Religious myth, not class consciousness, drove slaves to free themselves

Evidence

Du Bois had been skeptical of Marx and Lenin on both scores. In Black Reconstruction, he reviewed the events of the American post bellum with a Hegelian sense of the “cunning of Reason.” The slaves freed themselves, Du Bois thought, not by way of an objective consciousness of their condition but rather by the dictates of religious myth: … The mass of slaves, even the more intelligent ones, and certainly the great group of field hands, were in religious and hysterical fervour. This was the coming of the Lord. This was the fulfillment of prophecy and legend. It was the Golden Dawn, after chains of a thousand years. It was everything miraculous and perfect and promising, (p. 122) And the other figures in the drama of emancipation, from Lincoln down to the poor whites, were just as much overtaken by the unintended consequences of their actions: Lincoln had never been an Abolitionist; he had never believed in full Negro citizenship; he had tried desperately to win the war without Negro soldiers, and he had emancipated the slaves only on account of military necessity, (p. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1121

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the defining content of Du Bois’s ‘cunning of Reason’ reading of emancipation.
• XREF: connects to: Nearly all the theologian’s slaves rejected his paternalist family myth — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 252