the narrative Du
Bois decries has survived, adapting itself to the new vocabulary of our
era.
(continued)
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