Lecture Notes: "Revolutions Never Go Backward"

The U.S. Civil War was a revolution that did not begin as a revolution. It began as a conflict between competing visions of the American project. It was as Cedric Robinson explains, fundamentally a question of the South's desire to see:

the preservation of their rule over a thriving slave economy, the maintenance of a societal stratification based on slavery, and the defense of the master/slave culture from the predations of manufacturing capitalists and abolitionist liberalism.

And for the Union:

the preservation of the union; that is, retaining their political and commercial provenance in the South and western territories.[1]

This was not a revolution, but a project that portended the continued misery for those who had always been victims of American progress and of the idea of America itself. But the Civil War became a revolution. For those competing visions could not perceive that there were others who might force their own visions onto the landscape. Those who made revolution were Black folks, and those who followed their lead. Their revolution was to make the idea of America something it would have never been: A force for emancipation.And yet, for the masses of those Africans, it was merely the continuation of prior movements, previous insistences. To them, freedom was the “coming of the Lord.”[2] And war— what W.E.B. Du Bois describes as “force, anarchy and debt. Its end is evil, despite all incidental good.”[3] —was its imperfect vehicle. It would need to remade as an ark of deliverance. Thinking with those ancestors who saw Divine order through human chaos, Du Bois declared:

“It was all foolish, bizarre, and tawdry. Gangs of dirty Negroes howling and dancing; poverty-stricken ignorant laborers mistaking war, destruction and revolution for the mystery of the free human soul; and yet to these black folks it was the Apocalypse…All that was Beauty, all that was Love, all that was Truth, stood on the top of these mad mornings and sang with the stars. A great human sob shrieked in the wind, and tossed its tears upon the sea,—free, free, free.”[4]

But there would be more. Society itself would have to be remade, not just the intentions of the war. For those who saw “the finger of God in all this,”[5] the post-emancipation reality would have to match their dream: the dream of the maroon, the vision of the Delanys and Garnets. The dream of Araminta Ross. And as the writer for the New Orleans Tribune declared, “Revolutions never go backward.”[6]This was a world that was to be renewed by the fresh influx of Black freedom dreams. A world without exploitation, without brutality, and without imprisonment. A world where we all benefit equally from our labor, where resources are shared, where the ring shout builds a Black togetherness and beingness, undisturbed by those beyond it. A world, otherwise.Revolutions never go backward. Except in America. This was actual Reconstruction, what Robinson calls “Black Deconstruction.”[7] Not merely the attempt to rend a fraying United States in order to perfect some vision of the Founding Fathers. But a failed revolution premised on the “rejection of Africa as equal.”[8] In the process what Robinson calls “accumulation” won out over “liberty”, and for Du Bois, industry over abolition-democracy.

“The spectacle of Black sacrifice in the Civil War and the wars that were to follow provided no lasting relief for Blacks, no enduring justification for their freedom, no national resolve for racial justice.[9]

“The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”[10]

“A version of freedom larger than America’s prepared to accept.”[11]

We continue to live in that failed revolution.And in that failure, that “splendid failure”[12] lies a vision of human emancipation the world—this world, otherwise—still requires.

[1] Cedric Robinson, Black Movements in America, 67.[2] W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 84-127.[3] W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 55.[4] W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 124.[5] John S Rock, quoted in Vincent Harding, There is a River, 222.[6] Quoted in Vincent Harding, There is a River, 256.[7] Robinson, Black Movements in America, 82.[8] Michael Gomez, Exchanging our Country Marks, 292.[9] Robinson, Black Movements in America,[10] Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 30.[11] Malcolm X, quoted in Michael Dawson, Black Visions, 240.[12] Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 708.