Chapter 7 opens with an excerpt from an imagined Black Emancipation Proclamation, titled “The Unanimous Declaration of ‘These Hands’” by the Black Folks of America. This proclamation borrows the language of America’s original Emancipation Proclamation but centers on the Black experience, detailing the injustices visited on enslaved people and pointing out that democracy requires the consent of the governed, an institution undermined by the mere existence of slavery.

In 1935, W. E. B. Du Bois published Black Reconstruction in America, a work that challenged the traditional narrative of seeing the post-Civil War Reconstruction era as a failure. Among other arguments, Du Bois put forth that enslaved Black people won the war against enslavers by “removing themselves from the economy that funded their proposed white supremacist empire” (160). In his model, enslaved people freed America, instead of the other way around.

Pre-Civil War, the economic force of the enslaved class was enormous. Essential to the production of food and cotton, enslaved people also existed as assets, leveraged to secure mortgages on land and as surety on loans. Their combined worth was $3.5 billion, four times the total of all the money in America.