Page:W. E. B. Du Bois - The Gift of Black Folk.pdf/266

254 into a solid phalanx, but in order to do this they had to give up much.

In the first place the leadership of the South passed from the hands of the old slave owners into the hands of the newer town capitalists who were largely merchants and the coming industrial leaders. Some of them represented the older dominant class and some of them the newer poor whites. They were welded, however, into a new economic mastership, less cultivated, more ruthless and more keen in recognizing the possibilities of Negro labor if “controlled” as they proposed to control it. This new leadership, however, did not simply solidify the South, it proceeded to make alliance in the North and to make alliance of the most effective kind, namely economic alliance. The sentimentalism of the war period had in the North changed to the recognition of the grim fact of destroyed capital, dead workers and high prices. The South was a field which could be exploited if peaceful conditions could be reached and the laboring class made sufficiently content and submissive. It was the business then of the “New” South to show to the northern capitalists that by uniting the economic interests of both, they could exploit the Negro laborer and the white laborer—pitting the two classes against each other, keeping out labor unions and building