London, October 20, 1861
For months now, the leading London papers, both weekly and daily, have been repeating the same litany on the American Civil War. While they insult the free states of the North, they anxiously defend themselves against the suspicion of sympathizing with the slave states of the South. In fact, they continually write two articles: one in which they attack the North, another in which they excuse their attacks on the North. Qui s’excuse, s’accuse.
Their extenuating arguments are basically as follow. The war between North and South is a tariff war. Furthermore, the war is not being fought over any issue of principle; it is not concerned with the question of slavery but in fact centers on the North’s lust for sovereignty. In the final analysis, even if justice is on the side of the North, does it not remain a futile endeavor to subjugate eight million Anglo-Saxons by force! Would not a separation from the South release the North from all connection with Negro slavery and assure to it, with its 20 million inhabitants and its vast territory, a higher level of development up to now scarcely dreamed of? Should the North not then welcome secession as a happy event, instead of wanting to crush it by means of a bloody and futile civil war?
Let us examine point by point the case made out by the English press.
The war between North and South—so runs the first excuse—is merely a tariff war, a war between a protectionist system and a free-trade system, and England, of course, is on the side of free trade. Is the slave owner to enjoy the fruits of slave labor to the full, or is he to be cheated of part of these fruits by the Northern protectionists? This is the question at issue in the war. It was reserved for the Times to make this brilliant discovery; the Economist, Examiner, Saturday Review and the like have elaborated on the same theme. It is characteristic that this discovery was made not in Charleston, but in London. In America everyone knew, of course, that between 1846 and 1861 a system of free trade prevailed and that Representative Morrill only carried his protectionist tariff through Congress after the rebellion had already broken out. Secession did not take place, therefore, because Congress had passed the Morrill tariff; at most, the Morrill tariff was passed by Congress because secession had taken place. To be sure, when South Carolina had its first attack of secessionism, in 1832, the protectionist tariff of 1828 served as a pretext; but that a pretext is all it was is shown by a statement made by General Jackson. This time, however, the old pretext has in fact not been repeated. In the secession Congress at Montgomery,1 every mention of the tariff question was avoided, because in Louisiana, one of the most influential Southern states, the cultivation of sugar is based entirely on protection.
But, the London press pleads further, the war in the United States is nothing but a war aimed at preserving the Union by force. The Yankees cannot make up their minds to strike off fifteen stars from their banner.2 They want to cut a colossal figure on the world stage. Indeed, it would be quite a different matter if the war were being fought in order to abolish slavery. But the slavery question, as the Saturday Review, among others, categorically declares, has absolutely nothing to do with this war.
It must be remembered above all that the war was started not by the North but by the South. The North is on the defensive. For months it had quietly stood by and watched while the secessionists took possession of forts, arsenals, shipyards, customs houses, pay offices, ships, and stores of arms belonging to the Union, insulted its flag, and took Northern troops prisoner. The secessionists finally decided to force the Union government out of its passive stance by means of a blatant act of war; for no other reason than this they proceeded to bombard Fort Sumter near Charleston. On April 11 [1861] their General Beauregard had learned in a meeting with Major Anderson, the commander of Fort Sumter, that the fort only had rations for three more days and that it would therefore have to be surrendered peacefully after this period. In order to forestall this peaceful surrender the secessionists opened the bombardment early the next morning (April 12), bringing about the fall of the place after a few hours. Hardly had this news been telegraphed to Montgomery, the seat of the secession Congress, when War Minister Walker declared publicly, in the name of the new Confederacy, “No man can say where the war opened today will end.” At the same time he prophesied that before the first of May the flag of the Southern Confederacy would wave from the dome of the old Capitol in Washington and within a short time perhaps also from the Faneuil Hall in Boston. Only then did Lincoln issue the proclamation summoning 75,000 men to protect the Union. The bombardment of Fort Sumter cut off the only possible constitutional way out: the summoning of a general convention of the American people, as Lincoln had proposed in his inaugural address. As it was, Lincoln was left with the choice of fleeing from Washington, evacuating Maryland and Delaware, surrendering Kentucky, Missouri, and Virginia, or of answering war with war.
Karl Marx, 1849
The question as to the principle underlying the American Civil War is answered by the battle slogan with which the South broke the peace. [Alexander H.] Stephens, the Vice President of the Southern Confederacy, declared in the secession Congress that what fundamentally distinguished the constitution recently hatched in Montgomery from that of Washington and Jefferson was that slavery was now recognized for the first time as an institution good in itself and as the foundation of the whole political edifice, whereas the revolutionary fathers, men encumbered by the prejudices of the eighteenth century, had treated slavery as an evil imported from England and to be eradicated in the course of time. Another Southern matador, Mr. Spratt, declared, “For us it is a question of the foundation of a great slave republic.” Thus if the North drew its sword only in defense of the Union, had not the South already declared that the continuance of slavery was no longer compatible with the continuance of the Union?
Just as the bombardment of Fort Sumter gave the signal for the opening of the war, the electoral victory of the Northern Republican party, Lincoln’s election to the presidency, had given the signal for secession. Lincoln was elected on November 6, 1860. On November 8 the message was telegraphed from South Carolina, “Secession is regarded here as an accomplished fact”; on November 10, the Georgia legislature occupied itself with plans for secession, and on November 13 a special sitting of the Mississippi legislature was called to consider secession. But Lincoln’s election was itself only the result of a split in the Democratic camp. During the election campaign the Northern Democrats concentrated their votes on Douglas, the Southern Democrats on [John C.] Breckinridge; the Republican party owed its victory to this split in the Democratic vote. How, on the one hand, did the Republican party achieve this dominant position in the North; how, on the other hand, did this division arise within the Democratic party, whose members, North and South, had operated in conjunction for more than half a century?
Buchanan’s presidency3 saw the control which the South had gradually usurped over the Union, as a result of its alliance with the Northern Democrats, reach its peak. The last Continental Congress of 1787 and the first constitutional Congress of 1789–90 had legally excluded slavery from all territories of the republic northwest of Ohio. (Territories are the colonies lying within the United States which have not yet achieved the population level laid down in the Constitution for the formation of autonomous states.) The so-called Missouri Compromise (1820), as a result of which Missouri entered the ranks of the United States as a slave-owning state, excluded slavery from all other territories north of 36º30´ latitude and west of the Missouri [River]. As a result of this compromise the area of slavery was extended by several degrees of longitude while, on the other hand, quite definite geographical limits seemed to be placed on its future propagation. This geographical barrier was in turn torn down by the so-called Kansas-Nebraska Bill, whose author, Stephen A. Douglas, was at the time leader of the Northern Democrats. This bill, which passed both Houses of Congress, repealed the Missouri Compromise, placed slavery and freedom on an equal footing, enjoined the Union government to treat both with indifference, and left it to the sovereign people to decide whether slavery was to be introduced in a territory or not. Thus, for the first time in the history of the United States, every geographical and legal barrier in the way of an extension of slavery in the territories was removed. Under this new legislation the hitherto free territory of New Mexico, an area five times greater than New York State, was transformed into a slave territory, and the area of slavery was extended from the Mexican republic to latitude 38º north. In 1859 New Mexico was given a legal slave code which vies in barbarity with the statute books of Texas and Alabama. However, as the 1860 census shows, New Mexico does not yet have fifty slaves in a population of about 100,000. The South therefore only had to send over the border a few adventurers with some slaves and, with the help of the central government in Washington, get its officials and contractors to drum up a sham representative body in New Mexico, in order to impose slavery and the rule of the slaveholders on the territory.
However, this convenient method proved inapplicable in the other territories. The South, therefore, went one step further and appealed from Congress to the Supreme Court of the United States. This Supreme Court, which numbers nine judges, five of whom are Southerners, had long been the most amenable instrument of the slaveholders. In 1857, in the notorious Dred Scott case, it decided that every American citizen had the right to take with him into any territory any property recognized by the Constitution. The Constitution recognizes slaves as property and commits the Union government to the protection of this property. Consequently, on the basis of the Constitution, slaves could be forced by their owners to work in the territories, and thus every individual slaveholder was entitled to introduce slavery into territories hitherto free against the will of the majority of the settlers. The territorial legislatures were denied the right to exclude slavery, and Congress and the Union government were charged with the duty of protecting the pioneers of the slave system.
While the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had extended the geographical boundaries of slavery in the territories, and while the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854 had eliminated all geographical boundaries and replaced them by a political barrier, the will of the majority of the settlers, the Supreme Court’s decision of 1857 tore down even this political barrier and transformed all territories of the republic, present and future, from nurseries of free states into nurseries of slavery.
At the same time, under Buchanan’s administration, the more severe law of 1850 on the extradition of fugitive slaves was ruthlessly carried out in the Northern states. It seemed to be the constitutional calling of the North to play slave-catcher for the Southern slaveholders. On the other hand, in order to hinder as far as possible the colonization of the territories by free settlers, the slaveholders’ party frustrated all so-called free-soil measures, that is, measures intended to guarantee the settlers a fixed amount of uncultivated public land free of charge.
As in domestic policy, so also in the foreign policy of the United States the interests of the slaveholders served as the guiding star. Buchanan had in fact purchased the presidential office by issuing the Ostend Manifesto,4 in which the acquisition of Cuba, whether by payment or by force of arms, is proclaimed as the great political task of the nation. Under his administration northern Mexico had already been divided up among American land speculators, who were impatiently awaiting the signal to fall upon Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Sonora. The incessant piratical filibusters against the Central American states were no less carried out under the direction of the White House in Washington.5 Closely connected with this foreign policy, which was manifestly aimed at conquering new territory for the expansion of slavery and the rule of the slaveholders, was the resumption of the slave trade, secretly supported by the Union government. Stephen A. Douglas himself declared in the American Senate on August 20, 1859, that during the previous year more Negroes had been requisitioned from Africa than ever before in any single year, even at the time when the slave trade was still legal. The number of slaves imported in the last year amounted to 15,000.
Armed propaganda abroad on behalf of slavery was the avowed aim of national policy; the Union had in fact become the slave of the 300,000 slaveholders who rule the South. This state of affairs had been brought about by a series of compromises which the South owed to its alliance with the Northern Democrats. All the periodic attempts made since 1817 to resist the ever increasing encroachments of the slaveholders had come to grief against this alliance. Finally, there came a turning point.
Hardly had the Kansas-Nebraska Bill been passed, erasing the geographical boundary of slavery and making its introduction into new territories subject to the will of the majority of the settlers, when armed emissaries of the slaveholders, border rabble from Missouri and Arkansas, fell upon Kansas, a bowie-knife in one hand and a revolver in the other, and with the most atrocious barbarity tried to drive out its settlers from the territory which they had colonized. As these raids were supported by the central government in Washington, a tremendous reaction ensued. In the whole of the North, but particularly in the Northwest, a relief organization was formed to provide support for Kansas in the shape of men, weapons, and money. Out of this relief organization grew the Republican party, which thus has its origins in the struggle for Kansas. After the failure of the attempts to transform Kansas into a slave territory by force of arms, the South tried to achieve the same result by way of political intrigue. Buchanan’s administration, in particular, did its utmost to maneuver Kansas into the ranks of the United States as a slave state by the imposition of a slave constitution. Hence a new struggle took place, this time conducted for the most part in the Washington Congress. Even Stephen A. Douglas, leader of the Northern Democrats, now (1857–8) entered the lists, against the administration and against his Southern allies, because the imposition of a slave constitution would contradict the principle of settlers’ sovereignty passed in the Nebraska Bill of 1854. Douglas, senator for Illinois, a northwestern state, would naturally have forfeited all his influence if he had wanted to concede to the South the right to steal by force of arms or acts of Congress the territories colonized by the North. Thus while the struggle for Kansas gave birth to the Republican party, it simultaneously gave rise to the first split within the Democratic party itself.
The Republican party issued its first program for the presidential election of 1856. Although its candidate, John Frémont, did not win, the huge number of votes cast for him demonstrated the rapid growth of the party, particularly in the Northwest. In their second national convention for the presidential election (May 17, 1860), the Republicans repeated their program of 1856, enriched by only a few additional points. Its main contents were that not a foot of new territory would be conceded to slavery, and that the filibustering6 policy abroad must cease; the resumption of the slave trade was condemned, and lastly, free-soil laws would be enacted in order to further free colonization.
The point of decisive importance in this program was that slavery was not to be conceded another foot of new ground; rather, it was to remain confined once and for all within the limits of the states where it already legally existed. Slavery was thus to be interned for good. However, permanent territorial expansion and the continual extension of slavery beyond its old borders is a law of existence for the slave states of the Union.
The cultivation of the Southern export crops, i.e., cotton, tobacco, sugar, etc., by slaves is only profitable so long as it is conducted on a mass scale by large gangs of slaves and in wide areas of naturally fertile soil requiring only simple labor. Intensive cultivation, which depends less on the fertility of the soil and more on capital investment and on intelligent and energetic labor, runs contrary to the nature of slavery. Hence the rapid transformation of states such as Maryland and Virginia, which in earlier times employed slavery in the production of export commodities, into states which raise slaves in order to export them to states lying further south. Even in South Carolina, where slaves form four-sevenths of the population, the cultivation of cotton has remained almost stationary for years, due to the exhaustion of the soil. Indeed, South Carolina has become partly transformed into a slave-raising state by pressure of circumstances insofar as it already sells slaves to the states of the deep South and Southwest to a value of four million dollars annually. As soon as this point is reached, the acquisition of new territory becomes necessary, so that one section of the slaveholders can introduce slave labor into new fertile estates and thus create a new market for slave raising and the sale of slaves by the section it has left behind. There is not the least doubt, for example, that without the acquisition of Louisiana, Missouri, and Arkansas by the United States, slavery would long ago have disappeared in Virginia and Maryland. In the secession Congress at Montgomery, one of the Southern spokesmen, Senator Toombs, strikingly formulated the economic law that necessitates the constant expansion of the slave territory. “In fifteen years more,” he said, “without a great increase in slave territory, either the slaves must be permitted to flee from the whites, or the whites must flee from the slaves.”
As is well known, individual states are represented in the Congressional House of Representatives according to the size of their respective populations. Since the population of the free states is growing incomparably more quickly than that of the slave states, the number of Northern representatives has inevitably overtaken the number of Southerners. The actual seat of Southern political power, therefore, is being transferred more and more to the American Senate, where every state, whether its population is great or small, is represented by two senators. In order to assert its influence in the Senate and, through the Senate, its hegemony over the United States, the South thus needed a continual formation of new slave states. But this could only be brought about by conquering foreign countries, as in the case of Texas, or by transforming the United States territories first into slave territories, later into slave states, as in the case of Missouri, Arkansas, etc. John Calhoun, whom the slaveholders admire as their statesman par excellence, declared in the Senate as early as February 19, 1847 that only the Senate offered the South the means of restoring a balance of power between South and North, that the extension of the slave territory was necessary to restore this balance, and that therefore the attempts of the South to create new slave states by force were justified.
When it comes down to it, the number of actual slaveholders in the South of the Union is not more than 300,000, an exclusive oligarchy confronted by the many million so-called poor whites, whose number has constantly grown as a result of the concentration of landed property, and whose situation can only be compared with that of the Roman plebeians in the direst period of Rome’s decline. Only with the acquisition of new territories, the prospect of such acquisition, and filibustering expeditions is it possible to harmonize the interests of these “poor whites” successfully with those of the slaveholders, to channel their restless thirst for action in a harmless direction, and to tempt them with the prospect of becoming slaveholders themselves one day.
As a result of economic laws, then, to confine slavery to the limits of its old terrain would inevitably have led to its gradual extinction; politically it would have destroyed the hegemony exercised by the slave states by way of the Senate; and finally it would have exposed the slaveholding oligarchy to ominous dangers within their own states from the “poor whites.” With the principle that every further extension of slave territories was to be prohibited by law, the Republicans therefore mounted a radical attack on the rule of the slaveholders. Consequently, the Republican election victory could not help but lead to open struggle between North and South. However, as has already been mentioned, this election victory was itself conditioned by the split in the Democratic camp.
The Kansas struggle had already provoked a split between the slave party and its Democratic allies in the North. The same quarrel now broke out again in a more general form with the presidential election of 1860. The Northern Democrats, with Douglas as their candidate, made the introduction of slavery into the territories dependent upon the will of the majority of settlers. The slaveholders’ party, with Breckinridge as its candidate, asserted that the Constitution of the United States, as the Supreme Court had also declared, made legal provision for slavery; slavery was in actual fact already legal in all territories and did not require special naturalization. Thus, while the Republicans prohibited any growth of slave territories, the Southern party laid claim to all territories as legally warranted domains. What they had tried, for instance, with Kansas—imposing slavery on a territory against the will of the settlers themselves, by way of the central government—they now held up as a law for all Union territories. Such a concession lay beyond the power of the Democratic leaders and would only have caused their army to desert to the Republican camp. On the other hand, Douglas’s “settlers’ sovereignty” could not satisfy the slaveholders’ party. What the slaveholders wanted to achieve had to be brought about in the next four years under the new President; it could only be brought about by means of the central government and could not be delayed any longer. It did not escape the slaveholders’ notice that a new power had arisen, the Northwest, whose population, which had almost doubled between 1850 and 1860, was already more or less equal to the white population of the slave states—a power which neither by tradition, temperament, nor way of life was inclined to let itself be dragged from compromise to compromise in the fashion of the old Northern states. The Union was only of value for the South insofar as it let it use federal power as a means of implementing its slave policy. If it did not, it was better to break now than to watch the development of the Republican party and the rapid growth of the Northwest for another four years, and to begin the struggle under less favorable conditions. The slaveholders’ party, therefore, now staked its all! When the Northern Democrats refused to play the role of the Southern “poor whites” any longer, the South brought about Lincoln’s victory by splitting the votes and used this victory as an excuse for drawing the sword.
As is clear, the whole movement was and is based on the slave question. Not in the sense of whether the slaves within the existing slave states should be directly emancipated or not, but whether the twenty million free Americans of the North should subordinate themselves any longer to an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders; whether the vast territories of the Republic should become the nurseries of free states or of slavery; finally, whether the foreign policy of the Union should take the armed propaganda of slavery as its device throughout Mexico and Central and South America.
In a foreign article we shall examine the assertion of the London press that the North should sanction secession as the most favorable and only possible solution of the conflict.7
Die Presse, October 25, 1861
1 On February 4, 1861, the Congress of Montgomery founded the Confederate States of America, with eleven member states under the presidency of Jefferson Davis.
2 This total includes the contested border states that the South also claimed.
3 James Buchanan was US president from 1857 to 1861.
4 The Ostend Manifesto was issued in 1854 by the United States ambassadors to Spain, France, and England (the latter being Buchanan); it contained an offer to purchase Cuba from Spain and threatened to seize it by force if Spain refused.
5 Nicaragua was the particular object of these expeditions.
6 The term “filibuster” here denotes American insurrectionist activities carried out in a foreign country.
7 See the following chapter, “The American Question in England.”