As relayed by Zinn:
Simply by stopping work, the 4 million enslaved people had tremendous power because they could threaten the Confederacy with starvation at a time when hundreds of thousands of soldiers had been killed and war fatigue was high. Lee had two options: Either the South must free its slaves and use them to fight the North — and thereby make it impossible to benefit from slave labor in the future — or the South must surrender to the North on the assumption that after the war, they could resume enslavement practices.
Quoting Zinn:
George Rawick, a sociologist and anthropologist, describes the development of blacks up to and into the Civil War:
"The slaves went from being frightened human beings, thrown among strange men, including fellow slaves who were not their kinsmen and who did not speak their language or understand their customs and habits, to what W. E. B. DuBois once described as the general strike whereby hundreds of thousands of slaves deserted the plantations, destroying the South's ability to supply its army."
Excerpt From
A People's History of the United States
Howard Zinn
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