Du Bois held the Black worker’s enslaved labor causally caused the Civil War.

Evidence

It was thus the black worker, as founding stone of a new economic system in the nineteenth century and for the modern world, who brought civil war in America. He was its underlying cause, in spite of every effort to base the strife upon union and national power, (p. 15) Now let us pay close attention to what Du Bois was saying: slavery was the specific historical institution through which the Black worker had been introduced into the modern world system. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 929

Categorization

• XREF: Du Bois’s claim that the Black worker was the underlying cause of civil war reverses conventional union/emancipation narratives and connects to revisionist Civil War historiography in the reader’s library.