“The
Civil War in the United
States,” by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
1847 to 1871
This is a
re-translation of Marx, Engels and others’ short letters and news articles
about the U.S. Civil War. It clearly
points out that slavery contributed to the capitalist system – it is not just
some ‘pre-capitalist’ form of exploitation.
Marx was writing Das Capital during this period and he depicted
modern slavery as an open form of exploitation, contrasting it with wage
slavery, which was a hidden form of exploitation. Engels noted how slave cotton fueled the
capitalist textile mills of Manchester, England, not just the slave ships built in the ports
of the northern U.S. The many German revolutionaries that escaped
to the U.S. after the failed
1848 revolutions in Europe played a large part in fighting slavery and white
supremacy in Chicago, St.
Louis and Texas.
They were in contact with Marx and
Engels, providing on-the-ground information.
From maps Engels identified Chattanooga
and Atlanta as key rail-heads that would cripple and divide the Confederacy if taken – not Richmond,
which was mostly just a seat of government.
This
edition reprints 112 separate articles, letters and news stories about the war,
by a translator who was fired in 1951 for doing the translation. (U.S. version of
freedom…) It encompasses news stories
from the Greely’s New York Tribune, the Vienna
Die Presse, many letters back and forth, as well as articles by U.S. friends
and co-thinkers W.E.B. Dubois, Joseph Weydemeyer and the International Working
Men’s Association.
THE
SLAVE REVOLUTION
Of most
interest is W.E.B. Dubois’ clear point, also made by Marx, that the Civil War
was a revolutionary war of emancipation by the freedmen themselves. It was not just an abstract war by
capitalists against a more primitive form of accumulation, as is pictured by
some. In 1861 Marx said that a ‘slave
revolution’ would guarantee a Union victory. This book also points out the
differences between radical abolitionism / ‘red’ Republicanism and the ‘free
soilers’ among Republicans. The latter
did not want to compete with slaves for labor and wanted land without
competition from large slave-holders, but they had no particular opposition to
white supremacy. Many Republicans (and
Lincoln) initially saw the Civil War as merely a Constitutional matter related
to the illegitimacy of succession until later, when the war itself and dark-skinned
ex-slaves tipped the balance.
What
strikes one is the level of detail Marx and Engels dealt with on a regular
basis. Marx makes fun of the
hypocritical ‘anti-slavery’ British lords who earlier threw thousands of Gaelic
people off their land. The elites in England and France
supported the Confederacy because the war and Lincoln’s election initially was ostensibly ‘not
about slavery’ (cotton, cough, cough …) but about tariffs. But the lower classes did not support the
Confederacy, and stayed solid on that point. This is what prevented the European ruling
classes from helping the Confederacy.
In 1861
Marx goes into great detail over the fact that many southerners in nearly all states
did not want secession, naming South
Carolina as the only state where a majority were in
favor. Yet many present and prominent U.S. historians
of the Civil War – Catton, McPherson and especially the dreadful southern
historian Shelby Foote and his acolyte, Ken Burns – ignore this issue for the
most part. It seems to be crucial as an arrow pointed at the heart of
neo-Confederate ‘Lost Cause’ nationalist and regionalist lies.
ECONOMICS,
THEN AND NOW
Marx saw
that the Republican Party’s plan to limit slavery’s spread outside of the 15
slave states would ultimately end slavery, which needed to expand to
economically survive. This was also
the attitude of the slavocracy, which was angling for pushing U.S. slavery into Cuba,
Mexico and Central
America. He interpreted the
war as an aggressive one by the Confederacy to turn ¾ of the U.S. into slave
states. It was not a ‘war of northern aggression’ but one of southern
aggression. So when the national
government was of no use anymore to the slave power in 1861 with the victory of
Lincoln’s Republicans, as they intended to limit slavery’s spread in border, western
and northern U.S. territories, the Confederacy seceded and declared war at Fort
Sumter.
This is
similar to the present oil and gas industry, centered in the neo-Confederate oil-power
government of Texas. They threaten secession when they are dealing
with a national government which mentions a need to end the ‘carbon economy.’ (even
though the Democrats have a very real ‘all of the above’ strategy…) Or how 300,000 slave holders controlled the U.S. government until 1861, and now a handful of
capitalist billionaires control the U.S. government and both Parties
presently. Cotton and oil, slavery and wage slavery, inequality and inequality,
an unCivil War and a class war, both still haunt the U.S.
In these
pieces Marx eviscerates the dreadful British press on a regular basis. He pays great attention to the “Trent”
Affair, when U.S. ships stopped a British vessel, finding two Confederates on
board, Mason and Slidell (the latter still a town in Louisiana), who were
trying to get Britain and France into the war against the U.S. The British government used the episode to gin
up hatred against the U.S.,
but they failed. Marx shows how
McClellan’s reluctance to engage the Confederate army was political – to the
point where he harbored military traitors that were later arrested. Engels understands that the West is the key
to victory and analyzes battles, including those clearing Kentucky and Tennessee of Confederates in 1862. They comment on the dreadful state of 'poor whites' in the south, were had almost no property, just shabby farms, due to not being part of the large landlord / slave-owner strata. On display is Engel's pessimism and Marx's optimism; their hopes for a period of labor upsurge and formation of an independent labor party after the war; their mistaken belief in Andrew Johnson; their hope for freedman suffrage and continued U.S. military occupation of the ex-slave states, which did not come to pass after 1877.
This is a
great historical book by Marx and Engels for U.S. leftists, as it relates
to familiar issues and places in detail. Every Civil War ‘buff’ should read it. Marx saw the concurrent war against slavery
in the U.S. and the battle
against serfdom in Russia
as part of an upsurge against capital, emboldening the working classes. The 1st International was formed
in 1864 in the middle of the U.S. Civil War, which gives an indication of the
world-wide importance of these two struggles. It was followed by the first example of workers' rule in 1871, the Paris Commune.
Prior blog
reviews on this topic, use blog search box upper left with these terms, to
investigate our 14 year archive: "Why the South Lost the Civil War," "Lincoln," "Struggle & Progress," "The Neo-Confederate States," "Blockaders, Refugees and Contrabands," "The Bloody Shirt," "Guerillas, Unionists and Violence on the Confederate Home Front," "The Free State of Jones," "Andersonville Prison," "James-Younger Gang," "Southern Cultural Nationalism," "The Civil War in Florida," "A Blaze of Glory," "The State of Jones," "White Trash," "Drivin' Dixie Down" or use the
words “Civil War,” "John Brown" or “slavery."
And I
bought it at May Day Books, which carries many Marxist books by various
authors.
Red Frog
July 2,
2021
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