W.E.B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction continually creates jarring, provocative theoretical images, mixing race and class by design. Black reconstruction is, for Du Bois, the key to the story of ‘the US labor movement’. Du Bois regards the decision of workers to define themselves by their whiteness as understandable in terms of short-term advantages. The gradual transition to wage labor from 1800 to 1860 was an extremely serious matter for labor republicans. There were elements within republican thought that discouraged panic and encouraged long-term faith in republican solutions. Use of terms like white slavery and slavery of wages in the 1830s and 1840s presents an intriguing variation on the theme of American exceptionalism. US labor historians are usually pressed to explain why American workers have historically lacked the class consciousness said to have existed elsewhere in the industrializing world.
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