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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IV. Economics - 10. The Tradition of Slavery - 2. Slavery and Caste - 3. The Land Problem
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224 An American Dilemma
under severe discipline. To blame it on the inherent racial character of the
Negro was the most convenient way out. It did not involve any new and
strenuous thinking. It offered an escape from the difficult task of having to
introduce a basically new pattern of dealing with labor. A well-entrenched
system of slavery has probably nowhere been completely abolished by one
stroke. The plantation South was ruined through the War, and the Eman-
cipation forced upon it—ruined, it was felt, because of the Negro. Under
such circumstances it was likely that the South would try to build up a
labor organization as similar as possible to slavery.
As the years passed, the old plantation system reestablished itself. Negro
labor was on hand in spite of much short-distance wandering. A consider-
able portion of the old plantation owners were killed in the War, went
bankrupt or left the land for other reasons. Much land became forfeit
to creditors and tax authorities. But, as cotton prices soared, it was profitable
for anybody who could lay hands on cash to buy land and hire Negro
labor. After some attempts with a wage system, sharecropping became the
labor pattern into which the Negroes and, later on, poor whites were
pressed.®
3. The Land Problem
An economic reconstruction of the South which would have succeeded in
opening the road to economic independence for the ex-slaves would have
had to include, besides emancipation, suffrage and full civil liberties: rapid
education of the freedmen, abandonment of discrimination, land reform.
Some measures in all these directions were actually taken.
Concerning land reform, there were spurious attempts to break up the
plantation system and to distribute the land to the cultivators. There were
some few statesmen who grasped the importance of such a basic economic
reform for the Reconstruction program. Thaddeus Stevens and Charles
Sumner saw it.® But their strivings came to practically nothing. A small
amount of abandoned and confiscated land was turned over to Negroes by
the Union Army, by Union administrators of various kinds and, later, by
the Freedmen’s Bureau. But the latter institution had to use most of its
small appropriations—totaling less than $18,000,000—for general relief
or for educational purposes. Besides, it was allowed to operate for only
seven years (1865-1872).^®
To have given each one of the million Negro families a forty-acre free-
hold would have made a basis of real democracy in the United States that
might easily have transformed the modern world,^^ reflects Du Bois. This
may be true enough, but it should be kept clear that the historical setting
would hardly have allowed it. From an historical point of view it is even
more Utopian to think through anew the Reconstruction problem in terms
of modern social engineering. It is not entirely useless, however, as such
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