Ax-Grinder

BLACK RECONSTRUCTION--W. E. Burghardt Du Bois--Harcourt, Brace ($4.50).

Even casual readers of U. S. history books usually have an ordered, although not very detailed, picture of the sequence of events that led up to and followed the Civil War. For them armed conflict began with the guns at Fort Sumter and ended with Lee's surrender at Appomattox. For post-war developments they think of Lincoln's assassination, the attempt to impeach Andrew Johnson, the scandal of carpetbag rule in the South. Generally accepted without question is the historian's characterization of Reconstruction as "The Tragic Era."

Such readers, on opening Negro Du Bois's earnest analysis of the post-war years, will find themselves in an historical wonderland in which all familiar scenes and landmarks have been changed or swept away, surrounded by old historic facts in strange and novel dress, by new facts of whose existence they did not dream, by famed figures, from Lincoln to Charles Sumner, so disguised as to be almost unrecognizable. They will find that the Civil War lasted not four years, but 20; that it was decided, not by superior military strength or strategy, but by a general strike; that the era of carpetbag rule in the South, far from being a period of political scandal and corruption, was ''the finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions which this world had ever seen."

In Black Reconstruction, Negro-freeing Lincoln is overshadowed by Negro-loving Thaddeus Stevens. Grant stands out as less impressive than an ex-slave abolitionist named Douglass, and a crowd of strangers shoulders familiar figures from the scene. If the book has a personal hero, it is Charles Sumner of Massachusetts who talked much of the Negro in the Senate but refused to hobnob socially with him outside. Yet if readers remain immersed in Du Bois's murky history until their eyes have grown accustomed to its gloom, if they are willing to feel their way cautiously through a tangled thicket of quotations and statistics, they are likely to judge Black Reconstruction a perplexing, provocative, exasperating piece of work, in which the author has assembled an amazing mass of little-known facts, not all of them supporting his racial thesis.

Unlike most historians, Du Bois candidly admits that he has an ax to grind, declares that "the mass of American writers have started out so to distort the facts of the greatest critical period of American history as to prove right wrong and wrong right." Calling the roll of historians who have written of Reconstruction, he brings charges of omission or bias against almost all, including the Beards, Claude Bowers, the Encyclopaedia Britannica and eleven school textbooks. In his bibliography Author Du Bois is even more exclusive, listing 28 standard works as anti-Negro, twelve as propaganda for the South, 25 as "Fair to Indifferent on the Negro," only 13 by historians who "have studied the history of Negroes and write sympathetically about them."

With the field swept clear of rivals, Du Bois laboriously reconstructs his picture of the turbulent years from documents they neglected, facts they did not stress. Most modern readers can accept without argument his thesis that Negro slavery constituted one of the gravest problems the U. S. faced after the Revolutionary War, will be startled to learn that early U. S. leaders admitted they could visualize no solution, shocked at Du Bois's account of the commercial breeding of slaves that followed the Constitutional end of the slave trade (1808). He holds that the South "turned the most beautiful section of the nation into a centre of poverty and suffering, of drinking, gambling and brawling; an abode of ignorance among black and white more abysmal than in any modern land; and a system of industry so humanly unjust and economically inefficient that if it had not committed suicide in civil war, it would have disintegrated of its own weight."

Always seeing events from the Negro point of view, Du Bois writes of a Civil War that began in Kansas in 1854, did not end until after the Hamburg, S. C. riots during the Presidential campaign of 1876. Least persuasive portion of his history is his account of the general strike of the slaves during the war years, when large numbers followed the Northern troops despite the efforts of officers to discourage them, were used at first as laborers, were eventually trained and employed as troops. Southerners, if they penetrate so deeply into Du Bois's history, may quarrel with his account of the success of the former slaves in battle, as well as with his version of the softening Southern attitude toward slaves during the war, but they must face his facts that Lee himself, just before his final surrender, was contemplating using Negro troops, that Southern leaders planned to grant slaves their freedom if they would fight in defense of slavery.

Climax of Black Reconstruction is reached in Du Bois's passionate and imaginative record of Emancipation, in which pages of dates and documents are suddenly interrupted for bursts of prose poetry and cries of thanksgiving. Although his chapters on the workings of the Negro Legislatures in the South after the war will be of more interest to students, plain readers are likely to find his arguments with previous authors tedious, his claims of the social responsibility shown by black law-makers exaggerated.

The Author, now 67, published his first book, The Suppression of the Slave Trade, almost 40 years ago, considers it "not entirely unreadable" today. Of mixed Dutch, French and African blood, Author Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Mass., educated at Fisk University, Harvard and the University of Berlin, has taught school and served for 14 years as professor of economics and history at Atlanta University. Famed among Negroes as editor of The Crisis, which he founded in 1910, Author Du Bois became widely known beyond intellectual circles of his own race as an executive officer of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founder of the Pan-African congresses, author, in 1919, of a sensational article on racial discrimination in the U. S. Army that led to a brief suspension of The Crisis.

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