Review of Black Reconstruction Chapter One: The Black Worker

In this article I review chapter one of Black Reconstruction by W.E.B Dubois. He focuses on the state of the black working class in the South's antebellum period.

In the early chapters of the book, W.E.B. Dubois speaks on the state of the working class in the South before the American Civil War, beginning with the Black working class. The Black working class was composed overwhelmingly of enslaved Africans who provided the basis of the South’s economic, political, and cultural power before the Civil War. The slavocracy ruled the country since the formation of the original 13 colonies up until the Civil War. The South elected most presidents, congressmen, and supreme court judges in the antebellum period. The conditions under which the slavocracy held enslaved Africans was known as chattel slavery. Chattel slavery is a specific form of slavery where those enslaved are legally considered property, similar to land or livestock. The enslaved status was inherited, not dependent on religious conversion, but based on an increasingly consolidated notion of race. The chattel slave both provided labor and also speculative value, as many were used as collateral on loans from Northern banks and calculated as the liquid capital of slave owners.

The state of the chattel slave differed significantly from the state of the free white worker. Psychologically, the enslaved Africans were made to feel completely isolated from anything outside of the immediate plantation system. The slave master and the plantation were the entire world of the enslaved, with information from outside being very controlled, literacy purposefully kept to a minimum, and an almost paternal sense of inferiority indoctrinated into the minds of every enslaved African. The plantation system was a private, racialized police state where poor whites (whose only real form of employment was as agents of the plantation economy) would function as overseas, slave patrolmen and other functionaries of the slavocracy.

Materially, the slave owner had an interest in keeping their “property” alive, so the enslaved were generally guaranteed a bare minimum level of sustenance on most large plantations. Dubois calculated the cost of sustenance of the enslaved African of the time, and it was $10. Making enslaved Africans the “lowest paid workers” of that time period.

Due to the demographic balance within the South and the strength of the slavocracy, the number of slave revolts was relatively small compared to the Caribbean (where enslaved peoples comprised the overwhelming population of most islands). From the beginning of the slave trade in North America to the end of the Civil War, the number of slave revolts, both actual and planned, was around 250 to 311. Compared to the ones of the Caribbean (most successful being the Maroons wars of Jamaica and the Haitian Revolution) of which were much larger and more numerous, occurring in the hundreds to low thousands. Some of the slave revolts mentioned by Dubois were the Nat Turner Rebellion of 1831, the Vesey Conspiracy of 1822, and the rebellions of the Amestaid and Creole slave ships of 1839 and 1841.

Dubois did not go into detail about the Amestaid rebellion, but I believe it is an interesting example of how the international slave trade continued even though it was deemed illegal in the U.S. The Amestaid was a Portuguese slave ship transporting kidnapped Mende people of modern-day Sierra Leone. A rebellion broke out where the Mende people took over the ship but were captured by the U.S navy. Since the slave trade in the US had been abolished in 1808, the docking of the illegal ship in U.S ports caused controversy. It resulted in a major legal battle known as the Supreme Court of the United States vs. The Amistad. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Mende people and reaffirmed the right of the kidnapped Africans to use any means necessary to secure their freedom.

Dubois points to a very important contradiction within the slave system in chapter one. There was an inherent need to expand the slave economy by the slavocrats. More land was needed to be cultivated in order to feed the demands of Northern/European industry, and more enslaved people were needed for cultivation and financial speculation. Due to the close contact of the enslaved Africans with their master, racial intermingling was quite common, where mulatto children were produced. Many such children were sold into slavery by more desperate and /or sociopathic slaveowners, but many formed the increasingly significant Creole/freeman class of the South. This was a group of people whose status was increasingly curtailed as the country moved toward war. In many states of the South, voting rights were curtailed for free blacks as the slavocracy consolidated around the “Cotton Kingdom”. In Louisiana and Mississippi specifically, the free black population could theoretically vote up until 1812 and 1817, respectively.