Du Bois read the American Civil War as a peasant-based revolution.

Evidence

The processes of the Russian Revolution were a framework for his interpretation of Reconstruction because it, too, had begun among an agrarian, peasant people. It was a characteristic shared by all the revolutions that Du Bois linked in significance to the American Civil War and its Reconstruction: that is, France, Spain, India, and China (p. 708). — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1112

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the wider historiography of revolutionary peasant uprisings Robinson treats as the wellspring of the Black radical tradition.