Black Workers, the Republican Party, and Class Conflict in Reconstruction South Carolina

What is it about?

Following WEB Du Bois's framing of slave emancipation as a critical formative episode in US labor history, this article illuminates the remarkable post-Civil War confrontation between an expectant Black working class and embittered former slaveholders in Black-majority South Carolina. As freedpeople moved beyond claims to formal civic equality and turned to pursuing a 'capacious sense of freedom' that included a challenge to landholding and property rights, their wartime allies in the Republican Party began to waver. Faced with a choice of deepening the challenge to racial and class hierarchies or retreating into defense of the liberal order, Republican moderates moved toward an alliance with propertied whites—many of them their former Confederate adversaries—in an attempt to undermine Black workers' attempts to fundamentally reshape the post-Civil War South.

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Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

Why is it important?

While scholars have in recent years focused on the (considerable) racial elements in the violent postwar confrontation over the future of the US South, the evidence from South Carolina suggests that there was a powerful class dimension to freepeople's challenge to their former 'masters'. This article reaffirms Du Bois's insight in framing postwar Reconstruction as a critical, formative and traumatic episode in the history of the US working class.

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