Over the course of Chapter 2, Du Bois employs a wide variety of figurative language to paint a vivid picture of the political environment immediately after the American Civil War. In the following passage, he utilizes personification to underscore just how difficult a task the Freedmen's Bureau had been assigned:
When to the inherent difficulties of so delicate and nice a social operation were added the spite and hate of conflict, the hell of war; when suspicion and cruelty were rife, and gaunt Hunger wept beside Bereavement—in such a case, the work of any instrument of social regeneration was in large part foredoomed to failure.
Du Bois personifies hunger and bereavement as a means of emphasizing the difficulties of social regeneration. His particular use of figurative language helps crystallize the emotion and grief of a nation into concrete symbols, substituting the hundreds of thousands of mourners with personified emotion. Personification is effective as a literary device in this context because Du Bois is articulating the pain and suffering of an entire country over an extended period of time. While they are not unimportant, the precise details of who mourned and why are not essential for Du Bois's purposes in this context.
Du Bois begins Chapter 5 with a reflection on the city of Atlanta, Georgia—a center for both education and industry, from which Black Americans are excluded. Du Bois describes Atlanta's "awakening" at the dawn of the Civil War, personifying the city as a woman:
Once, they say, even Atlanta slept dull and drowsy at the foot-hills of the Alleghenies, until the iron baptism of war awakened her with its sullen waters, aroused and maddened her, and left her listening to the sea. And the sea cried to the hills and the hills answered the sea, till the city rose like a widow and cast away her weeds, and toiled for her daily bread; toiled steadily, toiled cunningly.
In the above passage, Du Bois begins by personifying the city of Atlanta, according her human pronouns and qualities such as the ability to sleep. This referral to an entire city as one "woman" allows Du Bois the liberty of generalizing its populace. Though they may not act as a collective, this particular use of figurative language imagines them as one. Furthermore, situated within this personification of Atlanta is a significant simile: her act of rising "like a widow" to "cast away her weeds," signifying her growth after the war into an industrial center.
