W.E.B. Du Bois’s critique of Radical Reconstruction (1865–77): A Hegelian approach to American modernity

Abstract

In this essay, I argue that Hegel’s model of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) is normatively gripping for Du Bois’s critique of Radical Reconstruction. My argument proceeds in three steps. First, I use Du Bois’s insights to explain the nature of progressive political change in historical time, an account Hegel lacks. I reconstruct the normative basis of Du Bois's political critique by articulating the three essential features of public reasoning qua citizenship. Second, I defend the promise of black civic enfranchisement with respect to the institutional conditions of love and labour in the wake of the Civil War. Third, I establish the central role black freedmen played in realizing the ideals of democratic self-governance affirmed in principle but seldom realized in practice in the United States.

Keywords

black family democratic citizenship Du Bois Hegel labour public reason racial capitalism Radical Reconstruction slavery

I Introduction

The influence of Hegel’s thought on Du Bois is a point of contention, with some scholars speculating about the usefulness of even making the comparison. There are two dominant trends for establishing the Du Bois/Hegel connection, both of which I find lacking. In seeking to recover the integrity of black political thought, Adolph Reed rejects linking Du Bois to Hegel. He considers such a move an attempt to vindicate black thought by demonstrating its suitability for inclusion in the European philosophical canon.¹ Reed contends that one should instead interpret Du Bois’s writing as a ‘historical artefact’ whose relevance is determined by the sociohistorical problematique that frames his inquiry.² Reed’s view has the unfortunate consequence of further isolating Du Bois’s critique of 19th century American society from philosophical debates about the nature of modern freedom. Moreover, historians agree that Du Bois’s problematique engages Hegel’s practical philosophy, such that at least some of his normative commitments betray a Hegelian conception of modernity.³

Unlike Reed, Shamoon Zamir argues the Du Bois/Hegel connection is a promising avenue of research.⁴ He focuses on the master/slave dialectic that Hegel outlines in the Phenomenology of Spirit in order to assess Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness. Zamir argues that Hegel’s master/slave dialectic models the relations between black and non-black citizens in the Jim Crow South and shows how racist judgement inhibits the flourishing of racially denigrated groups. Double consciousness is ‘this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity’.⁵ If one belongs to a denigrated racial group, one is compelled to assume an objectifying, third-person stance on one’s own self. The hostile white gaze is rendered the ‘measure’ of the black ‘soul’, against which a black individual struggles to affirm a positive sense of self-worth.⁶

I am sympathetic with Zamir’s account to the extent that it highlights the importance of interracial social cooperation. Overcoming double consciousness requires reconciliation with the will of one’s fellow citizens without foregoing – indeed, by asserting – one’s normative status as a ‘co-worker in the kingdom of culture’.⁷ However, I reject the master/slave dialectic for assessing race-based forms of social domination. The master/slave dialectic cannot illustrate the structural conditions necessary for the successful self-determination of all, as a historical achievement in the wake of the Civil War.⁸ On my view, the linchpin of Du Bois’s political philosophy is his defence of the civic enfranchisement of former slaves as American citizens and as moral equals in the American civic community. Unlike his republican predecessor Frederick Douglass who emphasizes freedom as non-interference in the lives of newly emancipated slaves, Du Bois stresses positive institutional conditions for actualizing black moral equality as American citizens by integrating black freedmen into social, economic and political life. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and in Black Reconstruction (1935), he focuses on the family, emancipated black labour in civil society and former slaves’ relation to the federal government. Taken together, the democratic reconstitution of this tripartite institutional framework articulates the ideal conditions of black civic enfranchisement. Du Bois’s political philosophy thus asserts that inclusion in the basic structure of American society is crucial for advancing the promise of freedom for former slaves. Yet, Du Bois scholars have yet to note that the family, civil society and the state are precisely the institutions that constitute Hegel’s conception of ethical life (Sittlichkeit). Because both Du Bois and Hegel appeal to this tripartite institutional framework in their political philosophies, it is instructive to read them together on this point. It clarifies which institutions have historically played an important role in the black struggle for freedom. Moreover, the philosophical justification of this tripartite institutional framework conveys its emancipatory potential for orienting future social justice movements.

In this essay, I restrict my analysis of the Du Bois/Hegel connection to the historical period of Radical Reconstruction in the United States, a period from 1865 to 1877 that remains hotly contested.⁹ Du Bois describes Reconstruction as a time when ‘all the Southern land was awakening as from some wild dream to […] social revolution’.¹⁰ In defending the unfolding of this social revolution, my analysis proceeds in three steps. In Section I, I use Du Bois’s insights to show the development of the institutional rationality of 19th century American society. I articulate three features of public reasoning qua citizenship as the normative basis guiding the civic enfranchisement of Black Americans. In Section II, I present the concrete details of Du Bois’s critique of Reconstruction. I show that the black family and emancipated black labour became objects of institutional recognition in their juridical and social dimensions, a change that was spearheaded by the democratic centralization of the federal government. According to Du Bois, the federal government – through the long defunct Freedmen’s Bureau – undertook the ‘herculean’ task of ‘the social uplift […] of four million [former] slaves to an assured and self-sustaining place in the body politic and [in the] econom[y]’.¹¹ In Section III, I conclude that delivering the promise of black freedom through citizenship precipitates American modernity by actualizing the universal ideals of democratic self-governance – namely, the public commitment to freedom and equality – affirmed in principle but seldom realized in practice.

By way of closing my introduction, I disarm three standard objections to my approach. First, one might object – apropos Reed – to any interpretation of the lived experience of black embodiment, as detailed by Du Bois, through the Hegelian lens of historical reason. In his lectures in the Anthropology, Hegel asserts that African and Afro-descended peoples are steeped in natural spirit and banished from the stage of world history. He mocks the prospect of their acting under the Idea of Freedom. Yet, Hegel admits in his 1830 lectures on history that the normative character of the United States is just emerging and – at least from his vantage point – is too inchoate to judge: ‘America is therefore the land of the future’.¹² Ironically, when Hegel looks to ‘the land of the future’, he hardly envisions the politics of race as crucial to the development of American modernity. Whether Hegel likes it or not, then, I submit that the owl of Minerva has flown further and Du Bois saw in which direction it flew. Racial matters are the necessary departure point for political critique in the United States and for theorizing the nature of modern freedom for any democratic constitutional republic founded on black chattel slavery, the genocide of indigenous peoples, the expropriation of indigenous land and colonialism.¹³

Second, my intention is not to demonstrate Du Bois’s Hegelianism. Du Bois’s primary concern is not with getting Hegel ‘right’ but with advancing the promise of freedom for his people, thereby offering a conception of American modernity from the standpoint of the black historical experience. To wit, the validity of my analysis does not rest on the philological question of whether or not Du Bois was thinking of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right in developing his critique of Reconstruction, although intellectual historians confirm Du Bois’s study of German social and political philosophy in Cambridge and Berlin in the 1890s. Be that as it may, exploring the Du Bois/Hegel connection does not require ascribing to Du Bois a ‘conscious’ or ‘unconscious’ adoption of Hegel in his critique of late 19th century American society. Rather, I aim to justify the institutions of the black family (as a sphere of freely chosen and expressed intimacy), dignified black labour and the racially inclusive modern American state as crucial in advancing the struggle for black freedom and therefore establish that these institutions are essential features in the historical articulation of the concept of modern freedom. Third, my reconstruction of the normative basis of Du Bois’s political critique contributes to advancing Hegel scholarship inasmuch as it provides a solution to a problem that has long plagued it: How to explain the nature of progressive political change in historical time by democratic agents self-consciously invoking the universal. The orthodox Hegelian view of progress offers a retrospective construction of a historical narrative. I argue, with the aid of Du Bois, that public reasoning qua citizenship is the impetus for the public transition of black standing from property to person. Such reasoning precipitates American modernity.

II Reasoning qua citizenship: On the self-conscious development of institutional rationality

Du Bois and Hegel both employ a philosophical methodology that responds to history, but they write in widely different historical contexts. Hegel develops his model of ethical life in the context of the Prussian empire. His formulation of the ideals of ethical life is oriented towards modern European history, offering an anti-democratic and Eurocentric defence of constitutional monarchy. Moreover, he rationalizes the exclusion of significant sections of the population from government and public life.¹⁴ Du Bois’s political philosophy, on the contrary, defends universal civic enfranchisement on a democratic basis. In responding to American political history, his departure point for theorizing American modernity is black chattel slavery, which mediates the public transition of black standing from property to person. In his critique of Reconstruction, he argues that the basic structure of late 19th century American society dramatically transformed because the American polity was forced to recognize the value of black citizenship for the first time. This was the result of former slaves publicly asserting the rights and privileges ethically appropriate to a new-found and hard-won citizenship – a historically unprecedented, and for many Whites at the time, unthinkable phenomenon.¹⁵ Because Du Bois’s notion of development has a democratic basis, he supports ordinary citizens’ self-conscious collective judgement, grounded in the public values of freedom and equality. This form of judgement expressed the political demands for inclusion of former slaves, who lobbied for the federal protection of their democratic rights, labour and families.¹⁶ In this section, I sketch Hegel’s model of objective spirit and show that – unlike Du Bois’s political philosophy – he describes the modern European’s relation to the universal as ‘unconscious’ (bewußtlose) with respect to the family and in civil society. Drawing from Du Bois, I argue that the ‘self-conscious’ conception of civic belonging precipitates the revision of institutional rationality in historical time, realizing more perfectly the universal, namely the Idea of Freedom. In Du Bois’s words, public reasoning qua citizenship ‘teach[es] a nation the value of its own ideals’, leading to the democratic development of the post-bellum United States.¹⁷

Hegel writes that ethical life is a ‘rational system of the will’s determination’, encompassing a constitutional monarchy, a constrained capitalist free market, and the bourgeois nuclear family informed by gender hierarchy.¹⁸ In the realm of actualized freedom, rational principles structure modern institutions, that is, their external, given aspect comprises objective freedom. An individual wills the principles expressing institutional rationality as an instance of her own self-determination. Modern ethical life operationalizes the rights of moral subjectivity that Kant prizes but ‘sublates’ or ‘raises’ (aufheben) them through concrete social practices. By partaking in ethical life, an individual acts through a universal that has achieved the status of a legitimate expression of practical agency inasmuch as it successfully functions as an ideal of self-governance and normativity mutuality.

The ideals of self-governance that organize the family and civil society are unconscious, according to Hegel. That is, through individuals’ pursuits of their immediate ends and desires the universal end is inadvertently realized within an objective rational system that mediates the development and expression of subjective particularity. As a family member, an individual honours a standard of behaviour that is loving, a novel achievement for relations of mutual recognition. Historically, the institutional rationality of the family did not privilege the subjective experience of love or sexual autonomy. For moderns, however, love constitutes an essential rule for comportment qua membership in the family. There, an individual satisfies her immediate disposition towards sensuality and creates a family that is uniquely her own.¹⁹ In the process, she alienates her immediate self-interest to constitute the shared interest of the family as a social entity, which then becomes the unified object of juridical and social respect. On Hegel’s view, women’s ethical personalities are identified with the family, which requires their subordination to reproductive activities in the household. Du Bois, however, defends the ethical right of black families to juridical and social recognition without presupposing gender subordination to be an essential feature of intimate familial bonds. As I detail in Section II, in the context of racial caste, the recognition of freely formed familial bonds is essential for actualizing black civic standing as moral equals in the American civic community.

According to Hegel, the ethical significance of the marriage contract is based on ‘the inwardness of subjective feeling’, experienced by the individual as an ‘immediate ethical relationship’.²⁰ The freely formed family achieves the status of ethical substance through the marriage contract. It then becomes an object of juridical protection and social respect, possessing ‘self-subsistent objective reality’, which is legally recognized as a ‘person’ with a distinct ‘right’.²¹ Hegel writes that the actual feeling of love must sustain a marriage, as there is no licit dictate that requires one to enter or remain in a loveless marriage. The crucial unconscious ethical function of the family is to prepare children to enter civil society, start their own families and become responsible citizens.²² In the best-case scenario, the marriage dissolves with the death of the partners who unwittingly achieve the infinite through the dignified lives of their children and the flourishing of their civic community.

Like the family, civil society is also an institutional site for the realization of citizens' subjective particularity. Civil society is a ‘system of needs’, where the selfish pursuit of needs simultaneously – and again, unconsciously – satisfies the needs of others through an endless series of free market exchanges.²³ Under the influence of Adam Smith, Hegel asserts that in the institutional context of civil society individuals’ pursuit of their self-interests inadvertently yields a greater good – the universal satisfaction of needs. However, aware of the dangers of capitalist free market society, he posits state-supported, public auxiliary institutions, that is, the Police (Polizei) and the Corporation (Korporation), to protect individuals against the chaos of a free market economy.²⁴ The Polizei and the Korporation secure and actualize ‘the livelihood and welfare of individuals’.²⁵ The Police is ‘the state insofar as it relates to civil society’.²⁶ As a public authority, it defends civil rights, private property and social welfare; and it explicitly incorporates the universal to constrain pernicious free market competition. The Korporation functions like a union or a community interest group, providing individuals with a sense of self-worth in their professional lives. The state-supported ethical integrity of civil society makes possible the economic self-determination of all.

By way of conveying the individual’s unconscious relation to the universal, Robert Pippin writes that individual autonomy is expressed within social agency. Bound to particularized rules of institutional reasoning, which define various social identities, an individual successfully enacts her practical agency:

Individual reflection and deliberation may be institution-bound, ruled, or governed by institutional rules (one deliberates for the most part qua rights-bearer, or qua family member, or qua citizen, where deliberation is oriented from the question of what it is good to do, qua any of these roles), but such dependence is not a qualification or restriction of freedom, understood as an individual’s exercise of rational agency, because such institutions themselves can be said to be objectively rational. My internalization of their rules is an internalization of what stand in themselves, and function in me as, effective reasons, genuine justifications.²⁷

Pippin’s explanation of practical agency is misleading. He does not stress that Hegel maintains, as does Kant, that membership in the state is an essential condition, rather than a restriction, of practical agency. For Hegel, citizenship has a special status that shapes our lives as family members, friends, labourers and even philosophers. Enacting civic standing assumes that ordinary citizens can obtain self-conscious awareness of the universal in their deliberations qua citizen; the latter possibility becomes especially pronounced in times of crisis, such as war occasions. Moreover, the notion of civic belonging penetrates the expression of practical agency in ethical life, as it characterizes the political morality of public reasoning and eventually impacts the de facto (i.e. ‘unconscious’) organization of social institutions such as the family and civil society. But Hegel does not explain in which institutional context reasoning qua citizenship occurs or what the rules of this kind of reasoning should be. Pippin too does not articulate what reasoning qua citizenship entails: What is ‘good’ to do qua the role of citizen? Such an account is requisite to explain the nature of the development of institutional rationality.

Hegel thus needs an account of public reasoning qua citizenship. Otherwise, citizens are left normatively without direction in confronting crises in an imperfect world. In her recent book, Lydia Moland points out that the self-conscious development of rational institutions in historical time is undertheorized by Hegel. While Hegel has a conception of the ‘cunning of reason’ for narrativizing historical progress retrospectively, she asks:

what is the citizen to do if her country fails to provide her with […] opportunities, if she cannot feel confident that her interests are protected by the state? Hegel in fact gives very little attention to the question of what individuals should actually do to promote rational institutions.²⁸

One might respond that the responsibilities of citizenship are limited to following the law and the edicts of government, or, when such laws are wanting, it requires citizens to fight for their basic rights. To be sure, an individual’s standing qua citizenship includes her juridical standing as a rights-bearer protected by the constitution, but it also includes a substantive set of normative commitments and values out of which a political community’s commitment to juridical right issues.²⁹ A substantive set of normative commitments and values that define ethical life are prior to juridical right, conditioning the expression of practical agency. They distinguish the normative character of a country and the people in it. For Du Bois, it reveals our self-conscious ‘substantial will’ as American folk that carries the historical legacy of a democratic people striving to be free.³⁰

To be clear, I am not interested in providing an account of ethical life that invokes what Ludwig Siep describes as ‘a strong identity of the spirit of the people’ or Charles Taylor’s communitarian conception of the good.³¹ The appeal to the ‘strong identity’ of a people does not demonstrate the normative significance of civic belonging as a historical achievement of spirit. As a historical achievement, spirit motivates praxis from One to Some to All acting under the idea of freedom. In other words, a sense of strong identity can just as well undermine – as advance – the prospect of all acting under the idea of freedom. Following Du Bois, I map the substantive set of normative commitments and values that define a civic community, for they are the basis for public reasoning that impels the progressive transformation of American society.

Drawing from Du Bois’s critique of Reconstruction, I offer three insights into how transformative public reasoning works that model the historically emergent ideal of normative mutuality in the American civic community. For Du Bois, the aspiration to restructure American society tracks this form of public reasoning in the post-bellum black community and is manifest in his account of the value of civic belonging during Reconstruction.³² To put in Hegelian parlance, American Sittlichkeit is a historical achievement of spirit that distinguishes our specific capacity as Americans to respond to, and create social practices that, taken collectively, show Americans – and Black Americans in particular – valuing universal freedom as the object and product of the self-conscious collective will. My comments here are schematic and are meant to sketch the basic features of this form of public reasoning. In the next section, I provide an exposition of the concrete institutional conditions of civic enfranchisement that reasoning qua citizenship yields during Reconstruction.

So, what is reasoning qua citizenship?

It requires the public assertion of one’s political standing in a civic community that is recognized by the state and one’s fellow citizens and is increasingly racially inclusive. Du Bois describes black political agency in the aftermath of the Civil War as striving to participate in a ‘government of men – not ordinary men either, but black men emasculated by [the] system of slavery; and now suddenly […] they came to a new birthright […] in the midst of the stricken and embittered population of their former masters’.³³ The new ‘birthright’ demands the social and juridical recognition of basic rights, but it also wages legitimate challenges to the institutional rationality of ethical life for the sake of realizing the civic equality of all.³⁴

Equal membership in a civic community is only partially achieved with the establishment of basic civil and political rights. The full promise of the value of citizenship is cashed out in terms of the expression of practical agency in determinant institutional contexts nested within the federal state. As I will detail in the next section, Du Bois affirms that ‘slavery was not abolished with the passing of the 13th Amendment’ because the antebellum racial caste system remained firmly in place in civil society.³⁵ He submits that in order to ensure that post-Emancipation freedom is not a ‘mockery’, further social and institutional mechanisms are necessary for protecting black citizens with respect to their status as rights-bearers, civilian labourers and family members.³⁶

The establishment of the juridical standing of social institutions such as the family and civil society actualizes the ethical ideal of the modern American state, as it becomes more coherent by reconciling its governing ideals and actual purposive activities. The rational structure of the modern state is therefore not static but subject to transformation. However, the public assertion of the rights and social privileges ethically appropriate to citizenship puts citizens in conflict with each other about the ideal of normative mutuality that should come to define their civic community and direct the purposive activities of the state. Du Bois observes that this conflict in the United States is primarily racial in character, contingent on whether or not black and brown people would be recognized as American citizens and what such recognition should entail:

Many [whites] began to express a fear lest the Negro become ‘overeducated’ and too ambitious, and America began to face frankly the problem as to just what it wanted the Negro to be. Was he to be trained as a free citizen, economically and socially equal to other Americans, or was he to be trained as a servile caste, the recipient of charity and good will, but not a full-fledged member of American democracy?³⁷

The three elements outlined above articulate the key features of public reasoning that Du Bois stresses developed the institutional rationality of late 19th century American society. To be sure, reasoning qua citizenship does not always lead to the development of ethical life and cannot be deductively read from Hegel’s Idea of Freedom. As Hegel warns, in other communities and historical periods, crises lead to the withering of spirit, as individuals turn inward in their alienation from a broken world.³⁸ However, in the case of the post-bellum black community, Du Bois asserts that black freedmen turned outward, drawing on the substantive set of normative commitments and values that define the American civic community in principle in order to assert their equal normative standing as American citizens. For a brief period, federal intervention supported the claims of black citizenship. Du Bois thus helps bring out the popular democratic dimension of Hegel’s practical philosophy inasmuch as reasoning qua citizenship charts progressive change in historical time by black political actors’ self-conscious judgement about the value of civic belonging.

III Radical Reconstruction (1865–77): On the self-conscious development of institutional rationality in the post-bellum United States

Du Bois remarks, ‘The true significance of slavery in the United States to the whole social development of America lay in the relation of slaves to democracy’.³⁹ The promise of Emancipation grounds the substantive institutional conditions of civic enfranchisement that would make possible the successful self-determination of all. But in order to deliver this promise, we must appreciate how slavery arrests the institutional rationality of antebellum American society. In the previous section, I have demonstrated with the aid of Du Bois that the self-conscious conception of civic belonging or public reasoning qua citizenship animates political struggle. Resistance to racial caste is waged by former slaves publicly asserting the rights and social privileges ethically appropriate to citizenship. In this section, I show how Black Americans’ public reasoning qua citizenship concretely advance the institutional conditions of labour and of love. For Du Bois, the emergence of America modernity is spearheaded by, on the one hand, a people just emerging from slavery; and, on the other hand, it implicates a nation hostile or indifferent to the universal ideals of self-determination it proclaims in principle but imperfectly realizes in practice. He contends that black freedmen spur America’s ‘first blossoming into the modern age’, where ‘human freedom would release the human spirit […] and set it free to dream and sing’.⁴⁰ ‘America thus stepped forward’, he continues, ‘and added to the Art of Beauty, gift of the Renaissance, and to Freedom of Belief […] a vision of democratic self-government: the domination of political life by the intelligent decision of free and self-sustaining men’.⁴¹

i. On the family

Du Bois articulates the ethical significance of the family as a social institution and black freedmen’s subjective particularity, expressed in the ‘freedom to love’.⁴² Since Du Bois, a rich literature has emerged about the black family in relation to the history of slavery.⁴³ In my remarks, I merely underscore that Du Bois invokes the right of the black family against externality, which imposes a duty on the social world, while reflecting freedmen’s affective desire to reconstitute their families in the wake of the Civil War.⁴⁴ Unlike Hegel, Du Bois defends the expression of desire, sexual autonomy and the enforcement of custodial rights without presupposing gender hierarchy. Gender subordination is rejected for the internal organization of family life, even as the transition from property to person incorporates Black Americans’ right to enter a legal marriage contract, if they so choose. As Lawrie Balfour points out, ‘Rather than arguing that black women, too, should be enthroned as queens of a tightly domestic sphere, he defends the importance of sexual freedom for any meaningful conception of women as free citizens’.⁴⁵ In realizing the promise of Emancipation, civic enfranchisement includes the recognition of black dignity with respect to the social (and juridical) status attached to participating in freely chosen familial bonds. Du Bois therefore focuses on the desires motivating the practical agency of former slaves, which drives the claim for social and juridical recognition of their familial bonds.

Du Bois describes slavery as a social system that views enslaved black people as incapable of ‘human feelings’ and of forming social bonds sustained by feelings of love.⁴⁶ In Black Reconstruction, he describes the family unit in the antebellum period as ‘defenceless’, underscoring its vulnerability on slave plantations.⁴⁷ Slaves ‘could be sold – actually sold as we sell cattle with no reference to calves or bulls, or recognition of family. It was a nasty business [b]ut it was a stark and bitter fact’.⁴⁸ This is not to say that social relations among slaves did not emerge that were intimate and loving in spite of the harrowing circumstances. Rather, Du Bois accents the impact of economic markets on the social organization of slave plantations. In light of the absence of the institutional recognition of the rights of the family, which must be predicated on citizenship, the slave economy regularly destroyed black families as family members were sold off to different owners; families were often only kept together by the capricious wishes of a slave owner. These wishes typically asserted unbridled sexual licence: Women and girls were routinely purchased and kept for concubinage. Sexual slavery was enmeshed with slavery as a system for the extraction of value in productive labour. Du Bois also describes the emergence of ‘breeding states’.⁴⁹ When Congress outlawed the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, the price of slaves exponentially increased, bolstering slave owners’ economic incentive to ‘breed’ and rape human beings.⁵⁰

The ethical obligations generated by love were not only disrespected, but rendered criminal, as slaves often had to ‘steal their own bodies’ to see loved ones.⁵¹ The following are some newspaper notices reporting runaway slaves that Du Bois gathers. He demonstrates the ethical importance of love whose ‘rights’ the slavocracy refused to recognize:

Fifty Dollar Reward – Ran away from the subscriber, a Negro girl named Maria. She is of copper color, between 13 and 14 years of age – bareheaded and barefooted. She is small for her age – very sprightly and very likely. She states she was going to see her mother in Maysville.

Committed to jail of Madison County, a Negro woman, who calls her name Fanny, and says she belongs to William Miller, of Mobile. She formerly belonged to John Givens, of this county, who now owns several of her children.

Fifty Dollar Reward – Ran away from subscriber, his Negro man Pauladore, commonly called Paul. I understand Gen. R.Y. Hayne has purchased his wife and children from H.L. Pinckney, Esp., and has them on his plantation at Goosecreek, where no doubt, this fellow is frequently lurking.⁵²

With respect to the last newspaper notice, Du Bois interjects that, indeed, ‘[o]ne can see Paul “lurking” about his wife and children’ on the Goosecreek plantation.⁵³ In the slave-owning South, the desire for a black man to see his own family is rebuked. The actual manifestation of affection is characterized pejoratively – in this case, as ‘lurking’. Black people, as property, were viewed as lacking the capacity for intimacy; the intention to act according to the ethical ideal of love was mocked or represented as bestial and irrational. The phenomenon continued into the Jim Crow era, when family ties were disrespected and often merited violent reprisal, as when black mothers were lynched for defending their children against hostile Whites.⁵⁴ Du Bois anticipates some of the arguments of prominent black feminist philosophers such as Angela Davis who explores the gendered nature of the denigration of black familial bonds.⁵⁵ The (white) feminist philosophy tradition often calls for (white) women to exit from, or abolish, the family; this call markedly contrasts with the black historical experience, where black women demand entry into their families and enforcement of their custodial rights.⁵⁶ To be sure, Du Bois never extols the cult of motherhood. In Darkwater, he writes ‘We cannot imprison women again in a home or require them all on pain of death to be nurses and housekeepers’.⁵⁷ In criticizing the bourgeois family, he observes, ‘only at the sacrifice of intelligence and the chance to do their best work can the majority of modern women bear children’.⁵⁸ And yet, his critique of the bourgeois family also asserts that a woman ‘must have the right of motherhood at her own discretion’.⁵⁹ Thus, he affirms the ethical rights of freely chosen, affective familial bonds, while rejecting the inegalitarian structure of bourgeois family life. With the end of the Civil War, Du Bois describes freedmen’s desperation to locate loved ones, a journey that would sometimes last many years and has become a recurrent theme of modern Africana literature. The democratic reconstitution of the family is a key gain of Reconstruction. It attests to freedmen’s resilience and desire to be truly free. As Toni Morrison in her novel Beloved (1987) observes: ‘to get a place where you could love anything you chose – not to need permission for desire – well now, that was freedom’.⁶⁰

ii. Emancipated black labour

With the passing of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, black labour was legally emancipated.⁶¹ However, Du Bois warns that a ‘second’ slavery would soon follow because securing a schedule of basic rights and liberties is necessary but insufficient for achieving civic equality.⁶² In order to render freedom ‘substantive’ and ‘actual’, the federal government had to facilitate the universal satisfaction of needs, focusing on the needs of black labour in particular and the fair adjudication of the terms of the wage contract. Such a provision is necessary to realize the full value of civic belonging. In this section, I discuss the establishment of the Freedmen’s Bureau, operating from 1865 to 1872, and show how it – much like Hegel’s corporations and police – functions to preserve the ethical integrity of civil society, but does so in a race-sensitive fashion that invokes the self-conscious universal of freedom and equality by democratic agents. Guiding the intervention were black freedmen themselves, who, in reasoning qua citizenship, helped direct, organize and fund the Bureau’s activities.⁶³

Because freedmen ‘didn’t even own the rags on their backs’, Du Bois claims that federal intervention in civil society had to disrupt the antebellum racial caste system and secure the institutional conditions of dignified black labor.⁶⁴ He argues that the Bureau was an indispensable institution for the satisfaction of black labour’s interests; it facilitated the economic self-determination of former slaves and white refugees of the civil war.⁶⁵ The Freedmen’s Bureau sutures the ethical integrity of civil society by administering the transition from the ‘feudal agrarianism [of the slavocracy] to modern farming and industry [of post-Emancipation] civil freedom’.⁶⁶ ‘An instrument of social regeneration’, the Bureau is designed to help emancipated labour become ‘self-supporting’.⁶⁷ He stresses that without economic rights, the black community would remain ‘enslaved in all but name’.⁶⁸ With Emancipation, for the first time, black people in the South assumed the social identity of civilian labourers and became entitled to payment for their work and a wage contract at all – a transition that the Freedmen’s Bureau oversaw. Their social identity as civilian labourers, however, were often rejected by white proprietors who resented paying black people. Each dollar paid to a black labourer was a dollar fleeced from the white community. To suppose that black labour is free to choose its own ends in civil society such that it becomes self-supporting was anathema.

According to Du Bois, in these circumstances it becomes the responsibility of federal government to make economic freedom ‘substantive’ and ‘actual’ for black labourers.⁶⁹ Without federal support, freedmen’s standing as right-bearers remained formal, as they were subject to the unrestrained economic exploitation of racist white proprietors in civil society, who exerted

a determined effort to reduce black labor as nearly as possible to a condition of unlimited exploitation and build a new class of capitalists on this foundation. The wage of the Negro worker […] was to be reduced to the level of bare subsistence by taxation, peonage, caste and every method of discrimination.⁷⁰

In order to prevent this, through the Freedmen’s Bureau, ‘the United States government assumed charge of the emancipated [slave] as the ward of the nation’.⁷¹ Countering ‘practical re-enslavement’, the Bureau created the ‘social conditions’ for ‘the improvement, protection, and employment of refugee freedmen’, as well as for their ‘general welfare’.⁷² In his view, the Bureau was ‘the most extraordinary and far-reaching institution of social uplift that America has ever attempted’.⁷³

Du Bois asserts that the Bureau’s primary responsibility was to ‘see that freedmen were free to choose their employers and help mak[e] fair contracts for them’.⁷⁴ The federal administration of a fair wage contract stipulated the following: no beating, harassment or intimidation in the workplace; white employers must pay black workers without withholding earnings; black labour has the right to choose employers and leave offices of employment at will without being forced to labour under any condition not of their choosing; black labour was entitled to and received judicial standing in civil courts, including the right to sue former employers; and all wages were taxed. With tax monies, a public school system was established for the first time in the South.⁷⁵ The Freedmen’s Bureau thus subordinated the accumulation of capital to the needs of labour.⁷⁶ One Southern politician at the time complained with respect to the federal government’s efforts, ‘That is more than we do for white men!’⁷⁷

Such complaints were groundless and ignored the political reality: White refugees of the Civil War received aid and support from the Bureau.⁷⁸ Although the Reconstruction Amendments aimed to ease the plight of black freedmen, the Bureau also helped poor Whites who lacked adequate access to basic resources and were excluded from opportunities to exercise meaningful economic self-determination and democratic citizenship. Moreover, it compelled their cooperation with, and their expression of good will towards, black labourers. The Bureau, nonetheless, was perceived as an intrusion into Southern plutocracy for the exclusive benefit of black persons. Resistance to the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill is exemplified by President Andrew Johnson (in office 1865–1869), who declares that it is unconstitutional, unnecessary and extra-juridical because it suppresses the rights of ‘all citizens’. In other words, an organization that protects against wage theft, and black wage theft in particular, fights for fair wage contracts, secures black property rights and advocates interracial social cooperation is perceived as infringing upon white people’s civil and political rights.⁷⁹ Du Bois responds that historical conditions required securing the ethical integrity of civil society as a system for the universal satisfaction of needs. ‘The [U.S.] government must have [the] power to do what manifestly must be done’.⁸⁰ He thereby posits: the right to a fair wage should be a privilege of American citizenship as such, white or black, and must therefore be protected by the modern American state.⁸¹ The backlash against the expansion of federal power to protect civilian labour and social welfare leads to the dismantling of the Freedmen’s Bureau. As it prevails, the economic rights of citizenship are left unprotected and interracial social cooperation is unseated as the organizational principle of civil society. A racial caste system is reaffirmed. The backlash further confirms the racialized character of the conflict among citizens about the rights and social privileges ethically appropriate to American citizenship. With the dismantling of the Freedmen’s Bureau, state legislatures pass the Black Codes and bolster the unchecked ascendency of the Ku Klux Klan. Poor Whites gain the privilege and wanton licence of racial whiteness with the rise of the Jim Crow era. But, they lose the opportunity to exercise meaningful economic self-determination, which is only possible through a cooperative alliance with black labour, according to Du Bois.⁸²

IV Conclusion

I have argued that Du Bois’s critique of Reconstruction illustrates that American Sittlichkeit radically transforms, as black freedmen assert – and redefine – the value of American civic belonging. Public reasoning qua citizenship is the normative basis for their critique of the institutional rationality of post-bellum 19th century American society. As a result, the federal government actualizes an expansive ethical ideal for administering justice with respect to the institutional conditions of love and of labour. The nation’s democratic development captures its people striving to understand what it means to be free, given the universal values of freedom and equality that characterize its political morality. Du Bois identifies the development of American modernity with the reconstitution of the black family, civil society, and the federal state, with black freedmen playing a central role. He thus contends that freedmen are responsible for America’s ‘first blossoming into the modern age’.⁸³ Black freedmen, as citizens, publicly assumed social identities as family members and civilian labourers, demanding the recognition of their families and labour, as well as basic civil and political rights. Each of these components are necessary, and, for Du Bois, form an interlocking system that is the institutional basis of civic enfranchisement. In this regard, the Hegelian-inflected conception of ethical life is normatively gripping for his critique of Reconstruction.

By way of concluding, I would like to address two objections to my presentation of Du Bois’s political philosophy. First, one might object that I have only restated a long-held consensus that Du Bois is an assimilationist. Second, the objection might continue, Reconstruction failed, so it is foolish to invoke the ethical ideal of democratic self-governance in the modern American state, which does not have a salutary record of protecting black civic enfranchisement. With respect to the first objection, I submit that Du Bois’s guarded affirmation of the institutions of American society does not warrant his longstanding reputation as an elitist snob or an assimilationist concerning ‘the constitutive norms of modernity’.⁸⁴ Strictly speaking, one cannot assimilate to the norms of modernity, if one conceives modernity as the emergence of the institutional conditions of democratic self-governance. In presenting the Hegelian-inflected dimension of his critique of Reconstruction, I have stressed the normative basis of black democratic agency, which served as the impetus for the development of the American republic during a major episode of American history. While membership in a particular civic community – being a citizen of a modern state – is essential to the form of spirit (Gestalt des Geistes), Geistigkeit or purposive mindedness is an ongoing historical achievement. To conceive of Sittlichkeit as an objective ethical substance illustrates, on the one hand, a rational system of the will’s determination that an individual confronts as already given in her attempt to find her normative bearings in the world. On the other hand, objective spirit is not fixed; its institutional rationality is subject to public scrutiny that must negate ethically irrelevant or injurious expressions of institutional rationality that undermines a rational agent’s capacity to feel at home in the world. Particularly in a time of crisis, with the breakdown of intersubjective normative commitments, social norms must achieve the status of institutional norms to guide anew institutional rationality. The emergence of a new institutional norm is inevitably the result of conflict; and, as previously stated, conflict is racial in character in the United States. The struggle for which ethical norm should count as rationally obligatory for all diagnoses a crisis, but it also paves the way forward for spirit’s self-conscious education to the universal. The uncharitable label of assimilationist thus distorts how Du Bois envisions the relation of slaves to American democracy. Former slaves were not judging themselves unworthy in light of the ethical ideals of 19th century American society. Rather, they judged the prevailing system of ethical life as unworthy of its own ideals, which are accepted in principle but seldom realized in practice.

With respect to the second objection, given his emphasis on the state-supported transition of black chattel slavery to free modern industry, Du Bois shifts responsibility for the ultimate failure of Reconstruction on to the shoulders of the federal government and the bigoted reassertion of white supremacist power. He maintains that, ideally, the state ought to alleviate the burden placed on disenfranchised American citizens, securing the necessary institutional conditions for their successful self-determination as family members and civilian labourers. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he does not blame black political actors’ lack of resourcefulness and democratic literacy for the failure of Reconstruction. Instead, he observes that once the federal government withdrew support of the post-bellum black community and defunded the Freedmen’s Bureau, which he thought should have been made a permanent federal institution, ‘At least eight million Negroes [were] left without effective voice in government, naked to the worst elements of the community’.⁸⁵ Though he never calls for the recreation of the Bureau, he continues to call for the realization of the full promise of black citizenship. My account of Du Bois’s political philosophy establishes that future social justice movements remain justified in calling for racially inclusive civic enfranchisement. And White Americans must prepare themselves to share the world and assume responsibility for the democratic reconstitution of the civic community.

Finally, I would like to point out that Hegel’s practical philosophy assumes that the institutional rationality of ethical life accommodates liberal plurality, whereas Du Bois illustrates that achieving a racially pluralistic society is an unfinished political project, one that leads to the radical reconstruction of American society every time it is attempted. Du Bois thus frames the significance of black citizenship in terms of its impact on the coherence of rational institutions. To attempt this project is not only worthwhile, but it imparts a sobering lesson about the moral courage and resilience necessary to exercise democratic agency in the context of racial caste. Although hostile, reactionary forces prevail with the dismantling of Reconstruction policies, Du Bois emphasizes the importance of appreciating the political gains of the period. ‘The attempt to make black men American citizens was in a certain sense a failure, but a splendid failure’.⁸⁶ Yet he adds that the ‘rebuilding’ of American democracy ‘whether it comes now or a century later, will and must go back to the basic principles of Reconstruction’.⁸⁷ There is therefore much philosophers and the American public alike have to learn from Du Bois’s critique of Reconstruction, which shows the challenges and the triumphs of creating a democratic society that is truly free and equal for all.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Elvira Basevich