The 150th Anniversary Commemoration
Of The American Civil War –In Honor Of The Union Side- The Last Hard Year Of War-A Book Review From The Left
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 20th
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 were
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 1939 book review
highlighting key points of their interest in the evolving situation in the
United States from1861-65.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels on
the US Civil War
Author:
George Novack
Engels called the American
Civil War “the first grand war of contemporaneous history”. Marx later hailed
it as “the greatest event of the age”. Today when the nineteenth century has
receded into the distance and the bourgeois power that issued out of the Civil
War bestrides the world, we can realize the colossal magnitude of the conflict
far better than they. The Second American Revolution stands out as the decisive
turning point of Nineteenth century history.
All the more valuable
therefore are the views of these two great working class leaders on the Civil
War in the United States while it was still in progress, now made available as
a whole for the first time in English. These writings consist of seven articles
contributed to the New York Tribune and thirty-five to the Vienna Presse in
1861-1862 together with sixty-one excerpts from the correspondence between Marx
and Engels during 1861-1866. The editor has also appended two addresses written
by Marx for the First International, one to President Lincoln and the other to
President Johnson.
In turning to these writings for the
first time this reader received three immediate impressions. First, the
evergreen quality of these articles written so many years ago. How little faded
they are by the passage of time! Then the astonishingly intimate knowledge of
American history possessed by Marx and Engels, which would go far to dispel the
ignorant prejudice that these Europeans were unfamiliar with the peculiar
conditions of the United States. Finally, the incisiveness of their most casual
comments on personalities and events coupled with the remarkable insight of
their observations. Again we see what inexhaustible vitality and prophetic
power is lodged in the materialist interpretation of history discovered by
these master minds, which enabled them to plumb deep below the billowing
surface of events and fathom the underlying formations and motive forces of
history in the making.
These genial powers shine forth in
the following quotation from the first article, which summarizes the sixty
years of American politics before the Civil War in five succinct sentences.
The progressive abuse of the Union
by the slave power, working through its alliance with the Northern Democratic
Party, is, so to say, the general formula of United States history since the
beginning of this century. The successive compromise measures mark the
successive degrees of the encroachment by which the Union became more and more
transformed into the slave of the slave-owner. Each of these compromises
denotes a new encroachment of the South, a new concession of the North. At the
same time none of the successive victories of the South was carried but after a
hot contest with an antagonistic force in the North, appearing under different
party names with different watchwords and under different colors. If the
positive and final result of each single contest told in favor of the South,
the attentive observer of history could not but see that every new advance of
the slave power was a step forward to its ultimate defeat. (Marx, The American
Question in England, New-York Daily Tribune, October 11, 1861.)
The rise and fall of the slave power
is the grandest example of the dialectic in American history. The slaveholders
had to be lifted to the heights before they were dashed to the ground and
annihilated forever in the Civil War, an historical precedent it is good to
keep in mind when the advancing world reaction seems to be carrying everything
before it.
The first two articles of the series
contributed to the Vienna Presse written in refutation of the arguments
disseminated by the Southern sympathizers in England, are the meatiest portions
of this collection. The pro-slavery advocates contended, first that the war
between the North and South was nothing but a tariff war; second, that it was
waged by the North against the South to maintain the Union by force; and,
third, that the slave question had nothing to do with it.
Marx easily explodes the first
argument with five well-placed facts to the contrary. In answer to the second,
he points out that the war emanated, not from the North, but from the South.
The Civil War originated as a rebellion of the slaveholding oligarchy against
the Republican government. Just as the bombardment of Fort Sumter started the
war, so Lincoln’s election, gave the signal for secession. Lincoln’s victory
was made possible by the breach between the Northern and Southern wings of the
Democratic Party, and the rise of the Republican Party in the new Northwest.
The key to secession was therefore to be found in the upsurge of the Northwest.
By splitting the Democratic ranks and supporting the Republican candidate, the
Northwestern states upset the balance of power which had enabled the slave
power to rule the Republic for six decades and thereby made secession necessary
and inevitable.
With the principle that any further
extension of slave territory was to be prohibited by law, the Republicans
attacked the rule of the slaveholders at its root. A strict confinement of
slavery within its old terrain 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
side of the “poor whites”. The Republican election victory was accordingly
bound to lead to the open struggle between North and South.
The assumption of state power placed
a noose in the hands of the Republican bourgeoisie which they could draw as
tight as they pleased around the neck of the slave power until they had
succeeding in strangling it. Having lost control of the government to their
adversary and faced with the prospect of slow death, the slaveholders
determined to fight for their freedom—to enslave others!
The political contest which resulted
in civil war was but the expression of profound economic antagonisms between
the slave and free states. According to Marx, the most important of these was
the struggle over the possession of the territories necessary for the expansion
of their respective systems of production. In a striking phrase Marx states
that “the territorial contest which opened this dire epopee was to decide
whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the
immigrant or prostituted to the tramp of the slavedriver”. The Western lands
were the rock on which the Union was shipwrecked.
To those who represent the
slaveholder’s rebellion as a defensive, and, therefore, a just war, Marx
replied that it was the precise opposite. The dissolution of the Union and the
formation of the Confederacy were only the first steps in the slaveholders’
program. After consolidating their power, the slavocracy must inevitably strive
to conquer the North and to extend its dominion over the tropics where cotton
could be cultivated. “The South was not a country... but a battle cry”; the war
of the Southern Confederacy “a war of conquest for the extension and
perpetuation of slavery”. The slave-owners aimed to reorganize the Union on the
basis of slavery. This would entail the subjugation of North America, the
nullification of the free institutions of the Northern states, the perpetuation
of an obsolete and barbaric method of production at the expense of a higher
economic order. The triumph of the backward South over the progressive North
would deal an irreparable blow to human progress.
To those who argued that slavery had
nothing to do with the Civil War because the Republicans feared to unfurl the
banner of emancipation at the beginning of the conflict, Marx pointed out that
the Confederacy itself proclaimed the foundation of a republic for the first
time in modem history with slavery as its unquestionable principle. Not only
the secession movement but the war itself was, in the last analysis, based upon
the slave question.
Not in the sense of whether the
slaves within the existing slave states would be emancipated or not (although
this matter, too, must sooner or later be settled), but whether twenty million
men of the North should subordinate themselves any longer to an oligarchy of
three hundred thousand slaveholders; whether the vast territories of the
republic should be planting-places for free states or for slavery; finally, whether
the national policy of the Union should take armed propaganda of slavery in
Mexico, Central and South America as its device.
Thus Marx proceeds from the
political to the economic and finally to the social core of the Civil War. With
surgical skill he probes deeper and deeper until he penetrates to the heart of
the conflict. “The present struggle between the North and South,” he concludes,
“is nothing but a struggle between two social systems; between the system of
slavery and the system of free labor.” The struggle has broken out because the
two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American
continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other.” If
this conclusion appears elementary to us today, it is only because history has
absolutely confirmed it. But one has only to compare Marx’s words at the
opening of the Civil War with the writings of the other politicians of the
period to appreciate their foresight.
In connection with this admirable
account of the causes of the war, Marx underscores the crucial political,
economic, and military importance of the border states. These states, which
were neither slave nor free, were a thorn in the side of the South on the one
hand, and the weakest part of the North on the other. The Republican government
was inclined toward a weak, cowardly, and conciliatory policy of waging the war
out of regard for the support of these ambiguous allies and did not throw off
their constraining influence until the war was half over.
Marx and Engels followed the
military aspects of the conflict with the closest attention. “The General” in
particular was absorbed by the tactics and strategy of the contending forces.
He was justly impatient with the Fabian policies of McClellan and his “anaconda
plan” for surrounding, constricting, and crushing the South, advocating instead
a bold and sharp stroke launched at the middle of the South. He thus
anticipated in 1862 Sherman’s decisive march through Georgia two years later.
Exasperated by the manifold blunders and half-heartedness of the Union generals
as well as the reluctance of the Republican bourgeoisie to use revolutionary
methods in waging the war, he at one time despaired of a Northern victory. But
Marx, with his eye upon the immensely superior latent powers of the North and
the inherent weaknesses of the South, chided him for being “swayed a little too
much by the military aspect of things”.
The majority of these articles deal
with various international aspects of the Civil War, among them the diplomatic
jockeying of the great European powers, so reminiscent of the present Spanish
Civil War, as well as the intrigues of Napoleon the Little in the chancelleries
of Europe and his adventures in Mexico. Marx and Engels were concerned with the
international events as foreign correspondents, as residents of England, but
above all as revolutionary proletarian internationalists. Marx kept close
surveillance over the efforts to embroil England in a war against the Union and
exposed the factors that kept the Palmerston government in check: the
increasing dependence of England on American foodstuffs, the superior
preparedness of the United States for war, the rivalry between the Whigs and
Tories in the coalition cabinet and, last but not least, the fear of the
people. Marx played a leading role in frustrating the plans of the war-hawks by
mobilizing the English workers in huge public meetings of protest against the
Southern sympathizers among the English upper crust.
These miscellaneous writings do not
constitute either a comprehensive or definitive treatment of the Civil War and
the revolution interlaced with it. Marx and Engels would undoubtedly have
revised and elaborated not a few of the judgments they expressed at the moment
in the light of subsequent developments. The last extracts from their
correspondence show them in the act of changing their previous opinion of
Johnson. Here are a few points that call for correction or amplification. In
concentrating upon the more immediate causes of the Civil War, Marx and Engels
do not delve into the general economic background of the conflict. Their survey
needs to be supplemented by an account of the maturing crisis within the slave
system and the impetuous rise of Northern capitalism which provided the economic
premises of the Civil War.
Marx was mistaken in attributing the
removal of Frémont solely to political intrigue. This Republican General was
caught in flagrante delicto. His wife accepted expensive gifts from army
contractors while the Department of the West under his command was a grafter’s
paradise. In one deal Frémont purchased 25,000 worthless Austrian muskets for
$166,000; in another, financed by J.P. Morgan, he bought for $22 each condemned
guns which the War Department itself had illegally sold a few months before for
$3.50 each! And the House Committee of Investigation uncovered even worse cases
of corruption. Possibly Marx became acquainted with these facts when he studied
the official reports. That would account for his failure to return to the
subject, as he promised.
The principal lack in these writings
from our present standpoint is the absence of distinction between the separate
and potentially antagonistic class forces allied on the side of the Union. In
particular, insufficient stress is laid upon the special political position,
program, aims, and interests of the Republican big bourgeoisie who headed the
state and led the army. This was not accidental. Marx and Engels emphasized the
broad outlines and major issues uppermost at the moment and more or less set to
one side for future consideration the forces and problems which lurked in the
background and came to the fore at a later stage of the struggle.
A few words must be said about the
editor’s introduction. It is liberally smeared with Stalinism. This substitute
for Marxism is, like certain substitutes for mayonnaise, concocted by omitting
or adulterating the principal ingredients. Mr. Enmale would have us believe
that out of the Civil War a truly democratic government emerged in the United
States.
“In its Civil War phase, the
revolution abolished chattel slavery, and destroyed the old plantocracy,” he
remarks. “At the same time it insured the continuance of democracy, freedom,
and progress by putting an end to the rule of an oligarchy, by preventing
further suppression of civil liberties in the interests of chattel slavery, and
by paving the way for the forward movement of American labor.”
How Marx in his wrath would have
hurled his Jovian thunderbolts at the head of the vulgar democrat who uttered
such deceitful phrases—and in his name! The Civil War put an end to one
oligarchy and marked the beginning of another, which Marx himself
characterized, in a later letter to Engels, as “the associated oligarchy of
capital”, which in its turn became the bulwark of reaction, suppressed civil
liberties, and exerted every effort to check the advance of American labor. It
is not impossible that Mr. Enmale is unacquainted with this letter, written on
the occasion of the bloody suppression of the great railroad strikes of 1877 by
the Federal troops, since it was omitted from the English edition of the
Correspondence issued by the same house. But Enmale’s ignorance of Marx’s views
does not excuse his crude falsification of American history since the Civil
War. In fairness to the editor, it must be said that his notes and biographical
index are accurate and very helpful.
The Civil War opened the road for
the final triumph of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in the United States.
During the fight to the death with the slavocracy, Marx and Engels in their
capacity as revolutionary labor leaders correctly stressed the positive,
democratic, progressive and revolutionary significance of the struggle waged by
the bourgeois republic. They based their practical political policy on the fact
that the struggle of the working class for its own emancipation would be
promoted by the victory of the North and thrown back by the triumph of the
Confederacy. At the same time they never proclaimed their political confidence
in the Republican bourgeoisie, freely criticized their conduct of the war, and
maintained their independence vis-à-vis their temporary allies.
In the years that have elapsed since
its conquest of power, the capitalist regime has become the mainstay of
reaction in the United States and throughout the world. While giving full
credit to the achievements of the Second American Revolution, contemporary
Marxists are first of all obliged to expose the negative bourgeois, reactionary
sides of its character which historical development have thrust to the
forefront. In this way they will remain true, not to the dead letter, but to
the living spirit of Marxism embodied in these precious pages.
New International Feb 1939
The Civil War in the United States, by By KARL MARX and FREDERICK ENGELS
Edited and introduced by Richard
Enmale New York. International Publishers.
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