Two, Three, Many Reconstructions
W.E.B. Du Bois contra Eric Foner in the Historiography of American Reconstruction
Scenes from The New Orleans Massacre of 1866, published in Harper’s Weekly
At this point in my studies and reading, I have come to a place where I am consistently orbiting the same topics, with an interest in continuing to develop an adequate knowledge of their historiographic context and the production of notes towards their ongoing logical treatment. The primary focuses, to my mind, are most often the relationship between race and class, social relations of the value form and its content in forms of exploitation, the dynamics of capital accumulation and the form of the State, and the critical engagement of categories from Marxism and Marx’s mature work with the historical content of colonialism, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, and the plantation production system. In reading texts dealing with these categories, and in my further treatments and syntheses of their contents, I have aimed to engage the critical theory of Cedric J. Robinson’s racial capitalism as a serious intervention in debates on the transition to and origins of the capitalist mode of production. I began this initially with an eye towards exploring the dynamic of racialization to contemporary expansions of carceral state infrastructure, what we know as the advent of mass incarceration. While this remains an objective, I have found in the study of racial capitalism a more critical approach to the role and form of the State, through the hydra of racialism and nationalism, in the constitution and reproduction of capitalist social relations. This focus has only grown in importance.
In my view at present, a critical era for observing dynamics of State formation and constitution in the US is the Reconstruction period in the decade following the American Civil War, a revolutionary conjuncture encompassing the transition between articulations of racial class formation, once fixed to a more clear demarcation between free and enslaved labor, the territoriality of class in property of land and labor, into a model where this dichotomy develops into the deterritorialized and differentiated rates of exploitation characteristic of wage labor’s generalized coherence in the expansion of industrial production, i.e. capital’s real subsumption of labor. While there is a broader literature to still explore here, not only of the nineteenth century US but also regarding the historical lineages of the historical and modern State, the two standard bearers for a radical, revisionist interpretation of Reconstruction are the works of W.E.B. Du Bois (Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880) and Eric Foner (Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1876).
Of the fraught terrain that is the history of Reconstruction historiography, these two stand out as the most comprehensive examples of a scholarly practice committed to preserving the memory of the revolutionary and emancipatory potential that this era brought forth in the US. For much of the twentieth century, the prevailing historiography of Reconstruction drew from the Dunning School of the 1920’s and 1930’s, named after William Dunning and composed of himself, John W. Burgess, and their students, focusing on an interpretation of Reconstruction’s failure ultimately being one of “negro incapacity” in the task of governance. Almost as soon as this school’s narrative took predominance in the field it was challenged, most prodigiously by Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, first published in monograph form in 1935. Aside from its reception amongst black scholars and activists at the time, and its resurgence of popularity in similar circles during the political reawakenings of the Civil Rights Movement era and the 1960’s, Du Bois’s contribution has remained marginal to academic historiography of the Reconstruction period. During the Civil Rights Movement, however, a new revisionist school did emerge against the Dunning School thesis, stressing the popular and democratic transformations ushered in by the period. No sooner did this arise, however, than did a post-revisionist current, stressing the conservative character of Reconstruction lawmakers and policy, a position most auspiciously summarized by C. Vann Woodward’s conclusions in 1979 that now historians understood “how essentially nonrevolutionary and conservative Reconstruction really was.”1 The historiography of Reconstruction is itself a site reflecting the political contestations of those periods contemporary to this production of historical knowledge, the past and present eliding their distinction even in the works of those who seek to bury the origins of social antagonism.
Of this trajectory, Du Bois and Foner stand out for their lucidity and respective awareness of the scope and stakes of historiographic work. What sets the works of Du Bois and Foner apart is their insistence on the revolutionary character of this moment of US history, and their careful elaborations upon the meanings of revolution and freedom to the subjects of their respective studies. Foner’s work maintains a greater academic purchase than that of Du Bois, supposedly for the fact of its being a concentration of his own lifelong contributions to revisionist Reconstruction historiography and his command of a greater array of available historical materials. Du Bois’s work still appears to retain the tainted reputation of an unabashed partisan, yet this was a task necessary to his work, given his claim that most histories of Reconstruction prior to his own owed their conclusions and questionable methodologies to the fact that “they cannot conceive Negroes as men; in their minds the word ‘Negro’ connotes ‘inferiority’ and ‘stupidity’ lightened only by unreasoning gayety and humor.”2 For all claims to Foner’s mastery of the history of Reconstruction literature, Du Bois’s own mastery of the field in his day, his decisive immolation of its precepts and methods in the final chapter of Black Reconstruction, remains overlooked as a basis for advancing further critical historiographic studies of race relations in the US.
Of his own method in orienting himself towards the study of Reconstruction, Du Bois, with only a literature heavily influenced by race prejudice at hand, and such a dearth of primary sources of the black worker that the “chief witness in Reconstruction, the emancipated slave himself [...] His written Reconstruction record has been largely destroyed and nearly always neglected”,3 the work of Reconstruction’s reconstruction is a contested field in the articulation of an objective Truth, in which the primary obstacle remains the pervasive logic of racialism:
What is the object of writing the history of Reconstruction? Is it to wipe out the disgrace of a people which fought to make slaves of Negroes? Is it to show that the North had higher motives than freeing black men? Is it to prove that Negroes were black angels? No, it is simply to establish the Truth, on which Right in the future may be built. We shall never have a science of history until we have in our colleges men who regard the truth as more important than the defense of the white race, and who will not deliberately encourage students to gather thesis material in order to support a prejudice or buttress a lie.4
The potency of Du Bois’s radicalism is not his commitment to an abstract ideal to which his historiography conforms, but the manner by which his critical method’s relation to truth, objectivity, and the conception of Right results in his radical conclusions, and the formidable character to which this imbues the work. The fundamental antagonism of labor and capital, labor’s immanent dictatorship of the proletariat that failed to actualize, the transformation of the dictatorship of property into the mature dictatorship of capital; these categories of the labor movement all emerge organically from his presentation, despite the overwhelming prejudice of available material to him, and against the current of reaction and race terror he faced throughout his lifetime, and most immediately in the midst of the revolutionary stirrings of labor in the 1920’s and 1930’s in which this particular work was produced.
The arrival of Du Bois to this point was a process of his own radicalization beyond the historiographic traditions within which he was educated. Cedric J. Robinson contextualizes this trajectory of Du Bois’s intellectual development in the transforming repression of black labor that resulted from the defeat of Reconstruction. This process, according to Robinson, is one where epistemological foundations are intrinsically interwoven in processes of class composition within the national form of the State apparatus. According to Robinson, the initial phase of the American constitutional order arose from a process where “the systems of manufacturing, plantation slavery, and farming had closed together into an integrated national economy sharing the exploitation of land, labor, and natural resources,” and “the social ideology and historical consciousness of the ruling classes acquired two domestic enemies, the Indian and the Negro.”5 With the advent of Emancipation, the struggles of political integration of black people as citizens, and the aggressively exterminationist character that Westward expansion took following the increase in federal military capacity that the Civil War produced, the fiction of “the noble savage ceased to have a function” adequate to the rationalizations of this transforming dynamic of State constitution.6 Thus arose, in the words of Du Bois, a “silence and contempt” in the collective judgment of black people, “the real frontal attack on Reconstruction, as interpreted by the leaders of national thought [...] from the universities and particularly from Columbia and Johns Hopkins.”7 Robinson elaborates further upon this movement as one of a shift in the balance of class forces:
As ideologues for both victorious northern industrial capital and a now chastened southern agrarian capital, the white intelligentsia–academician and otherwise–rewove social and historical legends that accommodated the exploitative projects of those ruling classes. The political consciousness of Black labor, white labor, and immigrant labor were to be smothered by the social discipline implicit in the legends. Complemented by the terror of state militias, company police, and security agents, the persistent threats of immigration controls, the swelling ranks of reserve labor, racialism was reattired so that it might once again take its place among the inventory of labor disciplines. Driven by the necessity to respond quickly to the rush of working-class mobilizations following the war, capital and its ideologues had not dallied.8
What resulted from this was the “desperate invention,” in Robinson’s words, of Black history by the Black “intelligentsia” in the late nineteenth century.9 Du Bois’s educational background in historical study was molded by this school, one that Robinson characterizes as “wedded to the tactics of supplication,” committed to forging a conception of national identity in which “their lot was reduced to an identification with the horror with which slavery had been concluded” in an effort to insist upon “the identity they presumed to share with their white, class counterparts.”10 This school, comprised of George Washington Williams, William Brown, Carter G. Woodson, and Bishop Henry Turner, sought redress for the racial antagonisms of Americanism with an inclusion of the part of Black history into the realization of the national project, thus “negating the national legend.”11 The historical narrative of “race uplift” became the calling card of this tradition, in which Du Bois himself was implicated. Influenced directly by Alexander Crummel and the political prominence of Booker T. Washington’s work and ideas, Du Bois would support the “Talented Tenth” notion of an elite of the race to lead the masses out of ignorance. He would, however, come to rebuke this in favor of a position of mass politics, as the Great Migration of the early twentieth century resulted in the integration of the black proletariat into industrial sectors of the US in the North and West, revealing to Du Bois and others a character of mass movement that the petit bourgeoisie remained blind to, and a dynamic of class struggle to which it had no response. Later in his life, Du Bois would characterize this movement in his thought and its relation to its origins as such:
I believed in the higher education of a Talented Tenth who through their knowledge of modern culture could guide the American Negro into a higher civilization. I knew that without this the Negro would have to accept white leadership, and that such leadership could not always be trusted. . . . Mr. Washington, on the other hand, believed that the Negro as an efficient worker could gain wealth and that eventually through his ownership of capital he would be able to achieve a recognized place in American culture. . . . [H]e proposed to put the emphasis at present upon training in the skilled trades and encouragement in industry and common labor. These two theories of Negro progress were not absolutely contradictory. Neither I nor Booker Washington understood the nature of capitalistic exploitation of labor, and the necessity of a direct attack on the principle of exploitation as the beginning of labor uplift.12
It is essential here to see the context of Black Reconstruction as a historiographic response on two fronts: that of the dominant ideological consensus of nation-state composition in the political, juridical, and economic doctrine of white supremacy, and the inadequacy of black bourgeoisification as a basis for emancipatory politics against the order of racial capitalism. This maneuver in Du Bois’s work is often at odds with his own popular reception, a thinker far too brilliant to be completely hidden from view, but also far too militant to be fully accommodated within American historiographic disciplines.
How do we then begin to discern what is unique to Foner’s Reconstruction? All too often it is treated as an extension to Du Bois’s characterization of the revolutionary character of the era, where the centrality of the emancipation of enslaved black people, the movement of labor, is the criterion for historical truth. This is, in part, certainly correct of the stated orientation to Foner’s contribution. However, a more precise objective is stated to the specificity of his own project in the preface:
Beyond the desire to provide a new account of Reconstruction, this study has an additional purpose—to demonstrate the possibility, and value, of transcending the present compartmentalization of historical study into “social” and “political” components, and of historical writing into “narrative” and “analytical” modes. Some practitioners of the “new” history have expressed fear that the very notion of “synthesis” suggests a return to the excessively broad generalizations and narrow political focus of an earlier era. This is not my intention. Rather, my aim is to view the period as a whole, integrating the social, political, and economic aspects of Reconstruction into a coherent, analytical narrative.13
Foner’s account possesses an aspiration towards the totality of Reconstruction, and as part and parcel of this seeks a totalizing method of historical information, the categorization of aspects of historical study, into a single, coherent account. The objective of synthesis gives his account a daunting character, its breadth and scope certainly astounding. But what we do find in Foner, as opposed to Du Bois, is a survey that includes the labor movement, even an account of the disastrous exclusion of black labor from the broader labor movement in the US by the end of Reconstruction, that does not itself identify the revolutionary character of the era with Du Bois’s immanent dictatorship of labor, much less addresses this aspect of Du Bois’s contribution, or any of Du Bois beyond the preface at all. We then have here, and quite obliquely, two Reconstructions, amidst a terrain already embattled with divergent interpretations, most frequently spurred on and inflamed by the persistent struggles against race terror for substantive equality that have carried on throughout US history to this day.
Noel Ignatiev, in an essay evaluating the differences between Du Bois and Foner’s interpretations of Reconstruction, locates the critical difference in their divergent characterizations of class relations regarding the role of black labor. Du Bois “considered the black worker, during and after slavery, the vanguard of the working class. Foner is willing to recognize the existence of a southern black proletariat after Emancipation, including timber workers, longshoremen, and others but he limits it to those who worked for wages.”14 From the outset, Du Bois identifies the slaves as proletarians, integrated in the global continuum of capital accumulation, the very foundation of surplus value, in a distinct form of exploitation alongside the development of wage labor. Du Bois famously recounts the general strike of black labor that turned the tide of the Civil War, whereas “Foner makes no mention of the general strike. Slaves could rebel, but only the worker could strike.”15 This distinction in their respective treatments of class, the racialized overtones of their implications, can be seen in Foner’s own obliquely made characterization of the specificity of capitalism:
Along with the liquidation of the old planter class and the new owners’ access to cash, this situation helped produce the most rapid transition to capitalist labor relations in any part of the South. Blacks quickly became a wage-earning labor force, receiving daily or monthly wages considerably exceeding those elsewhere in the South, and enjoying, as well, the traditional right to garden plots on which to raise vegetables and keep poultry and livestock. Yet the system did not end the conflict over labor discipline. Successful sugar production required a “thorough control of ample and continuous labor,” yet planters throughout Reconstruction complained of a shortage of workers, especially at harvest time, and of blacks’ continuing demands for higher pay. Indeed, the advent of Republican rule coincided with a sharp increase in sugar wages, which lasted until the economic collapse of 1873.16
For Foner, the black worker as a wage-laborer and the broadened mediation of money is the essential character of the capitalist exploitation of labor. However, this is precisely what prevents him from establishing a historical continuity between the centuries of slave revolt that spanned the Western hemisphere since the advent of European colonization, and the labor movement of predominately white workers in the North by the late-nineteenth century. Foner’s historiographic method is a reflection of the very conditions of the racial formation of class composition that secured Reconstruction’s defeat in the exclusion of black labor from the American organization of the modern labor movement. This is precisely what Du Bois saw and lived in his own time, and thus why his “dictatorship of labor” takes center-stage as the unrealized universality of Reconstruction’s class struggle.
In his assessment, Ignatiev is able to identify an important contrast to the processes of logico-historical thought between Foner and Du Bois in their respective treatments of revolution. Where Foner appears to limit the extent to which he speculates upon revolution’s possibilities to the historicity of accounts he is drawing upon, the sublime objectivity of the historian qua historian, Ignatiev sees the revolutionary movement in Du Bois’s own method of synthesis and historiographic production as practical activity and the undermining of these categories’ limits by the historical participants themselves; history is unbound from the immediacy of its object:
At issue, more than an assessment of the Radicals, is the algebra of revolution. The desires of a social class can change from one epoch to the next. While the French bourgeoisie showed after 1789 that it could live with the peasants' seizure of the feudal estates, in the specific circumstances of the post-Civil War South, land redistribution, advocated by Stevens, Julian, and Phillips, carried implications too subversive for any sector of capital. Again, while capital generally tends to reduce all distinctions between one individual and another to impersonal relations of the marketplace, in America, where consensus depended heavily on the existence of a color line, Stevens may have threatened the social order more by his decision to be buried in a "colored" graveyard than by the way he manhandled the Constitution. The notion of abolition-democracy stands astride two phases of a single revolutionary process. By introducing it, Du Bois revealed a revolution without fixed limits, in which one phase could pass over imperceptibly to the next. Phillips personified the historical movement: beginning as a Garrisonian, by the time he was finished he was speaking out in defense of the Commune and may have joined the International.17
There remains, then, a persistent barrier to the scientific practice of history in the failure of American historiography to fully appreciate the importance of the color line, not solely as a political articulation of race, but of the importance of racial class formation to the constitution of capitalist social relations in the US example, and the global ramifications of the apparent necessity of this category to capitalist reproduction. It appears to be the case that Du Bois’s adherence to the conscious and open critique of the influence that race plays in American historiography of Reconstruction contributes to his ability to discern not only the limits to Reconstruction, but to also speculate upon the precise manner by which they could have been, indeed almost were, overcome. Thus Du Bois identified in his own present time the remaining obstacles that the labor movement faced. While with Foner we have a synthesis that may more precisely account for the limits of Reconstruction, Du Bois provides us with a synthesis that moves beyond its object of contemplation into the realm of conceptual production.
Does this limitation condemn any engagement with Foner’s Reconstruction? Not in the slightest. So long as we understand its limitations, we may also engage more explicitly in the reflexive process of history’s rational reconstruction, interpreting Reconstruction and these accounts of it in terms of emergent dynamics that are brought forth by our own time’s consciousness of their importance. Having read both the Du Bois and the Foner, I find nothing objectionable about Ignatiev’s characterization of their divergent view on the racial composition of class relations. This is apparent enough in the distance between the works, as Du Bois offers us a theory of history, and Foner a history without theory.
Yet what value can be drawn from this is the theoretical engagement of Foner’s text along with a critical fidelity to what Du Bois notes is “the real modern labor problem,” that “out of the exploitation of the dark proletariat comes the Surplus Value filched from human beasts which, in cultured lands, the Machine and harnessed Power veil and conceal. The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown and black.”18 There is not a hint of reductionism in this statement, but a synthesis of the combinatory unevenness of race and class as co-constitutive aspects of a single process that is articulated and composed on a global stage. In Foner’s absence of any such interpretation of race and class, the blanket empiricism of racial antagonism amongst the working class remains apparently only the failure of a proper rhetorical appeal from radicals, implicitly an obstruction to the realization of the labor movement as a solely national political force. To better elaborate upon what is meant in this summary interpretation of Foner’s limits, and, furthermore, the limits of his synthesis that keeps it at the level of a more holistic empiricism, we can turn to a moment of his own account in which he indulges in speculation:
For historians, hindsight can be a treacherous ally. Enabling us to trace the hidden patterns of past events, it beguiles us with the mirage of inevitability, the assumption that different outcomes lay beyond the limits of the possible. Certainly, the history of other plantation societies offers little reason for optimism that emancipation could have given rise to a prosperous, egalitarian South, or even one that escaped a pattern of colonial underdevelopment. Nor do the prospects for the expansion of scalawag support—essential for Southern Republicanism’s long-term survival—appear in retrospect to have been anything but bleak. Outside the mountains and other enclaves of wartime Unionism, the Civil War generation of white Southerners was always likely to view the Republican party as an alien embodiment of wartime defeat and black equality. And the nation lacked not simply the will but the modern bureaucratic machinery to oversee Southern affairs in any permanent way. Perhaps the remarkable thing about Reconstruction was not that it failed, but that it was attempted at all and survived as long as it did. Yet one can, I think, imagine alternative scenarios and modest successes: the Republican party establishing itself as a permanent fixture on the Southern landscape, the North summoning the resolve to insist that the Constitution must be respected. As the experiences of Readjuster Virginia and Populist-Republican North Carolina suggest, even Redemption did not entirely foreclose the possibility of biracial politics, thus raising the question of how Southern life might have been affected had Deep South blacks enjoyed genuine political freedoms when the Populist movement swept the white counties in the 1890s.19
There is something revealing in the poverty of Foner’s speculations, where “genuine political freedom” only sees a more entrenched Republican party presence in the South and a more consistent Constitutional order. The nation-state, while examined in the specificities of its transformations throughout Foner’s work, remains the limit-point of totality in his work. For Foner, even this brief moment is “the realm of the purely speculative,”20 and we are unable to escape from the reality that Reconstruction failed, though we find consolation in the mere fact that Reconstruction ever happened at all, regardless of its outcomes. But, then, we are to take away the grave importance of its “failure,” that it was a “tragedy” for “the nation as a whole.”21 There is an implicit, attainable ideal of the nation and its social-political constitution beyond the very means of its concrete historical actuality. Foner’s aversion to abstraction and the speculative, his reduction of speculation to such immediacies of pragmatic politics, leaves this idea of the nation undefined throughout his synthesis, though a progressive notion of its promise must guide the reader’s own conclusions as to the eventual importance of Reconstruction, its so-called “failure.”
We have here a difference in the developments of a logical treatment of history. Was Reconstruction merely a failure, or was it a failure because it was defeated? Is it the “treachery of hindsight” that gives rise to Du Bois’s discovery of the proletarian dictatorship immanent to the Reconstruction South and post-Civil War America? One could be tempted to merely understand this to be a wild speculation, but it is not speculation unbound. Rather, Du Bois unleashes the movement of thought from the oppositional content of his material. Where Foner seeks a synthesis that understands Reconstruction, Du Bois maneuvers from understanding to the historical situation of Reconstruction in its historical totality; he makes the leap from understanding to Reason. We not only know the events and the categories of Reconstruction, but we have the limits of these terms, and the possibilities of these limits’ supersession, as regards Reconstruction’s place in the historical trajectory of capitalist development and the social composition of the labor movement. Du Bois’s dictatorship of labor is not merely a speculation in a game of historical counterfactuals. It is historical consciousness; the black worker is not only established as the substance of Reconstruction historiography, but its subject as well.
In his Notes on Dialectics, C.L.R. James tells us that Hegel gave us another name for Reason: “speculative truth.” This was, to Hegel, the importance of dialectic, the capacity to speculate into the future, the creation of truth. Curiously, he identifies in this a moment of mysticism: “there is mystery in the mystical, only however for the Understanding which is ruled by the principle of abstract identity; whereas the mystical, as synonymous with speculative, is the concrete unity of those propositions which understanding only accepts in their separation and opposition."22 But this is not a valorization of the mystical, for those that are content to leave truth to the realm of the mystical are themselves, like those mired in the Understanding, comfortable with thought as abstract identification. Reason, for Hegel, is equal to the mystical only insofar as it thus similarly “lies beyond the compass of understanding.”23
To comprehend the difference between the Reconstructions of Du Bois and Foner, we must turn to these aspects of their historiographic operation. Where Foner is a negation that establishes a determinate distinction in our contemporary understanding, Du Bois’s work still stands in a distinct register, where the determinations of the understanding of his time were dissolved, and the universality of labor’s emancipation in the movement of the black worker revealed as immanent to, indeed the only challenge adequate to the universality of capital. James, in his engagement with Hegel, says that “the truth is what you examine and what you examine it with; both are in process of constant change.”24 This is the reflexive movement of dialectic that makes thought scientific, logic the science of thought. It is this task that awaits the renewal of engagement in Reconstruction historiography, the challenge to Foner’s contribution to a history that remains essential to the struggles of today.
This summary adopted from the preface to Foner, Eric. 1988. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. New York: Harper & Row.
Du Bois, W.E.B. 1998. Black Reconstruction in America: [1860-1880]. New York, NY: The Free Press. P. 726
Ibid, p. 721
Ibid, p. 725
Robinson, Cedric J. 2000. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill; London: University Of North Carolina Press. P. 187
Ibid, p. 188
Du Bois (1998) pp. 718-721
Robinson (2000) pp. 188-189
Ibid, p. 189
Ibid.
Ibid, p. 192
From The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois, Quoted in Ibid, p. 193
Foner (1988) pp. xxvi-xxvii
“‘The American Blindspot’: Reconstruction according to Eric Foner and W.E.B. Du Bois - Noel Ignatiev | Libcom.org.” n.d. Libcom.org. Accessed September 4, 2022. https://libcom.org/article/american-blindspot-reconstruction-according-eric-foner-and-web-du-bois-noel-ignatiev.
Ibid.
Foner (1988) p. 402
Ignatiev
Du Bois (1998) p. 16
Foner (1988) pp. 603-604
Ibid, p. 604
Ibid.
Quoted in James, C.L.R. 1948. Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin. https://files.libcom.org/files/CLR%20James%20-%20Notes%20on%20Dialectics.pdf p. 19
Quoted in Ibid, p. 20
Ibid, p. 50