"To win the war America freed the slave and armed him; and the threat to arm the mass of the Black workers of the Confederacy stopped the war. . . . Most Americans used the negro to defend their own economic interests and, refusing him adequate land and real education and even common justice, deserted him shamelessly as soon as their selfish interests were safe."The main question to which the Negroes returned again and again [during Reconstruction] was the problem of owning land. It was ridiculed as unreasonable and unjust to the impoverished landholders of the South, and as a part of the desire for revenge which the North had. . . . [But] again and again . . . [formerly enslaved people] expressed their right to the land and the deep importance of this right. . . ."What [White Southerners and some White Northerners] insisted on during Reconstruction was labor, continuous, steady labor. . . . Of labor for the economic benefit of the laborer . . . they had no conception; and to any transfer of capital in land to the laborer . . . they were bitterly opposed."W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880, published in 1935

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