In photographs Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln both look the part of the respectable Victorian gentleman. But they were almost diametrically opposed in their attitude toward what was called at the time the social question. Lincoln happily represented railroad corporations as a lawyer. As a politician he was a champion of free wage labor. Karl Marx, on the other hand, was a declared foe of capitalism who insisted that wage labor was in fact wage slavery, since the worker was compelled by economic necessity to sell his defining human attribute—his labor power—because if he did not, his family would soon face hunger and homelessness.
Of course Marx’s critique of capitalism did not deny that it had progressive features, and Lincoln’s championing of the world of business did not extend to those whose profits stemmed directly from slaveholding. Each man placed a concept of unrewarded labor at the center of his political philosophy, and both opposed slavery on the grounds that it was intensively exploitative. Lincoln believed it to be his duty to defend the Union, which he saw as the momentous American experiment in representative democracy, by whatever means should prove necessary. Marx saw the democratic republic as the political form that would allow the working class to develop its capacity to lead society as a whole. He regarded US political institutions as a flawed early version of the republican ideal. With their “corruption” and “humbug,” US political institutions did not offer a faithful representation of US society. Indeed, too often they supplied a popular veneer to the rule of the wealthy—with a bonus for slaveholders. But Marx’s conclusion was that they should become more democratic, broadening the scope of freedom of association, removing all forms of privilege, and extending free public education.1
As a young man Marx had seriously considered moving to the United States, perhaps to Texas. He went so far as to write to the mayor of Trier, the town where he had been born, to request an Auswanderungschein, or emigration certificate. In the following year he wrote an article considering the ideas of the “American National Reformers,” whose comparatively modest original aims—the distribution of 160 acres of public land to anyone willing to cultivate it—he recognized as justified and promising: “We know that this movement strives for a result that, to be sure, would further the industrialism of modern bourgeois society, but that … as an attack on land ownership … especially under the existing conditions … must drive it towards communism.”2 (The idea of distributing public land in this way did indeed have explosive implications, as we will see, and the new smallholders did often lack the resources needed to flourish, as Marx predicted, but his idea that they would therefore embrace “communism” was more than a stretch.) In 1849, writing as editor of Germany’s leading revolutionary democratic journal, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Marx praised the frugal budget and republican institutions of the United States in comparison with the bloated bureaucracy and unaccountability of the Prussian monarchy.3
Subsequently Marx remained fascinated by events in the US, and for ten years—1852 to 1861—he became the London correspondent of one of its leading newspapers, the New York Daily Tribune. The invitation to write for the Tribune came from Charles Dana, its editor, who had met Marx in Cologne in 1848 when Marx was in charge of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Marx accepted Dana’s invitation, and for a decade this was his only paid employment. He contributed over 400 articles, 84 of which were published without a byline, as editorials. Although initially happy with the arrangement, Marx complained of the pay ($5 an article, later raised to $10), of the fact that he was not paid for pieces that were not published, and of the editorial mangling of what he had written. In one moment of particular vexation—he had received no fees for months—he confided to his friend Frederick Engels that the whole arrangement was one of pure exploitation:
It is truly nauseating that one should be condemned to count it a blessing when taken aboard a blotting paper vendor such as this. To crush up bones, grind them and make them into a soup like [that given] to paupers in a workhouse—that is the political work to which one is constrained in such large measure in a concern like this …4
On other occasions Marx expressed himself as pleased to find an outlet for his views and the results of his research into British social conditions. He wrote about the everyday problems of British workers, about the Indian mutiny, the Crimean War, Italian unification, French financial scandals, and Britain’s disgraceful Opium Wars.5
For obvious reasons, the one topic Marx did not cover was events in the United States. In February 1861 the Tribune responded to the crisis by dropping all its foreign correspondents except Marx. However, the paper, finding room for few of his dispatches, soon ceased paying him. He accordingly found another outlet for his journalism, the Viennese paper Die Presse, which, unlike the Tribune, expected him to write about the extraordinary conflict unfolding in North America; most of the longer articles reprinted in this book first appeared in Die Presse.
Abraham Lincoln had a rather more unalloyed experience of exploitation as a young man, since he worked for no pay on his father’s farm until the age of twenty-one. Indeed, the elder Lincoln would hire out Abraham’s services to other farmers, without handing over any payment to his son. In later life his relations with his father were cool and distant.6 Marx obtained a doctorate from one of Germany’s leading universities; Lincoln had only one year of formal education. Acquiring a license to practice law required no academic credential, but simply a judge willing to swear in the candidate and vouch that he was of good character. Working for a law firm was itself an education, one that evidently allowed Lincoln to hone his skills as a reasoner and advocate. His legal business prospered, and he came to embody the social mobility that was linked to the celebration of “free labor.” As he was first a Whig and later a Republican, it is likely that he read quite a few of the articles Marx wrote for the Tribune, signed or otherwise, since this paper was favored by those interested in reform and the fate of the Republican Party. Marx was probably unaware of Lincoln, a one-term representative from Illinois, until the later 1850s, when Lincoln shot to prominence because of his debates with Stephen Douglas, as the two men contended to become senator for Illinois. Lincoln was nine years older than Marx; even so, it is still a little strange to read Marx’s affectionate references to him as the “old man” in the mid-1860s.
Marx and Lincoln both saw slavery as a menace to the spirit of republican institutions. But Lincoln believed that the genius of the Constitution could cage and contain the unfortunate slaveholders until such time as it might be possible to wind up slavery in some gradual and compensated manner. Marx saw the progressive potential of the republic in a different light. Its institutions, however flawed, as least allowed the partisans of revolutionary change openly to canvass the need for organization against capitalism and expropriation of the slaveholders.
In this introduction I explore why two men who occupied very different worlds and held contrary views nevertheless coincided on an issue of historic importance and even brought those worlds into fleeting contact with one another, and how the Civil War and Reconstruction—which Eric Foner has called America’s unfinished revolution7—offered great opportunities and challenges to Marx and to the supporters of the International in the United States. Furthermore, I will urge that the Civil War and its sequel had a larger impact on Marx than is often realized—and, likewise, that the ideas of Marx and Engels had a greater impact on the United States, a country famous for its imperviousness to socialism, than is usually allowed.
It is, of course, well known that Karl Marx was an enthusiastic supporter of the Union in the US Civil War and that on behalf of the International Workingmen’s Association he drafted an address to Abraham Lincoln congratulating the president on his reelection in 1864. The US ambassador in London conveyed a friendly but brief response from the president. However, the antecedents and implications of this little exchange are rarely considered.
By the close of 1864 many European liberals and radicals were coming round to supporting the North, but Marx had done so from the outset. To begin with, the cause of the South had a definite appeal to liberals and radicals, partly because many of them distrusted strong states and championed the right of small nations to self-determination. Lincoln himself insisted in 1861 that the North was fighting to defend the Union, not to free the slaves. Many European liberals were impressed by the fact that the secessions had been carried out by reasonably representative assemblies. The slaves had had no say in the matter, but then very few blacks in the loyal states had a vote, either, and hundreds of thousands remained slaves.
If the Civil War was not about the defense of slavery, as many claimed, then the pure argument for Unionism was a weak one. Progressive opinion in Europe was supportive of a right to self-determination and in 1830 had not been at all disturbed when Belgium separated from the Netherlands, nor would it be in 1905 when Norway split from Sweden. Had the Netherlands or Sweden resorted to war to defend these unions, they would have been widely condemned. Consider, also, that Garibaldi began his career as a freedom fighter in the late 1830s as a partisan of the Republic of Rio Grande do Sul, a breakaway from the Empire of Brazil. Marx himself denounced Britain’s dominion over Ireland. In December 1860, Horace Greeley, who had just replaced Dana as editor of the New York Tribune, wrote an editorial arguing that though the Secession was very wrong, it should not be resisted by military means. There were also minority currents in the European labor and socialist movement who preferred Southern agrarianism to the commercial society of the North.
The attitude toward the war of many outside North America greatly depended on whether or not slavery was seen as a crucial stake in the conflict. Some members of the British government were inclined to recognize the Confederacy, and if they had done so this would have been a major boost to the South. But ever since 1807, when Britain abolished its Atlantic slave trade, the British government had made suppression of Atlantic slave trafficking central to the Pax Britannica. When Lord Palmerston, as foreign secretary, negotiated a free trade agreement with an Atlantic state, he invariably accompanied it with a treaty banning slave trading. During the Opium Wars, British war ships were sent by Palmerston to demand that China should allow the drug traffic to continue in the name of free trade and pay compensation to British merchants whose stock they had seized.8 Marx found the hypocrisy of “Pam” and the British breathtaking:
Their first main grievance is that the present American war is “not one for the abolition of slavery’ and that, therefore, the high-minded Britisher, used to undertake wars of his own and interest himself in other people’s wars only on the basis of ‘broad humanitarian principles,” cannot be expected to feel any sympathy for his Northern cousins.9
Withering as he was about the British government’s humbug, he was well aware that large sections of the British people, including much of the working class, were genuinely hostile to slavery. The slaves in the British colonies had been emancipated during 1834–8, following a slave uprising in Jamaica and sustained, large-scale popular mobilizations in Britain itself. Public opinion was sensitized to the issue and uncomfortably aware of the country’s dependence on slave-grown cotton. If it became apparent that the secessionists really were fighting simply to defend slavery, it would be extraordinarily difficult for the London government to recognize the Confederacy.
From the beginning, Marx was intensely scornful of those who supported what he saw as basically a slaveholders’ revolt. He insisted that it was quite erroneous to claim, as some did, that this was a quarrel about economic policy. Summarizing what he saw as the wrongheaded view espoused by influential British voices, he wrote:
The war between North and South [they claim] is a mere tariff war, a war between a tariff system and a free trade system, and England naturally stands on the side of free trade. It was reserved to the Times [of London] to make this brilliant discovery…The Economist expounded the theme further…Yes [they argued] it would be different if the war was waged for the abolition of slavery! The question of slavery, however, [they claim] has absolutely nothing to do with this war. Then as now, the Economist was a tireless advocate of the “free market.”
Marx’s unhesitating support for the North did not mean that he was unaware of its grave defects as a champion of free labor. He openly attacked the timidity of its generals and the venality of many of its public servants. Nevertheless he saw the Civil War as a decisive turning point in nineteenth-century history. A victory for the North would set the scene for slave emancipation and be a great step forward for the workers’ cause on both sides of the Atlantic. Support for the North was a touchstone issue, he believed, and it became central to his efforts to build the International Workingmen’s Association.
Marx’s political choice stemmed from an early analysis of the roots of the war in which he refused to define the struggle in the terms first adopted by the belligerents themselves. Marx’s well-known conviction that politics is rooted in antagonistic social relations led him to focus on the structural features of the two sections, and the emergence therein of contradictory interests and forms of social life. Marx and Engels were quite well informed about US developments. Many of their friends and comrades had emigrated to the United States during the years of reaction that followed the failure of the European revolutions of 1848. With few exceptions those émigrés had gone to the North, especially the Northwest, rather than to the South. Marx and Engels corresponded with the émigrés and wrote for, and read, their newspapers.
Marx and Engels were well aware of the privileged position of slaveholders in the structure of the American state, but believed that this privilege was menaced by the growth of the North and Northwest. Lincoln’s election was a threat to the Southern stranglehold on the republic’s central institutions, as embodied in Supreme Court rulings, cross-sectional party alignments, and fugitive slave legislations. In July 1861 Marx writes to Engels:
I have come to the conclusion that the conflict between the South and the North—for 50 years the latter has been climbing down, making one concession after another—has at last been brought to a head…by the weight which the extraordinary development of the Northwestern states has thrown into the scales. The population there, with its rich admixture of newly arrived Germans and Englishmen and, moreover, largely made up self-working farmers, did not, of course, lend itself so readily to intimidation as the gentlemen of Wall Street and the Quakers of Boston.10
One might wish this expressed a little more delicately and appreciatively—the Quakers had played a courageous role in resisting the slaveholders—but it is quite true that many of the Germans and English who sought refuge in the United States after 1848 brought with them a secular radicalism that changed and strengthened the antislavery cause in the United States by broadening its base of support. Before considering the nature of what might be called the German corrective it will be helpful to look at the evolution of Marx’s analysis.
The clear premise of Marx’s argument is that the North was expanding at a faster pace than the South—as indeed it was. But Marx contends that it is the South that is consumed by the need to expand territorially. The expansion of the North and Northwest, as Marx well knew, was even more rapid, a reflection of a momentous industrial growth and far-reaching commercialization of farming. The North and the Northwest, with a combined population of 20 million, were now linked by an extensive network of railroads and canals. The South might talk about King Cotton, but the truth was that economic growth in the South was not at all as broadly based as that in the North. Cotton exports were growing, but little else. In 1800 the South had the same population as the North; by 1860, it was only a little more than half as large, 11 million persons, about 7.5 million being Southern whites and 3.5 million slaves.
In Marx’s view, the South had three motives for territorial expansion. First, its agriculture exhausted the soil, and so planters were constantly in quest of new land. Second, the slave states needed to maintain their veto power in the Senate, and for this purpose needed to mint new slave states just as fast as new “free” states were recognized. Third, there was in the South a numerous class of restive young white men anxious to make their fortune, and the leaders of Southern society were persuaded that an external outlet must be found for them if they were not to become disruptive domestically.11
By itself the argument that there was a shortage of land in the South has limited validity. Expansion of the railroads could have brought more lands into cultivation. Additionally, the planters could have made better use of fertilizers, as did planters in Cuba. If there was a shortage, it was a shortage of slaves, relative to the boom in the cotton plantation economy of the 1850s.
Combined with the third point—the mass of restless filibusters12—the shortage argument gained more purchase. There was no absolute shortage of land and slaves, but planters could offer only so much support to their children. Southern whites had large families, and there was a surplus of younger sons who wished to make their way in the world. In the 1850s these young men—with what Marx called their “turbulent longings”—had been attracted to “filibustering” expeditions aimed at Cuba and Nicaragua—just as similar adventurers had sought glory and fortune in Texas and Mexico. Their parents might not always approve of freelance methods, but did see the attraction of acquiring new lands.
Undoubtedly Marx’s clinching argument was that which referred to political factors:
In order to maintain its influence in the Senate, and through the Senate its hegemony over the United States, the South therefore requires a continual formation of new slave states. This, however, was only possible through conquest of foreign lands, as in the case of Texas, and through the transformation of the territories belonging to the United States first into slave territories and then into slave states.13
The whole movement was and is based, as one sees, on the slave question. Not in the sense of whether the slaves in the existing slave states should be emancipated or not, but whether twenty million free men of the North should subordinate themselves any longer to an oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders.14
As social science and as journalism this was impressive, but it did not bring Marx to the political conclusion at which he aimed. The political subordination of Northerners—scarcely the equivalent of slavery—would be ended by Southern secession. Marx was focused on the possibility of destroying true chattel slavery, which he knew to be a critical component of the reigning capitalist order. He further insisted that it was folly to imagine that the slaveholders, aroused and on the warpath, would be satisfied by Northern recognition of the Confederacy. Rather, it would open the way to an aggressive South that would strive to incorporate the border states and extend slaveholder hegemony throughout North America. He reminded his readers that it was under Southern leadership that the Union had sought to introduce “the armed propaganda of slavery in Mexico, Central and South America.”15 Spanish Cuba, with its flourishing slave system, had already been singled out as the slave power’s next prey.
Marx’s argument and belief was that the real confrontation was between two social regimes, one based on slavery and the other on free labor: “The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peaceably side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other.” In this mortal struggle the North, however moderate its initial inclinations, would eventually be driven to revolutionary measures.
Marx believed that the polity favored by the Southern slaveowners was very different from the republic aspired to by Northerners. He did not spell out all his reasons, but he was essentially right about this. Southern slaveholders wished to see a Federal state that would uphold slave property; that would return and deter slave runaways, as laid down in the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850; and that would allow slaveholding Southerners access to Federal territories. The planters were happy that the antebellum state was modest in size and competence, since this meant low taxes and little or no interference with their “peculiar institution.”16 They did not favor either high tariffs or expensive internal improvements. But this restricted view of the state was accompanied by provisions that affected the lives of Northerners in quite intimate ways. The fugitive slave law of 1850 required all citizens to cooperate with the Federal marshals in apprehending runaways. In the Southern view, slaveholders should be free to bring slaves to Federal territories, an importation seen as an unwelcome and unfair intrusion by migrants from the Northern states, whether they were antislavery or simply antiblack. Southerners had favored censorship of the Federal mail, to prevent its use for abolitionist literature. They supported a foreign policy that pursued future acquisitions suitable for plantation development. But they did not want a state that had the power to intervene in the special internal arrangements of the slave states themselves. For them, a Republican president with the power to appoint thousands of Federal officials in the Southern states and with no intention of suppressing radical abolitionists spelled great danger.
Marx did not support the North because he believed that its victory would directly lead to socialism. Rather, he saw in South and North two species of capitalism—one allowing slavery, the other not. The then existing regime of American society and economy embraced the enslavement of four million people whose enforced toil produced the republic’s most valuable export, cotton, as well as much tobacco, sugar, rice, and turpentine. Defeating the slave power was going to be difficult. The wealth and pride of the 300,000 slaveholders (there were actually 395,000 slave owners, according to the 1860 Census, but at the time Marx was writing this had not yet been published) was at stake. These slaveholders were able to corrupt or intimidate many of the poor Southern whites, and they had rich and influential supporters among the merchants, bankers and textile manufacturers of New York, London and Paris. Defeating the slave power and freeing the slaves would not destroy capitalism, but it would create conditions far more favorable to organizing and elevating labor, whether white or black. Marx portrayed the wealthy slave owners as akin to Europe’s aristocrats, and their removal as a task for the sort of democratic revolution he had advocated in the Communist Manifesto as the immediate aim for German revolutionaries.
Lincoln, as a Whig brought up in Kentucky and southern Illinois, was quite familiar with the tensions created by slavery in the borderlands between South and North. His wife’s close relatives were slaveholders; one of his great uncles owned forty slaves. As a moderate Whig and, later, moderate Republican, Lincoln was ready to uphold the legal and constitutional rights of slaveholders. But he worried about the nation’s coherence and integrity. The earliest statement of his political philosophy, his speech “On the Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” delivered at the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield in 1838, gives expression to his pride in US political institutions. But it also expresses deep dismay at the growing streak of lawlessness he sees in American life. He was alarmed at rising antagonism stemming from race, slavery and abolition, citing the summary execution of blacks believed to be plotting rebellion; the wanton killing of a mulatto; and attacks on law-abiding abolitionists by violent mobs, leading to the death of Elijah Lovejoy, editor of an antislavery paper. These events violated the rule of law that should be every citizen’s “political religion.”17 As he will have been aware, such mob actions were orchestrated by self-described “men of property and standing,” the supposedly patriotic allies of Southern politicians—at this point all parties were cross-sectional in their support. The rioters portrayed the Abolitionists as the pawns of a foreign—specifically British—plot against America.18 Here were disturbing signs that the republic’s institutions were infected by an uncontrollable and deep-seated malady. Lincoln feared for a future in which some aspiring tyrant would establish his personal rule “at the expense of emancipating slaves or enslaving free men.”19 The lawless threat might come either from slaveholders or from abolitionists.
Lincoln’s stress on the republic of laws and due process was accompanied by a defense of the need for a National Bank to collect and disburse the public revenues and by his consequent hostility to Van Buren’s proposal that revenues should instead be entrusted to local “sub-treasuries.” In a major speech he gave as a member of the Illinois state legislature Lincoln attacked this scheme. In Lincoln’s view the Bank, run as a privately-owned public corporation, had two decisive advantages. Firstly, it put the money deposited with it to work, earning interest and furnishing credit, where the unspent revenue would simply rust away in the network of sub-treasury lock boxes. Secondly the National Bank better served align the “duty” and the “interest” of Bank officials than would a dispersed chain of sub-treasuries. As a permanent corporation the Bank knew that it would only continue to be entrusted with the public revenues if it proved a faithful custodian. The shifting personnel of a scattered network of sub-treasury officials in each state would be far more vulnerable to individual frailty or fecklessness (leading to the wry comment: “it may not be improper here to add, that Judas carried the bag, was the Sub-Treasurer of the Savior and his disciples”20). Already at this comparatively early period, Lincoln saw corporate capital and credit as a fructifying force, idealizing corporate ownership and distrusting public initiatives in the realm of finance.
When elected to the House of Representatives in Washington, Lincoln’s first act (in January 1848) was to denounce the victorious and almost concluded war with Mexico as unnecessary, unconstitutional, and the result of presidential mendacity and aggression.21 While not pinning the blame for the war on slavery, as some did, and while accepting its result as a fait accompli, Lincoln backed David Wilmot’s motion, which stipulated that slavery should be entirely excluded from any newly acquired land. Slavery had been abolished in Mexico in 1829, during the administration of Vicente Guerrero, and there was a real prospect that the self-proclaimed champions of “Anglo-Saxon freedom” would reestablish slavery in lands where it had already been eliminated.22
In the course of his speech attacking the way the Mexican war had been launched, Lincoln delivered the following judgment:
Any people anywhere being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right—a right which, we hope and believe, is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such a people that can, may revolutionize, and make their own so much of the territory as they inhabit. More than this, a majority of any portion of such a people may revolutionize, putting down a minority, intermingled with or near about them, who may oppose their movements. Such a minority was precisely the case of the Tories in our own Revolution. It is a quality of revolutions not to go by old lines, or old laws.23
This blunt and brusque version of the “self-determination” principle was offered as the right way to look at Mexico’s “revolution” against Spain and Texas’s “revolution” against Mexico. Its terms might easily endorse “settler sovereignty,” but Lincoln was later to enter a crucial caveat on this point (to be considered below).
Lincoln set out his views on slavery in a series of major speeches that defined him as a politician. These included one in Peoria in 1854 that dwelled on the implications of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and offered a sketch of the republic’s successive attempts to compromise over slavery; the “House Divided” speech in 1858, delivered to a Republican convention; several speeches he gave as a Republican senatorial candidate in debate with Stephen Douglas (including one devoted to the Dred Scott ruling); and a speech at the Cooper Union in New York, in 1860. Put together, they make a weighty tome, and no other Republican leader devoted such sustained attention to the topic. The speeches often lasted two or three hours, were each heard by audiences of several thousand, and were reprinted verbatim in sympathetic newspapers. Southern leaders and opinion formers became familiar with their contents. Characteristically, they are quite unrelenting about the wrongs of slavery, but also moderate in their conclusions. Once he became a presidential candidate, Lincoln reiterated his respect for the compromises embodied in the US Constitution and the compromise acts of 1820 and 1850, but he opposed any further concessions. He favored an end to slavery in the Federal district in Washington because such a move was not excluded by those agreements. Likewise he opposes the Dred Scott ruling allowing slaves to be brought into Federal territory. But he was prepared to recognize and implement established law, including that relating to fugitives. For the long term Lincoln believed that means should be found gradually to emancipate the slaves, for example by freeing the children born to slave mothers once the children reached the age of 25, or some other alternative that gave compensation to their owners and allowed the former slaves to be settled in Africa. Abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison had long attacked the latter idea. It was associated with Whig slaveholders, notably Henry Clay, a man much admired by Lincoln, who supported what was known as the colonization of African Americans, treating them as aliens in the land where most of them had been born and inviting them to “return” to the land of their ancestors.
Lincoln’s support for colonization separated him from the main currents of abolitionism, but his concern for the integrity of the Federal state, his early disapproval of the lawlessness of the defenders of slavery, and his distaste for the slaveholders’ demand for special treatment all signal themes that characterized the Republican Party of the 1850s. Unlike the Radicals, he did not fulminate against the “slave power,” but he did attack the exorbitant representation of Southern white men in the House of Representatives and electoral college, which came about because the slave population of each state was counted when apportioning delegates, with each slave deemed equivalent to three-fifths of a free man. He sought a new and more demanding ideal of the nation and the republic. Whereas antebellum US national feeling characteristically deferred to the slaveholders, the Republicans sponsored a new vision of the nation that challenged the South’s claim to special consideration. In the Republican view, if slaves could be brought into Federal territories then the incoming slaveholders would be able to grab the best land and develop it more rapidly than free farmers. The Republicans also favored public improvements and free education. The Republican vision had great appeal in the regions characterized by cheap and rapid transportation, the growth of manufacturing, and the spread of the “market revolution.”24 This surge of growth spread wealth quite broadly among farmers, artisans, and small businessmen, in contrast to the South, where the cotton boom enriched a narrower circle of slave owners and their hangers-on.25 Lincoln believed that the broad prosperity of the North and the Northwest was rooted in its free labor system, a view shared by Marx. Republican pride in the progress of the free states repelled the Southern mainstream. Lincoln won 40 percent of the popular vote in 1860, but all of these votes came from the free states.
That Lincoln detested slavery was clear from his speeches and writings, and it is not surprising that he sketched half a dozen different key arguments on the topic in his notebooks.26 He was also willing to talk about complex and gradual schemes of compensated emancipation. But as a national leader, what he offered was not an attack on slavery but implacable resistance to its territorial expansion. The puzzle here can only be resolved by identifying what else it was about his outlook and deepest convictions that restrained his evidently sincere opposition to slavery. The answer is probably his profound attachment to the Constitution and his awareness that within that Constitution it would be extraordinarily difficult to change the historic compromise the document represented between North and South, slavery and freedom. Lincoln’s patriotism was even stronger than his dislike of slavery and obliged him, he believed, to accommodate to the latter out of due regard for a nation established by, and catering to, Southern slaveholders.
The Republican Party was founded to defend the rights of “free labor” and to fight for a ban on slavery in Federal territories. The Republicans also adopted the “agrarian” stakeholder view, a semisocialist idea that any man wishing to become a farmer should be given land for a homestead in the Federal territories, a proposal that was to be translated into legislation in 1862. Lincoln had worked hard, educated himself, and become a prominent attorney and political figure. This background reinforced his belief that the free labor system allowed a man to make his way in the world. The Republicans also supported a system of public education for all and the foundation of a chain of “land grant” colleges, namely colleges endowed with revenue from the sale of public land. Lincoln believed that the pacts that had made the United States must be respected, but he also held that in the long run the nation could not remain half slave and half free.
Marx did not directly compare the claims of North and South as competing nationalisms. Instead he questioned whether the South was a nation, writing, “ ‘The South,’ however, is neither a territory strictly detached from the North geographically, nor a moral unity. It is not a country at all, but a battle slogan.” Many who were much closer to the situation than Marx entered the same judgment in the years before 1861, yet soon had to acknowledge that the Confederacy did rapidly acquire many of the ideological trappings of a nation, complete with a claimed “moral unity” based on exaltation of the racial conceits and values of a slave society and of the conviction that white Southerners were the true Americans. Their values were a strange mixture of traditional patriotism and paternalism and—for whites alone—libertarianism. Hundreds of thousands of white Southerners who owned no slaves nevertheless fought and died for the rebellion, seeing the Confederacy as the embodiment of their racial privileges and rural civilization. The rebels were fighting for a cause that embodied a way of life, one that embraced minimal taxation and extensive “states’ rights.” The mass of slaveless whites not only had the vote but also enjoyed the “freedom of the range,” which is to say that they could graze their animals on vast tracts of public land and on uncultivated private land. They also enjoyed significant hunting rights. Such privileges allowed them to live, as they put it, “high on the hog.” Engels pointed out to Marx that the secession movement had backing from the generality of whites in the more developed and populous parts of the South.27
Southern nationalism itself responded to, and stimulated, Unionist or Yankee nationalism.28 Whereas patriotism was about the past, the new nationalist idea, a reflection of modernity, was about the future. Even at a time when truly industrial methods only affected a few branches of society, “print capitalism” and the “market revolution” were already transforming public space and time. The new steam presses poured out a torrent of newspapers, magazines, and novels, all of them summoning up rival “imagined communities.”29 Rail and cable further accelerated the dynamics of agreement and contradiction. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared first as serial installments in a newspaper, then as a book. It moved the Northern reader to tears, but seemed a grotesque libel to Southerners. The North’s imagined community could not embrace the slaveholder, let alone the degraded slave traders, and the South’s drew the line at the abolitionist and the radical newspaper editor. That incompatible national imaginings played a part in precipitating the conflict by no means takes away from the underlying discrepancy between the two social formations.
That the Civil War was an “irrepressible conflict,” that its roots lay in the different labor regimes of the two sections, and that these differences crystallized in opposing images of the good society are not novel propositions. Different versions of them have been entertained by, among many others, such notable historians as David Potter, Don Fehrenbacker, Eric Foner, Eugene Genovese, John Ashworth and Bruce Levine.30 The idea that rival nationalisms played their part is an extension of such views, but Daniel Crofts points to the difficulty of pinpointing the exact moment of their birth:
It is tempting to project back onto the prewar months the fiercely aroused nationalisms that appeared in mid-April [1861]. To do so would not be entirely in error, but it invites distortion. The irreconcilably antagonistic North and South described by historians such as Foner and Genovese were much easier to detect after April 15. Then and only then could Northerners start to think in terms of a conflict urged on behalf of “the general interests of self-government” and the hopes of humanity and the interests of freedom among all peoples and for ages to come.31
But this account gives too much to Unionist rhetoric. The Union’s war aim was quite simply the preservation of the Union, and the frustration of “the interests of self-government” as understood by the majority of Southern whites. Both nationalisms had a markedly expansive character, but the Union’s was purely continental at this stage, whereas the Confederacy’s looked toward South America (notably to Cuba) as well as to the west. The clash was thus one of rival empires as well as competing nations.
It was the election of Abraham Lincoln that precipitated Secession. Lincoln’s positions on slavery, as we have seen, were moderate—he took his stand only against any expansion of slavery, as he carefully explained in his exchanges with Stephen Douglas in the 1850s. But he represented a dangerous figure for Southern slaveholders nonetheless, because he attacked slavery as a wrong and because he concentrated on this issue to the virtual exclusion of any other. If Marx was right about the inherently expansionist character of Southern slavery, then Lincoln’s modest but firm stance against it was enough to provoke them to the desperate expedient of secession. As I have already noted, there was no real space constraint—and if there had been, Kansas was not the right place for cotton plantations—but Lincoln’s presidency rankled for other reasons.
The vehement speeches that defined Lincoln’s emergence as a Republican challenger were insulting as well as alarming to Southern ears. He was not more radical than other Republicans in his conclusions—rather the reverse—but he was more consistent and unwavering in his focus, and that was very unsettling.32 How could his appointees be trusted? How would he and they respond to any future John Brown–style adventure? Many leading Southerners, though exercised by such dangers, nevertheless still at first opposed secession (Alexander Stephens, the future Confederate vice president, being a case in point), on the grounds that it was fraught with even worse danger—revolutions invariably destroy those who start them. But the more moderate Southerners were at the mercy of the more extreme. The departure of one slave state, let alone five or more, would decisively weaken the remaining Southern states’ position in Washington. Such a conclusion belongs to the realm of rational calculation, but at a certain point, the clash of two incompatible nationalisms—and the sense of rightfulness and justification they entail—is needed to explain the willingness to engage in a life-and-death struggle.
Marx had scorn for national one-sidedness and self-satisfaction, but he did see a sequence of national revolutions as necessary to the war against aristocracy and monarchy. He may not have been fully aware of the extent to which he saw both German nationalism and North American nationalism as progressive forces. In 1861 his options stemmed from a conviction that the Civil War had a good prospect of destroying the world’s major bastion of chattel slavery and racial oppression. But he was also aware that ideas produced by the German national revolution were helping to redefine the Union.
This brings us to the too often neglected contribution of the German Americans. Bruce Levine’s study The Spirit of 1848 shows the transformative impact of the huge German immigration around the midcentury.33 At this time the level of immigration was rising to new heights, and Germans comprised between a third and a half of all newcomers. In the single year 1853, over a quarter of a million German immigrants arrived. The German Americans soon became naturalized and formed an important pool of votes for those who knew how to woo them. To begin with, Democratic rhetoric had some impact on them, but by the mid-1850s many German Americans were attracted to the Republicans, and they in turn helped to make Republicanism and the antislavery position more broadly attractive.
Protestant evangelicalism strongly influenced US abolitionism. The evangelical repudiation of slavery was very welcome, but eventually too close an association between the two served to limit antislavery’s base. The evangelicals twinned antislavery with temperance and Protestantism, and this diminished the appeal of abolitionism in the eyes of many Catholics and not a few freethinkers. Already in the 1830s William Lloyd Garrison and William Channing were seeking to root the antislavery critique in more rationalist varieties of Protestant Christianity. There was also a current of radical English immigration that inclined to antislavery and the secular politics of Tom Paine.34 But the large-scale German influx greatly strengthened the secular culture of antislavery. With their breweries, beer gardens, musical concerts, and turnverein (exercise clubs), the German radicals furnished a strong secular current in the antislavery movement, and even the German Protestants had concerns which differentiated them from the US Methodists and Baptists.
The temperance cause loomed large for evangelicals but had no charm for German and Nordic immigrants. The more radical German Americans supported women’s rights and female suffrage; Mathilda Anneke published a German-language women’s paper. Margarete Schurz was influential in the introduction of public kindergartens. Sometimes Marx’s German American followers are portrayed as deferring to the prejudices of white, male trade unionists, but this is unfair. When Joseph Wedemeyer, Marx’s longtime friend and comrade, helped to found the American Workers League (Amerikanische Arbeitersbund) in Chicago in 1853, its founding statement of principles declared that “all workers who live in the United States without distinction of occupation, language, color, or sex can become members.”35 Today such a formula sounds entirely conventional, but in 1853 it was very fresh. Indeed, this may have been the first occasion on which a workers’ organization adopted it. The revolutionary German Americans did not invent this stance all by themselves, but they did readily adopt a critique of racial and gender exclusion pioneered by radical abolitionists. Like other exiles, the German Americans quarreled with one another, some inclining to the Republicans and others opting for purely labororiented groups, and Marx’s followers shared this division. Many saw the founding of a labor party as the long-term goal, but even some of those closest to Marx, like Wedemeyer, also saw a tactical need to strengthen the Republicans and attack the slave power. Indeed, August Nimtz concludes that “the Marx party, specifically through Wedemeyer…played an important role in winning the German émigré community to the Republican cause.”36
The mass of German Americans were naturally hostile to the nativist chauvinism of the Know Nothings (or American Party). The Republican Party only emerged as the dominant force in the North in the 1850s by defeating the Know Nothings and repudiating its own nativist temptation. While some Republican leaders flirted with nativist prejudice, the party itself attacked—even demonized—“the Slave Power” and not the immigrants. The presence of hundreds of thousands of German American voters helped to ensure this orientation.37
As the Civil War unfolded, German Americans and their overseas friends furnished vital support to the Northern cause. At the outbreak of the war, a German American militia in St. Louis played a key role in preventing Missouri’s governor from delivering the state—and the city’s huge arsenal—into Confederate hands. Wedemeyer became a colonel, served as a staff officer in St. Louis for General John Frémont, and was put in charge of the city’s defenses. Eventually 200,000 Germans fought for the Union, with 36,000 fighting in German-speaking units. Carl Schurz became a major general, and later a senator. Franz Sigel and Alexander Schimmelfennig became generals. Two other members of the Communist League who also became Unionist officers were August Willich and Fritz Anneke. Indeed, the correspondence of Marx and Engels is studded with references to the military progress of these friends and acquaintances. The imperative to rally against the “Slave Power” also alleviated the sometimes bitter differences of émigré politics.
The military resources represented by the wider German-American enrollment were very significant, but the same could be said of the Irish American contingents, which grew to be just as large. The German Americans brought with them an openness to the antislavery idea that was to promote a new sense of the character of the war and the way it should be fought. Reviewing a recent collection of hundreds of letters written by German American volunteers, Kenneth Barkin writes: “the major reason for volunteering [for the Union army] was to bring slavery to an end.”38 This new research very much vindicates Levine’s argument in The Spirit of 1848.
The veterans of 1848 saw themselves as social revolutionaries but also as exponents of a national idea and movement. Whatever their ambivalence—and it was considerable—they were aware of the lessons of the Napoleonic epoch and of the nationalist renewal that it had provoked in Germany. One of the most striking expressions of this movement had been the doctrines of Carl von Clausewitz—his contention that war was the continuation of politics by other means, his attention to moral factors, and his insistence on the priority of destroying the enemy’s social basis rather than capturing territory or capital cities. Clausewitz’s magnum opus, On War, had been published in 1832, and its ideas had currency among the 1848 veterans. Unionist military strategy at first ignored the Clausewitzian imperatives and instead preferred the doctrine of Antoine Jomini, a Swiss military theorist who had sympathized with the French Revolution.39 With few exceptions, Northern commanders were determined to avoid resorting to revolutionary measures, fearing that this would lead to race war. Instead, they relied implicitly on a strategy of blockade and cordons to exhaust the Confederacy and on the capture of Richmond (a strategy that Marx questioned in his article for the March 27, 1862, issue of Die Presse).
At a different level, Francis Lieber, a teacher at Columbia College and a German American of pre-1848 vintage, helped to shape the Union response to the war. The War Department looked to him when devising its rules of military conduct. Lieber played an important role in the Loyal Publication Society. He had been a strong exponent of the need for a party system in the antebellum period, but thought a new approach was needed once fighting began. His pamphlet No Party Now But All for Our Country stressed the wartime need to suppress party conflict and devote all energies to defeating the rebellion. His program for a more thoroughgoing and single-minded mobilization for the war effort was welcomed by the Union Leagues.40
The German American mobilization for the Union was disinterested in that it did not ask for anything for itself in return for its support, though it did sometimes urge recognition for the workingman.41 (Northern Protestant churches gave strong support to the Union, but some of their leaders urged that the time had come for Protestantism to be recognized as the country’s official religion.)42
The national imagination pitted producers against parasites, or plain folk against snobs. Both Marx and Lincoln used a class-like language in evaluating the conflict. Marx stressed that secession was, above all, the work of aristocratic slaveholders, implicitly absolving the plain folk of the South from responsibility. There were clear majorities for secession in the representatives’ gatherings that agreed to the setting up of the Confederacy, with the issue of secession decided by special conventions in ten cases and by the legislature in one other. Scrutiny of these decisions—and the contrary decisions taken by one special convention and three legislatures—shows that the participants were nearly all slaveholders and considerably better off than the average free citizen (only about a third of the heads of Southern households owned slaves). The supporters of immediate secession were considerably richer than those who were lukewarm or opposed. Put another way, those with more slaves—the main form of wealth—were keenest on secession.43
Lincoln claimed to find a similar pattern in Washington in the first days of the war as many deserted their posts:
It is worthy of note that while in this the government’s hour of trial large numbers of those in the Army and Navy, who have been favored with offices, [have] proved false to the hand that had pampered them, not one common soldier, or common sailor, is known to have deserted his flag. The most important fact of all is the unanimous firmness of the common soldiers and common sailors…This is the patriotic instinct of the plain people. They understand, without an argument, that destroying the government which was made by Washington means no good to them.44
Though certainly invoking class-like qualities, at the same time Lincoln is certainly appealing to national sentiment, just as on the Confederate side there was also, very emphatically, an appeal to the spirit of George Washington (and Thomas Jefferson) and a claim that the common (white) folk were the heart of the nation and that it was they who filled the fighting ranks of the rebel army. (This was true, though by the end of the extraordinarily grueling conflict, Southern desertion rates were to be higher.)
Lincoln was to spell out an important qualification to the sweeping endorsement of the right of revolution in his Mexican War speech, one that had a direct bearing on the South’s right to self-determination. He declared: “The doctrine of self-government is right—absolutely and eternally right—but it has no just application, as here attempted. Or perhaps I should rather say that whether it has such just application depends upon whether a negro is not or is a man. If he is not a man, why in that case, he who is a man may, as a matter of self-government, do just as he pleases with him. But if the negro is a man, is it not to that extent a total destruction of self-government to say that he, too, shall not govern himself? When the white man governs himself that is self-government, but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government—that is despotism. If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that ‘all men are created equal’ and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.”45
Lincoln uttered these words in Peoria in 1854 responding to the debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the dispute over the right of communities in the Federal territories to establish themselves as newly formed states, with or without slaves. The principle outlined in the above passage ruled out what Marx called “settler sovereignty.” However attractive and compelling Lincoln’s argument might be, it could only be urged in favor of Unionist resistance to secession if the Union had itself repudiated slavery. But Lincoln and the majority of Republicans expressly condoned the survival of slavery in the Union and only opposed its extension to the Federal territories.
Once elected, Lincoln’s main concern was to court the slaveholding border states and make sure as few of them as possible backed the rebellion. His success in this became the source of his caution in moving against slavery. Amending the Constitution in order to outlaw slavery was anyway out of the question—it would have needed large qualified majorities to pass in Congress and be endorsed by the states. Lincoln also held that the wrong of slavery was a national and not personal affair, and therefore slaveholders should be compensated for their loss of property. Given that the slaves of the South were worth more than all the machines, factories, wharves, railroads, and farm buildings of the North put together, any program of emancipation was going to be very gradual. In his first inaugural address Lincoln declares that the only major difference between the sections was with reference not to slavery as such but to its expansion.
Many US historians treat the Northern decision to go to war in a fatalistic way, echoing Lincoln’s own later phrase: “And the war came.”46 The Unionist cause—US or American nationalism—is simply taken for granted as an absolute value needing no further explanation or justification. However, Sean Wilentz adopts a bolder line, taking his cue from the Lincoln’s first inaugural address:
Above and beyond the slavery issue, Lincoln unflinchingly defended certain basic ideals of freedom and democratic self-government, which he asserted he had been elected to vindicate. There was, he said, a single “substantial dispute” in the sectional crisis: “one section of our country believes that slavery is right and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended.” There could be no doubt about where Lincoln stood, and where his administration would stand, on that fundamental moral question.47
But Lincoln’s formula was deliberately circumscribed to allow agreement to disagree, and not to challenge slavery as such. If slavery really was a moral outrage—and if it disqualified sovereign right, as Lincoln himself had declared in Peoria in 1854—then he should have said that slavery was “wrong and ought to be abolished.” In the absence of any action against slavery—even something very gradual like a “Free Womb” law—the war policy of the Union, measured against Lincoln’s own statements, suffered a yawning legitimacy deficit. As to whether there could be doubt about where Lincoln stood, it is a simple fact that many of his contemporaries, especially the Radicals and abolitionists, did indeed doubt him and his administration. Marx, for his part, was aware of the problem, and troubled by it, but prepared to place a wager that the North would be forced to take revolutionary antislavery measures.
During the secession crisis Lincoln refused to compromise an iota of his stand against any expansion of slavery, something that could not be said of other Republican leaders once thought to be more radical than Lincoln (notably Seward). But he was prepared indefinitely to extend or perpetuate the compromise that he had made. He supported a proposed new amendment—it would have been the Thirteenth—to declare the future of slavery in the various states to be wholly the concern of those states forevermore, and no business of the Federal authorities. In February and March the proposed amendment received the necessary qualified majority in Congress and the approval of several Northern states, as well as Lincoln’s approval. But it was then overtaken by the logic of secession and the firing on Fort Sumter.48
If the new president could not come out more clearly against slavery, then he could not challenge the South’s “right to revolution.” Lincoln declared himself satisfied that the Union cause and his oath of office were fully self-sufficient and amply justified resistance to rebellion. To underline that secession was rebellion, he waited until a Federal installation had been attacked before ordering military action. While there was certainly room for doubt concerning Lincoln’s exact position on slavery, it is also very possible that he was himself aware that the Union cause with slavery was very much weaker that it would be without slavery. The gains of an emancipation policy were later explained in terms of weakening the Confederate economy or strengthening the Union Army, but, important as these considerations were, there was another just as important: the imperative to remedy the North’s legitimacy deficit, for the sake of the morale of the Union’s keenest supporters. At some level Lincoln was probably aware of this, but in 1861 he was beset by an immediate and elemental challenge to which he had to respond. In his statement concerning the right to revolution there was a half-stated implication that such a right only existed where it was realistic. For a while opposition to secession could be offered in terms of realpolitik—the South was too weak to sustain it and its rebellion was destroying international respect for the republic and what it stood for.
William Seward, shortly to become Lincoln’s secretary of state, broadly hinted at the international situation and the damage that secession would do to the projection of US power. Speaking in the Senate in January 1861 he declared:
The American man-of-war is a noble spectacle. I have seen it enter an ancient port in the Mediterranean. All the world wondered at it and talked about it. Salvos of artillery, from forts and shipping in the harbor, saluted its flag. Princes and princesses and merchants paid it homage, and all the people blessed it as a harbinger of hope for their own ultimate freedom…I imagine now the same noble vessel entering the same haven. The flag of thirty-three stars and thirteen stripes has been drawn down, and in its place a signal is run up, which flaunts the device of a lone star or a palmetto tree. Men ask, “Who is the stranger that thus steals into our waters?” The answer, contemptuously given, is: “She comes from one of the obscure republics of North America. Let her pass on.”49
The secession of a limited number of rural states would, in this view, drastically diminish US power. It would hand over control of the Mississippi to the rebels and put in question free access to Southern markets. Even worse, it would spell the end of the “empire of liberty,” harming both sections, since, separated, they would no longer count. Seward was speaking in the Senate and addressing his remarks as much to moderate Southerners, who could be deterred from joining the secession movement, as to Northerners. All concerned were aware that the European powers were already jostling to take advantage of Washington’s distraction. (A French military expedition had landed in Mexico and was about to install a puppet regime, that of the “Emperor Maximilian.”) If there had been a sectional compromise, and some sort of nominal union had been salvaged, we can be pretty sure that it would have been sealed by territorial expansion—most likely the seizure of Cuba.
The Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, sought to play down the defense of slavery as the motive for the conflict and instead dwelt on the Northern threat to states’ rights and on the affronts that had been offered to Southern honor. He stressed continuity between the ideals of the American Revolution and their latter-day embodiment in the Confederacy. The Confederate Constitution was closely modeled on that of 1787. Davis’s vice president, Alexander Stephens, was not so careful—he described slavery as the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy. The nature of the conflict itself would steadily highlight Southern dependence on slavery. The slaveholders’ aversion to taxation led the Confederate authorities to try to finance the war simply by printing money, with paralyzing consequences.
Of course dissidents in the North claimed that Lincoln rode roughshod over republican liberties. But this was in the service of a Unionist nationalism to which many Democrats as well as Republicans also subscribed. As the conflict proceeded, the salience of slavery in Southern society itself became of decisive importance, creating severe problems for the Confederacy and becoming a target of Unionist strategy. The Confederacy’s very belated attempt to free a few hundred slaves and enroll them in a colored regiment came much too late to have any impact and still rested on a racial compact. But implicitly it conceded that the South had built on a faulty foundation.50
Let us return to the sources of the conflict and the nature of the Republican threat. The Civil War crisis was, of course, precipitated by the growth of the Republican party and the election of a Republican president. Lincoln would be able to make a host of appointments, including many in the Southern states themselves. He would be able to veto legislation and give orders to the executive apparatus. Moreover, civil society in the North had become tolerant of provocations escalating from Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its more militant sequel (Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, 1856) to John Brown’s attack on Harper’s Ferry. Brown was an out-and-out revolutionary yet broad sections of Northern opinion were inclined to excuse—or even endorse—his bloody escapades. Southern leaders abominated religious abolitionism, but they were even more alarmed at the growth of a secular Republican politics that could win Northern majorities and use these to dominate the state. Southern fear of Republicanism and radical abolitionism imbued secession with a pre-emptive counter-revolutionary purpose and vocation, something easily perceived by Marx. Yet while the South’s counter-revolution speedily carved out a new state, the Northern revolution proved weak and laggard.
Lincoln had gone to great lengths to promote the widest possible alliance in defense of the Union, accommodating moderates and making concessions to slaveholders in the border states. But by the summer of 1862, lack of progress, heavy casualties, and the cautious and defensive conduct of the war were inspiring mounting criticism and a greater willingness to listen to abolitionists and Radical Republicans, who argued for a bolder strategy, both militarily and politically.
The more Marx learned about militant abolitionism, the more impressed he became. In an article for Die Presse of August 9, 1862, he wrote of the growing attention paid in the North to Abolitionist orators, and in particular to Wendell Philips, who “for thirty years… has without intermission and at the risk of his life proclaimed the emancipation of the slaves as his battle cry.” He paraphrases at length a speech by Phillips “of the highest importance” in which the veteran abolitionist indicts Lincoln’s conservative and cowardly policy:
The government [of Lincoln] fights for the maintenance of slavery and therefore it fights in vain … He [Lincoln] waits … for the nation to take him in hand and sweep away slavery through him … If the war is continued in this fashion it is a useless squandering of blood and gold … Dissolve this Union in God’s name and put another in its place, on the cornerstone of which is written: “Political equality for all the citizens in the world” … Let us hope that the war lasts long enough to transform us into men, and then we shall quickly triumph. God has put the thunderbolt of emancipation into our hands in order to crush the rebellion.51
Lincoln’s willingness to adopt an emancipation policy was somewhat greater than his abolitionist and Republican critics allowed. Even compensated emancipation was still keenly opposed by the loyal border states, and by many Democrats who declared they would fight for the Union but not for the Negro. Lincoln believed that maintenance of the broadest Unionist coalition was essential to victory. He also greatly preferred an emancipation accompanied by compensation, and allowing due process to the property-holders. Democrats and moderate Republicans long hoped to persuade the Confederacy to come to terms, and to this end, they opposed measures that would irrevocably alienate the South. But while abolitionists and radical Republicans railed against Lincoln’s studied moderation, it was the actions of a few thousand slave rebels outside the political system—the “contrabands”—which helped the Radicals in Washington eventually to win the argument.
The arrival of fugitive slaves in Union encampments surrounding the Confederacy made slavery and its role in the conflict impossible to ignore. Some Union commanders tried to return the fugitives to their masters. Others found this a perverse and impractical response. General Benjamin Butler—stationed in Virginia—became the first Union commander to obtain Washington’s backing for a policy of refusing to return escaping slaves; instead, he put them to work as civilian auxiliaries. The legal term contraband was adopted to explain and justify this practice, though the term awkwardly implied that the (ex)-slaves were confiscated rebel property. A Confiscation Act passed by Congress and “reluctantly” endorsed by the president declared that slaves working for the rebel forces would be subject to confiscation and would be put to good use as support workers by the Union Army. In August, General Frémont, commanding in Missouri, declared martial law and announced that rebels were liable to summary execution and that their slaves were free. There was an outcry; Frémont refused to modify his order and was dismissed.
Lincoln allowed the pragmatic use of “contrabands” but not advocacy of an emancipationist military policy. Frémont had acted impulsively and in hope of political advancement. But the deeds and words of two field commanders—David Hunter in South Carolina and John Phelps in Louisiana—showed that military emancipation had an operational logic. General Phelps, commanding a Vermont regiment, urged, “The government should abolish slavery as the French destroyed the ancien régime.”52 His men enrolled all slaves who presented themselves, and forbade planters to use the whip. Similar proposals came from General Hunter, who was advancing along the South Carolina coast and islands. Both men would be removed from their commands. General Butler, who had welcomed the contrabands, at first declined to form black regiments, but by mid-1862 he had dropped his opposition. (Refusing to accept colored soldiers in Louisiana was particularly absurd, as they had always existed in this state and had even been recognized by the Confederacy.) Thanks to his political connections, Butler managed to recruit black units without getting immediately dismissed. Meanwhile the growing number of “contrabands” showed the folly of making no open attempt to deprive the rebels of slave labor and of not urging Union commanders to enroll as many former slaves as possible by offering them their freedom.53
By the summer of 1862 the Union’s failure to make military progress led many to listen to the abolitionists and radical Republicans who were making the case for an immediate emancipation policy. Speaking tours by Wendell Phillips, Anne Dickinson, and Frederick Douglass attracted huge and enthusiastic crowds. Lincoln became increasingly eager to break what seemed like a military stalemate. The Confederacy was able to send more white soldiers to the front because slaves were still toiling to produce the supplies needed by the Confederate armies. The Confederates also used slaves in their military camps to carry out service and support roles. A second Confiscation Act in July allowed Union commanders to commandeer rebel property, and put “contrabands” to work, with fewer formalities. But in Lincoln’s view neither Congress nor the military had the authority to determine the future fate of the “contrabands” who, in law, had become the property of the state, not free citizens.
The president still worried about the reaction of the border states—their representatives in Congress ensured that—but by June 1862 their key centers were securely held by Union troops. More worrying was the military impasse and a discouraging international reaction, with the British considering diplomatic recognition of the rebels. Lincoln believed that his “war powers” as president and commander-in-chief fully entitled him to free the slaves of rebels and to arm freedmen if he deemed it a military necessity. But he had to frame his use of these powers in such a way as to minimize the risk of a challenge from Congress or the Supreme Court (where there was still a Democratic majority). He also felt the need to justify emancipation in such a way as to avoid giving the impression that he wanted slaves to slaughter their masters and mistresses in their beds. Cabinet colleagues urged him to wait until there was good news, so that the emancipation would not seem like an act of desperation. In September 1862, following the battle of Antietam, he issued the preliminary proclamation, giving the rebels time to abandon the insurrection, failing which the proclamation would come into force on January 1, 1863.
Marx and Engels had from the outset insisted on the war’s antislavery logic, but the first eighteen months of the conflict tested their conviction. Engels was particularly distressed by the passivity and defensiveness of the Union commanders, and beyond that what he called “the slackness and obtuseness” that appeared throughout the North, the lack of popular zeal for the republic, contrasting it with the daring and energy of the rebels. On August 7, 1862 Marx urged his friend not to be overinfluenced by the “military aspect” of matters. On October 29, following the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation, Marx was powerfully reassured. He wrote:
The fury with which the Southerners have received Lincoln’s [Emancipation] Acts proves their importance. All Lincoln’s Acts appear like the pettifogging conditions which one lawyer puts to his opposing lawyer. But this does not alter their historic content. Indeed it amuses me when I compare them with the drapery in which the Frenchman envelops even the most unimportant point.54
Thereafter Marx and Engels had growing confidence in Lincoln, even if they continued to complain about the quality of the Union’s military leadership and the need for a thoroughgoing shake-up in the republic’s ruling institutions.
The Emancipation Proclamation brought new legitimacy and—at least in principle—new opportunities to deepen the struggle. However, it did not entirely sever the Union from support of slavery. Its terms respected the slave property rights of loyal slaveholders in the border states and in areas occupied by the Union Army. Emancipation applied to the roughly three million slaves beyond Union control, since they were the property of slaveholders still in rebellion. These freed people were enjoined “to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defense” and to be willing to work at “reasonable wages.” The Proclamation includes a clause permitting freedmen to be enrolled for garrison duty. The Proclamation went further than the Confiscation Acts in allowing former slaves to be organized in fighting units though for some time many were kept in menial support roles. Those who were enlisted as soldiers were placed under white officers and, to begin with, given a lower rate of pay. Eventually the thirst for manpower in a hugely destructive war led to the enrollment of 180,000 African Americans in the Union Army and over 10,000 in the Navy. (By the end of the conflict, however, only about a hundred African Americans had been commissioned as officers of the colored units, most of these being chaplains or doctors). Many “contrabands” did not become soldiers but were put to work digging trenches or graves, or in other support roles. Most Union commanders remained cautious in their use of black troops and their appeals to the black population, shunning the sort of autonomous mobilization thought entirely appropriate for German American or Irish American troops.
The Emancipation policy exacerbated Confederate problems in areas near the fighting, but it remained unclear whether the proclamation’s message was reaching much further or whether the slaves could respond even if it was. Militia, patrols, and military police roamed the Southern countryside looking for slave fugitives and Confederate deserters. The number of slave fugitives grew to as many as 400,000 or 500,000 by the end of the war, a total that includes many who fled their masters in Kentucky, the border states, and the other Union-occupied areas that had been excluded from the Emancipation Proclamation. Although there are some signs of slave desertion or noncooperation in rebel-held areas, the patrols, militia, and military police were still a strong deterrent for those deep in Confederate territory, and only those close to the front could escape. A few could hide out in swamps and forests, but it was Union advances—from Vicksburg in July 1863 to Atlanta in September 1864—that eventually made it possible for slaves to desert the plantations en masse. This having been said, the war placed the slave order under great strain, with many white men of military age away and their wives managing as best they could. Anxious about their economic fate, planters ordered cotton to be grown and neglected the cultivation of foodstuffs. The war still made for very uneasy relations between slaves and overseers or mistresses. Peter Kolchin writes:
Slaves took advantage of wartime disruption in numerous ways: they obeyed orders with less alacrity, they challenged weakened authority more readily, they followed the progress of Yankee forces and aided that progress in a variety of ways, from providing valuable military intelligence to enlisting in the Union army, and they fled in increasing numbers, especially when Federal troops neared. Despite heightened fears on the part of the white population, however, they did not engage in the sort of massive uprising that occurred in Saint Domingue during the French Revolution.55
It was more rational for Southern slaves to look to the Union army, with its new black contingents, to lead the assault on the slave order.
The emancipation policy certainly helped in Europe, rendering public opinion in Britain and France more hostile to recognizing the rebels. The fledgling labor and socialist movements were not completely united, but the most dynamic and representative currents now rallied against the Confederacy. Marx and Engels based their efforts to develop the International Workers Association on this trend. Marx believed that the willingness of Manchester workers to rally in support of the North, even though the “cotton famine” menaced their own livelihood, showed the moral superiority of a rising class.
Lincoln was dismayed when General Meade failed to aggressively follow up his victory over the rebels at Gettysburg. Instead, Meade issued a proclamation saying that the country “looks to the army for greater efforts to drive from our soil every vestige of the presence of the invader.” Lincoln was dismayed to find that he had yet another general who entirely failed to grasp the simple idea that “the whole country is our soil.”56 But above and beyond the importance of defending the whole territory of the former Union was the claim that the North was defending a new Union that would correspond more closely to the democratic nation state cherished by so many nineteenth-century nationalists.57 In his famous address at Gettysburg Lincoln underlined the “new birth of freedom” that must inform and infuse the military struggle. He used the word nation, with its warm resonance, five times, in preference to the flatter term union. Was this rebirth defined by slave emancipation or was it simply a vindication of American “principles of self-government”? Both interpretations were available. The rebirth of the national spirit was something that many immigrants as well as natives would be able to understand, because they came from lands like Germany and Ireland where the national revolution was as yet unconsummated. (The Irish Fenians strongly supported the North, helping to organize a number of units). And as revolutionary and democratic nationalists, they were less inclined to be fixated by given political forms, such as the US Constitution.
European nationalisms, with their dominant ethnicities and religions, had their own problems with reconciling rival concepts and recognizing minorities. The Republicans had shied away from crude nativism, but without embracing the radical abolitionist call for equality. The formulas expressed by Lincoln at Gettysburg did not offer citizenship to the freedmen (nor to American Indians), though Northern European Protestant immigrants somehow fit in. Dorothy Ross urged that Gettysburg marks a step back from the universalism of the Declaration of Independence:
Lincoln transforms a truth open to each man as man into something he shares by virtue of his partnership in the nation…Lincoln solved the moral conflict he faced between principles and national survival by linking human rights to national allegiance, but human rights became the subordinate partner.58
However, one could say that lofty statements of rights desperately need to be brought down to earth and that at least Lincoln was pushing in that direction (Marx inclined to this conclusion). But at the time of Gettysburg, slavery was not yet finished, and what remained of it might still be given a new lease of life in the event of the Northern peace party gaining the upper hand. The Radical concern to get some sweeping and thorough antislavery measure agreed upon—perhaps a Thirteenth Amendment—stemmed from this fear.
The leaders of the North faced more dissidence than did those of the South. The war’s heavy toll on life and the North’s failure to inflict decisive defeats on the Confederate forces led “copperhead” Democrats to hanker for peace talks. Conscription led to violent draft riots in 1863 in New York and other urban centers, with the rioters attacking blacks as the supposed cause of the conflict. But even New England abolitionists with impeccable patriot credentials could doubt whether war was the right way to impose their section’s superior civilization. The avowed abolitionist (and future chief justice) Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., as a young officer who had just experienced several terrible, bloody engagements, wrote to his orthodox Republican father:
If it is true that we represent civilization wh. is in its nature, as well as slavery, diffuse & aggressive, and if civn and progress are better things why they will conquer in the long run, we may be sure, and will stand a better chance in their proper province—peace—than in war, the brother of slavery—it is slavery’s parent, child and sustainer all at once.59
What Holmes here refers to as civilization and progress are forces that Marx would have seen as capitalism or the advance of bourgeois social relations. The sentiments expressed point to pacifism rather than anti-imperialism. The idea is that one way or another the North is going to prevail, so why not do so in a kinder, gentler way? The North’s ownership of the future is set down to the extraordinary locomotive of its capitalist economy. Marx himself probably would have agreed that the North would prevail in any case, but would have added that 300,000 slaveholders were not going to give up their human property without a continuing fight.
Holmes’s letter was written in December 1862, at a time when the consequences and character of the emancipation policy were not yet clear. Without abandoning all his misgivings, Holmes became more committed to the war over the next year or two. His enthusiasm for the Union cause was boosted by the bravery of the black soldiers in the assault of Fort Wagner, by revulsion at the racial attacks in New York, and, finally, by the growing effectiveness of the Northern war machine, which at last made all the bloodshed seem to be to some purpose after all.60 The fluctuations of Northern morale illustrated the old saw that nothing succeeds like success.
The gradual improvement in the Union’s military position, especially the taking of Vicksburg in July 1863, allowed for a greater application of the emancipation policy, as Union forces broke through into territories where there were large numbers of slaves. A static war, and one focused on set-piece engagements, meant that the slaves in the Confederate rear areas had little chance of playing any role. The majority of African Americans who enrolled, including slaves, came from areas already controlled by the Union. Indeed, many tens of thousands of them came from Kentucky, since, as the loyal slaveholders had warned, Union commanders had no way of knowing whether a black recruit was someone’s property or, if he was, what the home state or political stance of that property owner might be. Heavy troop losses—and black losses were very heavy—meant that commanders were disinclined to ask awkward questions. For their part, the new recruits saw enlistment as a good way to escape bondage, even if it was also an illegal one. (Legal slavery actually outlasted the Confederacy and was only formally ended towards the close of 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment, introduced by the Congressional Radicals, was finally endorsed by the requisite qualified majority of states.)
The advantages of an “aggressive” emancipation policy—one that aimed to penetrate Confederate lines—were logistical, as well as military in the narrow sense, as may be inferred from Grant’s account of the advantages of a war of movement in North Carolina. It would, Grant wrote, “give us possession of many Negroes who are indirectly aiding the rebellion.”61 In practice, of course, the appearance of Union columns led the slaves to act no longer as mere “possessions,” but as Union scouts, auxiliaries, and recruits eager to see the Confederacy defeated. The Emancipation policy was always premised on the view that slaves would respond to it. So long as slaves were still unarmed in the face of mounted patrols and blood-hounds, there was little they could do, but once Union troops thrust into Confederate territory the black population became an invaluable ally, helping the Union at last to crush the stubborn rebellion. There had been intimations of this in 1862 and 1863 but, partly because of excessive caution, the emancipation policy was not pursued with sufficient vigor until the last six months of the war.62
From time to time Lincoln hankered for an aggressive military policy linked to emancipationism. As early as March 1863 he wrote to Governor Andrew Johnson of Tennessee warmly endorsing the idea of Johnson taking command of a “negro military force” since “[t]he colored population is the great available, yet unavailed of, force for the restoration of the union.” He was especially supportive of this since Johnson was the governor of a slave state, and “[himself] a slaveholder.” Lincoln was convinced that “[t]he bare sight of fifty thousand armed and drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi would end the rebellion at once.”63 Wendell Phillips had pointed out in an influential lecture that Toussaint Louverture had raised precisely such a drilled black force in Saint Domingue in the 1790s and trounced the Spanish and British.64 But, unlike Andrew Johnson, Toussaint was black and a former slave.
Frederick Douglass, 1852
Lincoln later returned to the idea of an unorthodox force that might get behind enemy lines. In August 1864, he invited Frederick Douglass, the black abolitionist, to visit him to discuss whether there might be some way of bringing the emancipation message to the mass of still enslaved blacks and of encouraging them to desert the plantations. He explained, “The slaves are not coming as rapidly and numerously to us as we had hoped.”65 Lincoln seems to have envisioned a small, highly mobile force, but it is not clear whether he intended that the commander be black, nor what rules of engagement the unit might have. The president was keen to avoid any hint or imputation of race war (the Proclamation’s injunction against violence toward slaveholders was prompted by this concern). The encounter with Douglass did not come to anything. Douglass thought a propagandist column would soon be overwhelmed. The two men did not meet again for several months during which General Sherman’s capture of Atlanta and march to the sea at last brought the possibility of escape to masses of slaves on his route. Union successes also ensured Lincoln’s victory in the election of 1864, something that had seemed—to Lincoln as well as his critics and opponents—very much in doubt in the summer of that year.
It is at this point that we should consider the brief and mediated exchange between Marx and the US president. The two men were both averse to wordy rhetoric and conventional pieties, and yet both discovered an emancipatory potential in a bloody and often sordid Civil War. Lincoln did not indulge in flowery language. When it came to justifying slave emancipation, Lincoln was bound by political and constitutional considerations, the need to retain the loyalty of the border states, and the legal obligation to take only such actions as conformed to his war powers as president. So neither the Emancipation Proclamation nor the Gettysburg address avow an abolitionist objective, even if both had an implicit antislavery message for those willing to hear it.
The Radical Republicans liked the Emancipation Proclamation but saw it as incomplete. It left in bondage some 800,000 slaves owned by loyal masters—and, of course, those in rebel territory—so the final fate of slavery still remained to be decided. Radical Republicans debated different options, and in January 1864 they introduced a Thirteenth Amendment that, if approved by the necessary majorities, would end slavery and override any peace negotiations or Supreme Court rulings that might salvage slavery’s considerable remnants.66
Lincoln was aware that the Proclamation might be vulnerable, and this awareness may explain why he invited the artist Francis Carpenter to stay a few months at the White House and paint a picture of the first reading of the Proclamation to Lincoln’s cabinet. The painting makes it clear that the measure was backed by the cabinet’s weightiest members, with Seward prominently depicted addressing his colleagues. Lincoln was obviously proud of the Proclamation—he described it as “the central event of my administration and the great event of the nineteenth century”—but he also wanted to display the backing it enjoyed from all his distinguished colleagues. Seward himself saw matters differently, explaining to the painter that the Emancipation Proclamation was “merely incidental” and that the most important cabinet meeting was the one that followed the firing on Fort Sumter. However, the painting, usually in a lithograph version, was to be widely adopted, becoming one of the most widely diffused of national images in subsequent decades.67
Lincoln’s course following the Emancipation Proclamation aimed not just to maintain and invigorate the Unionist coalition but also to appeal to public opinion in the wider Atlantic world and to head off the inclination of the governments in Paris and London to recognize the Confederacy or, later, to offer mediation. Lincoln’s carefully constructed appeals to abolitionism were a vital part of this. Since the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) embraced several British and French trade unions, it was evidently worthy of some diplomatic acknowledgment. The General Council of the IWA asked Karl Marx to draft a message of congratulation to Lincoln on the occasion of his reelection. The Republican watchword “Free Labor, Free Soil, Free Men” was designed to indict the “Slave Power” and, however vaguely, to offer rights, land, and recognition to the laborer. This was not anticapitalism, but it was, in Marx’s terms, a step in the right direction.
Marx found drafting the International’s Address to Lincoln more difficult than he had anticipated. He complained to Engels that such a text was “much harder [to draft] than a substantial work,” since he was anxious that “the phraseology to which this sort of scribbling is restricted should at least be distinguished from the democratic, vulgar phraseology …”68 Nevertheless he allowed himself the following resonant, if complex, paragraph:
When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders 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 eighteenth century … then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given warning, that the slaveholders’ rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor …
The address also warned that so long as the republic was “defiled by slavery,” so long as the Negro was “mastered and sold without his concurrence,” and so long as it was “the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master,” they would be “unable to attain the true freedom of labor.”69
The repeated invocation of the cause of labor in the address thus gave its own more radical twist to the “free labor” argument characteristic of Lincoln and other Republicans. In the address, Marx observed:
The workingmen of Europe feel sure that as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American antislavery 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 matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of the social world.70
The US ambassador to Britain, Charles Francis Adams, replied to the address, on behalf of the president, a month later, writing, “I am directed to inform you that the address of the Central Council of your Association, which was duly transmitted through this legation to the President of the United States, has been received by him. So far as the sentiments expressed by it are personal, they are accepted by him with a sincere and anxious desire that he may be able to prove himself not unworthy of the confidence which has recently been extended to him by his fellow citizens.” Adams went on to declare that “the United States regard their cause in the present conflict with slavery-maintaining insurgents as the cause of human nature and…they derive new encouragement to persevere from the testimony of the workingmen of Europe.”71 Thus both the address and the reply refer to labor with the greatest respect and both assert the rights of labor, embedding them in, respectively, the “rights of man” and “the cause of human nature.”
As emancipation advanced on the military and legislative fronts, the question was raised were the freedmen and women US citizens and did they have the vote? In the months before he unveiled his emancipation policy, Lincoln had gone out of his way to reiterate his support for colonization of those freed from slavery. He had invited black leaders to the White House to lecture them on the wisdom of leaving a land where they would never be accepted as real equals. This was the summer of 1862 and may charitably be interpreted as an attempt to placate Northern racism. But in 1864–5, as the emancipation policy led to large-scale escapes and as the Thirteenth Amendment gathered support, a new abolitionist and antiracist agenda emerged concerning the civic status of those who were to be freed from slavery. Lincoln had repeatedly declared that slaves were part of humankind and that it was blasphemy to belittle or deny this, as he thought Stephen Douglas and other Democratic leaders did. But Lincoln’s vehemence on the equal humanity of the former slaves did not mean that they were all simply Americans who were entitled, once released from slavery, to equal citizenship. As we have seen, he long believed that they would remain a sort of alien or stranger and should be invited to leave North America and found a land of their own in Africa or the Caribbean.72
In a speech at Charleston on September 18, 1858—part of his famous debating duel with Stephen Douglas—Lincoln had insisted, “I am not, nor have I ever been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.”73 This view of the Negro and his rights was not lightly held, but it did change in the course of the conflict.
In the last year of the war Lincoln gave up his long-held attachment to the policy of encouraging freed people to leave the United States and find a new life in Africa. He found that colonization was rejected not only by black abolitionists and church leaders but also by the “contrabands” who had fled the Confederacy. Elizabeth Keckley, seamstress and confidante to the president’s wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, and herself a former slave, headed the Contraband Relief Association in Washington, D.C.74 The president was curious about the outlook of the contrabands and Keckley arranged for a few to visit the White House. As we have noted, the “contrabands” had pressured the Union authorities to take a stand on slavery. Now they helped to persuade Lincoln to give up the idea of colonization, which African Americans had many reasons to reject. A point they sometimes made that may have had a special appeal to Lincoln was the argument of “unrequited labor.” After all, the slaves’ toil had built the seat of government in Washington, D.C., and many fortunes in both South and North.75 There was also the emphatic rejection voiced by the black leader Edward Thomas: “Are you an American? Are you a Patriot? So are we. Would you spurn all absurd, meddlesome, impudent propositions for your colonization in a foreign country? So do we.”76
By the time of the Lincoln’s second inauguration, in March 1865, the president was less constrained than on earlier occasions and placed slavery as central to the conflict in a way that he had previously avoided. He gave vent to his sense of the heavy wrong that his nation had committed by permitting an extremity of human bondage. He declared that each side in the still unfinished conflict had looked for “an easier triumph” but had not been able to contrive “a result less fundamental and astounding.” He saw the carnage of the war as perhaps God’s punishment for the nation’s “offences” and concluded that he could only hope and pray that “this mighty scourge of war” would come to a speedy end. He added: “Yet if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled up by the bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”
This passage certainly put “American slavery” at the center, and strikingly memorialized its enormity as a system for the exploitation of labor. But the Second Inaugural Address did not mention the black soldiers or outline any ideas as to the future fate of the emancipated slave. In the preceding months Radical members of Congress had urged that the freedmen should be given the vote as part of the reconstruction of the rebel states. Lincoln had been noncommittal to begin with, but as he explained himself, he became more positive. Writing to the governor of Louisiana at a time when that state was establishing franchise qualifications, he gently observed, “I barely suggest for your private consideration whether some of the colored people may not be let in—as for instance the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks.”77 In this attempt to cajole the Louisiana governor, using a moderate tone was no doubt advisable, and the enfranchisement of black soldiers would already establish a considerable bloc of black voters. If Lincoln had lived, it seems quite possible that as the situation evolved, so would his views on this matter. James Oakes has noted that Lincoln, in the last year of his life, went out of his way to seek out Frederick Douglass, the outstanding black abolitionist, as on the occasion noted already. Given the racism that permeated the North as much as the South, Lincoln’s willingness to solicit the views of the veteran abolitionist and treat him as an equal was a significant development. When Douglass was stopped at the door of the reception held following Lincoln’s second inaugural, the president went over publicly to greet him and make clear to all how welcome this black leader was in the White House.78
Douglass himself later wrote, “Viewed from genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent, but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.” This verdict doesn’t directly refer to race, but we may assume that racial feeling is also covered by the term sentiment. Lincoln’s attempts to reach out to Douglass in the last year of his life seem to signal the stirring of an awareness of the need for African American agency if freedom were really to be won.
By the time of the Second Inaugural the Confederacy was collapsing. The North’s belated victory reflected growing success in mobilizing its potential resources—and the Confederacy’s increasing failure to do so. The emancipation policy, black enlistment and Union strikes deep inside rebel territory allowed black courage and toil to favor and fortify the Union. So long as it could maintain 400,000 men in the field—as it did until the last months of 1864—the Confederacy still had a hope of exploiting one of the waves of Northern defeatism that periodically swept the North and bringing it to terms. But while the North was at last bringing its resources to bear the Confederacy was dragged down by problems that stemmed directly from the slave regime. Confederate nationalism and the battlefield effectiveness of the rebel forces were sapped by severe shortages, hyperinflation and market collapse. The Southern armies possessed the war materiel they needed to maintain the fight. Indeed, if he had known about it, Marx could have been impressed by the success of the state-directed Southern war industries. But the class-egoism of the planters—their tax allergy and their obsession with growing cotton—led to financial chaos and agricultural dearth. The planter-dominated government resorted to printing bank notes and haphazard requisitions. The resulting hyperinflation disorganized production and exchange. The planters stockpiled some 7 million bales of the commodity in the hope of selling at a good price once the war had ended. The depreciating currency robbed producers of any incentive to grow food for sale, leading to desperate food shortages—in an agricultural state. The Southern desertion rate overtook that of the North. Eventually the Southern military decided to negotiate surrender rather than to pursue a guerrilla struggle that might once again have put wind in the sails of a Northern peace movement. Educated Americans knew about the major role played by “guerrilla” struggle in the Spanish resistance to Napoleon. They also knew about Toussaint Louverture’s victory over the British and the defeat of the French by the Haitian republic. But the Southern elite had no stomach for such a fight since it would have imperilled the entire social order of the South. By surrendering when they did the Southern officers were able to retain their side-arms, their horses and some hope of keeping their land and, as we have seen, of rebuilding their local leadership and cross-sectional alliances.79
The assassination of Lincoln prompted the International to send another “Address,” this time to Andrew Johnson, the new American president.80 This address closed with the observation that the way was now open to a “new era of the emancipation of labor.” But Marx and Engels were soon alarmed by the actions of Lincoln’s successor. On July 15, 1865, Engels writes to his friend attacking Johnson: “His hatred of Negroes comes out more and more violently…If things go on like this, in six months all the old villains of secession will be sitting in Congress at Washington. Without colored suffrage, nothing whatever can be done there.”81 The IWA General Council sent a protest to President Johnson in September 1865 and urged that the freedmen should not be denied the vote. In April 1866 Marx writes to Engels, “After the Civil War the United States are only now really entering the revolutionary phase.”82 A clash between president and Congress drove the Republicans to more radical measures just as the ending of the war was marked by a multiplication of movements and demands.
Marx and Engels expected more from the victory of the Union than an end to slavery, momentous as that was. They also expected the producers to assert new political and social rights. If the freedmen moved simply from chattel slavery to wage slavery, if they were denied the right to vote, or to organize, or to receive an education, then the term emancipation would be a mockery. Some Union commanders were already settling freedmen on public or confiscated land. The decision to set up a Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands in March 1865 seemed to mark a recognition that the occupying power was to take responsibility for an extraordinary situation.
As it turned out, the era of Reconstruction did indeed bring a radical surge in both South and North, with the Republican party seeking to keep abreast of events by adopting the ideas of radical abolitionists, black as well as white, and with pressure being exerted by a shifting coalition of labor unions, social reformers, African American conventions, feminists, and last but not least, the multiplying American sections of the IWA. The martyred president’s acknowledgment of its earlier address, and the warm, not to say fulsome, nature of Marx’s tribute to the “son of the working class” helped to make the International a quite respectable and visible body. The post–Civil War radicalization in North America in some ways may be compared with the British experience of slave emancipation and home political reform in the 1830s.83 In both countries, abolitionism and the “free labor” doctrine seemed at a certain juncture to consecrate wage labor and its central role in the capitalist order, only to give rise to popular movements—Chartism in Britain, a wave of class struggles and popular radicalism in the US—that challenged the given form of the bourgeois order. Although the banner of free labor expressed bourgeois hegemony at one moment, it furnished a means of mobilizing against it at another. In one register, the ideal of free labor encouraged the aspiration of workers to become independent small producers, with their own workshops and farms. Hence the Republican slogan “Free soil, free labor, free men” and its embodiment in the Homestead Act of 1862.84 But in the United States of the 1860s and 1870s, as in the Britain of the 1840s, there were increasing numbers of wageworkers who did not want to become farmers and who looked to a collective improvement in the rights of working people. David Montgomery, taking a sample of over seventy labor organizers of the later 1860s about whom information is available, found that most of them were second-generation wageworkers, about half of them British immigrants. Their efforts focused not on acquiring land but on regulating the conditions of labor and securing political and industrial representation of the workingman.85 Of course some workers did take up the offer of land, but many realized that this could prove a trap. Already by the middle and late 1860s the farmers’ Grange movement was complaining about exorbitant railroad freight rates and cutthroat competition from large producers.
David Fernbach points out that the “Address to President Lincoln” was one of the first public acts of the International.86 Lincoln’s reply was a publicity coup. Moreover, the campaign to radicalize the resistance to Southern secession—to turn the Civil War into a social revolution—seems to have had a major impact on Marx’s thinking and vocabulary. The addresses written by Marx for the International, including the association’s own inaugural address, make repeated use of the term “emancipation,” a word that Marx used in his early writings but which did not figure in the Communist Manifesto or in his writings in the 1850s. Marx’s return to the concept also involved a modification of the way it was used by abolitionists. For most abolitionists the word emancipation conjured up the idea of an Emancipator, an external agent carrying out the process of liberation. Marx believed that the new working class would be the agent of its own liberation. He did sometimes take note of slave resistance and slave revolt, but he did not study the Haitian example and tended to believe that slaves needed external deliverance. Given that people of color were a minority—albeit a large one—in the Southern US, this was very likely to be the case in North America. But the notion of emancipation also contains within it the idea that the person or social group to be emancipated is self-standing, capable of exercising freedom, and has no need of an exploiter. Marx had always seen the modern industrial working class as the first exploited class that—because of the social and political rights it had, or would, conquer, and because it was schooled and organized by capitalism itself—could take its destiny into its own hands. The agent here was the “collective worker,” all those who contributed to social labor. Marx argues in the IWA’s inaugural address that “the emancipation of the working class will be the task of the working class itself.” In a word, it will be self-emancipation. Marx saw the fostering of working-class organization as the International’s most crucial task, and he believed that class struggle would set up a learning process that would lead them sooner or later to see the need for working-class political power.87 Even this modification of the emancipation concept may have contained some small, unconscious echo of Lincoln at Gettysburg, as when Marx commends the Paris Commune for embodying “the people acting for itself, by itself.”88
Raya Dunayevskaya argues in Marxism and Freedom that the US agitation for an eight-hour day during and immediately after the Civil War prompted Marx to deepen and elaborate his analysis of the length of the working day in Das Kapital, published in 1867.89 The early US labor movement, like Britain’s, sought, and sometimes won, laws limiting the length of the working day. In the years 1864–8 this campaign achieved a new scale and intensity in the United States. Some employers argued that this would be ruinous, since they made all their profits in the last two hours of the day—an argument Marx refuted. He showed that the more efficient employers would be able to thrive under such regulation. As we will see below, struggles over this issue were to play a major role in US labor organizing in the postbellum world. The eight-hour day movement was important to Marx because it expanded the free time available to the laborer.
Marx was well aware that the forced labor of the slave meant very long hours for all, whether old or young, male or female. And in the scarce hours left to them the slaves were as far as possible denied uses of their time that would pose any risk to the system. Thus rigorous laws sought to prevent slaves from learning to read or write, or to venture outside the plantation without a pass. The wageworker, even though intensely exploited, had greater opportunities for education and communication. When Joseph Wedemeyer organized the Arbeitsbund that organization sought to develop the workers’ access to culture, to press for universal public education, and to oppose “all laws that violate anyone’s natural rights, like temperance, Sabbath, or other prohibitionist laws.”90
The discretion available to the wageworker in the sphere of consumption, culture, and reproduction was registered as a vital point in Marx’s work for Das Kapital. Slaves were superexploited because they did not receive any monetary reward for toil that yielded a huge flow of premium commodities. With little or no cash, they had no claim on social wealth. Although the wageworkers received much less than the value of their work, they were able to shape their own “extended reproduction,” that is, not only to reproduce themselves and their families in ways of their own choosing but also to achieve a level of social communication beyond that—for example, by buying newspapers and even helping to produce them.91 Plantation slaves were, by contrast, permitted only “simple reproduction” within a narrow locality—a subsistence defined by allowances from the planter and by what they could themselves produce in garden plots. Marx and the abolitionists sometimes went too far in attributing an abject state to the slaves. They were not sufficiently aware of the reality of a slave community that produced its own culture of survival and resistance. But they were nevertheless quite right to indict the tight invigilation of the slaves, the narrow space allowed them, the daily violence of the slave system, and the constant disruption of the slave community as the plantation economy advanced. The controversies over North American slavery brought home to Marx the relatively broader possibilities of class struggle open to the wageworker even in normal times.
The political antecedents and consequences of slavery and emancipation in the US republic also had a deep impact on Marx and other nineteenth-century socialists. Marx was far from admiring the US political system, which he regarded as continuing to exhibit extreme degrees of corruption, demagoguery, and humbug. But he was impressed by the vast scale and almost elemental character of the social struggles that had been unleashed there. Curiously, Marx and Engels devoted little attention to the aspects of the Constitution and its functioning that rendered it so vulnerable to abuses. For example, they did not note the vagaries of the electoral college or the indirect election of senators. Nevertheless Lincoln’s conduct during the Civil War crisis illustrated important points, in Marx’s view. The challenge of a “slaveholders’ revolt” justified resort to military means. Karl Kautsky and other Marxists were later to argue that any workers’ government elected within a bourgeois democratic regime should expect there to be the capitalist equivalent of a “slaveholders’ revolt” and should prepare to suppress it by any means necessary. Lincoln’s preparedness to suspend habeas corpus and to impose presidential Reconstruction showed that democracy might need to be defended by emergency measures. The example of the Paris Commune reminded Marx of the term “dictatorship of the proletariat,” a term that he had not used between 1852 and 1871. Like the Romans, Marx saw dictatorship as different from tyranny in that the dictator wielded extraconstitutional powers for a brief emergency period. Lincoln’s actions were justified by socialists using such arguments as Hal Draper points out in his discussion of the evolution of Marx’s ideas.92
At the close of the Civil War, Engels wrote to Wedemeyer with the following prophecy:
Once slavery, the greatest shackle on the political and social development of the United States, has been broken, the country is bound to receive an impetus from which it will acquire quite a different position in world history within the shortest possible time, and a use will then soon be found for the army and navy with which the war is providing it.93
Northern capitalism did indeed receive great impetus from the war, after which it embarked on headlong continental expansion. For three decades this proved to be such an absorbing task that little was done to project US power outside the country’s own borders. William Seward wanted Caribbean acquisitions, but the Radical Republicans were not interested.94 Troops were sent to repress the resistance of the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Apache, and steps were taken to modernize the navy, but the terrible losses of the Civil War bequeathed a great distrust of military adventures that lasted for a generation.
Instead, the main focus was on three intimately interlinked processes that were of supreme interest to Marx and Engels: the advance of capitalism in North America, the unfolding of an epic class struggle, and the progress made toward building a genuine workers’ party. The outcome of this mighty contest was to determine the possibility, timing and character of any US bid for empire.
In the post–Civil War era, the recently reunited United States was the most dynamic and soon the largest capitalist state in the world. No country illustrated Marx’s ideas with greater precision and purity. Great railroads spanned the continent, and vast factories sprouted up, producing steel, agricultural machinery, sewing machines. The emancipation of four million slaves, the demobilization of three million soldiers, and the arrival of a stream of new immigrants swelled the size of the most diverse laboring class in the world. Marx predicted that capitalist conditions would generate class conflict as workers were brought into contact with one another and discovered their common condition. Though they might at first follow their employers, their attempts to acquire security and improved pay or conditions would repeatedly bring them into conflict with them. This would teach the workers the need to organize and seek political representation. And since capitalism would create wealth at one pole and misery at another, and since it would be gripped by recurrent crises, the workers would be drawn to support increasingly radical measures. The Gilded Age served as a laboratory test of such ideas, and with its robber-baron capitalists and titanic labor conflicts, it vindicated many of them.95 But despite several attempts, no broad-based working-class party emerged in the United States, and the country proved a laggard in developing a welfare state. In these respects much greater progress was made in Europe, especially in Marx’s native Germany, where the rise of a Social Democratic Party inspired by Marx’s ideas persuaded Chancellor Otto von Bismarck to begin construction of a social security system.
Marx had observed that labor in the white skin would not be truly free so long as labor in the black skin was in chains. This should be understood as a complex sociological proposition as much as a simple moral statement. In 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery in the United States, ended a formal legal status that was already crumbling because of massive slave desertions, the Emancipation Proclamation, and deep, disruptive inroads by the Union armies. The greater part of the Confederate forces had melted away and the planter class was reeling from its spectacular defeat. But, paradoxically, local white power emerged in some ways stronger than before. Alarmed at the sight of free black people, former Confederate officers and men formed militia and patrols designed to defend white families from luridly imagined threats and to deny land and hunting rights to the freemen, to ensure that they were still available for work. Union officers enforced a ban on the whip, but they could not be everywhere. Moreover, the coercion applied to the freed people was increasingly economic rather than physical. Many were obliged to enter very lopsided contracts, with minimal pay until the crop had been sold and with wages paid in “checks” that could only be redeemed at the local store.
The new president in Washington condoned and shared the Southern whites’ reaction to black freedom. Johnson urged white-only Southern assemblies to endorse the Thirteenth Amendment, saying that if they did their states could then reenter the Union. He was angered by the continuing demands of the Radical Republicans and the actions of some Union officers who had taken over properties abandoned by Confederate officials and begun distributing land to the freedmen. Johnson believed that the freedmen now needed to be taught their place. He sympathized with the actions of all-white assemblies who enacted strict new labor codes, obliging the freedmen to accept work where it was offered and penalizing “vagrants.” Leading Southern gentlemen and ladies paid court to Johnson in the White House, hailing him as the harbinger of reconciliation and the savior of his country. So although Johnson did press Southerners to accept the Thirteenth Amendment, he did so while assuring them that their acceptance would smooth their state’s path to rapid reentry into the Union. The idea that the original secessions had been illegal, null, and void potentially opened the way to arguing that the seceders could now simply return. The Republicans insisted that it should fall to Congress to set out the terms of “Reconstruction.” They passed resolutions stripping former Confederate officials and officers of their political rights and laying down procedures for fines and confiscations. But the president found ways to frustrate them.
Using his presidential power, Johnson issued thousands of pardons to Confederate military and civilian officials. He also issued a decree halting the distribution of land to the freedmen (of course the estates of whites who had been pardoned could not be seized anyway). The Republican Radicals were able to pass a series of Reconstruction Acts by margins large enough to make the measures immune to presidential veto. In 1866 the Republicans had shied away from giving the freedmen the vote, but the conflict with Johnson and their own plans for Reconstruction persuaded them that only extending the franchise could bring about the election of genuinely loyal assemblies in the Southern states. The presence of an occupying Union Army certainly helped, but the Republicans also needed to mobilize as much political support as possible in the states undergoing Reconstruction.
The Republicans failed (by a narrow margin) to impeach Johnson for treason, but nevertheless were able to impose much of their own vision of Reconstruction on the former slave states, thanks to the presence of Union troops and to the emergence of Union Leagues drawing support from the freedmen and from Southern whites who resented the power of the planters. But the Republican leaders set too much store by the ballot, underestimating the need for measures to tackle the severe economic problems of the South. So long as Union troops were on hand, the freedmen braved intimidation and went out to vote, but occupation was not a long-term solution. Returning Confederate soldiery lurked in the shadows and bided their time.96
As the Northern public became aware of the new President’s gross indulgence of traitors and of the planters’ resort to violence in their attempt to rebuild a coercive labor regime, support for the Radicals grew. Northern outrage at the presidential pardons and at the vicious racial revanchism of the Ku Klux Klan and kindred groups led the Congressional Republican majority to support more radical measures and to propose extending the vote to the freedmen of the South. The Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 promoted the enfranchisement of black males. In 1866–8 the Radical Republicans had the wind in their sails and managed to overrule the president on key issues. But the momentum of the Radicals was checked by the defeat of their attempt to impeach Johnson, with the appearance of moderates who refused to back the measure. The Republican Party recovered in 1868 by endorsing General Ulysses S. Grant, the hugely popular Union commander, as its candidate in the presidential election. Though this ensured a Republican victory, it gave the White House to a man who lacked political experience and judgment, surrounded himself with mediocrities, and failed to include a single Southern Republican in his cabinet. However, as a military commander Grant had at least learned how fickle, shortsighted, and cowardly was the “public opinion” manufactured by the newspapers.
President Grant lent his backing to a Republican strategy of restoring some of the sanctions on former Confederate officials and obliging the reconstructed states to give freedmen the vote as the price of reentry into the Union. For a while the Radical Republicans could still influence Grant, but they failed to register that the revolution in the South was generating its own counterrevolution and could only be sustained by strong and constant support from Washington, and by a far-reaching mobilization of those who supported the new order in the South.
Reconstruction set out to make freedom and equality more tangible, and for a while it succeeded in curbing white terror and promoting black representation and equality. Congressional Reconstruction had given the vote to the freedmen, and the result was to be Republican majorities in the occupied states and the election of some 600 black legislators and officials throughout the occupied South. By itself this was an extraordinary development. African Americans now sat in the Senate and House of Representatives in Washington as well as in the state assemblies.97
In Louisiana attempts had been made to segregate public space and means of transport. The state’s 1868 Constitutional Convention asserted the novel concept of “public rights,” which would give equal access to public space. The Constitution’s Bill of Rights declared that all citizens of the state should enjoy “the same civil, political, and public rights and privileges, and be subject to the same pains and penalties.” The concept of public rights was clarified by a prohibition of racial discrimination on public transport and in places of public resort or accommodation. Rebecca Scott, quoting the document, contrasts this clear requirement with the “oblique language” of the Fourteenth Amendment.98
Many abolitionists and Radical Republicans believed that the suppression of slavery was not enough and that the freedmen deserved at least free education, and preferably land and the vote as well. In this situation it was important that some Union Leagues were responsive to abolitionist appeals and that a convention of 150 colored men from 17 states met in Syracuse, New York, in October 1864. The Syracuse convention and subsequent gatherings in Charleston and New Orleans framed a broad program for equal civic and political rights. Many of the participants in these events were already free before the war. They articulated the aspirations of colored communities in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Tennessee—areas occupied by Unionist forces long before the final collapse. Their leaders argued that black soldiers had earned citizenship by helping to save the Union. They also paid their taxes, and therefore deserved representation. At Syracuse, Charleston, and elsewhere the call was not simply for rights in the abstract but for tangible expressions of a new status—the right to vote and serve on juries—and a Homestead Act for the South that would give land to the freedmen. A “Declaration of Rights and Wrongs,” adopted at both Syracuse and Charleston, warned that passing measures favorable to the freedmen would be a hollow mockery if planters were still free to intimidate and dragoon them.99
The Reconstruction administrations were elected by precarious majorities, achieved by the votes of black men, and also by reaching out to whites who had never owned slaves or supported the Secession, or who had found the Confederacy a nightmare. The Freedmen’s Bureau, established in 1865, was wound up in 1870. Radical Republicans and abolitionists were too inclined to believe that once slavery had been struck down a new regime of wages and “free labor” would automatically follow. Many freedmen and women devoted more time to cultivating tiny plots that they rented or claimed as squatters. Though some entered into agreements with the planters, who still owned the best land, their new employers complained that the freed people thought that they could withdraw their labor whenever convenient or demand higher pay just when the harvest had to be brought in. An early recovery of the Southern economy was not sustained because of a credit famine. Merchants were only willing to advance credit for staple production, leading to shortfalls in the production of subsistence crops. The plantation economy went into decline, with many landowners in the cotton belt offering sharecropping arrangements to the freedmen. In some cases the sharecropper would be the tenant of a piece of land, some of which could be used for subsistence production. But to begin with it was more common for the sharecropper to work on a planter’s land for a modest wage and the promise of further pay once the crop was sold. Thus the sharecropper bore the risk of a poor market on his own shoulders, and this was not the end of his problems. Tenants and sharecroppers often needed to borrow money, and they became indebted to store owners, who would charge them high rates of interest on loans as well as high prices for merchandise. These arrangements narrowed the scope of the Southern market, fostered stagnation and decline, and caused economic pain to white farmers as well as black laborers and tenants.100
With Union soldiers on call, the freedmen voted in new officials and sent black representatives and senators to Washington. The Reconstruction administrations also fostered a variety of social programs. These regimes, lasting from four to ten years, were innovative. As Eric Foner explains, they sought to introduce social institutions that the old slave-state authorities had neglected: “Public schools, hospitals, penitentiaries, and asylums for orphans and the insane were established for the first time or received increased funding. South Carolina funded medical care for poor citizens, and Alabama funded free legal counsel for indigent defendants.”101 With some charitable assistance, the Reconstruction administrations laid the basis for an educational system that was to comprise university colleges as well as high schools, open to the freed people and their descendants. The social programs of Reconstruction demanded resources that were in chronically short supply. Raising taxes alienated potential supporters. The South experienced a credit famine, as banks and storekeepers would advance supplies only for cotton cultivation and did so in far more modest installments than they had before the war, when slave property could be offered as collateral.
The empowerment of the freedmen was carried through in the teeth of continuing resistance from white “rifle clubs,” the Ku Klux Klan, and kindred organizations. The Reconstruction administrations fared best—at least for a while—in states where there was either a large black population (South Carolina and Louisiana) or a solid phalanx of white Republicans (Texas and Arkansas).102 Much depended on the quality and energy of local political leadership. What was needed was an alternative to Federal troops as guarantors of the new order.
In the few areas where there were not only Union soldiers but also black elected officials and police, there were instances of freedmen’s labor associations successfully taking over and running the plantations. This occurred on several of the rice plantations along the rivers of coastal South Carolina. The planters’ practice of paying wages in “checks” at high-priced stores that they controlled had bred hostility to the wage system: “In Colleton County, by the early 1870s, several large plantations were operating under what a newspaper called “a sort of ‘communism,’ ” with black laborers forming societies, electing officers, and purchasing estates collectively.103 But such enclaves of labor power were precarious, and in the later 1870s black organization and ownership was to be targeted in South Carolina as it was elsewhere.
The Northern public had been disturbed by white terrorism and so-called “race riots” (really ethnic cleansing), but it had little patience for the heavy costs of an extended occupation of the South and was demoralized by reports of carpetbagger corruption. Prior to the 1872 election, a group of “reform” or Liberal Republicans, led by Horace Greeley, mustered a challenge to Grant, but they argued for less rather than more engagement in the South. Grant’s reelection gave a little extra time, but neither the president nor the Republicans gave decisive support to the Reconstruction administrations. To do so would have been expensive and contrary to the growing view that the time had come for a reconciliation with Southern elites. The size of Union forces in the South was continually being whittled down, and white vigilantism was emboldened. Some attempts were made in South Carolina to defend Reconstruction by relying on a local mixed militia, but eventually in the key states the Republican governors had to rely on Federal troops.104
The Civil War had landed Washington with a debt of $2.8 billion, and the bankers had extracted exceedingly favorable terms.105 Schuyler Colfax, from Indiana, proposed that the huge war effort required new taxes—a progressive income tax and a levy on the shareholders of the banks and the new corporations. Colfax pointed out that the farmer had to pay a tax on his property, so justice demanded that there should be a tax on capital—especially that of shareholders—as well as on employees and cultivators.106 The income tax was agreed upon but the plan for a tax on capital was vetoed by Wall Street and the treasury secretary. The income tax was set at 3 percent and much war expenditure was paid for either by issuing war bonds or by printing greenbacks. Some urged that the public debt be paid off in the same way, although the value of the paper currency had fallen by about a third. The Republicans, having contracted the debt, argued that paying it off with devalued paper would be a sorry reward for the patriotism of those who had subscribed, whether bankers or ordinary citizens. Their decision to pay off that debt in gold left the Treasury bare, unable to pay for Reconstruction in the South or ensure steady growth in the North. Neither the Lincoln administration nor its Republican successors seized the opportunity to introduce a central bank or effectively to regulate the thousands of private banks. This was to be a source of future financial instability and meant that farmers and small or medium businesses did not have access to reliable and reasonably-priced credit. In a book of letters addressed to Colfax in 1865, Henry Carey, the noted critic of free-trade economics, warned that a credit famine would ruin all hopes for successful Reconstruction.107 Yet nothing was done to meet this problem, Southern producers were starved of credit and by 1880 per capita income in the US South was only 50 percent of the national average, and it would remain so for many decades after. The weakness of the Southern economy was a drag on national performance, but the national economy also suffered because of the primitive banking regime. One rather understated criticism of the postbellum US financial system concludes: “The main costs to the US economy of not having a central bank were a less efficient payments system and a greater potential for instability.”108 The North’s master financier, Jay Cooke, who had marketed the Union’s war bonds, was himself to be bankrupted by the crisis of 1873.
As it happened, by 1869 Schuyler Colfax was vice president and, one might have hoped, ready to devise a way of taxing the new breed of robber barons. Unfortunately, it was soon discovered that he was implicated in the Credit Mobilier scandal. The Credit Mobilier had issued shares to large numbers of legislators, backing return for their backing on its railroad projects. (From the days of John Law onward, there has always been a connection between financial innovation and swindling.)
During the heyday of Radical Reconstruction Northern white workingmen made some gains of their own. The freed people were in a struggle for the control of space, both public and private; the Northern workers sought to control time. In this industrializing era the average working day lasted more than eleven hours. In 1868 Congress was persuaded to establish an eight-hour legal working day for Federal employees. Eight states had similar laws, though implementation was weak. Radical Reconstruction also favored the first attempts to regulate the railroads. The stirrings of a new social utopianism and a very practical trade union movement were encouraged by the polarizations around Radical Republicanism. Wendell Phillips led prominent abolitionists and Radicals in supporting Eight Hour Leagues. In demanding the eight-hour day the “labor reformers” were accepting “clock time” and a degree of labor discipline as part of a wider scheme of improvement. Starting from free labor principles, Ira Steward argued that shorter hours meant higher pay and that higher pay would combat unemployment and the erosion of wages by inflation. As he bluntly put it, “new employments depend upon a more expensive style of living.”109
In 1867 a National Labor Union was formed to spread the eight-hour day demand. At its first national meeting the NLU declared: “The National Labor Union knows no north, no south, no east, no west, neither color nor sex, on the question of the rights of labor.”110 The London headquarters of the International sent a warning in May 1869 attacking both ill-founded rumors of war (between Britain and the US) and the all-too-real domestic threat to living standards:
The palpable effect of the Civil War was, of course, to deteriorate the position of the American workman. In the United States, as in Europe, the monster incubus of a national debt was shifted from hand to hand, to settle down on the shoulders of the working class.111
However, it ventured to anticipate that there would be resistance, and resistance that would have been enhanced by what had already been achieved: “For all this, the Civil War did compensate by freeing the slave and [by] the consequent moral impetus this gave to your own class movement.”112
Phillip Paludan urges that the war’s deleterious impact on labor, and labor’s reaction, have not received sufficient attention. The immiseration of Northern workers as a consequence of the great inflation of the 1860s prompted hundreds of strikes and the emergence of many new workers’ organizations. Indeed for a while there was a sharp discrepancy between the squeezing of these workers and the improvements accruing to both farmers and former slaves. The Homestead program allowed farmers’ sons to acquire land cheaply. Farmers could pay off debts with depreciated currency, and the building of new railroads soon gave them easier access to markets. As for the former slaves, the disintegration of a formidable apparatus of labor coercion had immediate benefits, as families reunited and some withdrew from the labor force while others received at least modest payment.113 But in both cases these improvements were precarious, as Northern and Northwestern railroads raised freight rates, Southern landowners drove a harder bargain, and white vigilantes sought to intimidate the freedmen.
Some Southern black workers sought to join the eight hours movement. The New Orleans Tribune, published by black journalists, supported the campaign, and a State Labor Convention in South Carolina called for a nine-hour day. But true wage labor was of limited significance in the South, so the impact of these moves was small. A Colored Workers Convention in New York in 1869 sought to build a bridge between organized labor and the freedmen. The “Declaration of Rights and Wrongs” framed by African American conventions at Syracuse and Charleston denounced segregation in public places and warned that measures favorable to the freedmen would be a hollow mockery if planters were still free to intimidate and dragoon them.114 But the differing problems of workers in the South and North made it more difficult to promote an alliance between them.
Marx’s addresses had increased awareness of the International Workingmen’s Association in the United States. The IWA attracted a diverse range of supporters there, and even as senior a figure as Senator Charles Sumner was occasionally prepared to support events staged by the International. By the early 1870s the IWA had fifty sections in a dozen urban areas, ranging from Boston and New York in the East, to such crucial hubs as St. Louis and Chicago in the Midwest, to San Francisco on the West Coast. In New York there were militia companies led by supporters of the International, and an African American militia was also said to have become affiliated. But there is no mention of sections in the South, even in those areas like South Carolina where there was labor militancy. The reason for this was very likely the threatening security situation, which obliged all supporters of Reconstruction to cleave to the Republican Party and its militia. (During the early 1870s the young Albert Parsons—subsequently a strong supporter of the International, advocate of independent working-class politics, and Haymarket martyr—was a colonel in the Texas National Guard, which was in effect a Republican militia).
Some leading female abolitionists declined to support the Fourteenth Amendment on the ground that while promoting the enfranchisement of black men it left women without the vote.115 This was an argument about priorities, since nearly all abolitionists supported women’s suffrage. The great majority of abolitionists believed that any chance of achieving black male enfranchisement should be supported. The 1868 elections, allowing voters their first opportunity to respond to Johnson’s conduct and to news of white brutality in the South, was a good year for Republicans in most parts of the North and West, and confirmed the Republican Congress’s desire for black suffrage in the South. Where the Republican leadership had the courage to fight for black male suffrage in the North and West, then they had a good prospect of winning it at home as well as for the South. The fact that so many African Americans had risked their lives for the Union carried great weight with Northern voters. In Iowa, a proposal to give black men the vote passed in a referendum in 1868 though a similar proposal had failed there in 1857. However, the skill and conviction with which the Iowa Republicans seized the “egalitarian moment” was not seen everywhere.116
The vulnerability of the black communities in the South also furnished an added argument for black male enfranchisement. The women of the North and West had certainly rallied to support the war effort and were shortly to gain the right for themselves to vote for school boards in Kansas and elsewhere. But whereas the racial order was—at least momentarily—disputed, gender divisions had not been challenged by the war. (Though, as we will see below, this began to change with the advent of peace.) The dispute over this issue soon subsided, as most socialists and abolitionists did support votes for women. This cleared the way for new attempts in the 1870s to explore the makings of a progressive coalition.117
The appearance of the labor movements encouraged the view that a fresh start could be made in the 1870s, with the emergence of new issues and voices. Racism, sexism, and conscious or unconscious bourgeois ideology continued to hold much of the population in thrall and to weaken progressive movements. But much more remarkable than this predictable state of affairs was the emergence of challenges to it: to racism, including institutional racism; to male privilege in the home and workplace as well as at the ballot box; and to the divine right of employers to dictate to their employees and to accumulate vast personal fortunes.
For a brief span—about half a dozen years—the US sections of the IWA became the sounding board and banner for a diverse series of radical initiatives. The IWA and the National Labor Union were seen as sister organizations. The German American Marxists wielded what was then a very novel doctrine—the idea that if labor were only sufficiently well organized it would became a mighty lever for social advances, opening the way to all sections of the oppressed. The privileges of white and male workers were not addressed: all attention was focused on the great concentration of privilege represented by capital. In theory, female and black workers were welcome to join the workers’ organizations and would enjoy equal rights within them, though the practice often lagged some way behind. Some of the IWA’s US sections developed a primitive and sectarian Marxism that contrasts with the program and practice of the German Social Democratic Party. Marx and Engels were often uneasy at the narrow-mindedness of their American followers, but they were themselves partly responsible for this, since they had not yet developed a conception of the different character and goals of trade unions on the one hand and political parties on the other. The fact that the International embraced, or mixed, both types of organization was no bad thing, but because there had been no theorization of their distinct and different purposes the result was often confusion and tension. There was also the dilemma posed by the scope for social alliances. The workers needed to organize themselves as a distinct body, yet they also needed to reach out to potential allies—farmers, farm laborers, progressive members of the middle class, home workers—on a range of issues. The implicit labor metaphysic of some of the German American Marxists failed to tackle these issues. Nevertheless, in the short run the International actually thrived by avoiding a clear stance on such questions and simply allowing each section to organize in its own way and according to its own priorities.
The German American Marxists might have been narrow-minded, but still they were committed to the principles of racial and gender equality, though they soft-pedaled these issues when seeking to recruit bona fide wageworkers such as the Irish of Pennsylvania, New York, and elsewhere who did not share these principled commitments, arguing that it would be easier to educate them once they had joined the IWA. Marx and Engels, familiar with anti-Irish discrimination in England, readily agreed that special efforts should be made to win over the Irish workers. They may not fully have realized that in the US the Irish workers—especially the Pennsylvania miners—had been stigmatized as “copperheads” and traitors because they were believed to have lacked enthusiasm for the Northern cause. The International’s strong Unionist credentials and welcoming attitude toward the Irish proved a good combination.
The IWA became a rallying point for many of the disparate forces of emancipation seeking to take part in the reconstruction of the social order. It attracted the attention of Victoria Woodhull—in some ways the Arianna Huffington of the 1870s—who edited the widely selling and much discussed Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly and used it to publicize the initiatives of the IWA. Tennie Claflin, Victoria’s sister, was elected colonel of a militia after urging that the workers would need a force to defend them in the struggles to come. In 1870 and 1871 the Weekly published several articles summarizing the Communist Manifesto or explaining the documents of the IWA. It exposed the schemes of the railway promoters and argued that the greed of the owners of the Staten Island ferry led them to skimp on safety, and their negligence eventually caused a disaster in which a hundred passengers perished. An editorial evoked the new spirit:
This is the age of rights, when, for the first time in human history, the rights of all living things are, in some way, recognized as existing. We are far enough yet from according to all their rights, but we talk about them, we see them, and thought is busy to determine how best they should be secured.118
A series of articles entitled “Man’s Rights, or How Would you Like It?” explored the idea of women taking leading positions in economic affairs while it became the turn of men to be “housekeepers and kitchen girls.”119 Other articles sought to reconcile a needed collectivism with the rights of the individual. The banks and the corporations should be taken into truly public ownership, and democratic institutions should ensure “the personal participation of each in the preparation, administration, and execution of the laws by which all are governed.” But the state should not seek to prescribe how people lived: “Social freedom means the absolute immunity from impertinent intrusion in all affairs of exclusively personal concernment, such as scientific or religious belief, the sexual relationship, habits of dress, diet or the like.”120
With her sister, Woodhull was the founder of Wall Street’s first female brokerage, and used her rewards from this to finance the Weekly, “the lady broker’s paper.” Eclectic and radical, the Weekly showed a lively interest in socialism and new forms of collective self-government and published a special edition of Marx’s “Address on the Civil War in France.” Marx wrote a friendly note to Woodhull and suggested that his daughter Jenny could supply an article on her experiences in France following the suppression of the Paris Commune.121
After the European panic occasioned by the Commune uprising, Marx and his followers had moved the IWA’s headquarters to New York. This is often seen as a ploy by Marx and his followers to prevent the IWA failing into the hands of the anarchists. No doubt there is truth in this. Yet there was indeed, as Marx claimed, a promising opening in the United States in which the International could begin to sink real roots in North America.
In Europe, respectable opinion was outraged by the supposed excesses of the Communards in 1871. But in the United States it was the bloody suppression of the Commune that provoked outrage, and sympathy for the victims. Marx’s Civil War in France was widely read by reformers and radicals. The IWA mustered a demonstration of 70,000 or more in New York in December 1871 to pay tribute to the Commune’s tens of thousands of martyrs. The parade brought together the Skidmore Guards (a black militia), the female leadership of Section 12 (Woodhull and Claflin), an Irish band, a range of trade unions, supporters of Cuba’s fight for independence marching under the Cuban flag, and a broad spectrum of socialist, feminist, Radical, and Reform politics. In its aftermath, Section 12 and its supporters in the Equal Rights Association, a new reform body, proposed running a ticket in the forthcoming presidential election, with Victoria Woodhull and Frederick Douglass as the candidates. For a brief moment an attempt was made to present a progressive alternative in the 1872 elections, but it passed.122
Many of Marx’s US followers distrusted Woodhull. She was president of the American Society of Spiritualists, and her Wall Street brokerage had the support of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the richest man in America. The IWA Council declared that wage earners should comprise at least 60 percent of the membership in all sections. Section 12 was suspended for failing to reach this figure. The failure to distinguish between trade union and party was part of the problem here. So, too, was the conception that workers’ interests were somehow natural and sociologically given without benefit of ideology or politics. The sectarian exclusion of Section 12 weakened the International, though in the short run the dissension it aroused was eclipsed when Woodhull and her Weekly became embroiled in an unrelated obscenity suit. Incensed by hypocritical attacks on her philosophy of “free love,” she ran a story in the Weekly exposing the extramarital affair of New York’s most prominent preacher. The scandal briefly led to Woodhull’s imprisonment and prevented her from developing her political profile. Feminist and spiritualist leaders followed the socialists in keeping their distance from her.123
There was to be a legacy of distrust and factional strife between those of Marx’s German American followers who believed that party building was the priority, and others who saw the trade unions as the priority. Both “Yankee” and German Internationalists deplored racial violence and supported female enfranchisement, but the trade unionists gave low priority to such issues, and many Socialists despised the narrowness and caution of the trade union leaders. On the other hand the rumblings of class conflict split the radical Republicans, as some sided with the employers, others with the workers, some supporting the eight-hour demand, and others hostile to it. Then the postwar boom was brought to a shuddering halt by the crash of 1873. The wages of workers had been eroded by the depreciating purchasing power of greenbacks. With their own living standards falling by as much as a third in a few years, the workers of the North and West were first and foremost concerned about bread-and-butter issues. The Republicans lost ground, as they seemed incapable of defending either the wages of Northern workers or the political gains of Southern freedmen. Ultimately the Republicans had deferred to the large property holders in both sections.