2025/09/01 by Justin F. Jackson · 1 voice
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Defense, Military, and Policy Studies #Labor Movements and Unions #Race, History, and American Society
paper · pdf · doi:10.1215/15476715-11846090
openalex publication_date 2025/09/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/21 · openalex updated_date 2026/03/13
W hat should "military labor" mean, for historians?How might fusing categories of class and war help write new narratives of work, as well as warfare, in the modern world?And what interpretations does the concept and method foreclose, given its contradictions, boundaries, and blind spots?Reena Goldthree's appeal to reunite W. E. B. Du Bois's "forgotten insights on working people and martial labor" with venerable themes of "class formation, labor regimes, state power, and workingclass consciousness" found in his Black Reconstruction offers a promising first answer.Indeed, in that talismanic volume's chapter on the Civil War's "general strike," Du Bois himself devised the term military labor to categorize the particular and peculiar status of those among the four hundred thousand African American fugitives who fled to Union lines.For Du Bois, their conscious withdrawal of labor power from planters and Confederate armies, and provision of the same to federal troops, ensured ultimate Union victory because it transformed a cautious, plodding war to preserve the union into a revolutionary struggle for emancipation.Early in the war, Du Bois recognized, Union generals who invoked martial authority and congressional legislation to "confiscate" and retain freedom seekers as "contraband" weaponized their labor power against secession.By 1862, Yankee commanders who used freedmen to build fortifications and roads, and employed freed people as domestics, guides, cooks, and nurses, realized that Black men who had fed, spied, "and handled a spade" for them "could also handle a gun and shoot." From this giant "army of striking labor," noted Du Bois, the Union recruited nearly 180,000 enlistees whose service and sacrifices practically guaranteed abolition.Yet Du Bois also acknowledged the coercions of Black military labor and how they foreshadowed Reconstruction's more reactionary dimensions.In Louisiana, Union generals' "half-military slave regime" forced destitute freed people to return to sugar plantations or toil on public works as the price of wages I thank editors for their feedback, and Joel Suarez and Patrick Dixon for their insight.