Black Reconstruction and the Wages of Whiteness

Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 was published in 1935. It runs to over seven hundred pages. It overturned the entire scholarly consensus on the most contested period in American history — and it was ignored by the profession it addressed for roughly thirty years.

It is now widely regarded as one of the great works of historical sociology, and its final chapter is one of the most remarkable things any scholar has written about their own discipline.

What every educated American knew in 1935.

Ask a well-read person in 1935 what happened after the American Civil War, and you would get a story that ran roughly as follows.

The South, defeated and prostrate, was subjected to a vindictive occupation. Corrupt Northern adventurers — carpetbaggers — descended to loot it, aided by treacherous local whites — scalawags. The freed slaves, being unready for citizenship, were manipulated into voting, put into offices they could not fill, and presided over governments of unprecedented corruption and incompetence. Decent white Southerners, driven to desperation, eventually organised to restore order and civilisation, and by 1877 Redemption had returned the South to responsible government.

This was not folklore. It was the scholarly consensus, produced by professional historians at the leading universities, taught in schools and universities across the country, and set out in the standard works.

It had a name: the Dunning School, after William Archibald Dunning of Columbia University, whose students produced state-by-state monographs on Reconstruction across the first three decades of the twentieth century. It was the account in the leading textbooks. It supplied the plot of The Birth of a Nation (1915), the most commercially successful film of its era, screened at the White House. It supplied the background of Gone with the Wind (1936).

And it was, in its central claims, false.

Du Bois — sixty-seven years old, out of the academy, editing a magazine — spent years in the sources and wrote seven hundred pages demonstrating it.

Du Bois's problem was not simply that the consensus was wrong. It was that the consensus was produced by the ordinary operation of a scholarly discipline — by trained professionals, at leading institutions, using archives, publishing in university presses, and reviewing each other's work.

How does a profession get something this large this wrong?

His answer, which is the subject of his final chapter, is that the historians shared a set of assumptions so deep that they functioned as perception rather than as argument: that Black people were incapable of self-government; that Black testimony was not evidence; that the accounts of former slaveholders were reliable and the accounts of former slaves were not.

Given those assumptions, the archive produces the Dunning story automatically. No conspiracy is required. The sources consulted, the testimony credited, the questions asked and the categories used all run one way.

And Du Bois's response is not to complain about bias. It is to go to the same archives and produce a better account — using the government records, the Freedmen's Bureau files, the state constitutional conventions, the legislative journals, the Congressional testimony, and — decisively — the writings and speeches of Black participants that the profession had simply not read.

What the book argues

Four theses, each of which contradicted the consensus, and all four of which are now standard.

1. The general strike

Du Bois's most striking reinterpretation, and the one that changed how the war itself is understood.

The standard account: slaves were freed by Lincoln and the Union army. They are the objects of the story.

Du Bois's account: enslaved people freed themselves, and in doing so decided the war.

He calls it a general strike — the withdrawal of labour by roughly half a million people who left the plantations and crossed to Union lines.

The mechanics matter. The Confederate war economy depended on enslaved labour to feed the armies and work the war industries while white men fought. As enslaved people left in growing numbers, that economy degraded. And they did not merely leave: some 200,000 Black men served in the Union army and navy — roughly a tenth of Union forces — and Lincoln himself stated that without this manpower the war could not have been won.

"This was not merely the desire to stop work. It was a strike on 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 plantations."

The significance for sociology: this converts enslaved people from objects of policy into historical agents, and it does so with a concept from labour history rather than from the vocabulary of emancipation. It is a structural argument, not a moral one, and it is far harder to answer.

2. Reconstruction governments were not the disaster described

Du Bois documents what the Reconstruction state governments actually did.

They established the first public school systems in the South, for both races — a fact of enormous consequence and one the Dunning School consistently minimised.

They wrote constitutions that abolished property qualifications for voting and officeholding, reformed penal codes, established public institutions, and in several states were more democratic than the Northern constitutions of the period.

On corruption: Du Bois does not deny it existed. He points out that the period was corrupt everywhere — this is the era of Tammany Hall, the Crédit Mobilier scandal and the Grant administration — that Southern corruption was frequently the work of white officials and Northern investors, and that the sums involved were smaller than in the contemporaneous North. The charge of unique corruption was a political weapon, not a finding.

On Black officeholding: he documents who these men actually were — many literate, some formally educated, several previously free, a number ministers and teachers — against the caricature of illiterate incompetence. Roughly 2,000 Black men held public office during Reconstruction, including two US senators and a number of congressmen.

3. Reconstruction was defeated by violence

The overthrow was not, as the consensus held, the return of order. It was a campaign of organised terror.

Du Bois documents the Klan, the White Leagues, the Red Shirts, the political assassinations, the massacres — Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873; Hamburg, South Carolina, in 1876; and the sustained intimidation that suppressed the Black vote across the South.

And he documents the withdrawal of Northern support: the retreat of Northern capital from any interest in Southern democracy once the economic questions were settled, the Compromise of 1877, and the removal of federal troops.

4. The abolition-democracy thesis

Du Bois's framing of what Reconstruction was: an attempt to build what he calls abolition-democracy — a democracy that abolishes not merely slavery but the conditions that reproduce subordination.

Not merely the removal of legal ownership, but land, education, political participation and economic independence.

The land question is central and it was the failure. The confiscation and redistribution of plantation land to freedpeople — "forty acres and a mule," which was briefly policy under Sherman's Field Order No. 15 and was rescinded — would have created an independent Black yeomanry. Without it, formal freedom coexisted with economic dependence, and sharecropping and debt peonage rapidly filled the gap.

Du Bois's judgement: Reconstruction failed not because it went too far but because it did not go far enough, and specifically because the property question was never settled.

The wages of whiteness

Introduced in 4.5.3 as the local form of the colour line; here is its full context and the argument around it.

Du Bois's question is the one Marxist analysis had never satisfactorily answered: why did poor white Southerners side with the planters?

Their material interests aligned with poor Black Southerners: both worked land they did not own, both faced the same creditors, both were paid badly. A united labour movement across the colour line would have been formidable, and there were moments — the Populist movement of the 1890s, the Readjusters in Virginia — when it nearly formed.

It did not hold. And Du Bois's explanation is the passage quoted in 4.5.3: the public and psychological wage of deference, public space, better schools, police from their own ranks, lenient courts and the franchise.

Three things make this argument formidable, and they are worth separating.

One: it does not require anyone to be deceived. The goods on Du Bois's list are real. A white worker who chose status over solidarity was not suffering from false consciousness (4.1.7); he was accepting a genuine payment. This is a materialist explanation of racial solidarity, and it is far more robust than any account resting on prejudice or manipulation.

Two: it identifies who pays. The planter class supplied the status wage at no cost to itself. Deference is free. Segregated public space is free or nearly so. The arrangement transferred nothing from the top and secured the top's position.

Three: it explains a persistent political pattern. The mechanism — a subordinate group offered relative status in place of material improvement, and thereby bound to those above it — is not confined to the American South, and Du Bois says so. It is the domestic form of the colonial dividend (4.5.3).

And the trade was a bad one even in its own terms. Du Bois's evidence: Southern white workers had lower wages, worse schools, weaker unions, less social provision and shorter lives than Northern white workers throughout this period. The status wage was paid for out of their material wage, and the region's poverty was one of its costs.

The book's final chapter is unlike anything else in classical social science, and it is why this book belongs in a sociology course rather than only a history one.

Having spent seven hundred pages reconstructing the period, Du Bois turns to the profession that got it wrong and asks how.

He goes through the leading textbooks and the standard monographs by name and quotes them. He shows the pattern: Black incapacity assumed rather than argued; Black testimony absent from the sources consulted; former slaveholders' accounts treated as neutral; and the violence of Redemption described as restoration.

And then he asks the question that makes the chapter unforgettable:

"One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. We must not remember that Daniel Webster got drunk but only remember that he was a splendid constitutional lawyer. We must forget that George Washington was a slave owner... and simply remember the things we regard as creditable and inspiring. The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example; it paints perfect men and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth."

And:

"Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?"

His diagnosis of the mechanism is sociological, not moral. The historians were not lying. They were operating inside a set of assumptions supplied by their society, with an archive assembled by one side, in a profession whose members had no reason to question either. The result was a scholarly consensus that functioned as ideology (4.1.7) — and it was produced by exactly the procedures a discipline uses to produce knowledge.

That is the most uncomfortable finding in the book, and it is aimed at the reader's own discipline, whichever one that is.

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How the argument fared

Almost completely vindicated, and it took a generation.

The reception in 1935 was thin. Some respectful reviews; the profession largely did not engage. The Dunning School remained standard in textbooks into the 1950s.

The revision came from the 1960s onwards. Kenneth Stampp's The Era of Reconstruction (1965) and John Hope Franklin's work began the reversal. Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (1988) is the definitive modern synthesis, and it confirms Du Bois on essentially every major point: the agency of the freedpeople, the achievements of the Reconstruction governments, the centrality of the land question, and the role of organised violence in the overthrow. Foner is explicit about the debt and has called Black Reconstruction a work of "monumental" importance that the profession ignored for reasons that reflect badly on it.

On the general strike thesis, the scholarship is more nuanced than Du Bois's formulation but supports its substance. Ira Berlin and the Freedmen and Southern Society Project's documentary volumes established in detail how the actions of enslaved people forced emancipation onto the Union agenda. The debate over "self-emancipation" versus Lincoln's agency continues, with most historians now holding that both operated and that the older account, in which enslaved people were purely passive recipients, is untenable.

And the Dunning School is now taught as a case study in how scholarship reproduces the politics of its period.

The wages of whiteness in contemporary scholarship

The concept has had an enormous second life.

David Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness (1991) takes the phrase for its title and develops the argument for the antebellum Northern white working class — how Irish and other immigrant workers became "white," and what that identity did for and to them. It founded the field of whiteness studies.

Theodore Allen's The Invention of the White Race (1994, 1997) traces the legal construction of whiteness in colonial Virginia, arguing it was a deliberate ruling-class strategy following Bacon's Rebellion of 1676 — in which Black and white bound labourers had rebelled together — after which the colonial legislature systematically separated their legal statuses.

Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White (1995) and Karen Brodkin's How Jews Became White Folks (1998) trace the historical mobility of the racial boundary, which is itself strong evidence that the categories are constructed rather than given.

And the political science literature on why lower-income white voters in some contexts support policies that reduce their own material benefits is, whatever position one takes in it, working the ground Du Bois opened. Michael Dawson, Ira Katznelson (When Affirmative Action Was White, 2005, on the racially selective administration of New Deal and GI Bill benefits) and the split labour market literature (8.4) all descend from this argument.

Two honest cautions on the concept.

It can be over-extended. Not every instance of a subordinate group failing to unite with another is explained by a status wage. Sometimes the reasons are organisational, geographic, informational, or simply that the two groups did not know each other. Du Bois's argument works because he documents the specific goods and shows who supplied them; applications that skip that step are asserting rather than demonstrating.

And it is contested within the field. Some labour historians argue that whiteness studies has over-generalised from particular cases, underestimated genuine interracial labour organising where it occurred, and attributed to ideology what is better explained by employer strategy and legal structure. That debate is live, and the strongest version of Du Bois's argument — grounded in a specific documented list of goods and a specific documented cost — survives it best.

Why the book matters methodologically

Set aside the substantive findings and look at what Du Bois did.

He read the archive against the grain. The same government records the Dunning School used, read with different assumptions about whose testimony counts, produce a different history. Whose evidence is admitted is a methodological choice with enormous consequences — the point Douglas and Atkinson made about suicide statistics (4.2.4) and Becker made about the hierarchy of credibility (4.3.9).

He treated the subordinated as agents. Not as a population to be described but as actors whose choices shaped outcomes. This is now standard in social history — "history from below" — and Du Bois anticipated E. P. Thompson (4.1.8) by nearly thirty years.

He integrated class and race without subordinating either.

And he turned the analysis on his own field. "The Propaganda of History" is a sociology of knowledge (4.1.7, 5.15) applied to a live scholarly consensus by someone who had been on the receiving end of it.

"Black Reconstruction is a history book." It is historical sociology: a structural analysis of class, race and state formation, using historical evidence, with a concluding sociology of knowledge.

"The general strike is a metaphor." Du Bois means it structurally: the mass withdrawal of labour that degraded the Confederate war economy. The scholarship supports the substance while debating the framing.

"Du Bois denied Reconstruction corruption." He documented it, showed it was general to the era, showed much of it was the work of white officials and Northern investors, and showed the charge was deployed selectively.

"The wages of whiteness means white workers were fooled." The opposite. The goods were real. It is a materialist explanation, which is what makes it strong.

"Poor whites benefited from the arrangement." They received status goods and paid in wages, schools, unions and life expectancy. Du Bois's evidence is that Southern white workers did materially worse than Northern ones throughout.

"The book was recognised immediately." It was largely ignored for three decades. The Dunning School remained standard into the 1950s, and Foner's confirming synthesis appeared in 1988 — fifty-three years later.

Why it matters

It is a demonstration that a whole discipline can be systematically wrong, through the ordinary operation of its own procedures, when its assumptions and its archive run the same way. That finding does not expire, and it is aimed at whatever field the reader works in.

It supplies the best materialist account of racial solidarity there is. The public and psychological wage explains, without recourse to deception or to inherent prejudice, why cross-racial class alliances repeatedly failed — and it names both the goods and the cost.

It restores agency to the subordinated as a matter of evidence rather than of sentiment. The general strike thesis is a structural argument about the collapse of a war economy, and it changed how the Civil War is understood.

And it shows what excluded scholarship costs a discipline. Du Bois was right in 1935. The profession found out in the 1960s and confirmed it in 1988. Thirty to fifty years of teaching a false account of the most consequential period in a nation's history — because the person who had the evidence was not someone the profession read. That is the price of a canon assembled by institutions rather than by argument, and it is the second time this course has had to make the point (3.3.3, 4.5.1).

Black Reconstruction in America (1935) overturned the Dunning School consensus — carpetbaggers, scalawags, incapable freedpeople, corrupt governments, and Redemption as the restoration of order — which was professional scholarship, taught nationally, and the basis of The Birth of a Nation.

Four theses. The general strike: roughly half a million enslaved people withdrew their labour, degrading the Confederate war economy, with some 200,000 serving in Union forces — they were agents, not objects. The Reconstruction governments founded the South's first public school systems and wrote unusually democratic constitutions, with corruption that was general to the era and disproportionately white. Redemption was organised terror, combined with the withdrawal of Northern interest. And abolition-democracy failed because it did not go far enough — above all on land.

The wages of whiteness: poor white Southerners received a "public and psychological wage" — deference, public space, better schools, police from their own ranks, lenient courts, the vote — real goods, costing the planter class nothing, accepted in place of material gains. A materialist explanation of racial solidarity, requiring no deception. And a bad trade even on its own terms: Southern white workers had lower wages, worse schools and shorter lives than Northern ones.

"The Propaganda of History" turns the analysis on the historians: not lying, but working inside assumptions supplied by their society with an archive assembled by one side. "Shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?"

Vindication took decades: largely ignored in 1935, revised from the 1960s (Stampp, Franklin), and confirmed comprehensively by Foner's Reconstruction (1988) — fifty-three years later.

The concept's second life: Roediger (The Wages of Whiteness, 1991) founding whiteness studies; Allen on the legal invention of the white race after Bacon's Rebellion; Ignatiev and Brodkin on the mobility of the racial boundary; and Katznelson on the racially selective administration of New Deal and GI Bill benefits.

Dunning School — the early-twentieth-century historiography of Reconstruction as a vindictive and corrupt failure; now discredited.

General strike (Du Bois's usage) — the mass withdrawal of enslaved labour that degraded the Confederate war economy and forced emancipation.

Abolition-democracy — a democracy that abolishes not only slavery but the conditions reproducing subordination: land, education, political participation, economic independence.

Redemption — the overthrow of Reconstruction governments and restoration of white supremacist rule in the South.

Public and psychological wage — the status goods offered to white workers in place of material improvement.

Whiteness studies — the field examining the historical construction and operation of white racial identity.

Propaganda of history — Du Bois's term for scholarship that functions to legitimate an existing order while appearing to describe the past.

History from below — the writing of history centred on the actions and experience of the subordinated.

One — read the last chapter. "The Propaganda of History" is about twenty-five pages and can be read on its own. It is the best short account of how a discipline gets something large wrong.

Two — apply the wage test. Take any social hierarchy you know. Ask what non-material goods the middle group receives, who supplies them at what cost, and what the middle group gives up to keep them.

Three — check whose evidence counts. Take any contested account of an event. Ask whose testimony is treated as reliable and whose as interested. That single question reorganises most disputes.

Four — find a consensus that shifted. Identify something your school taught you about history that scholars now regard differently. Trace when the revision happened and what evidence drove it.

Five — test the trade. Look up comparative figures for wages, schooling and life expectancy in the American South and North for any decade between 1880 and 1950. Du Bois's claim was that the status wage cost the white worker materially, and the figures are checkable.