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W.E.B. Du Bois’s Abolition Democracy

The enduring legacy and capacious vision of Black Reconstruction.

In the war’s aftermath, the question of what would happen to the newly emancipated also remained unresolved. The dawning of what Du Bois called “Abolition Democracy” was no more predetermined than the outcome of the war itself. In his account, Lincoln’s successor, the pathetic President Andrew Johnson, was the primary Washington villain and was amply aided by his secretary of state, William Seward of New York, while the heroes of Reconstruction—the Radical Republicans, the recently enfranchised, the “carpetbaggers” (sojourners from outside the South) and “scalawags” (the Southerners allied with them)—all sought to resist Johnson’s reactionary intentions.

Yet the villains ultimately won, and for Du Bois, this was not only due to their own efforts. Despite the heroism of people like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens, Du Bois argued, these Northern “abolitionists were not enemies of capital”; rather, they were, Du Bois noted (citing a quote from Will Herberg), “typical bourgeois-democratic revolutionists” unable to lead the promise of Reconstruction to its fulfillment in the face of formidable foes.

The “counter-revolution of 1876” that overthrew Reconstruction, Du Bois continued, “was in essence a revolution inspired by property and not a race war.” This insight may seem intuitively obvious, but even today many who see class struggle as the locomotive of history frequently ignore how this class struggle played out in the South.

For Du Bois, the failure of Reconstruction was in many respects not just a national tragedy but also an international one. Reconstruction had the potential to unleash an “economic revolution on a mighty scale,” one that would produce a “world-wide reverberation,” and it also served as “one of the most extraordinary experiments of Marxism that the world, before the Russian Revolution, had seen. That is, backed by the military power of the United States, a dictatorship of labor was to be attempted.”

This mass movement would have developed “political power and organization” under the umbrella of that “protective military power.” But “labor leaders” in the North blinked and wilted, becoming “increasingly petty bourgeois” to the point that they “turned their backs on black labor.” Meanwhile, farmers “organized the Grange, but not for black farm tenants and laborers, not for the struggling peasant proprietors among the freedmen.” When these farmers emerged as a political movement with the Populist Party’s rise in the 1890s, it was, Du Bois argued, too late: “The power which they had put in the hands of the employers in 1876 so dominated political life that free and honest expression of public will at the ballot-box was impossible in the South, even for white men,” because “it was not simply the Negro who had been disfranchised in 1876, it was the white laborer.” Thus, Du Bois concluded morosely, “labor suffered not only in the South but throughout the country and the world over.”