They walked out.
It was a lie, writes the socialist and thinker W. E. B. Du Bois. Far from being obedient to slaveholders, enslaved Blacks thought about freedom.
In Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, Du Bois writes that despite the fact that four million enslaved Blacks couldnt neither read nor white, and the fact that the majority were overwhelmingly isolated on plantations throughout the South, Blacks, nonetheless, thought about freedom.
When he was approaching manhood, thoughts of freedom aroused the enslaved Frederick Douglass to do something. He resolved that 1835 should not pass without witnessing an attempt to secure my liberty. It was freedom versus the dehumanization of a life in servitude to others and for the financial wealth of others, a life in which the Black captive is forced to give up autonomy of their very bodies and potential to grow as human beings.
It was in plain sight to any Black to recognize that not only was a financially better off family of whites becoming wealthier thanks to work produced by free labor, but also the material produced from that work is valued more than the enslaved. Blacks certainly recognized how a new country was benefiting from their labor. The global buying and selling of slaves went hand-in-hand with the global selling and buying of cotton and tobacco.
The South depended on the free labor of Blacks to keep the South financially viable as a force to defeat the North. To that end, writes Du Bois, the South was not slow to spread propaganda and point to the wretch condition of fugitive Negroes in order to keep the loyalty of its dispensable labor force. The campaign of lies didnt work. When the enslaved began walking off the plantation, they did so with the intent to put the slaveholding class out of business. Permanently! Enslaved Blacks joined a movement, that is, whatever Union regiment rolled into towns near them. Wherever the army marched and in spite of all obstacles came the rising tide of slaves seeking freedom.
The South thought with confidence in their image of the happy Negro that plenty would stay and work hard to produce the money necessaryto what? Keep the narrative of white supremacy and enslavement alive? Blacks would stay in place to remain unfree? In the face of this civil crisis, who among the Southerners truly understood what it meant to seek freedom from an injustice and inhumane system?
Hundreds of thousands of Blacks left their masters homes and plantations, Du Bois writes, and they were anything but wretched fugitives. Neither wreaking havoc nor about seeking vengeance on the unprotected or women, enslaved Blacks took a more effective and more decent way to freedom.
While many joined the Union, others looked for family members while others still began enjoying their autonomy by settling on land and building homes. For those who joined the Union, they found themselves mistreated by the soldiers, but nonetheless, it was a freedom never experienced before. Blacks were free to willingly learn to be the best soldier with a cause!
Enslaved Blacks understood that they couldnt go back.
It was a general strike. It was one a wide basis against the conditions of work. It was a general strike that involved directly in the end perhaps a half million people. They wanted to stop the economy of the plantation system, and to do that they left the plantation. Blacks were determined not to go back, and they were not about to be reenslaved through army aid. Blacks wanted to work, but for the benefit of their freedom, acknowledging by doing so that freedom isnt about the accumulation of wealth or living in ignorant bliss. Freedom is worth fighting for. Its worth living for. Its the kind of freedom that benefits all and not something exclusively for the wealthy and well-connected.
As General Ulysses Grant realized, Blacks were willing to work as fatigue men in the departments of the surgeon general. They worked as quartermasters as well as cooks in the commissary. Black men helped build roads while women worked in camp kitchens. Some served in the army as nurses. Grant, impressed, saw in this work, committed by Black people, the beginnings of a Freedmens Bureau, writes Du Bois. Black men and women were now receiving wages as free laborers.
The white owners only thought in terms of losing money. Profits. And, yes, the bodies that produced that wealth for them. They couldnt see the moral necessity of laboring to better the conditions for all human beings. Their insistence on valuing the things that the enslaved produced brainwashed them and subsequent generations to think of the infamous dichotomy of things versus humans. What humans would produce those things, preferably for free or as cheaply as possible?
To that end, the slaveholding class appealed to the disenfranchised poor white, reminding them that they are, after all, brothers. We all have a common object in keeping white men superior. If I didnt keep seeing Du Bois name, I would think these words are those of the current Dear Leader. As Du Bois witnessed in the 19th Century, this appeal to the masses about the maintenance of white supremacy is a virus that continues on, as a legacy of slavery. Such rhetoric by the rich and powerful is intended to fuel the masses of economically poor whites with fear and hate for the free Black.
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