The use of slave women as day workers naturally broke up or made

In the solemn and thunderous words of W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the greatest minds to confront the moral and spiritual crimes of history, we find a truth that pierces through time: “The use of slave women as day workers naturally broke up or made impossible the normal Negro home, and this and the slave code led to a development of which the South was really ashamed and which it often denied, and yet perfectly evident: the raising of slaves in the Border slave states for systematic sale on the commercialized cotton plantations.” These are not cold words of analysis, but the lament and indictment of a man who saw how evil is not merely a wound upon bodies, but a corruption of the soul of a nation. Within this single passage lies the anatomy of a tragedy — the destruction of family, the perversion of motherhood, and the commodification of human life in pursuit of profit and power.

W. E. B. Du Bois, writing in the early twentieth century, sought to reveal what the South, and indeed much of the nation, had tried to forget — that slavery was not only a system of labor, but a system of deliberate dehumanization. The “use of slave women as day workers” was not a matter of employment, but of exploitation. Women, torn from their children and their homes to labor in fields or in the houses of others, could not form stable families. Their motherhood was reduced to transaction; their humanity, to utility. What Du Bois unveils is the deliberate breaking of the Black home, an act not of circumstance but of policy — for to keep a people in bondage, their love must be fragmented, their roots severed, their sense of belonging turned into despair.

The “slave code”, that network of laws and punishments which governed every breath of enslaved life, did not simply regulate the body; it ruled the heart. It forbade education, denied marriage, and erased the sanctity of family — all to sustain an economic empire built upon cotton, blood, and hypocrisy. The South’s shame, which Du Bois calls “perfectly evident,” was not that these things were unknown, but that they were known and denied. To admit them would be to confront the monstrous truth that a society claiming to be Christian had turned motherhood into manufacture and childbirth into commerce. The very act of raising children had been twisted into production — not of free souls, but of property.

This “raising of slaves” in the Border States, as Du Bois describes, was a cruel and systematic practice. When the cotton plantations of the Deep South demanded more labor, human lives became export goods. Women in states like Virginia and Maryland were forced to bear children not for love or lineage, but for sale. Families were torn apart; fathers and mothers were sold away from one another, children sent southward like livestock. The Black home, which in freedom might have been a sanctuary of tenderness and dignity, was shattered again and again until all that remained was endurance — that indomitable strength which Du Bois later called the “gift of suffering” in the soul of his people.

Consider the story of Harriet Jacobs, who wrote in her memoir Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl of the agony of motherhood under slavery. Hiding in an attic crawlspace for seven years to escape her master’s abuse, she wrote letters to make her captors believe she had fled north, while she remained above her grandmother’s house, hearing her children’s voices below but unable to hold them. Her suffering was not unique — it was emblematic. Every enslaved mother, forced to work, to breed, to endure separation, lived that same anguish. Through Jacobs’ eyes, we see exactly what Du Bois meant: the destruction of the “normal home”, and with it, the assault upon the human spirit itself.

The power of Du Bois’s words lies not merely in their condemnation of the past, but in their exposure of what systematic oppression truly means. It is not just the whip and the chain; it is the calculated unmaking of the bonds that hold people together — family, love, dignity, hope. When he wrote these words in Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois sought to reclaim the narrative from those who had romanticized the Old South. He stripped away the lies of “gentility” and “heritage,” showing instead a civilization built upon cruelty cloaked in piety. The “commercialized cotton plantations” were not the symbols of prosperity that Southern mythmakers boasted of, but the graves of human joy and moral conscience alike.

From his words, let every generation draw this lesson: no civilization can call itself great if it profits from the breaking of the human soul. The destruction of the Black home under slavery was not only a wound upon the enslaved, but upon the very idea of America — a contradiction so deep that it still bleeds through history. To heal it, we must remember. We must honor those who, despite all attempts to erase them, kept their humanity alive — mothers who whispered songs to their children through the bars of their captivity, fathers who risked their lives for a glimpse of freedom, families who rebuilt themselves from ashes after emancipation. Their endurance is the truest measure of greatness, not the monuments of those who enslaved them.

Therefore, let this truth stand as both memorial and commandment: a society’s strength lies in the sanctity of its homes and the dignity of its mothers. Wherever those are destroyed — by greed, by prejudice, by the cold machinery of commerce — that society imperils its soul. Du Bois’s words remind us that history is not a shadow behind us, but a mirror before us. To build a just world, we must guard against every system that divides and degrades, and instead, like the freed generations that followed, labor to restore what was broken: the home, the heart, and the humanity of us all.