Simply by stopping work, they could threaten the Confederacy with starvation. Yet, these slaves had enormous power in their hands. Freedom for the slave was the logical result of a crazy attempt to wage war in the midst of four million black slaves, and trying the while sublimely to ignore the interests of those slaves in the outcome of the fighting. The Abolitionists never had a real majority of the people of the United States back of them. It was not the Abolitionist alone who freed the slaves. The enslaved women and men “decided the war” despite the South and despite the North. ![]() So that in this way it was really true that … this withdrawal and bestowal of his labor decided the war.”Ī central thrust of Du Bois’s writings serve to demonstrate that abolition was achieved through the actions of Black men and women: through escape to fight in the ranks of the Union army, through the general strike and the threat of a general strike, through forms of resistance, through their presence as the primary force that fueled the Southern economy. They waged what Du Bois called a “general strike”: “the slave entered upon a general strike against slavery… He ran away to the first place of safety and offered his services to the Federal Army. With almost four million enslaved persons of color and over a quarter million freed Black men and women, the sheer power of their labor and their acts of resistance decided the Civil War. Du Bois demonstrates that the women and men who were enslaved in the South used their collective power, their labor and the threat of their labor force, to bring victory to the movement for abolition. ![]() In the chapter titled “The General Strike” of his book Black Reconstruction in America, W.E.B. Harcourt read and discuss Slaves of the State: Black Incarceration from the Chain Gang to the Penitentiary by Dennis Childs They Were Her Property by Stephanie Jones-Rogers “ Venus in Two Acts” by Saidiya Hartman The History of Mary Prince by Mary Prince Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution by Eric Foner Thursday, NovemColumbia University The artist Dread Scott presents the slave revolt reenactment project. Professors Dennis Childs, Maeve Glass, Stephanie Jones-Rogers, and Bernard E.
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