Friday, July 2, 2021

The War of Southern Aggression

 “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 Downor 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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