1.

“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.”

“The South, after the war, presented the greatest opportunity for a real national labor
movement which the nation ever saw or is likely to see for many decades. Yet the
labor movement, with but few exceptions, never realized the situation. It never had
the intelligence or knowledge, as a whole, to see in black slavery and Reconstruction,
the kernel and meaning of the labor movement in the United States.”

2.

“Considering the economic rivalry of the black and white worker in the North, it would
have seemed natural that the poor white would have refused to police the slaves. But
two considerations led him in the opposite direction. First of all, it gave him work and
some authority as overseer, slave driver, and member of the patrol system. But above
and beyond this, it fed his vanity because it associated him with the masters. Slavery
bred in the poor white a dislike of Negro toil of all sorts. He never regarded himself as
a laborer, or as part of any labor movement. If he had any ambition at all it was to
become a planter and to own “niggers.” To these Negroes he transferred all the dislike
and hatred which he had for the whole slave system. The result was that the system
was held stable and intact by the poor white.”

“first, they constituted the police patrol who could ride with planters and now and
then exercise unlimited force upon recalcitrant or runaway slaves; and then, too, there
was always a chance that they themselves might also become planters by saving
money, by investment, by the power of good luck; and the only heaven that attracted
them was the life of the great Southern planter.”

“North and South agreed that laborers must produce profit; the poor white and the
Negro wanted to get the profit arising from the laborers’ toil and not to divide it with
the employers and landowners. When Northern and Southern employers agreed that
profit was most important and the method of getting it second, the path to
understanding was clear. When white laborers were convinced that the degradation of
Negro labor was more fundamental than the uplift of white labor, the end was in
sight.”

“The mass of poor whites were in an anomalous position. Those of them who were
intelligent or had during slavery accumulated any capital or achieved any position, had
always attached themselves in sympathy and interest to the planter class. This meant
that the mass of ignorant poor white labor had practically no intelligent leadership.”

“He had viewed slavery as the cause of his own degradation, but he now viewed the
free Negro as a threat to his very existence. Suppose that freedom for the Negro
meant that Negroes might rise to be landholders, planters and employers? The poor
whites thus might lose the last shred of respectability. They had been used to seeing
certain classes of the black slaves above them in economic prosperity and social
power. But after all, they were still Negroes and slaves. Now that freedom had come,
poor whites were faced by the dilemma of recognizing the Negroes as equals or of
bending every effort to still keep them beneath the white mass in income and social
power.”

3.

“It was the drear destiny of the Poor White South that, deserting its economic class
and itself, it became the instrument by which democracy in the nation was done to
death, race provincialism deified, and the world delivered to plutocracy. The man who
led the way with unconscious paradox and contradiction was Andrew Johnson.”

“He [Andrew Johnson] kept on insisting upon punishment for the South, and not only
personal punishment but economic punishment, so that many conservatives were
afraid that they had elected to the Presidency a radical who would seriously attack the
South.”

“Johnson, on the contrary, could never regard Negroes as men. “He has all the
narrowness and ignorance of a certain class of whites who have always looked upon
the colored race as out of the pale of humanity.”

“Southern leaders descended upon the President; not simply the former slave barons
but new representatives of the poor whites. In less than nine months after the
Proclamation of Amnesty, 14,000 prominent persons are said to have received pardons
from the President.”

“The transubstantiation of Andrew Johnson was complete. He had begun as the

champion of the poor laborer, demanding that the land monopoly of the Southern
oligarchy be broken up, so as to give access to the soil, South and West, to the free
laborer. He had demanded the punishment of those Southerners who by slavery and
war had made such an economic program impossible. Suddenly thrust into the
Presidency, he had retreated from this attitude. He had not only given up extravagant
ideas of punishment, but he dropped his demand for dividing up plantations when he
realized that Negroes would largely be beneficiaries. Because he could not conceive of
Negroes as men, he refused to advocate universal democracy, of which, in his young
manhood, he had been the fiercest advocate, and made strong alliance with those who
would restore slavery under another name.”

“This change did not come by deliberate thought or conscious desire to hurt—it was
rather the tragedy of American prejudice made flesh; so that the man born to narrow
circumstances, a rebel against economic privilege, died with the conventional ambition
of a poor white to be the associate and benefactor of monopolists, planters and slave
drivers. In some respects, Andrew Johnson is the most pitiful figure of American
history. A man who, despite great power and great ideas, became a puppet, played
upon by mighty fingers and selfish, subtle minds; groping, self-made, unlettered and
alone; drunk, not so much with liquor, as with the heady wine of sudden and
accidental success.”

4.

“Reconstruction was an economic revolution on a mighty scale and with world-wide

reverberation. Reconstruction was not simply a fight between the white and black
races in the South or between master and ex-slave. It was much more subtle; it
involved more than this. There have been repeated and continued attempts to paint
this era as an interlude of petty politics or nightmare of race hate instead of viewing it
slowly and broadly as a tremendous series of efforts to earn a living in new and untried
ways, to achieve economic security and to restore fatal losses of capital and
investment. It was a vast labor movement of ignorant, earnest, and bewildered black
men whose faces had been ground in the mud by their three awful centuries of
degradation and who now staggered forward blindly in blood and tears amid petty
division, hate and hurt, and surrounded by every disaster of war and industrial
upheaval. “Reconstruction was a vast labor movement of ignorant, muddled and
bewildered white men who had been disinherited of land and labor and fought a long
battle with sheer subsistence, hanging on the edge of poverty, eating clay and chasing
slaves and now lurching up to manhood. Reconstruction was the turn of white
Northern migration southward to new and sudden economic opportunity which
followed the disaster and dislocation of war, and an attempt to organize capital and
labor on a new pattern and build a new economy. Finally Reconstruction was a
desperate effort of a dislodged, maimed, impoverished and ruined oligarchy and
monopoly to restore an anachronism in economic organization by force, fraud and
slander, in defiance of law and order, and in the face of a great labor movement of
white and black, and in bitter strife with a new capitalism and a new political
framework.”