Ruth’s Reviews > Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 > Status Update

"The Coming of the Lord" is a chapter about black soldiers in the Civil War. (No Black Confederate soldiers!) pp. 121-126 are DuBois' reflections on the meaning of emancipation.

DuBois isn't only writing about the Civil War, but about what people in the thirties believed about it. He asserts here that the defection of enslaved black workers from the South won the war for the North. I can't believe we never discussed this in school at all.

Read the third chapter, "The Planter." Du Bois argues the owners were brutalized by their reliance on enslaved labor, that they were stupid, weak, and especially, sexually immoral, & that they impoverished the South.

The elevated language in the first two chapters is inspiring. i want to quote everything.