An Unfinished Revolution

Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln

Robin Blackburn

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781844677221
• eBook ISBN:
  9781781683798
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln exchanged letters at the end of the Civil War. Although they were divided by far more than the Atlantic Ocean, they agreed on the cause of "free labor" and the urgent need to end slavery. In his introduction, Robin Blackburn argues that Lincoln's response signaled the importance of the German American community and the role of the international communists in opposing European recognition of the Confederacy.
The ideals of communism, voiced through the International Working Men's Association, attracted many thousands of supporters throughout the US, and helped spread the demand for an eight-hour day. Blackburn shows how the IWA in America-born out of the Civil War-sought to radicalize Lincoln's unfinished revolution and to advance the rights of labor, uniting black and white, men and women, native and foreign-born. The International contributed to a profound critique of the capitalist robber barons who enriched themselves during and after the war, and it inspired an extraordinary series of strikes and class struggles in the postwar decades.
In addition to a range of key texts and letters by both Lincoln and Marx, this book includes articles from the radical New York-based journal Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, an extract from Thomas Fortune's classic work on racism Black and White, Frederick Engels on the progress of US labor in the 1880s, and Lucy Parson's speech at the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World.

Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln:
An Unfinished Revolution

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.

MARX REJECTS ECONOMIC
EXPLANATIONS OF THE WAR

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 s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Abraham Lincoln
• Karl Marx
• Letters
• Articles
• Acknowledgments