From The Marxist Archives -In Honor Of The 75th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International-
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Workers Vanguard No. 959
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21 May 2010
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TROTSKY
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LENIN
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Karl Marx on the American Civil War
(Quote of the Week)
From the outset of the U.S. Civil War, much of the British
capitalist class, whose textile industry depended on cotton imported from the
Southern slave states, clamored for the North to allow the South to secede.
Countering those forces, Karl Marx, who fought to rally the English working
class to support the Union’s blockade of Confederate ports, emphasized that the
war posed a struggle to the death between two social systems that could no
longer coexist: industrial capitalism in the North and chattel slavery in the
South. It took the Civil War, the Second American Revolution, to crush the
system of black enslavement. And it will take a third, socialist, American
revolution to achieve genuine social equality for the oppressed black masses and
the emancipation of all labor through the overthrow of the decrepit capitalist
order.
“Let him go, he is not worth your anger!” Again and again English
statesmanship cries—recently through the mouth of Lord John Russell—to the North
of the United States this advice of Leporello to Don Juan’s deserted love. [In
literature and the theater, Leporello is the servant and loyal friend of the
libertine Don Juan.] If the North lets the South go, it then frees itself from
any association with slavery, from its historical original sin, and creates the
basis of a new and higher development….
“The South,” however, is neither a territory closely
sealed off from the North geographically, nor a moral unity. It is not a country
at all, but a battle slogan.
The advice of an amicable separation presupposes that the Southern
Confederacy, although it assumed the offensive in the Civil War, at least wages
it for defensive purposes. It is believed that the issue for the slaveholders’
party is merely one of uniting the territories it has hitherto dominated into an
independent group of states and withdrawing them from the supreme authority of
the Union. Nothing could be more false…. A large part of the territory thus
claimed is still in the possession of the Union and would first have to be
conquered from it. None of the so-called border states, however, not even those
in the possession of the Confederacy, were ever actual slave
states. Rather, they constitute the area of the United States in which
the system of slavery and the system of free labour exist side by side and
contend for mastery, the actual field of battle between South and North, between
slavery and freedom. The war of the Southern Confederacy is, therefore, not a
war of defence, but a war of conquest, a war of conquest for the spread and
perpetuation of slavery….
The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore,
nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the
system of free labour. 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.
—Karl Marx, “The Civil War in the United States,” 7 November
1861
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Articles by Karl Marx in Die Presse 1861
The Civil War in the United States
Written: Late October,
1861;
Source: Marx/Engels Collected Works, Volume
19;
Publisher: Progress Publishers, Moscow,
1964;
First Published: Die Presse No. 306,
November 7, 1861;
Online Version: Marxists.org
1999;
Transcription: Bob Schwarz and Tim Delaney;
“Let him go, he is not worth thine ire!” Again and again English
statesmanship cries - recently through the mouth of Lord John Russell-to the
North of the United States this advice of Leporello to Don Juan's deserted love.
If the North lets the South go, it then frees itself from any admixture of
slavery, from its historical original sin, and creates the basis of a new and
higher development.
In reality, if North and South formed two autonomous countries, like, for
example, England and Hanover, their separation would be no more difficult than
was the separation of England and Hanover.
"The South," however, is
neither a territory closely sealed off from the North geographically, nor a
moral unity. It is not a country at all, but a battle slogan.
The advice of an amicable separation presupposes that the Southern
Confederacy, although it assumed the offensive in the Civil War, at least wages
it for defensive purposes. It is believed that the issue for the slaveholders'
party is merely one of uniting the territories it has hitherto dominated into an
autonomous group of states and withdrawing them from the supreme authority of
the Union. Nothing could be more false: “
The South needs its entire
territory. It will and must have it.” With this battle-cry the
secessionists fell upon Kentucky. By their “entire territory” they understand in
the first place all the so-called
border states-Delaware, Maryland,
Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri and Arkansas. Besides,
they lay claim to the entire territory south of the line that runs from the
north-west corner of Missouri to the Pacific Ocean. What the slaveholders,
therefore, call the South, embraces more than three-quarters of the territory
hitherto comprised by the Union. A large part of the territory thus claimed is
still in the possession of the Union and would first have to be conquered from
it. None of the so-called border states, however, not even those in the
possession of the Confederacy, were ever
actual slave states. Rather,
they constitute the area of the United States in which the system of slavery and
the system of free labour exist side by side and contend for mastery, the actual
field of battle between South and North, between slavery and freedom. The war of
the Southern Confederacy is, therefore, not a war of defence, but a war of
conquest, a war of conquest for the spread and perpetuation of slavery.
The chain of mountains that begins in Alabama and stretches northwards to the
Hudson River-the spinal column, as it were, of the United States-cuts the
so-called South into three parts. The mountainous country formed by the
Allegheny Mountains with their two parallel ranges, the Cumberland Range to the
west and the Blue Mountains to the east, divides wedge-like the lowlands along
the western coast of the Atlantic Ocean from the lowlands in the southern
valleys of the Mississippi. The two lowlands separated by the mountainous
country, with their vast rice swamps and far-flung cotton plantations, are the
actual area of slavery. The long wedge of mountainous country driven into the
heart of slavery, with its correspondingly clear atmosphere, an invigorating
climate and a soil rich in coal, salt, limestone, iron ore, gold, in short,
every raw material necessary for a many-sided industrial development, is already
for the most part free country. In accordance with its physical constitution,
the soil here can only be cultivated with success by free small farmers. Here
the slave system vegetates only sporadically and has never struck root. In the
largest part of the so-called border states, the dwellers of these highlands
comprise the core of the free population, which sides with the Northern party if
only for the sake of self-preservation.
Let us consider the contested territory in detail.
Delaware, the most north-eastern of the border states, is factually
and morally in the possession of the Union. All the attempts of the
secessionists at forming even one faction favourable to them have since the
beginning of the war suffered shipwreck on the unanimity of the population. The
slave element of this state has long been in process of dying out. From 1850 to
1860 alone the number of slaves diminished by half, so that with a total
population of 112,218 Delaware now numbers only 1,798 slaves. Nevertheless,
Delaware is demanded by the Southern Confederacy and would in fact be militarily
untenable for the North as soon as the South possessed itself of Maryland.
In
Maryland itself the above-mentioned conflict between highlands
and lowlands takes place. Out of a total population of 687,034 there are here
87,188 slaves. That the overwhelming majority of the population is on the side
of the Union has again been strikingly proved by the recent general elections to
the Congress in Washington. The army of 30,000 Union troops, which holds
Maryland at the moment, is intended not only to serve the army on the Potomac as
a reserve, but, in particular, also to hold in check the rebellious slaveowners
in the interior of the country. For here we observe a phenomenon similar to what
we see in other border states where the great mass of the people stands for the
North and a numerically insignificant slaveholders' party for the South. What it
lacks in numbers, the slaveholders' party makes up in the means of power that
many years' possession of all state offices, hereditary engagement in political
intrigue and concentration of great wealth in few hands have secured for it.
Virginia now forms the great cantonment where the main army of
secession and the main army of the Union confront each other. In the north-west
highlands of Virginia the number of slaves is 15,000, whilst the twenty times as
large free population consists mostly of free farmers. The eastern lowlands of
Virginia, on the other hand, count well-nigh half a million slaves. Raising
Negroes and the sale of the Negroes to the Southern states form the principal
source of income of these lowlands. As soon as the ringleaders of the lowlands
had carried through the secession ordinance by intrigues in the state
legislature at Richmond and had in all haste opened the gates of Virginia to the
Southern army, north-west Virginia seceded from the secession, formed a new
state, and under the banner of the Union now defends its territory arms in hand
against the Southern invaders.
Tennessee, with 1,109,847 inhabitants, 275,784 of whom are slaves,
finds itself in the hands of the Southern Confederacy, which has placed the
whole state under martial law and under a system of proscription which recalls
the days of the Roman Triumvirates. When in the winter of 1861 the slaveholders
proposed a general convention of the people which was to vote for secession or
non-secession, the majority of the people rejected any convention, in order to
remove any pretext for the secession movement. Later, when Tennessee was already
militarily over-run and subjected to a system of terror by the Southern
Confederacy, more than a third of the voters at the elections still declared
themselves for the Union. Here, as in most of the border states, the mountainous
country,
east Tennessee, forms the real centre of resistance to the
slaveholders' party. On June 17, 1861, a General Convention of the people of
east Tennessee assembled in Greenville, declared itself for the Union, deputed
the former governor of the state, Andrew Johnson, one of the most ardent
Unionists, to the Senate in Washington and published a “declaration of
grievances,” which lays bare all the means of deception, intrigue and terror by
which Tennessee was “voted out” of the Union. Since then the secessionists have
held east Tennessee in check by force of arms.
Similar relationships to those in West Virginia and east Tennessee are found
in the north of Alabama, in north-west Georgia and in the north of North
Carolina.
Further west, in the border state of
Missouri, with 1,173,317
inhabitants and 114,965 slaves-the latter mostly concentrated in the north-west
of the state-the people's convention of August 1861 decided for the Union.
Jackson, the governor of the state and the tool of the slaveholders' party,
rebelled against the legislature of Missouri, was outlawed and took the lead of
the armed hordes that fell upon Missouri from Texas, Arkansas and Tennessee, in
order to bring it to its knees before the Confederacy and sever its bond with
the Union by the sword. Next to Virginia, Missouri is at the present moment the
main theatre of the Civil War.
New Mexico-not a state, but merely a Territory, into which
twenty-five slaves were imported during Buchanan's presidency in order to send a
slave constitution after them from Washington-had no craving for the South, as
even the latter concedes. But the South has a craving for New Mexico and
accordingly spewed an armed band of adventurers from
Texas over the
border. New Mexico has implored the protection of the Union government against
these liberators.
It will have been observed that we lay particular emphasis on the numerical
proportion of slaves to free men in the individual border states. This
proportion is in fact decisive. It is the thermometer with which the vital fire
of the slave system must be measured. The soul of the whole secession movement
is
South Carolina. It has 402,541 slaves and 301,271 free men.
Mississippi, which has given the Southern Confederacy its dictator,
Jefferson Davis, comes second. It has 436,696 slaves and 354,699 free men.
Alabama comes third, with 435,132 slaves and 529,164 free men.
The last of the contested border states, which we have still to mention, is
Kentucky. Its recent history is particularly characteristic of the
policy of the Southern Confederacy. Among its 1,135,713 inhabitants Kentucky has
225,490 slaves. In three successive general elections by the people-in the
winter of 1861, when elections to a congress of the border states were held; in
June 1861, when elections to the Congress in Washington took place; finally, in
August 1861, in elections to the legislature of the State of Kentucky-an ever
increasing majority decided for the Union. On the other hand, Magoffin, the
Governor of Kentucky, and all the high officials of the state are fanatical
supporters of the slaveholders' party, as is Breckinridge, Kentucky's
representative in the Senate in Washington, Vice-President of the United States
under Buchanan, and candidate of the slaveholders' party in the presidential
election of 1860. Too weak to win over Kentucky for secession, the influence of
the slaveholders' party was strong enough to make this state amenable to a
declaration of neutrality on the outbreak of war. The Confederacy recognised the
neutrality as long as it served its purposes, as long as the Confederacy itself
was engaged in crushing the resistance in east Tennessee. Hardly was this end
attained when it knocked at the gates of Kentucky with the butt of a gun to the
cry of: “
The South needs its entire territory. It will and must have
it!"
From the south-west and south-east its corps of free-booters simultaneously
invaded the “neutral” state. Kentucky awoke from its dream of neutrality, its
legislature openly took sides with the Union, surrounded the traitorous Governor
with a committee of public safety, called the people to arms, outlawed
Breckinridge and ordered the secessionists to evacuate the invaded territory
immediately. This was the signal for war. An army of the Southern Confederacy is
moving on Louisville, while volunteers from Illinois, Indiana and Ohio flock
hither to save Kentucky from the armed missionaries of slavery.
The attempts of the Confederacy to annex Missouri and Kentucky, for example,
against the will of these states, prove the hollowness of the pretext that it is
fighting for the rights of the individual states against the encroachments of
the Union. On the individual states that it considers to belong to the “South”
it confers, to be sure, the right to separate from the Union, but by no means
the right to remain in the Union.
Even the actual slave states, however much external war, internal military
dictatorship and slavery give them everywhere for the moment a semblance of
harmony, are nevertheless not without oppositional elements. A striking example
is
Texas, with 180,388 slaves out of 601,039 inhabitants. The law of
1845, by virtue of which Texas became a State of the Union as a slave state,
entitled it to form not merely one, but five states out of its territory. The
South would thereby have gained ten new votes instead of two in the American
Senate, and an increase in the number of its votes in the Senate was a major
object of its policy at that time. From 1845 to 1860, however, the slaveholders
found it impracticable to cut up Texas, where the German population plays an
important part, into even two states without giving the party of free labour the
upper hand over the party of slavery in the second state. This furnishes the
best proof of the strength of the opposition to the slaveholding oligarchy in
Texas itself.
Georgia is the largest and most populous of the slave states. It
has 462,230 slaves out of a total of 1,057,327 inhabitants, therefore nearly
half the population. Nevertheless, the slaveholders' party has not so far
succeeded in getting the Constitution imposed on the South at Montgomery
sanctioned by a general vote of the people in Georgia.
In the State Convention of
Louisiana, meeting on March 21, 1861, at
New Orleans, Roselius, the political veteran of the state, declared:
“The Montgomery Constitution is not a constitution, but a
conspiracy. It does not inaugurate a government of the people, but a
detestable and unrestricted oligarchy. The people were not permitted to
have any say in this matter. The Convention of Montgomery has dug the grave of
political liberty, and now we are summoned to attend its burial."
Indeed, the oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders utilised the
Congress of Montgomery not only to proclaim the separation of the South from the
North. It exploited it at the same time to reshape the internal constitutions of
the slave states, to subjugate completely the section of the white population
that had still preserved some independence under the protection and the
democratic Constitution of the Union. Between 1856 to 1860 the political
spokesmen, jurists, moralists and theologians of the slaveholders' party had
already sought to prove, not so much that Negro slavery is justified, but rather
that colour is a matter of indifference and the working class is everywhere born
to slavery.
One sees, therefore, that the war of the Southern Confederacy is in the true
sense of the word a war of conquest for the spread and perpetuation of slavery.
The greater part of the border states and Territories are still in the
possession of the Union, whose side they have taken first through the ballot-box
and then with arms. The Confederacy, however, counts them for the
"South" and seeks to conquer them from the Union. In the border states
which the Confederacy has occupied for the time being, it is holding the
relatively free highlands in check by martial law. Within the actual slave
states themselves it is supplanting the hitherto existing democracy by the
unrestricted oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders.
Were it to relinquish its plans of conquest, the Southern Confederacy would
relinquish its capacity to live and the purpose of secession. Secession, indeed,
only took place because within the Union the transformation of the border states
and Territories into slave states seemed no longer attainable. On the other
hand, were it to cede the contested territory peacefully to the Southern
Confederacy, the North would surrender to the slave republic more than
three-quarters of the entire territory of the United States. The North would
lose the whole of the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, except the narrow
strip from Penobscot Bay to Delaware Bay, and would even cut itself off from the
Pacific Ocean. Missouri, Kansas, New Mexico, Arkansas and Texas would draw
California after them. Incapable of wresting the mouth of the Mississippi from
the hands of the strong, hostile slave republic in the South, the great
agricultural states in the basin between the Rocky Mountains and the
Alleghenies, in the valleys of the Mississippi, the Missouri and the Ohio, would
be compelled by their economic interests to secede from the North and enter the
Southern Confederacy. These north-western states, in their turn, would draw
after them into the same whirlpool of secession all the Northern states lying
further east, with perhaps the exception of the states of New England.
What would in fact take place would be not a dissolution of the Union, but a
reorganisation of it, a
reorganisation on the basis of
slavery, under the recognised control of the slaveholding oligarchy. The
plan of such a reorganisation has been openly proclaimed by the principal
speakers of the South at the Congress of Montgomery and explains the paragraph
of the new Constitution which leaves it open to every state of the old Union to
join the new Confederacy. The slave system would infect the whole Union. In the
Northern states, where Negro slavery is in practice unworkable, the white
working class would gradually be forced down to the level of helotry. This would
fully accord with the loudly proclaimed principle that only certain races are
capable of freedom, and as the actual labour is the lot of the Negro in the
South, so in the North it is the lot of the German and the Irishman, or their
direct descendants.
The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a
struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of
free labour. 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 the border states, the disputed areas in which the two systems have
hitherto contended for domination, are a thorn in the flesh of the South, there
can, on the other hand, be no mistake that, in the course of the war up to now,
they have constituted the chief weakness of the North. One section of the
slaveholders in these districts simulated loyalty to the North at the bidding of
the conspirators in the South; another section found that in fact it was in
accordance with their real interests and traditional ideas to go with the Union.
Both sections have equally crippled the North. Anxiety to keep the “loyal”
slaveholders of the border states in good humour, fear of throwing them into the
arms of secession, in a word, tender regard for the interests, prejudices and
sensibilities of these ambiguous allies, has smitten the Union government with
incurable weakness since the beginning of the war, driven it to half measures,
forced it to dissemble away the principle of the war and to spare the foe's most
vulnerable spot, the root of the evil-
slavery itself.
When, only recently, Lincoln pusillanimously revoked Frémont's Missouri
proclamation on the emancipation of Negroes belonging to the rebels, this was
done solely out of regard for the loud protest of the “loyal” slaveholders of
Kentucky. However, a turning point has already been reached. With Kentucky, the
last border state has been pushed into the series of battlefields between South
and North. With the real war for the border states in the border states
themselves, the question of winning or losing them is withdrawn from the sphere
of diplomatic and parliamentary discussions. One section of slaveholders will
throw off the mask of loyalty; the other will content itself with the prospect
of a financial compensation such as Great Britain gave the West Indian planters.
Events themselves drive to the promulgation of the decisive
slogan-
emancipation of the slaves.
That even the most hardened Democrats and diplomats of the North feel
themselves drawn to this point, is shown by some announcements of very recent
date. In an open letter, General
Cass, Secretary of State for War under
Buchanan and hitherto one of the most ardent allies of the South, declares
emancipation of the slaves the
conditio sine qua non of the Union's
salvation. In his last
Review for October, Dr.
Brownson, the
spokesman of the Catholic party of the North, on his own admission the most
energetic adversary of the emancipation movement from 1836 to 1860, publishes an
article
for Abolition.
“If we have opposed Abolition heretofore,” he says among other things,
“because we would preserve the Union, we must
a fortiori now oppose
slavery whenever, in our judgment, its continuance becomes incompatible with the
maintenance of the Union, or of the nation as a free republican state."
Finally, the
World, a New York organ of the diplomats of the
Washington Cabinet, concludes one of its latest blustering articles against the
Abolitionists with the words:
“On the day when it shall be decided that either slavery or the
Union must go down, on that day sentence of death is passed on slavery. If the
North cannot triumph without emancipation, it will triumph
with emancipation."
