Z.’s Reviews > W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Reconstruction > Status Update

Setting aside at chapter VIII due to time constraints. Plan to pick back up later.

"But were the [poor Southern] whites to be bound to the [newly freed] black laborer by economic condition and destiny, or rather to the white planter by community of blood? Almost unanimously [...] victims of a war fought largely by the poor whites for the benefit of the rich planter [...] sought redress by demanding unity of white against black, and not unity of poor against rich, or of worker against exploiter."

"[During the Civil War, northern laborers] showed their resentment [to capitalists] in the peculiarly human way of beating and murdering the innocent victims of it all, [free black people]; while in the South, five million non-slaveholding poor white [men] [went] by the thousands to fight and die for a system that had degraded them equally ... Could one imagine anything more paradoxical than this whole situation?"

"This explains the difference between the slave revolts in the West Indies, and the lack of effective revolt in the Southern United States. . . . In the South . . . the great planters formed proportionally quite as small a class but they had singularly enough at their command some five million poor whites; that is, there were actually more white people to police the slaves than there were slaves."