Reading Black Reconstruction in America: Entry 3 – The Planter

Chapter three of Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 is titled “The Planter.” Like the two before it, and the one coming next, at 23 pages it is a relatively short entry in a book where chapters averages 43 pages. But this “lighter” entry reinforces the doctrine of black inferiority. It demonstrates, in the pre-Civil War context, race as a political, economic, and scientific construction. It sets us up for upcoming need to reconstruct all three, and the failures in those efforts.

Du Bois begins, according to the chapter title, by noting the concentration and domination of the planter class (i.e. “slaveholders”) in terms of ownership of labor, land, and capital. The three-fifths compromise, furthermore, degraded not only the slaves helped to disenfranchise, in practice, much of the white south. Charles Sumner would note that, in 1864, South Carolina’s politics were controlled by 150-180 men.[1] Du Bois adds:

The planter certainly dominated politics and social life–he boasted of his education, but on the whole, these Southern leaders were men singular ignorant of modern conditions and trends and of their historical background. All their ideas of gentility and education went back to the days of European privilege and caste. They cultivated a surface acquaintance with literature and they threw Latin quotations even into Congress. Some few had a cultural education at Princeton and Yale, and to this day [1935] Princeton refuses to receive Negro students, and Yale has admitted a few with reluctance, as a curious legacy from slavery. …They were ‘gentlemen’ according to the older and more meager connotation of the word.[2]

Northerners were impressed, Du Bois relays, by Southern planter extravagances and lordliness. The leisure, good breeding, and high living of Southern leaders caused flattery and fawning by Northerners. The planter class, argues Du Bois, were consumers primarily. They lived grandly, keeping “elaborate households.” They focused on fine furnishings, keeping liquor cabinets stocked, and gambled, dueled, and caroused. The idea of planter extravagance, moreover, caused such an impression that, after the Civil War, new Southern whites and freedmen Reconstruction leaders wasted tax money imitating the perceived lordliness of former planters.[3]

And then there’s the sex. Here’s Du Bois on planter sexuality:

Sexually they were lawless, protecting elaborately and flattering the virginity of a small class of women of their social class, and keeping at command millions of poor women of the two laboring groups of the South. Sexual chaos was always the possibility of slavery, not always realized but always possible: polygamy through the concubinage of black women to white men; polyandry between black women and selected men on plantation in order to improve the human stock of strong and able workers. The census of 1860 counted 588,352 persons obviously of mixed blood–a figure admittedly below the truth.’Every man who resides on his plantation may have his harem, and has every inducement of custom, and of pecuniary gain…to tempt him to the common practice.[4]

Du Bois goes on to note the “racial catholicity” of several Presidents of the United States–such that one Southern woman, and sister of a President, declared that they were all “only mistresses of seraglios.” [5]

The chapter then moves to a consideration of the means by which planters might have increased their income over the course of slavery. Du Bois considers whether planers might hold out for higher prices, engage in intensive farming, try to control transportation, and simply making labor work harder for less in return. After thinking through all the factors, which included a strong consideration of the planters’ “lazy and self-indulgent” tendencies, Du Bois concludes that “more ruthlessly exploiting his slave labor” was route taken. The slave power, then, lagged the North in the application of intelligence and industry to its main source of income.[6]

In focusing on extracting more from its slave labor, the planters followed their beliefs. To them, these black inhabitants could only labor as slaves. They were “persuaded” furthermore, Du Bois argues, that black labor was better off than white labor, that the South had a better labor system, and that agricultural products were the true source of U.S. wealth (over manufactured goods). Planters believed that black labor was the most efficient for “ordinary toil” based the “doctrine of racial differences.” Planters did not believe that blacks could achieve a “higher intelligence and increased efficiency.” Planters relied theologically on the “Curse of Canaan” and (pseudo)scientifically on “all available doctrines of race inferiority.” These differences were taught in schools and forwarded in periodicals such that planters “born after 1840” believed “that all valid laws in psychology, economics and politics” did not extend to blacks and slaves. [7]

Here’s an important passage from Du Bois—connecting this doctrine to politics and economics, and foreshadowing its insidious post-Civil War results:

The espousal of the doctrine of Negro inferiority by the South was primarily because of economic motives and the inter-connected political urge necessary to support slave industry; but to the watching world it sounded like the carefully thought out result of experience and reason; and because of this it was singularly disastrous for modern civilization in science and religion, in art and government, as well as in industry. The South could say that the Negro, even when brought into modern civilization, could not be civilized, and that, therefore, he and the other colored peoples of the world were so far inferior to the whites that the white world had a right to rule mankind for their own selfish interests. [8]

And here’s a key flourish on the results of the planter class and their “educational and social propaganda”:

Never in modern times has a large section of a nation so used its combined energies to the degradation of mankind. The hurt to the Negro in this era was not only his treatment in slavery; it was the would dealt to his reputation as a human being. Nothing was left; nothing was sacred; and while the best and more cultivated and more humane of the planters did not themselves always repeat the calumny, they stood by, consenting by silence, while blatherskites said things about Negroes too cruelly untrue to be the word of civilized men. Not only then in the forties and fifties did the word Negro lose its capital letter, but African history became the tale of degraded animals and sub-human savages, where no vestige of human culture found foothold.[9]

The press for more on-the-ground labor and efficiency included the use of women as day workers, which broke up slave homes and made biological reproduction (much needed) an impossibility. That impossibility led to what Du Bois argues was the quiet shame of the South—a situation planters denied: namely, the necessity of “raising…slaves in the Border slave states for systematic sale on the commercialized cotton plantations.” This helped planters “beat down the cost of [their] slave labor.” Du Bois estimates that 50-80,000 slaves (purchased workers) went from Border States into the South in the 1850s. This market fostered “sexual chaos” among black families as Border State slave manufacturers deliberately paired black men and women for breeding. This led Border States to “frantically defend slavery” while also vigorously opposing “the reopening of the African slave trade.”[10]

As the economics of slave labor became tight and tricky as time progressed, a premium was placed on political power. As Du Bois relays, 4,000,000 slaves balanced 2,400,000 Northern voters. This is why, in part, that as land opened in the West, Southern leaders slavery there—to counteract the possible power of new free states and their voters. Along with the possibility of harvesting new, fresh land, politics demanded an aggressive push into the West. Settlers, however, did not want to compete with slave labor. These facts alone help explain the controversies around the Compromise of 1850 and the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act. These acts helped pave the way to slavery in the West. [11]

Du Bois devotes a significant amount of text, both his narrative and through long block quotes, reinforcing that succession was about the commitment to cotton and slave labor. The South helped bind Border States by giving up on advocacy for reopening the slave trade and forbidding the importation, into the Confederacy, of blacks from foreign countries. [12]

Over time, Du Bois asserts, the psychological toll of slavery on the planters increased. It would be fatal. Du Bois explains:

The mere fact that a man could be, under the law, the actual master of the mind and body of human beings had to have disastrous effects. It tended to inflate the ego of most planters beyond all reason; they became arrogant, strutting, quarrelsome kinglets; they issued commands; they made laws; they shouted their orders; the expected deference and self-abasement; they were choleric and easily insulted. Their “honor” became a vast and awful thing, requiring wide and insistent deference. Such of them as were inherently weak and inefficient were all the more easily angered, jealous, and resentful; while the few who were superior, physically or mentally, conceived no bounds to their power and personal prestige. As the world had long learned, nothing is so calculated to ruin human nature as absolute power over human beings.[13]

Du Bois then turns to Frederick Douglass to summarize the objects of the white planter: “…[1] complete suppression of all anti-slavery discussion. … [2] expatriation of the entire free people of color… [3] unending perpetuation of slavery in the republic… [4] nationalization of slavery…in every state… [5] the extension of slavery over Mexico and the entire South American states.” [14]

These planters, then, “turned the most beautiful section of the nation into a center of poverty and suffering, of drinking, gambling, and brawling; an abode of ignorance among black and white more abysmal than in any modern land; and a system of industry so humanly unjust and economical inefficient that if it had not committed suicide in civil war, it would have disintegrated of its own weight.” [15]

Because of these problems, contradictions, unjust ambitions, and evils, Du Bois asserts that “the planters died as a class” with the Civil War. The became either poor whites or rose with some of those poor whites into capitalists and landholders.[16]

Final thoughts: I loved Du Bois’ full analytical perspective on the planters—their psychology, politics, powers, weaknesses, ambitions, vision, and pseudo-philosophy of society. We are set up for a great fall. Indeed, the ethical reader now wants them to fall. Hard. But we are also prepared for some degree of endurance. The power of planter class culture, and its doctrine of black inferiority, has been conveyed. We can see how it will distort Southern leadership’s assessment of the war and subvert Reconstruction. – TL

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Notes

[1] W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, Introduction by David Levering Lewis (1935; reprint, New York: The Free Press, 1992), p. 32-34.
[2] Ibid., p. 34.
[3] Ibid., p. 35.
[4] Ibid., p. 35.
[5] Ibid., p. 36.
[6] Ibid., p. 36-37.
[7] Ibid., p. 37-39.
[8] Ibid., p. 39.
[9] Ibid., p. 39.
[10] Ibid., p. 41, 43, 44, 45.
[11] Ibid., p. 41-42.
[12] Ibid., p. 48-50, 51.
[13] Ibid., p. 52-53.
[14] Ibid., p. 53.
[15] Ibid., p. 53.
[16] Ibid., p. 54.