Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 Quotes

“One reads the truer deeper facts of Reconstruction with a great despair. It is at once so simple and human, and yet so futile. There is no villain, no idiot, no saint. There are just men; men who crave ease and power, men who know want and hunger, men who have crawled. They all dream and strive with ecstasy of fear and strain of effort, balked of hope and hate. Yet the rich world is wide enough for all, wants all, needs all. So slight a gesture, a word, might set the strife in order, not with full content, but with growing dawn of fulfillment. Instead roars the crash of hell...”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

“One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example; it paints perfect men and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

“Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

“Arms in the hands of the Negro aroused fear both North and South. Not that the Negroes could not and would not fight, for these same blacks, largely under their own officers, had beaten back Louisiana whites at Port Hudson and Milliken's Bend. But, it was the silent verdict of all America that Negroes must not be allowed to fight for themselves. They were, therefore, dissuaded from every attempt at self-protection or aggression by their friends as well as their enemies.”
― W E B Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America

“It was not, then, race and culture calling out of the South in 1876; it was property and privilege, shrieking to its own kind, and privilege and property heard and recognized the voice of its own.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

“No more idiotic could be laid down than to require a people to follow a written rule of government 90 years old, if that rule has been definitely broken in order to preserve the unity of the government and to destroy an economic anachronism. In such a crisis legalists may insist that consistency with precedent is more important than firm and far sighted rebuilding. But, manifestly, it is not. Rule following, legal precedence, and political consistency are not more important than right, justice, and plain common sense.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

“XVII. THE PROPAGANDA OF HISTORY

How the facts of American history have in the last half century have been falsified because the nation was ashamed. The South was ashamed because it fought to perpetuate human slavery. The North was ashamed because it had to call in the black men to save the Union, abolish slavery and establish democracy.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

“VI. LOOKING BACKWARD

How the planters, having lost the war for slavery, sought to begin again where they left off in 1860, mere substituting for the individual ownership of slaves, a new state serfdom of black folk.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

“It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

“The true significance of slavery in the United States to the whole social development of America lay in the ultimate relation of slaves to democracy. What were to be the limits of democratic control in the United States? If all labor, black as well as white, became free – were given schools and the right to vote – what control could or should be set to the power and action of these laborers? Was the rule of the mass of Americans to be unlimited, and the right to rule extended to all men regardless of race and color, or if not, what power of dictatorship and control; and how would property and privilege be protected? This was the great and primary question which was in the minds of the men who wrote the Constitution of the United States and continued in the minds of thinkers down through the slavery controversy. It still remains with the world as the problem of democracy expands and touches all races and nations.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

“All men know that by sheer weight of physical force, the mass of men must in the last resort become the arbiters of human action. But reason, skill, wealth, machines and power may for long periods enable the few to control the many. But to what end? The current theory of democracy is that dictatorship is a stopgap pending the work of universal education, equitable income, and strong character. But always the temptation is to use the stopgap for narrower ends, because intelligence, thrift and goodness seem so impossibly distant for most men. We rule by junta; we turn Fascist, because we do not believe in men; yet the basis of fact in this disbelief is incredibly narrow. We know perfectly well that most human beings have never had a decent human chance to be full men. Most of us may be convinced that even with opportunity the number of utter human failures would be vast; and yet remember that this assumption kept the ancestors of present white America long in slavery and degradation.

It is then one's moral duty to see that every human being, to the extent of his capacity, escapes ignorance, poverty and crime. With this high ideal held unswervingly in view, monarchy, oligarchy, dictatorships may rule; but the end will be the rule of All, if mayhap All or Most qualify. The only unforgivable sin is dictatorship for the benefit of Fools, Voluptuaries, gilded Satraps, Prostitutes and Idiots. The rule of the famished, unlettered, stinking mob is better than this and the only inevitable, logical and justifiable return. To escape from ultimate democracy is as impossible as it is for ignorant poverty and crime to rule forever.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

“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 fried. 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 Eastern democratic ideals. Industrialization might even have brought a third party representing labor and raised the proletariat to dominance.”
― W E B Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America

“IX. THE PRICE OF DISASTER

The price of the disaster of slavery and civil war was the necessity of quickly assimilating into American democracy a mass of ignorant laborers in whose hands alone for the moment lay the power of preserving the ideals of popular government; of overthrowing a slave economy and establishing upon it an industry primarily for the profit of the workers. It was this price which in the end America refused to pay and today suffers for that refusal.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

“IV. THE GENERAL STRIKE

How the Civil War meant emancipation and how the black worker won the war by a general strike which transferred his labor from the Confederate planter to the Northern invader, in whose army lines workers began to be organized as a new labor force.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

“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 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.”
― W E B Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America

“Here were grown, sensible men arguing about a written form of government adopted ninety years before, when men did not believe that slavery could outlive their generation in this country, or that civil war could possibly be its result when no man foresaw the Industrial Revolution or the rise of the Cotton Kingdom; and yet now, with incantation and abracadabra, the leaders of a a nation tried to peer back into the magic crystal, and out of a bit of paper called the Constitution, find eternal and immutable law laid down for their guidance forever and ever, Amen!”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

“How extraordinary, and what a tribute to ignorance and religious hypocrisy, is the fact that in the minds of most people, even those of liberals, only murder makes men. The slave pleaded; he was humble; he protected the women of the South, and the world ignored him. The slave killed white men; and behold, he was a man!”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

“One has but to read the debates in Congress and state papers from Abraham Lincoln down to know that the decisive action which ended the Civil War was the emancipation and the arming of the black slave; that, as Lincoln said, "Without the military help of black freedmen, the war against the south could not have been won." The freedmen, far from being the inert recepients of freedom at the hands of philanthropists, furnished 200k soldiers in the Civil War who took part in nearly 200 battles and skirmishes, and in addition perhaps 300k others as effective laborers and helpers In proportion to population, more Negroes than whites fought in the Civil War.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

“If the Reconstruction of the southern states, from slavery to free labor, and from aristocracy to industrial democracy, had been conceived as a major national program of America, whose accomplishment at any price was well worth the effort, we should be living in a different world.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

“There are many, many exceptions, but, in general, it is true that there is scarcely a bishop in Christendom, a priest in the church, a president, a governor, mayor, or legislator in the United States, a college professor or public school teacher who does not in the end stand by War and Ignorance as the main method for the settlement of our pressing human problems. And this despite the fact that they may deny it with their mouths every day.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

“The method of force which hides itself in secrecy is a method as old as humanity. The kind of thing that men are afraid or ashamed to do openly, and by day, they accomplish secretly, masked and at night. The method has certain advantages; it may, with a certain impunity attack the high and the low; it need hesitate at no outrage at maiming or murder; it shields itself in the mob and then throws over all a veil of darkness which becomes glamour. It attracts people who would otherwise not be reached. It harnesses the mob.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

“It is fair to say that the Negro carpetbag governments established the public schools of the south. Although recent researches have shown many germs of a public school system in the south before the war, there can be no reasonable doubt that common school instruction in the south, in the modern sense of the term, was founded by the Freedmen's Bureau and missionary societies, and that the state public school system was formed mainly by Negro Reconstruction governments.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

“The fact of the matter was that in the pre-war South, there were two insuperable obstacles to a free public school system. The first was the attitude of the owners of property. They did not propose under any circumstances to be taxed for the public education of the laboring class. They believed that laborers did not need education; that it made their exploitation more difficult; and that if any of them were really worth educating, they would somehow escape their condition by their own efforts.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

“Sons of ditch-diggers aspired to be bastard sons of kings and thieving aristocrats rather than of rough handed children of dirt and toil. The immense profit from this new exploitation and world-wide commerce enabled a guild of millionaires to engage the greatest engineers, the wisest men of science, as well as pay high wage to the more intelligent labor and at the same time to have left enough surplus to make more and thorough the dictatorship of capital over the state and over the popular vote, not only in Europe and America, but in Asia and Africa. The world wept because within the exploiting group of New World masters, greed and jealousy became so fierce that they fought for trade and markets and materials and slaves all over the world until at last in 1914 the world flamed in war. The fantastic structure fell, leaving grotesque profits and poverty plenty and starvation empire and democracy staring at each other across world depression. And the rebuilding, whether it comes now or a century later, will and must go back to the basic principles of reconstruction in the United States during 1867-1876--Land light and leading for slaves black brown yellow and white...”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

“The bargain of 1876 was essentially an understanding by which the federal government ceased to sustain the right to vote of half of the laboring population of the south, and left capital as represented by the old planter class, the new northern capitalist, and the capitalist that began to rise out of the poor whites, with a control of labor greater than in any modern industrial state in civilized lands. Out of that there has arisen in the south an exploitation of labor unparalleled in modern times, with a government in which all pretense at party alignment or regard for universal suffrage is given up. The methods of government have gone uncriticized, and elections are by secret understanding and manipulation; the dictatorship of capital in the south is complete.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

“The bravest of the carpetbaggers, Tourgee, declared concerning the Negro voters, "They instituted a public school system in a realm where public schools had been unknown. They opened the ballot box and jury box to thousands of white men who had been debarred from them by a lack of earthly possessions. They introduced home rule in the south. They abolished the whipping post, and branding iron, the stocks and other barbarous forms of punishment which had up to that time prevailed. They reduced capital felonies from about twenty to two or three. In an age of extravagance they were extravagant in the sums appropriated for public works. In all that time, no man's rights were invaded under the forms of law”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

“Surprise and ridicule has often been voiced concerning the demand of Negroes for land. It has been regarded primarily as a method for punishing rebellion. Motives of this sort may have been on the minds of some Northern whites, but so far as the Negroes were concerned, their demand for a reasonable part of the land on which they had worked for a quarter of a millennium was absolutely justified, and to give them anything less was an economic farce. On the other hand, to have given each one of the Million Negro free families a forty acre free-hold would have been the basis of real democracy in the United States that might have easily transformed the modern world.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

“The transubstantiation of Andrew Johnson was complete. He had begun as the champion of the poor laborer, demanding that the land monopoly of the Southern oligarchy be broken up, so as to give access to the soil, South and West, to the free laborer. He had demanded the punishment of those southerners who by slavery and by war, had made such an economic program impossible. Suddenly thrust into the presidency, he had retreated from this attitude. He had not only given up extravagant ideas of punishment, but he dropped his demands for dividing up plantations when he largely realized that Negroes would be beneficiaries. Because he could not conceive of Negroes as men, he refused to advocate universal democracy, of which, in his young manhood, he had been the fiercest advocate, and made strong alliance with those who would restore slavery under another name.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

“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 was Andrew Johnson.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

“Democracy, that inevitable end of all government, faces eternal paradox. In all ages, the vast majority of men have been ignorant and poor, and any attempt to arm such classes with political power brings the question: Can Ignorance and Poverty rule? If they try to rule, their success in the nature of things must be halting and spasmodic, if not absolutely nil; and it must incur the criticism and the raillery of the wise and the well to do. On the other hand, if the poor, unlettered toilers are given no political power, and are kept in exploitation by poverty, they will remain submerged unless rescued by revolution; and a philosophy will prevail, teaching that the submergence of the mass is inevitable and is on the whole best, not only for them but the ruling classes.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880