These notes are part of the Black Reconstruction Reading Group‘s study material.
Chapter 9 page 353 to 380
The Price Of Disaster
In 1876 the white laborer disenfranchised the black laborer by cutting the voting power of the laboring class into. They realized that this gave too much power to the employer so in the ’80s the populace movement tried to realign the economic warfare but it was too late.
Tears and sentiment went to the former slave Baron and the planter class rather than the working class which DuBois called “the old snobbery of class judgment in new form”.
Marx wrote Andrew Johnson after Lincoln’s assassination imploring him to emancipate labor and give equal rights to all citizens or “later faces new struggle which will once more drench your country in blood”. (P. 354)
Hot labor summer in 1866. The national Labor Union of workers was organized and the Negro worker had been neglected. They talk about the 8-hour question. “There should be no distinction of race or nationality, but only separation into two great classes; laborers and those who live by others’ labor. Negroes were soon to be admitted to citizenship in the ballot…” (P. 354)
Again, white labor had a choice, to organize negro laborers or guard against their competition and they chose the latter. White American labor could not come to agreement on how to handle negro labor.
We often talk today about slavery never ending and just taking new forms. Silvis present of the international labor movement spoke out in 1868 on slavery: “but when the shackles fell from the limbs of those 4 millions of blacks, it did not make them free men; it’s simply transferred them from one condition of slavery to another; it placed them upon the platform of the white working men, and made all slaves together.”
Because white workers’ racism and wanting the negros to organize separately, they organized separately in “contradiction of all sound labor policy.”
Marxism experiment in the South with the dictatorship of Labor “emphasizing the necessity of the political power and organization backed by protective military power.” White labor workers in the North saw a more purely economic solution demanding higher wages and shorter hours. In the north it was a dictatorship of wealth and growing corporate control.
With falling prices and unemployment directly after the war, and rising prices and normal employment in 1868-1873, labor leaders became “increasingly Petty bourgeois and turn their backs on black labor…The Knights of Labor did not turn their attention to Negroes until after 1876.”White workers gravitated toward the Democratic party while negro laborers went with the Republican party pitting “white and black labor in direct opposition.” (P. 359)
“Thus this labor went into the Great War of 1877 against Northern capitalists unsupported by the Black man, and the black man went his way in the South to strengthen and consolidate his power, unsupported by Northern labor.” p. 367
The land problem. On one hand Stevens and Charles Sumner advocated for black freedmen to become small landowners. On the other hand, the Northern Capitalists didn’t want to start that precedent and advocated against that.
In 1867, the South voted on reconstruction in a series of States change their state constitutions. For the first time there were black voters and poor whites voting who hadn’t voted before. They were fair and honest elections.
P. 372 chart on percent negro delegates
The different factions mobilize to have their own control over reconstruction. In the Democratic party there is “the mere stupid, causeless, a less hatred of the Negro.” We see this in today’s Republican party. CA chimed in in favor of white people running the country “without the aid of either Negroes or Chinese.” WA further excluded “Indians”.
P.376 “thus the campaign [to replace Johnson] started with contradictions inside the Democratic party.”
In1868 President Johnson pardoned everyone who was involved in the rebellion. “He declared, in effect, that the dictatorship of labor, attempted in the South under the Reconstruction acts, had led to corruption and bloodshed and, therefore, prevented the rise of industry in the South which was the real solution of the race problem.”
The 15th amendment is passed giving the right to vote, but the land and real education were demands that weren’t met.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
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