Black Reconstruction Chapter Two: The White Worker
In this article I review chapter two of Black Reconstruction by W.E.B Dubois. In this chapter he writes on the conditions of white workers in the antebellum period.
In chapter two, W.E.B. Dubois writes on the conditions of the white worker within the North and South. Unlike the North, the South never developed a significant industrial proletariat during the antebellum period. In contrast, to the North, which quickly discarded its land-oligarchic class in exchange for an industrial/financial bourgeoisie after the 1775 American War of Independence, the South retained the old slaveocracy. Agriculture in the North developed increasingly based on small peasant proprietors instead of slave labor. These small peasant proprietors became increasingly land-hungry as the industrial bourgeoisie’s demands for European immigrant labor increased. The shift in development led to divergent interests in the Euro-American expansion onto indigenous land. The white agricultural worker had their immediate self-interest in the prevention of the expansion of the slave trade and the slavocracy; not because they loved the enslaved, but because they were in competition with the slavocracy for indigenous land out west.
Abolitionism and the Union Movement
The white worker in the North despised free black labor due to perceived competition and the racial prejudice that hardened during slavery’s development. Before and during the Civil War, many free blacks in the North were killed in large-scale violent confrontations with white workers. These conflicts became more bloody during the Civil War with the 1863 New York draft riots, where free black workers were hunted down and lynched in the hundreds by predominantly Irish immigrant mobs. The white worker in the North also feared the expansion of slave labor because it put downward pressure on the wages they could bargain for. The union movement in the North, because of the same ideological pre-dispositions toward the black race, did not develop a concrete position on slavery. Some were somewhat in opposition, some ignored the slavery issue altogether, and others, even many influenced by Karl Marx, viewed abolitionism as purely an industrial-bourgeoisie movement.
Dubois goes into more detail regarding Western Europe in Chapter 5: The Coming of the Lord, but to summarize, the workers of Western Europe, specifically England and France, were significantly more supportive of the abolitionist struggle in the United States compared to the American white working class. W.E.B. Dubois mentioned the position of the Chartist movement in England, its support for abolition, and the increasing influence of Karl Marx on the English union movement, and its support of abolitionism.
The abolitionist movement was always small in the North but became increasingly influential as the contradictions within the American national economy developed. The abolitionist movement developed in conjunction with the developing labor movement in America, but also in conflict with labor, primarily over how far the country should go in abolishing slavery. There was a wide view among the more “centrist” members of the labor movement that black workers had to be removed altogether from the country before the labor movement could truly develop. Abraham Lincoln was a big proponent of the idea that the black worker, freed from slavery, had no place in the US. He strongly favored migration to Liberia or even Mexico, but those migration plans never materialized due to the strong demand for labor within the United States and the impracticality of forcefully removing millions of people over large distances.
Conditions of Poor Whites
The conditions for poor whites in the South were described as feudal by Dubois. The majority of whites in the antebellum South owned no slaves, but large sections of what can be considered a white “middle class” directly drew their living from the slave economy. Outside of the slavocrats and their functionaries, the economic and social conditions of the vast majority of whites was abysmal. Illiteracy was widespread as the slavocracy had no interest in the development of a public education system (something developed out of the labor struggle), public utilities or infrastructure. Much of the progress toward public utilities and education would come during the reconstruction period.
The slavocrats, like feudal lords, had no interest in the development of a national economy like the Northern bourgeoisie. In later chapters, Dubois discusses changes in the tax structure during Reconstruction where, in the case of South Carolina, professionals and the merchant class were taxed 5 times the rate of taxes compared to land-owners (page 405). More will be discussed in Chapter 3, but the slavocracy purposefully pursued policies detrimental to the development of an industrial bourgeoisie. This divergence of interest between the industrial bourgeoisie and the slavocratic planter class was one of the reasons for the Civil War.
On Colonialism
Dubois will expand on this point later in the book, but he states in the last few paragraphs that the subjugation of the black workers to the demands of a neo-slavocratic Southern white bourgeoisie laid the groundwork for colonialism in Africa and Asia.