The 150th Anniversary Commemoration Of The American Civil War –In Honor Of The Abraham Lincoln-Led Union Side- The Hard Years Of War-A Sketch- Wilhelm Sorge’s War-Take Five

The 150th Anniversary Commemoration Of The American Civil War –In Honor Of The Abraham Lincoln-Led Union Side- The  Hard Years Of War-A Sketch- Wilhelm Sorge’s War-Take Five  

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

I would not expect any average American citizen today to be familiar with the positions of the communist intellectuals and international working-class party organizers (First International) Karl Mark and Friedrich Engels on the events of the American Civil War. There is only so much one can expect of people to know off the top of their heads about what for several generations now has been ancient history.  I am, however, always amazed when I run into some younger leftists and socialists, or even older radicals who may have not read much Marx and Engels, and find that they are surprised, very surprised to see that Marx and Engels were avid partisans of the Abraham Lincoln-led Union side in the American Civil War. I, in the past, have placed a number of the Marx-Engels newspaper articles from the period in this space to show the avidity of their interest and partisanship in order to refresh some memories and enlighten others. As is my wont I like to supplement such efforts with little fictional sketches to illustrate points that I try to make and do so below with my take on a Union soldier from Boston, a rank and file soldier, Wilhelm Sorge.  

Since Marx and Engels have always been identified with a strong anti-capitalist bias for the unknowing it may seem counter-intuitive that the two men would have such a positive position on events that had as one of its outcomes an expanding unified American capitalist state. A unified capitalist state which ultimately led the vanguard political and military actions against the followers of Marx and Engels in the 20^th century in such places as Russia, China, Cuba and Vietnam. The pair were however driven in their views on revolutionary politics by a theory of historical materialism which placed support of any particular actions in the context of whether they drove the class struggle toward human emancipation forward. So while the task of a unified capitalist state was supportable alone on historical grounds in the United States of the 1860s (as was their qualified support for German unification later in the decade) the key to their support was the overthrow of the more backward slave labor system in one part of the country (aided by those who thrived on the results of that system like the Cotton Whigs in the North) in order to allow the new then progressive capitalist system to thrive.       

In the age of advanced imperialist society today, of which the United States is currently the prime example, and villain, we find that we are, unlike Marx and Engels, almost always negative about capitalism’s role in world politics. And we are always harping on the need to overthrow the system in order to bring forth a new socialist reconstruction of society. Thus one could be excused for forgetting that at earlier points in history capitalism played a progressive role. A role that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and other leading Marxists, if not applauded, then at least understood represented human progress. Of course, one does not expect everyone to be a historical materialist and therefore know that in the Marxist scheme of things both the struggle to bring America under a unitary state that would create a national capitalist market by virtue of a Union victory and the historically more important struggle to abolish slavery that turned out to be a necessary outcome of that Union struggle were progressive in the eyes of our forebears, and our eyes too.

Furthermore few know about the fact that the small number of Marxist supporters in the United States during that Civil period, and the greater German immigrant communities here that where spawned when radicals were force to flee Europe with the failure of the German revolutions of 1848 were mostly fervent supporters of the Union side in the conflict. Some of them called the “Red Republicans” and “Red 48ers” formed an early experienced military cadre in the then fledgling Union armies. Below is a short sketch drawn on the effect that these hardened foreign –born abolitionists had on some of the raw recruits who showed up in their regiments and brigades during those hard four years of fighting, the last year of which we are commemorating this month.

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Corporal Wilhelm Sorge had been glad, glad as hell, that the victor of Vicksburg, General Ulysses S. Grant, had just been made commander-in-chief of all the Union armies and that finally they were going to move out and finish with these damn rebels (he had heard that in taking Vicksburg by siege Grant had practically dug up the who damn Confederate state of Mississippi and that include old “secesh” President Jefferson Davis who Wilhelm now wished he could get his hands on personally when they entered Richmond which was only a matter of time as even an enlisted man could see as the weapons they were receiving, the uniforms, hell, even the silly rations were improving day by day while an sighting of Johnny showed that he might still have pluck but he was down to fowling rifles for Christ sake.  As he thought about the words “damn rebels” he had to laugh. He had certainly come a long way since the early days of the war when he had provoked his father, Friedrich Sorge a well-known Boston “high abolitionist” in the German-American community there (and later in the Midwest enclaves of Wisconsin and Ohio and down among the Unionist settlers in Texas who were holding  out the best they could) and one who in his youth had fought honorably on the barricades in Cologne in 1848, with his stubborn defense of the South’s right to their own nation and their own economic system even if it was slavery. He had even defended the huge profits that the firm he had worked for as a scales clerk, Franklin Sanborne and Son now long out of business once the cotton bales did not come north and the British had held to a hands off policy of breaking the Lincoln naval blockade, had derived from the sweated slave labor cotton trade with the South. Dreaming then of becoming a factor, a position which would have given him a percentage of the bales he contracted for down among the plantation owners. That lost dream meant nothing now except he wanted to see every cotton plantation owner lose his land and have it given to those who toiled on it. Yes, he was becoming his father’s son. 

Since then moreover Wilhelm had come under the tutelage of many anti-slavery advocates and unionists around many an army camp fire at night talking endlessly of the next battle to be waged to smash that damn slave system. No one was more instrumental in that development than an old German-American sergeant, Heinz Grosz, a comrade of his father’s in the old Cologne barricade days who had straightened him out (Wilhelm’s words) about what was right and wrong and who was right and who was wrong, in the battles in front of them. So when Grosz said that slavery’s days were numbered now that Grant was in charge, now that President Lincoln had a man who wanted to win Wilhelm had no reason to not believe him. There would still be bloody battles ahead but a corner had turned in that spring of 1864 and there was no turning back.

 

But some nights, many nights now that Grant was ready for total war, Wilhelm would toss in his bunk and wonder if he would survive to see the end. Whether he would see his old father and tell him that he had been right all along that this land needed to be freed from blooded slavery’s hand. More importantly whether he would get back to Boston to see that dear sweet Miss Lucinda Mason, to ask for her favors once again, who had prodded him into this desperate fight (by withdrawing those same favors). See her, get married as she had promised if he survived, and be able to raise his head and tell his children, hell his grandchildren, what a righteous fight was all about. About honest toil and sweat in a righteous fight.