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Workers Vanguard No. 931
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27 February 2009
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TROTSKY
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LENIN
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Karl Marx and the U.S. Civil War
(Quote of the Week)
February is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham
Lincoln, the president during the U.S. Civil War. While Lincoln was not a
radical abolitionist and had initially opposed only the expansion of slavery,
Karl Marx nonetheless recognized that Lincoln came to the understanding that
defeating the Confederacy required the smashing of black chattel slavery. Marx
hailed the Civil War as a great bourgeois-democratic revolution and rallied the
European working class to support the victory of the North. We reprint below
excerpts from an address drafted by Marx for the First International on the
occasion of Lincoln’s re-election in 1864. This was written before the
systematic export of capital —i.e., imperialism—had come onto the world
scene.
We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a
large majority.
If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your
first election, the triumphant warcry of your re-election is, Death to
Slavery....
When an oligarchy of 300,000 slave-holders dared to inscribe, for
the first time in the annals of the world, “slavery” on the banner of Armed
Revolt; when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great
Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the
Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution
of the 18th century; when on those very spots counter-revolution, with
systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding “the [...] ideas entertained
[...] at the time of the formation of the old Constitution,” and maintained
“slavery to be a beneficent institution,” indeed the only solution of the great
problem of “the relation of labour to capital,” and cynically proclaimed
property in man “the corner-stone of the new edifice,” then the working classes
of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper
classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the
slave-holders’ rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of
property against labour, and that for the men of labour, with their hopes for
the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict
on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the
hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the
pro-slavery intervention, importunities of their betters—and, from most parts of
Europe, contributed their quota of blood to the good cause.
While the working men, the true political power of the North,
allowed slavery to defile their own republic; while before the Negro, mastered
and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the
white-skinned labourer to sell himself and choose his own master; they were
unable to attain the true freedom of labour or to support their European
brethren in their struggle for emancipation, but this barrier to progress has
been swept off by the red sea of civil war.
The working men of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of
Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the
American Anti-Slavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an
earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the
single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the
matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of
a social world.
—Karl Marx, “To Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of
America” (November 1864) [brackets in original]
***********
Articles by Karl Marx in Die Presse 1861
The North American Civil War
Written: October 1861;
Source: Marx/Engels Collected Works, Volume 19;
Publisher: Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964;
First Published: Die Presse No. 293, October 25,
1861;
Online Version: marxists.org 1999;
Transcribed: Bob Schwarz;
HTML
Markup: Tim Delaney in 1999.
London, October 20, 1861
For months the leading weekly and daily papers of the London press have been
reiterating the same litany on the American Civil War. While they insult the
free states of the North, they anxiously defend themselves against the suspicion
of sympathising with the slave states of the South. In fact, they continually
write two articles: one article, in which they attack the North, and another
article, in which they excuse their attacks on the North.
In essence the extenuating arguments read: The war between the North and
South is a tariff war. The war is, further, not for any principle, does not
touch the question of slavery and in fact turns on Northern lust for
sovereignty. Finally, even if justice is on the side of the North , does it not
remain a vain endeavour to want to subjugate eight million Anglo-Saxons by
force! Would not separation of the South release the North from all connection
with Negro slavery and ensure for it, with its twenty million inhabitants and
its vast territory, a higher, hitherto scarcely dreamt-of, development?
Accordingly, must not the North welcome secession as a happy event, instead of
wanting to overrule it by a bloody and futile civil war?
Point by point we will probe the plea of the English press.
The war between North and South -- so runs the first excuse -- is a mere
tariff war, a war between a protectionist system and a free trade system, and
Britain naturally stands on the side of free trade. Shall the slave-owner enjoy
the fruits of slave labour in their entirety or shall he be cheated of a portion
of these by the protectionists of the North? That is the question which is at
issue in this war. It was reserved for
The Times to make this brilliant
discovery.
The Economist, The Examiner, The Saturday Review and
tutti quanti expounded the theme further. It is characteristic of this
discovery that it was made, not in Charleston, but in London. Naturally, in
America everyone knew that from 1846 to 1861 a free trade system prevailed, and
that Representative Morrill carried his protectionist tariff through Congress
only in 1861, after the rebellion had already broken out. Secession, therefore,
did not take place because the Morrill tariff had gone through Congress, but, at
most, the Morrill tariff went through Congress because secession had taken
place. When South Carolina had its first attack of secession in 1831, the
protectionist tariff of 1828 served it, to be sure, as a pretext, but only as a
pretext, as is known from a statement of General Jackson. This time, however,
the old pretext has in fact not been repeated. In the Secession Congress at
Montgomery all reference to the tariff question was avoided, because the
cultivation of sugar in Louisiana, one of the most influential Southern states,
depends entirely on protection.
But, the London press pleads further, the war of the United States is nothing
but a war for the forcible maintenance of the Union. The Yankees cannot make up
their minds to strike fifteen stars from their standard. They want to cut a
colossal figure on the world stage. Yes, it would be different if the war was
waged for the abolition of slavery! The question of slavery, however, as
The
Saturday Review categorically declares among other things, has absolutely
nothing to do with this war.
It is above all to be remembered that the war did not originate with the
North, but with the South. The North finds itself on the defensive. For months
it had quietly looked on while the secessionists appropriated the Union's forts,
arsenals, shipyards, customs houses, pay offices, ships and supplies of arms,
insulted its flag and took prisoner bodies of its troops. Finally the
secessionists resolved to force the Union government out of its passive attitude
by a blatant act of war, and
solely for this reason proceeded to the
bombardment of Fort Sumter near Charleston. On April 11 (1861) their General
Beauregard had learnt in a meeting with Major Anderson, the commander of Fort
Sumter, that the fort was only supplied with provisions for three days more and
accordingly must be peacefully surrendered after this period. In order to
forestall this peaceful surrender, the secessionists opened the bombardment
early on the following morning (April 12), which brought about the fall of the
fort in a few hours. News of this had hardly been telegraphed to Montgomery, the
seat of the Secession Congress, when War Minister Walker publicly declared in
the name of the new Confederacy: No man can say where
the war opened
today will end. At the same time he prophesied that before the first of May
the flag of the Southern Confederacy will wave from the dome of the old Capitol
in Washington and within a short time perhaps also from the Faneuil Hall in
Boston. Only now ensued the proclamation in which Lincoln called for 75,000 men
to defend the Union. The bombardment of Fort Sumter cut off the only possible
constitutional way out, namely the convocation of a general convention of the
American people, as Lincoln had proposed in his inaugural address. For Lincoln
there now remained only the choice of fleeing from Washington, evacuating
Maryland and Delaware and surrendering Kentucky, Missouri and Virginia, or of
answering war with war.
The question of the principle of the American Civil War is answered by the
battle slogan with which the South broke the peace. Stephens, the Vice-President
of the Southern Confederacy, declared in the Secession Congress that what
essentially distinguished the Constitution newly hatched at Montgomery from the
Constitution of Washington and Jefferson was that now for the first time slavery
was recognised as an institution good in itself, and as the foundation of the
whole state edifice, whereas the revolutionary fathers, men steeped in the
prejudices of the eighteenth century, had treated slavery as an evil imported
from England and to be eliminated in the course of time. Another matador of the
South, Mr. Spratt, cried out: "For us it is a question of founding a great slave
republic." If, therefore, it was indeed only in defence of the Union that the
North drew the sword, had not the South already declared that the continuance of
slavery was no longer compatible with the continuance of the Union?
Just as the bombardment of Fort Sumter gave the signal for the opening of the
war, the election victory of the
Republican Party of the North, the
election of Lincoln as President, gave the signal for secession. On November 6,
1860, Lincoln was elected. On November 8, 1860, a message telegraphed from South
Carolina said: Secession is regarded here as an accomplished fact; on November
10 the legislature of Georgia occupied itself with secession plans, and on
November 13 a special session of the legislature of Mississippi was convened to
consider secession. But Lincoln's election was itself only the result of a split
in the
Democratic camp. During the election struggle the Democrats of
the North concentrated their votes on
Douglas, the Democrats of the
South concentrated their votes on
Breckinridge, and to this splitting
of the Democratic votes the Republican Party owed its victory. Whence came, on
the one hand, the preponderance of the
Republican Party in the North?
Whence, on the other, the disunion
within the
Democratic
Party, whose members, North and South, had operated in conjunction for more than
half a century?
Under the presidency of Buchanan the sway that the South had gradually
usurped over the Union through its alliance with the Northern Democrats attained
its zenith. The last Continental Congress of 1787 and the first Constitutional
Congress of 1789 -90 had legally excluded slavery from all Territories of the
republic north-west of the Ohio. (Territories, as is known, is the name given to
the colonies lying within the United States itself which have not yet attained
the level of population constitutionally prescribed for the formation of
autonomous states.) The so-called Missouri Compromise (1820), in consequence of
which Missouri became one of the States of the Union as a slave state, excluded
slavery from every remaining Territory north of 36 degrees latitude and west of
the Missouri. By this compromise the area of slavery was advanced several
degrees of longitude, whilst, on the other hand, a geographical boundary-line to
its future spread seemed quite definitely drawn. This geographical barrier, in
its turn, was thrown down in 1854 by the so-called Kansas-Nebraska Bill, the
initiator of which was St[ephen] A. Douglas, then leader of the Northern
Democrats. The Bill, which passed both Houses of Congress, repealed the Missouri
Compromise, placed slavery and freedom on the same footing, commanded the Union
government to treat them both with equal indifference and left it to the
sovereignty of the people, that is, the majority of the settlers, to decide
whether or not slavery was to be introduced in a Territory. Thus, for the first
time in the history of the United States, every geographical and legal limit to
the extension of slavery in the Territories was removed. Under this new
legislation the hitherto free Territory of New Mexico, a Territory five times as
large as the State of New York, was transformed into a slave Territory, and the
area of slavery was extended from the border of the Mexican Republic to 38
degrees north latitude. In 1859 New Mexico received a slave code that vies with
the statute-books of Texas and Alabama in barbarity. Nevertheless, as the census
of 1860 proves, among some hundred thousand inhabitants New Mexico does not yet
count half a hundred slaves. It had therefore sufficed for the South to send
some adventurers with a few slaves over the border, and then with the help of
the central government in Washington and of its officials and contractors in New
Mexico to drum together a sham popular representation to impose slavery and with
it the rule of the slaveholders on the Territory.
However, this convenient method did not prove applicable in other
Territories. The South accordingly went a step further and appealed from
Congress to the Supreme Court of the United States. This Court, which numbers
nine judges, five of whom belong to the South, had long been the most willing
tool of the slaveholders. It decided in 1857, in the notorious Dred Scott case,
that every American citizen possesses the right to take with him into any
territory any property recognized by the Constitution. The Constitution, it
maintained, recognises slaves as property and obliges the Union government to
protect this property. Consequently, on the basis of the Constitution, slaves
could be forced to labour in the Territories by their owners, and so every
individual slaveholder was entitled to introduce slavery into hitherto free
Territories against the will of the majority of the settlers. The right to
exclude slavery was taken from the Territorial legislatures and the duty to
protect pioneers of the slave system was imposed on Congress and the Union
government.
If the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had extended the geographical
boundary-line of slavery in the Territories, if the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854
had erased every geographical boundary-line and set up a political barrier
instead, the will of the majority of the settlers, now the Supreme Court of the
United States, by its decision of 1857, tore down even this political barrier
and transformed all the Territories of the republic, present and future, from
nurseries of free states into nurseries of slavery.
At the same time, under Buchanan's government the severer law on the
surrendering of fugitive slaves enacted in 1850 was ruthlessly carried out in
the states of the North. To play the part of slave-catchers for the Southern
slaveholders appeared to be the constitutional calling of the North. On the
other hand, in order to hinder as far as possible the colonisation of the
Territories by free settlers, the slaveholders' party frustrated all the
so-called free-soil measures, i.e., measures which were to secure for the
settlers a definite amount of uncultivated state land free of charge.
In the foreign, as in the domestic, policy of the United States, the interest
of the slaveholders served as the guiding star. Buchanan had in fact bought the
office of President through the issue of the Ostend Manifesto, in which the
acquisition of Cuba, whether by purchase or by force of arms, was proclaimed as
the great task of national policy. Under his government northern Mexico was
already divided among American land speculators, who impatiently awaited the
signal to fall on Chihuahua, Coahuila and Sonora. The unceasing piratical
expeditions of the filibusters against the states of Central America were
directed no less from the White House at Washington. In the closest connection
with this foreign policy, whose manifest purpose was conquest of new territory
for the spread of slavery and of the slaveholders' rule, stood the
reopening
of the slave trade, secretly supported by the Union government. St[ephen]
A. Douglas himself declared in the American Senate on August 20, 1859: During
the last year more Negroes have been imported from Africa than ever before in
any single year, even at the time when the slave trade was still legal. The
number of slaves imported in the last year totalled fifteen thousand.
Armed spreading of slavery abroad was the avowed aim of national policy; the
Union had in fact become the slave of the three hundred thousand slaveholders
who held sway over the South. A series of compromises, which the South owed to
its alliance with the Northern Democrats, had led to this result. On this
alliance all the attempts, periodically repeated since 1817, to resist the ever
increasing encroachments of the slaveholders had hitherto come to grief. At
length there came a turning point.
For hardly had the Kansas-Nebraska Bill gone through, which wiped out the
geographical boundary-line of slavery and made its introduction into new
Territories subject to the will of the majority of the settlers, when armed
emissaries of the slaveholders, border rabble from Missouri and Arkansas, with
bowie-knife in one hand and revolver in the other, fell upon Kansas and sought
by the most unheard-of atrocities to dislodge its settlers from the Territory
colonised by them. These raids were supported by the central government in
Washington. Hence a tremendous reaction. Throughout the North, but particularly
in the North-west, a relief organisation was formed to support Kansas with men,
arms and money. Out of this relief organisation arose the
Republican
Party, which therefore owes its origin to the struggle for Kansas. After
the attempt to transform Kansas into a
slave Territory by force of arms
had failed, the South sought to achieve the same result by political intrigues.
Buchanan's government, in particular, exerted its utmost efforts to have Kansas
included in the States of the Union as a
slave state with a slave
constitution imposed on it. Hence renewed struggle, this time mainly conducted
in Congress at Washington. Even St[ephen] A. Douglas, the chief of the Northern
Democrats, now (1857 - 58) entered the lists against the government and his
allies of the South, because imposition of a slave constitution would have been
contrary to the principle of sovereignty of the settlers passed in the Nebraska
Bill of 1854. Douglas, Senator for Illinois, a North-western state, would
naturally have lost all his influence if he had wanted to concede to the South
the right to steal by force of arms or through acts of Congress Territories
colonised by the North. As the struggle for Kansas, therefore, called the
Republican Party into being, it at the same time occasioned the first
split within the Democratic Party itself.
The Republican Party put forward its first platform for the presidential
election in 1856. Although its candidate, John Fremont, was not victorious, the
huge number of votes cast for him at any rate proved the rapid growth of the
Party, particularly in the North-west. At their second National Convention for
the presidential election (May 17, 1860), the Republicans again put forward
their platform of 1856, only enriched by some additions. Its principal contents
were the following: Not a foot of fresh territory is further conceded to
slavery. The filibustering policy abroad must cease. The reopening of the slave
trade is stigmatised. Finally, free-soil laws are to be enacted for the
furtherance of free colonisation.
The vitally important point in this platform was that not a foot of fresh
terrain was conceded to slavery; rather it was to remain once and for all
confined with the boundaries of the states where it already legally existed.
Slavery was thus to be formally interned; but continual expansion of territory
and continual spread of slavery beyond its old limits is a law of life for the
slave states of the Union.
The cultivation of the southern export articles, cotton, tobacco, sugar ,
etc., carried on by slaves, is only remunerative as long as it is conducted with
large gangs of slaves, on a mass scale and on wide expanses of a naturally
fertile soil, which requires only simple labour. Intensive cultivation, which
depends less on fertility of the soil than on investment of capital,
intelligence and energy of labour, is contrary to the nature of slavery. Hence
the rapid transformation of states like Maryland and Virginia, which formerly
employed slaves on the production of export articles, into states which raise
slaves to export them into the deep South. Even in South Carolina, where the
slaves form four-sevenths of the population, the cultivation of cotton has been
almost completely stationary for years due to the exhaustion of the soil.
Indeed, by force of circumstances South Carolina has already been transformed in
part into a slave-raising state, since it already sells slaves to the sum of
four million dollars yearly to the states of the extreme South and South-west.
As soon as this point is reached, the acquisition of new Territories becomes
necessary, so that one section of the slaveholders with their slaves may occupy
new fertile lands and that a new market for slave-raising, therefore for the
sale of slaves, may be created for the remaining section. It is, for example,
indubitable that without the acquisition of Louisiana, Missouri and Arkansas by
the United States, slavery in Virginia and Maryland would have been wiped out
long ago. In the Secessionist Congress at Montgomery, Senator Toombs, one of the
spokesmen of the South, strikingly formulated the economic law that commands the
constant expansion of the territory of slavery. "In fifteen years," said he,
"without a great increase in slave territory, either the slaves must be
permitted to flee from the whites, or the whites must flee from the slaves."
As is known, the representation of the individual states in the Congress
House of Representatives depends on the size of their respective populations. As
the populations of the free states grow far more quickly than those of the slave
states, the number of Northern Representatives was bound to outstrip that of the
Southern very rapidly. The real seat of the political power of the South is
accordingly transferred more and more to the American Senate, where every state,
whether its population is great or small, is represented by two Senators. In
order to assert its influence in the Senate and, through the Senate, its
hegemony over the United States, the South therefore required a continual
formation of new slave states. This, however, was only possible through conquest
of foreign lands, as in the case of Texas, or through the transformation of the
Territories belonging to the United States first into slave Territories and
later into slave states, as in the case of Missouri, Arkansas, etc.
John
Calhoun, whom the slaveholders admire as their statesman
par
excellence, stated as early as February 19, 1847, in the Senate, that the
Senate alone placed a balance of power in the hands of the South, that extension
of the slave territory was necessary to preserve this equilibrium between South
and North in the Senate, and that the attempts of the South at the creation of
new slave states by force were accordingly justified.
Finally, the number of actual slaveholders in the South of the Union does not
amount to more than three hundred thousand, a narrow oligarchy that is
confronted with many millions of so-called poor whites, whose numbers have been
constantly growing through concentration of landed property and whose condition
is only to be compared with that of the Roman plebeians in the period of Rome's
extreme decline. Only by acquisition and the prospect of acquisition of new
Territories, as well as by filibustering expeditions, is it possible to square
the interests of these poor whites with those of the slaveholders, to give their
restless thirst for action a harmless direction and to tame them with the
prospect of one day becoming slaveholders themselves.
A strict confinement of slavery within its old terrain, therefore, was bound
according to economic law to lead to its gradual effacement, in the political
sphere to annihilate the hegemony that the slave states exercised through the
Senate, and finally to expose the slaveholding oligarchy within its own states
to threatening perils from the poor whites. In accordance with the principle
that any further extension of slave Territories was to be prohibited by law, the
Republicans therefore attacked the rule of the slaveholders at its root. The
Republican election victory was accordingly bound to lead to open struggle
between North and South. And this election victory, as already mentioned, was
itself conditioned by the split in the Democratic camp.
The Kansas struggle had already caused a split between the slaveholders'
party and the Democrats of the North allied to it. With the presidential
election of 1860, the same strife now broke out again in a more general form.
The Democrats of the North, with Douglas as their candidate, made the
introduction of slavery into Territories dependent on the will of the majority
of the settlers. The slaveholders' party, with Breckinridge as their candidate,
maintained that the Constitution of the United States, as the Supreme Court had
also declared, brought slavery legally in its train; in and of itself slavery
was already legal in all Territories and required no special naturalisation.
Whilst, therefore, the Republicans prohibited any extension of slave
Territories, the Southern party laid claim to all Territories of the republic as
legally warranted domains. What they had attempted by way of example with regard
to Kansas, to force slavery on a Territory through the central government
against the will of the settlers themselves, they now set up as law for all the
Territories of the Union. Such a concession lay beyond the power of the
Democratic leaders and would only have occasioned the desertion of
their army to the Republican camp. On the other hand, Douglas's settlers'
sovereignty could not satisfy the slaveholders' party. What it wanted to effect
had to be effected within the next four years under the new President, could
only be effected by the resources of the central government and brooked no
further delay. It did not escape the slaveholders that a new power had arisen,
the
North-west, whose population, having almost doubled between 1850
and 1860, was already pretty well equal to the white population of the slave
states -- a power that was not inclined either by tradition, temperament or mode
of life to let itself be dragged from compromise to compromise in the manner of
the old North-eastern states. The Union was still of value to the South only so
far as it handed over Federal power to it as a means of carrying out the slave
policy. If not, then it was better to make the break now than to look on at the
development of the Republican Party and the upsurge of the North-west for
another four years and begin the struggle under more unfavourable conditions.
The slaveholders' party therefore played
va banque. When the Democrats
of the North declined to go on playing the part of the poor whites of the South,
the South secured Lincoln's victory by splitting the vote, and then took this
victory as a pretext for drawing the sword from the scabbard.
The whole movement was and is based, as one sees, on the
slave
question. Not in the sense of whether the slaves within the existing slave
states should be emancipated outright or not, but whether the twenty million
free men of the North should submit any longer to an oligarchy of three hundred
thousand slaveholders; whether the vast Territories of the republic should be
nurseries for free states or for slavery; finally, whether the national policy
of the Union should take armed spreading of slavery in Mexico, Central and South
America as its device.
In another article we will probe the assertion of the London press that the
North must sanction secession as the most favourable and only possible solution
of the conflict.
Across the country, abortion rights, voting rights and
workplace protections are under attack. While Black and Brown youth are targeted
and face constant persecution, racist police and the George Zimmerman's of the
world roam free. Right-wing and corporate forces seek to undo the gains won by
the Civil Rights movement, the movement for women’s rights and every progressive
movement that has changed the history of this country for the better. Women
nationwide are taking the streets to defend the gains of our movements and to
push for greater rights and equality for all.
