Marx and Engels on the US Civil War: The 'Materialist Conception of History' in Action

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156920611X592409

Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 169–192 brill.nl/hima

Marx and Engels on the US Civil War: The ‘Materialist Conception of History’ in Action

August H. NimtzUniversity of Minnesota

[email protected]

AbstractMarx’s analysis, supplemented by that of Engels, of the US Civil War is as instructive, if not more, as any of their writings to illustrate their ‘materialist conception of history’. Because the American experience figured significantly in the young Marx’s path to communist conclusions, the outbreak of the War in 1861 obligated him to devote his full attention to its course. His application of their method allowed him to see more accurately the course of the War than his partner. Also, he was able to see what President Abraham Lincoln had to do, that is, to convert the War from one to end secession to one to overthrow slavery, before the President himself. Despite its contradictory outcome, Marx’s expectation that the War would put the US working class on terra firma for the first time was justified.

KeywordsMarx, Engels, US Civil War, slavery, historical materialism, Abraham Lincoln, race

After Karl Marx’s death in 1883, it fell to his partner Frederick Engels to defend their programme and ideas and, hence, their methodology. Youth and intellectuals attracted to their perspective – and opponents as well – raised questions about their ‘materialist conception of history’ which Engels had to address. Often the issue was whether he and Marx were guilty of ‘economic determinism’, and, if not, what would constitute contrary evidence. In a number of responses Engels offered the example of Marx’s analysis, as presented in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, of the coup d’état of Napoleon III in 1851 that brought an end to the Second Republic in France.1 Marx’s book, Engels argued, showed how the economic-determinism charge was belied by concrete and nuanced political analysis in which economic developments served mainly as a framework and/or platform for explanation.

1. See, for example, Engels’s letter to W. Borgius, in Marx and Engels 1975–2004m, pp. 264–7.

170 A. H. Nimtz / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 169–192

I want to make the case here for another analysis that they – Marx especially – conducted that serves just as well for illustrating the application of their methodology, specifically, their writings on the US Civil War. I suspect that Engels never offered that example because what they wrote, unlike the Eighteenth Brumaire, was largely inaccessible to those who might have been interested. Nevertheless, those writings, I argue, are as rich, if not more so, as Marx’s analysis of the overthrow of the Second Republic. And, unlike as in Engels’s lifetime, they are available now in a way that they have never been before – even online.2

Exhibit A for my case is the message that Marx wrote to Abraham Lincoln in November 1864, on behalf of the newly-formed International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), congratulating him on his re-election:

We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.

From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?

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; when on those very spots counterrevolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding ‘the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old constitution’, and maintained slavery to be ‘a beneficent institution’, indeed, the old solution of the great problem of ‘the relation of capital to labor’, and cynically proclaimed property in man ‘the cornerstone of the new edifice’ – then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders’ rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the proslavery intervention of their betters – and, from most parts of Europe, contributed their quota of blood to the good cause.

While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned

2. Available, for the most part, at <www.marxistsfr.org/archive/marx/works>.

A. H. Nimtz / Historical Materialism 19.4 (2011) 169–192 171

laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.

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 the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.3

Marx’s letter, as I intend to show, is a highly concentrated distillate of his and his partner’s views on not just the War itself but also the overthrow of slavery and the future course of the US social formation. It also anticipates better-known utterances of Marx. What follows are the details that I employ to support this claim.

Toward communist conclusions

To fully understand Marx’s letter to Lincoln, it is necessary to begin with his larger project that commenced at least two decades earlier. It, in turn, had roots in his reading of the US reality, a fact often under-appreciated. A brief overview is in order.

The still-fledgling republic taught the young Marx, a radical democrat, that even in the most politically democratic country on earth ‘human emancipation’ was not guaranteed.4 A nation without a feudal past, unlike Europe, had quickly evolved from its inception into one rife with social inequalities. Though his earliest comments about this side of the US reality – before he arrived at communist conclusions – make no mention of slavery in particular, what he read about the country was replete with references to the ‘peculiar institution’. Clearly, political democracy was insufficient for human emancipation or the ‘sovereignty of the people’ – a necessary conclusion in Marx’s road to communism. The US, in other words, was very much a work in progress.

3. Marx and Engels 1975–2004g, pp. 19–20. One advantage of Marx’s letter for English speakers is that English is its original rendering. Thus, there is no need to be concerned about the usual translation-issues when it comes to Marx’s method – at least for that audience.

4. The key text is Marx’s On the Jewish Question. For details on the impact of the US experience on Marx’s political trajectory, see Nimtz 2003, Chapter 1.


What explained the apparent contradiction, the coexistence of social inequalities and the most advanced political forms?5 Various accounts of the country revealed that private property drove social inequality, and, in the process, placed limits on political democracy. This insight spurred Marx’s subsequent investigation – accompanied by his new partner Frederick Engels – into the logic of private property, that is, political economy, the backbone of civil society and the context for understanding the political sphere. If private property-relations were the key in the diagnosis of the problem, the solution lied with the only class that had the interest and capability in ending class-society itself – the proletariat. Therefore, anything that helped to add to the ranks of the proletariat, specifically, the overthrow of precapitalist forms such as feudalism and slavery, was in its interests. Only with the arrival of the capitalist mode of production did the requisite material come into place, human and non-human, to make real democracy, the ‘sovereignty of the people’, a reality for the first time.

Armed with a solution to the puzzle that was so glaring in the case of the US, Marx and Engels set out to win workers to their new communist world-view. Exactly because of the democratic space that existed in the US, Germans who called themselves communists were able to operate more openly there than in their homeland itself. This fact brought Marx and Engels into their first intervention in US politics in 1846, around the land-question, an issue indirectly related to slavery. The two sharply criticised a self-proclaimed German communist for advocating land-ownership as a panacea for the still-emerging working class. While recognising the particular reality of the US, that the call for land-ownership enjoyed understandably wide support – thus the popularity of the Free Soil Party – they warned against making it an end in itself. At best, it was a necessary step toward the creation of a hereditary working class in the US. Humanity’s emancipation, they argued, rested on the shoulders of those who were the dispossessed, the modern proletariat. This long-view perspective about the US working class forever informed Marx and Engels’s practice in relation to politics in the US.

Marx noted in 1847 in his polemic on Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, The Poverty of Philosophy, the importance of slavery not only for the US, but for world-capitalism:

5. One aspect of the US political system that Marx found lacking was its federal framework. Federal government, he argued, was fragmented government, and an actual obstacle to democratic rule. See his ‘Moralizing Criticism and Critical Morality’, Marx and Engels 1975–2004a, pp. 334–5.


Direct slavery is as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the pre-condition of large-scale industry. . . . Without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe North America off the map of the world, and you will have anarchy – the complete decay of modern commerce and modern civilization. Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.6

Lest it be thought that Marx was providing a historical justification for slavery, a few months earlier he ridiculed Proudhon for attempting to find the ‘golden mean . . . between slavery and liberty’.7 He left no doubt that he sided with ‘liberty’. In the draft for the Communist Manifesto, written by his comrade Engels that same year, the difference between slaves and the proletariat was made clear. The

latter stands at a higher stage of development. The slave frees himself by becoming a proletarian, abolishing from the totality of property relationships only the property of slavery. The proletarian can free himself only by abolishing property in general.8

The overthrow of slavery was the necessary first step in the full development of the proletariat and, along with the institution of political democracy, the necessary precondition for the struggle between capital and labour and, thus, the road to socialist revolution and human emancipation.

Except for a brief, though insightful, comment about blacks,9 there is virtually nothing in the writings of Marx and Engels in this period that reveals what they thought about them and the question of race. Only with the outbreak of the Civil War would they write in a sustained way about race and slavery in the US.

Prelude to the ‘general conflagration’

After the end of the revolutionary wave in Europe between 1848 and 1849 and the shrinkage of the democratic space, many German veterans of those struggles migrated to the US. Marx himself gave some thought to doing the

6. Marx and Engels 1975–2004a, p. 167.7. Marx and Engels 1975–2004h, p. 101.8. Marx and Engels 1975–2004a, p. 100.9. Marx and Engels 1975–2004c, p. 211.


same, especially since it was there at this moment where it was easier for him to get his ideas into print – the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte being the most notable example – than in Europe, and Germany for certain. Hohenzollern censorship-laws enabled more German-language newspapers to be printed in the US, another venue for Marx, than in Germany itself.

Exile-politics was affected by ongoing political debates in the country, especially the increasingly contentious issue of the future of slavery. Of the veterans of 1848 who emigrated to the US, none was as important for the Marx party as Joseph Weydemeyer. Until his death in 1866, it was he who collaborated the closest with Marx and Engels on developments in America. His biggest contribution was to bring clarity on the slave-question to the German-American working class. Employing Marx and Engels’s ‘materialist conception of history’, he argued forcefully, immediately upon arrival in New York in 1851, through the first communist organisation and newspaper on American soil that he helped to found, that the advancement of the working class depended on the overthrow of slavery. In so doing, he consciously disputed the claim of the aforementioned current in German-American working-class politics that the abolition of wage-labour was on the immediate agenda and that the abolition of chattel-slavery was a side-issue.10

Ever on the lookout for a revival of the revolutionary movement, Marx and Engels took to heart two events at the end of 1859. Marx declared – and Engels concurred – ‘that the most momentous thing happening in the world today is the slave-movement – on the one hand, in America, started by the death of Brown, and in Russia, on the other’. Marx was referring, of course, to the abortive rebellion of the abolitionist John Brown at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, a few months earlier, which in turn had stimulated at least one slave-uprising in its aftermath. As for Russia, its ‘slaves’, that is, serfs, had also been on the march for emancipation as he had noted the previous year. A year later, in a move to pre-empt a revolt from below, the Czar abolished serfdom. Of enormous significance was that the Russian movement was coinciding with the one in the US. Precisely because they viewed the class-struggle from an international perspective, they gave more weight to the conjuncture of struggles in various countries than to isolated ones. The fight against slavery and other precapitalist modes of exploitation was part-and-parcel of the democratic revolution and a necessary step in labour’s struggle against capital. The Brown rebellion registered the depths of the impending crisis within the US itself. For

10. For details on Weydemeyer’s activities and those of other Marx sympathisers in the US, see Nimtz 2003, Chapter 2.


antislavery fighters it gave a needed lift to their cause, giving it a martyr for the first time. The veterans of 1848 responded predictably.

With Weydemeyer at the helm, the Marx party played an active rôle in advancing the antislavery cause at this very crucial moment, specifically, in the nomination and election of Abraham Lincoln for president. Along with another Marx-party sympathiser, Adolph Douai, Weydemeyer helped to mobilise German-American support for Lincoln’s nomination for the Republican Party. Though a bourgeois party, it was founded in 1854 in opposition to slavery and consistent with the perspective of the Marx party that the overthrow of slavery was the prerequisite for working-class hegemony. With the German-Americans in the party as the most ardent opponents of slavery, Weydemeyer and Douai saw their rôle as that of making sure it took the strongest antislavery position in the upcoming presidential election and nominate a candidate disposed to uphold that stance. The outcome of the process was captured by Weydemeyer’s newspaper, which ‘judged the . . . platform “certainly something short of a radical one, and a little lukewarm,” but one nevertheless “that in general satisfies the demands we make upon it.” It believed Lincoln was “the choice of the conservative wing of the Republican Convention” but vowed to support him as the “lesser of two evils.” ’11 As Marx explained to one party-member in Europe, ‘This time there seems good reason to hope that victory . . . will go to the Republican Party.’12

Weydemeyer and Douai then threw themselves into the campaign to get Lincoln elected. In a number of locations the German-American vote was decisive, due in part to their efforts. With Lincoln’s victory, the slavocracy began immediately to take the first steps toward secession. As Engels wrote to Marx in early January 1861:

In North America things are . . . heating up. With the slaves the situation must be pretty awful if the Southerners are playing such a risky game . . . [which] might result in a general conflagration. At all events . . . slavery would appear to be rapidly nearing its end . . .13

While history would prove Engels’s prediction to be true, it was far from certain at that moment that the president-elect would stand up to the slave-owners. Such uncertainty was clearly the sentiment of the milieu with whom the Marx party worked closest for Lincoln’s election. Three days after the

11. Levine 1992, p. 249.12. Marx and Engels 1975–2004j, p. 210. In the Complete Works, small capitalisation is used

to indicate the use of English in the original. 13. Marx and Engels 1975–2004j, p. 242.


election, Douai wrote in his paper that those who campaigned for Lincoln but were not, like himself, Republican Party members had the ‘special task to see to it that what has been achieved with our help is not again undone but is built up still more; and if reactionary elements in the Party of Reaction [the Democratic Party] intend to do that, we must form a counter-weight to them and press forward to further gains.’14 The task now was to be vigilant and not assume that the election had necessarily settled anything. In subsequent issues he concluded that the struggle now was, as Engels had assumed, for the complete abolition of slavery. He also argued that the ‘slave has in every condition the right and in certain conditions even the duty to free himself by every means possible from slavery’,15 or, as Malcolm X would say almost a century later, liberation ‘by any means necessary’. This was clearly a stance far beyond what the president-elect understood his mandate to be, but one that Engels accurately predicted he would have to take.

With the slavocracy’s attack on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, in April 1861, the ‘general conflagration’ that Engels predicted commenced. Once again, the Marx party would take its position alongside other working-class fighters. ‘When the Civil War began with the attack . . . most of the German radical organizations disbanded because the majority of their members had enlisted in the Union forces. The New York Communist Club did not meet for the duration of the war since most of its members had joined the Union Army.’16 Not the least important of the Marx-party members to do so was Weydemeyer.

‘A last card up its sleeve . . . a slave revolution’

With the outbreak of the Civil War, Marx and Engels gave their undivided attention to its every detail. For Marx this meant putting the completion of Capital on hold – testimony to the War’s significance for him. For both of them the heart of the matter was, once again, the slavery-question. Marx proved to be more insightful as he accurately predicted the overall course of events within a week of the beginning of hostilities: ‘There can be no doubt that, in the early part of the struggle, the scales will be weighted in favor of the South, where the class of propertyless white adventurers provides an inexhaustible source of martial militia. In the Long Run, of course, the North

14. Foner 1977a, p. 29. Holzer 2008 shows how the vigilance of such staunch antislavery forces helped to steel the president-elect.

15. Ibid.16. Foner 1984, p. 10.


will be victorious since, if the need arises, it has a last card up its sleeve, in the shape of a slave revolution.’17 Marx’s view that the slaves would be the decisive factor in the War proved to be true. His optimism would serve him well since the South was indeed initially successful, leading many supporters of the Union to be pessimistic about its prospects. Though also hopeful at the outset because of the North’s sheer population-advantage, Engels too began, as will be seen later, to harbour doubts.

As Marx put it, to defend the Northern cause in Europe, where the ruling classes and their governments in Britain and France sympathised with the slave-owners, required a ‘struggle in the press’, specifically, to mobilise European working-class opinion on its behalf. This meant having to read up intensely on US history, especially since his audience included, for about the first year of the War, the readers of the New York Tribune, and none other than Lincoln himself. With his historical-materialist perspective he was able to discern the ‘general formula’ of the country’s politics from its founding. In ‘foreign, as in the domestic, policy of the United States, the interests of the slaveholders served as the guiding star.’ Specifically, efforts to acquire Cuba, ‘unceasing piratical expeditions of the filibusters against the states of Central America’, and the conquest of Northern Mexico were all done for the ‘manifest purpose . . . [of ] conquest of new territory for the spread of slavery and of the slaveholders’ rule.’18

Marx addressed another and very significant dimension of the slavocracy, its relationship to the ‘so-called poor whites’ in the South. Since there were ‘millions’ of them – their ‘numbers have been constantly growing through concentration of landed property and whose condition is only to be compared with that of the Roman plebeians in the period of Rome’s extreme decline’ – how were they controlled given the relatively small number of slave-owners, a ‘narrow oligarchy’? He provided an answer: ‘Only by acquisition and the prospect of acquisition of new Territories, as well as by filibustering expeditions, is it possible to square the interests of these “poor whites” with those of the slaveholders, to give their restless thirst for action a harmless direction and to tame them with the prospect of one day becoming slaveholders themselves.’ The forcible incorporation of Northern Mexico into the US was clearly on Marx’s mind.

The same logic that drove the slave-owners to extend their mode of production regionally, therefore, would lead them to do the same nationally. Thus, Marx concluded,

17. Marx and Engels 1975–2004j, p. 277.18. Marx and Engels 1975–2004f, pp. 37–8.


The present struggle between the South and North is . . . nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other.19

More than any other, it was this claim that informed all of Marx’s judgements about the War, its course and outcome. It recognised that the North, regardless of how the Lincoln administration explained or even saw its actions, was objectively pursuing a war to overthrow slavery, ‘the root of the evil. . . . Events themselves drive to the promulgation of the decisive slogan – emancipation of the slaves.’ On display was one of the key features of Marx and Engels’s method, specifically, the assumption that a socio-historical process can have a reality independently of how its protagonists understand their rôle in it. But for this particular example the qualifier ‘can’, or ‘possibly’, is appropriate. At a certain stage, to be seen shortly, consciousness on the part of Lincoln became decisive. The slavocracy, Marx declared, was far more conscious of its tasks at the outset than Lincoln. For Lincoln to be successful, his consciousness, Marx knew, would have to catch up with reality.

There are two quite important issues that Marx raised in his arguments that are worth pursuing at this time. One concerns the issue of race, class and colour. For the first time, at least in the US context, Marx addressed this most contentious of issues, albeit in the form of only a few but nonetheless pregnant comments. In regard to the subjugation of the non-slaveowning whites of the South to the slavocracy, he wrote: ‘Between 1856 and 1860 the political spokesmen, jurists, moralists and theologians of the slaveholders’ party had already sought to prove, not so much that Negro slavery is justified, but rather that colour is a matter of indifference and the working class is everywhere born to slavery.’ Then, three paragraphs later, in regard to the claim that the logic of the slave-owners was to extend their system to the North, he wrote: ‘In the Northern states, where Negro slavery is in practice impossible, the white working class would gradually be forced down to the level of helotry [that is, the Helots of Sparta]. This would fully accord with the loudly proclaimed principle that only certain races are capable of freedom, and as the actual labour is the lot of the Negro in the South, so in the North it is the lot of the German and the Irishman, or their direct descendants.’20

The two comments are most instructive. They offer a window onto Marx’s thinking and approach to the race-class nexus, thoughts that anticipate

19. Marx and Engels 1975–2004f, p. 50. 20. Marx and Engels 1975–2004f, pp. 49–50.


better-known subsequent pronouncements. Both reveal Marx’s view that the exploitation of labour, or class-subordination, had its own logic and, in the US setting at least, had an ontological givenness independent of race/colour-distinctions. Thus, the exploiters were fundamentally indifferent about the race and colour of those they exploited.

His second comment recognised that in certain settings, again the US case, claims about racial superiority and inferiority could facilitate the exploitation-process. On the basis of such claims, some potentially exploited layers of society were more vulnerable than others. In the particular historical reality of mid-nineteenth-century America, German and Irish working-class immigrants were only a step above blacks in the racial hierarchy. Again, given the logic of labour-exploitation, workers with ‘white’ skin would suffice if those with ‘black’ were unavailable. Note that Marx employed ‘race’ to refer to colour as well as to national origins. This, no doubt, reflected the two different usages in German-speaking Europe and the US. But while race, however defined, facilitated the process of class-subordination, it was the logic of the latter itself that framed race and its employment. And as long as slavery was in place in the South, all workers, regardless of colour and location, would be vulnerable to enslavement. Whether Marx really believed that the slavocracy could actually impose its system on the North is uncertain. His historical-materialist perspective would suggest otherwise. But, exactly because the method did not assume historical inevitability, a struggle had to be waged in order to avoid such an outcome. What he wrote may, therefore, have been just for that reason – the ‘struggle in the press’.

The second issue worth noting in Marx’s three articles has to do with Mexico. In the Tribune, he commented on the way in which the slaveholders were able to maintain their hegemony within the South. They did so ‘by constantly throwing out to their white plebeians the bait of prospective conquests within and without the frontiers of the United States.’ In the first of the two articles in the liberal Vienna daily, Die Presse, he argued, as previously noted, that such a strategy was designed to convince ‘poor whites’ that they had the same interests as the slave-owners. As for the ‘conquests . . . without the frontiers’, Marx was clearly referring to Washington’s expropriation of Northern Mexico in 1845–6. Because the slavocracy ‘required a continual formation of new slave states’, for reasons already discussed, ‘the conquest of foreign lands, as in the case of Texas’, was the means for realising this goal. The illegal annexation in 1845 of Texas as a slave-state revealed Washington’s true intentions and precipitated war a year later with Mexico, the Mexican-American War. Then later, as a result of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, another piece of the conquest, present-day New Mexico and Arizona, ‘was


transformed into a slave territory. . . . In 1859 New Mexico [as the two states were collectively known] received a slave code that vies with the statute-books of Texas and Alabama in barbarity.’ But, because there were so few slaves in the territory, it ‘had therefore sufficed for the South to send some adventurers with a few slaves over the border, and then with the help of the central government in Washington and of its officials and contractors in New Mexico to drum together a sham popular representation to impose slavery and with it the rule of the slaveholders on the Territory.’ In essence, the conquest constituted ‘the armed spreading of slavery in Mexico’.21

Both the tone and spirit in which Marx wrote about the conquest of Northern Mexico is clearly at variance with what Engels said more than a decade earlier. In the same vein in which he applauded in 1848 French imperialism in Algeria, Engels wrote approvingly of Washington’s expropriation of Mexico. It advanced, he argued, the interests of the bourgeoisie by making possible the ‘creation of fresh capital, that is, for calling new bourgeois into being, and enriching those already in existence.’22 The conquest of Northern Mexico was, therefore, ‘waged wholly and solely in the interest of civilisation’, particularly because the ‘energetic Yankees’ – unlike the ‘lazy Mexicans’ – would bring about the ‘rapid exploitation of the California gold mines’ and, hence, for the ‘third time in history give world trade a new direction.’23 Though these were Engels’s opinions, there is nothing to suggest that they differed from those which Marx would have held at that time. As late as 1853 the latter expressed similar views about British imperialism in India.24 Such views were informed more by their newly arrived at historical-materialist perspective, and less by the concrete empirical terrain. A closer reading of the American reality revealed something quite different. Rather than the bourgeoisie it was the slavocracy that was served by the conquest, therefore preventing the full institution of capitalist relations of production in the acquired possessions and, thus, the growth of the working class. The benefits, in other words, that came with the acquisition of California were compromised by the ‘barbarity’ of slavery’s extension. Marx, therefore, just as Engels had done in relation to Algeria, changed his position on Mexico; he did the same for India.25

21. Marx and Engels 1975–2004f, pp. 40, 36, 42.22. Marx and Engels 1975–2004a, p. 527.23. Marx and Engels 1975–2004b, p. 365.24. Marx and Engels 1975–2004d, p. 132. 25. Marx and Engels 1975–2004i, p. 249. Thus, I take issue with Jeffrey Vogel’s otherwise-

thoughtful article, ‘The Tragedy of History’ (Vogel 1996), in which he speaks to Marx and Engels’s views on Mexico – India as well. Had he looked closer, he would have seen how their views evolved as I argue here.


This argument is given added credence by subsequent comments and pronouncements he made about Mexico. For example, he reported favourably in December 1861 that Mexico had refused in 1845 to meet with Washington’s emissary to even discuss the sale of its Northern territories.26 In 1848 or 1849 he, like Engels, would have viewed Mexico’s refusal unfavourably – an obstacle to the US bourgeoisie’s civilising mission. Interestingly, in the same month, Engels, in a passing comment, described the Mexican-American War as one in which ‘Mexico defended herself ’.27 It is hard to imagine that he would have employed such language in 1849. Then, in 1862, when Louis Bonaparte with the backing of England and Spain sought to take advantage of Washington’s preoccupation with the Confederacy by undertaking an imperialist venture into Mexico, Marx came to the defence of the country and its new liberal government headed by Benito Juárez. The intervention, he told Tribune readers, was ‘one of the most monstrous enterprises ever chronicled in the annals of international history.’28 When Bonaparte’s forces began to suffer setbacks at the hands of the Mexicans, he exclaimed to Engels: ‘If only the Mexicans (les derniers des hommes! [the dregs of humanity!]) were once more to best the crapauds [Bonaparte’s generals].’29 The success of the so-called dregs exhilarated Marx. His joy spoke volumes about the distance he and Engels had travelled from the initial application of their theoretical perspective.

Lincoln – a ‘sui generis figure’

Although Marx’s optimism regarding the course of the War was eventually vindicated, Lincoln’s hesitancy to do what he knew had to be done – to launch a ‘slave-revolution’ – caused vexation along the way. Lincoln’s efforts to appease the interests of slave-owners in states that had not joined the Confederacy led him to avoid the question of abolition for the first sixteen months or so of the War. Marx offered an explanation: ‘Lincoln, in accordance with his legal tradition, has an aversion for all genius, anxiously clings to the letter of the Constitution and fights shy of every step that could mislead the “loyal” slaveholders of the border states.’30

Marx nevertheless continued to criticise Lincoln for such a stance. Particularly repugnant was the policy that ‘no [Union] general could venture

26. Marx and Engels 1975–2004f, p. 103.27. Marx and Engels 1975–2004e, p. 527.28. Marx and Engels 1975–2004f, p. 71.29. Marx and Engels 1975–2004j, p. 431. 30. Marx and Engels 1975–2004f, p. 87.


to put a company of Negroes in the field’, with the result ‘that slavery was finally transformed from the Achilles’ heel of the South into its invulnerable horny hide. Thanks to the slaves, who do all the productive work, all able-bodied men in the South can be put into the field!’. Again, for Marx the key to victory was a ‘slave-revolution’, the need for the North to pursue a ‘revolutionary kind of warfare and to inscribe the battle-slogan of “Aboliton of Slavery!” on the star-spangled banner.’ The arming of blacks, free, runaway and captured slaves, would deprive the South of its ability to carry on the War. Lincoln ‘errs only if he imagines that the “loyal” slaveholders are to be moved by benevolent speeches and rational arguments. They will yield only to force.’31 In a letter to Engels, written, apparently, on the eve of the Die Presse article, he argued that the North would be compelled to ‘wage the war in earnest, have recourse to revolutionary methods and overthrow the supremacy of the border slave statesmen. One single nigger regiment would have a remarkable effect on Southern nerves.’32 Like Marx, Frederick Douglass had ‘repeatedly called for the arming of the slaves, insisting from the outset, “The Negro is the key of the situation – the pivotal point upon which the whole rebellion turns”.’33

By the summer of 1862 Marx became more hopeful about Lincoln. Among the steps he took was the recognition by Washington for the first time of the government of Haiti, whose roots could be traced to a successful slave-revolt, and, thus, fulfilling a long-sought hope of the abolitionists. But even more significant, ‘[a]nother law, which is now being put into effect for the first time,

31. Marx and Engels 1975–2004f, pp. 227–8.32. Marx and Engels 1975–2004j, p. 400. As for ‘nigger’, (again, small capitals here indicate

usage of English words in the original text) which Marx employed in more than one context, and of obvious concern not only for those of us with visible roots in Africa, the editors of the Complete Works note that, in the nineteenth century, it did not have the ‘more profane and unacceptable status’ of later history (Marx and Engels 1975–2004k, p. xl). Whether this is an apologia is neither here nor there. Apparently, even Harriet Tubman employed the term for self-description (Klingaman 2001, p. 88). Marx began to use it during the Civil War as he was familiarising himself with the US reality. In published writings, he always employed quotation-marks; in letters, often without. Only once in the available record did, it seems, he use it in a derogatory sense, in a diatribe against Ferdinand Lassalle (Marx and Engels 1975–2004j, pp. 389–90) in 1862, that is, in the year when he first used the word (for the context, see ‘Lassalle and Marx: History of a Myth’, in Draper 1989, pp. 241–69). Marx and Engels, like all mortals, were products, clearly, of the world in which they lived. Their comments in personal correspondence that were unambiguously racist, sexist or antisemitic must be seen in context, and in relation to their entire corpus of writings and actions. For what it is worth, Marx was fondly known by close friends and family as ‘Moor’, owing to his dark features, and he had a son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, a mulatto, who was also fondly called in family circles, ‘African’ and ‘Negrillo’. What the personal details suggest is that one should be cautious and not rush to judgement.

33. Foner 1988, p. 5.


provides that these emancipated Negroes may be militarily organised and put into the field against the South.’ The North had finally begun to use the ‘last card up its sleeve’. On the basis of these and the other legislation, Marx concluded that ‘no matter how the dice may fall in the fortunes of war, even now it can safely be said that Negro slavery will not long outlive the Civil War.’34

When Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation less than two months later – ‘from January 1, 1863, slavery in the Confederacy shall be abolished’ – Marx no doubt felt vindicated for his optimism. Though there is no way that Marx would have known, the rationale for it, as Lincoln explained to his cabinet in July, was uncannily similar to what he argued in his August article for Die Presse. ‘Emancipation’, the President said, had become

a military necessity, absolutely essential to the preservation of the Union . . . We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued. The slaves [are] undeniably an element of strength to those who [have] their service, and we must decide whether that element should be with us or against us . . . Decisive and extensive measures must be adopted . . . We [want] the army to strike more vigorous blows. The Administration must set an example, and strike at the heart of the rebellion.35

It was as if Lincoln anticipated and gave heed to Marx’s advice about the need for ‘a revolutionary kind of warfare’ and how to deal with the slavocracy: ‘They will yield only to force.’

The Proclamation, Marx declared, was ‘even more important than the’ recent Union victory at Antietam, Maryland – ‘the most important document in American history since the establishment of the Union, tantamount to the tearing up of the old American Constitution.’ His prediction that ‘Lincoln’s place in the history of the United States and of mankind will, nevertheless, be next to that of Washington’ proved to be more accurate. From the perspective of a historical materialist, Lincoln was ‘a sui generis figure’ in the annals of history: ‘He is not the product of a popular revolution. This plebeian . . . an average person of good will, was placed at the top by the interplay of the forces of universal suffrage unaware of the great issues at stake.’

Then Marx bestowed his highest compliment ever on the US: ‘The new world has never achieved a greater triumph than by this demonstration that, given its political and social organisation, ordinary people of good will can accomplish feats which only heroes could accomplish in the old world!’36

34. Marx and Engels 1975–2004f, pp. 228–9.35. McPherson 1996, p. 77. 36. Marx and Engels 1975–2004j, p. 250.


Superior social relations combined with particular institutional arrangements, that is, the electoral system, brought out, in other words, the best in Lincoln. Marx’s method also allowed him to understand the revolutionary tasks before Lincoln certainly sooner, if not better, than the President himself.37

The Emancipation Proclamation notwithstanding, Marx’s partner remained doubtful about the North’s prospects. Engels’s pessimism stood in sharp contrast to Marx’s optimism. Their different assessments constitute the only documented and sustained political disagreement between the two, lasting for well over two years. Particularly bothersome for Engels was the apparent irresoluteness of the North in comparison to the South in taking the necessary measures to break the back of the slave-owners. While acknowledging Engels’s concerns, Marx responded that ‘I’m prepared to bet my life on it that these fellows [the Confederacy] will come off worst, “Stonewall jackson” notwithstanding.’38 Marx answered the specifics of Engels’s complaints including his already discussed solution to the slavery-question. He also chided him on more than one occasion: ‘It strikes me that you allow yourself to be influenced by the military aspect of things a little too much.’39 And a few weeks later, ‘events over there [in America] are such as to transform the world.’40

As the War continued without any decisive turns after Lincoln’s Proclamation, it would be almost two years before Marx and Engels made any significant comments on developments in the US. The presidential campaign in the fall of 1864 got their attention. ‘I consider’, Marx told Engels,

the present moment, entre nous, to be extremely critical. If Grant suffers a major defeat, or Sherman wins a major victory, so all right. Just now, at election time, chronic series of small checks would be dangerous. I fully agree with you that, to date, Lincoln’s re-election is pretty well assured, still 100 to 1. But election time in a country which is the archetype of democratic humbug is full of hazards that may quite unexpectedly defy the logic of events. . . . This is undoubtedly the most critical moment since the beginning of the war. Once this has been shifted, old Lincoln can blunder on to his heart’s content.41

37. Marx was not unique in seeing the War as a revolutionary war, or, as a social revolution. James McPherson’s Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (McPherson 1991), specifically Chapter 1, quotes other leading figures of the period who shared a similar view. What distinguished Marx, however, from his contemporaries was his global perspective, his vision of the War as an advance for the world-revolutionary process.

38. Marx and Engels 1975–2004j, p. 416.39. Ibid.40. Marx and Engels 1975–2004j, p. 421.41. Marx and Engels 1975–2004j, p. 562.


Events would once again prove Marx, and this time Engels, to have been remarkably insightful. Just as he predicted, Lincoln did indeed win the election, overwhelmingly in the Electoral College, though closer in the popular vote. General William Tecumseh Sherman’s victory in Georgia on the eve of the election, as both had suspected – though Engels was ‘doubtful’ about his chances – proved to be decisive. Finally, as Marx confidently noted, Lincoln’s victory ensured the defeat of the Confederacy. With the results in, Frederick Douglass called the election ‘the most momentous and solemn that ever occurred in our country or in any other . . . to determine the question of life or death to the nation.’42 Modern research also concurs with Marx’s opinion about the cruciality of the election. A defeat for Lincoln would have, in all likelihood, lead to a negotiated settlement of the War to the advantage of the slavocracy.

By the summer of 1864 Engels began to be a bit hopeful about the North’s situation. When he and Marx received a letter in October that year from Weydemeyer, whom they had been out of touch with since the beginning of war and who had risen to the rank of colonel in the Union Army, they got for the first time an insider’s view of developments, particularly regarding the conduct of the War. Weydemeyer’s insights, Marx’s continuing optimism, and, most importantly, the progress registered by Sherman’s victory eventually won Engels over. His reply to Weydemeyer’s letter, in the aftermath of Lincoln’s re-election, makes this clear: ‘Despite the numerous blunders made by the Northern armies . . . the tide of conquest is rolling slowly but surely onward, and, in the course of 1865, at all events the moment will undoubtedly come when the organised resistance of the South will fold up like a pocket-knife . . .’. Engels then put the War in historical perspective: ‘A people’s war of this kind, on both sides, has not taken place since great states have been in existence, and it will, at all events, point the direction for the future of the whole of America for hundreds of years to come. 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.’43 Six months later, Engels’s prognosis came to be at Appomattox, just as Marx had been predicting from the outset. While he could not have foreseen the particulars, his general forecast about America’s future was also remarkably accurate, including the anticipation of US imperialism – ‘a use will then soon

42. Blassingame and McKivigan (eds.) 1991, p. 33.43. Marx and Engels 1975–2004k, p. 39.


be found for the army and navy’ – at home (the subjugation of the Plains Indians, as it turned out, was a significant chapter in this process) and abroad, testimony to the power of the theoretical perspective that he and Marx employed.

Marx’s claim, Engels’s as well, that a Northern victory would advance the democratic struggle on a world-wide basis has wide support in modern scholarship. McPherson certainly subscribes to this position, even citing Marx as evidence, specifically, his well-known passage from Capital, published two years after the end of the War: ‘As in the 18th century, the American war of independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle-classes, so in the 19th century, the American Civil War sounded it for the European working-class.’ McPherson, with the added emphasis on the significance of the overthrow of slavery, provides evidence, not only for Marx’s claim about Europe, but his and Engels’s allusions concerning developments elsewhere. ‘[P]erhaps it was more than coincidence that within five years of that Union victory, the forces of liberalism had expanded the suffrage in Britain and toppled emperors in Mexico and France. And it is also more than coincidence that after the abolition of slavery in the United States the abolitionist forces in the two remaining slave societies in the Western Hemisphere, Brazil and Cuba, stepped up their campaign for emancipation, which culminated in success two decades later.’44 Though nothing suggests that Marx and Engels anticipated the outcomes in either Brazil or Cuba, everything indicates that they would not have been surprised at what occurred in both countries. Other breakthroughs in the democratic movement had their roots in the outcome of the Civil War, not the least of which was the first wave of the struggle for equality for women in the United States – testimony, again, to Marx and Engels’s prescience.

Marx’s congratulatory message to Lincoln on his re-election in 1864 on behalf of the International Workingmen’s Association takes on added significance in light of the preceding discussion. And of particular importance for this analysis and argument is a most trenchant observation Marx made in it about class, race and US democracy that is worth repeating: ‘While the working men, the true political power of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic; while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned labourer to sell himself and choose his own master; they were unable to attain the true freedom of labour or to support their European brethren in their

44. McPherson 1996, pp. 224, 227. For details on how the course of the Civil War impacted upon developments in Brazil, see Rios 2001, Chapter 3.


struggle for emancipation, but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.’45 Marx’s lines are pregnant with insights. First, white workers in the US had made a Faustian bargain with the slavocracy that in turn placed severe limits not only on ‘free labour’ – as Lincoln often referred to it – but on bourgeois democracy itself. In exchange for the ‘wages of whiteness’, the ‘peculiar institution’ was given a new lease on life. Second, he anticipates the point he would concisely state three years later in Capital: ‘In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.’ Encapsulated here is not only his broader political strategy – the full attainment of bourgeois democracy as the precondition for the socialist revolution – but, as well, his particular view about race and class. That is, labour or the working class came in many faces as well as different skin-colours. But, in the final analysis, it was first and foremost labour. Implicit here is the assumption that race was no more than, as it would later be termed, a social construction, while class was a social construction and more. Because class for Marx, in other words, was first and foremost about social relations of production, it had a reality that went beyond the particular constructions or understandings given to it.

The third insight is the interconnectedness between on the one hand the overthrow of slavery and racism and liberation for workers in the US and, on the other hand, the advancement of the workers’ movement elsewhere, specifically, at that time, in Europe. Lastly, this was not simply a congratulatory message but, as well, an effort to impart to Lincoln, ‘the single-minded son of the working class’, in non-sectarian language, a particular reading of what was in progress – one to which Lincoln, as the historian James McPherson has suggested, was not indisposed.46 With boldness and confidence Marx, in other words, politically engaged the President of the US.

A contradictory aftermath

If the course and outcome of the War conformed in broad strokes to, certainly, Marx’s expectations, the aftermath, ‘the reconstruction of a social world’, did

45. Marx and Engels 1975–2004g, p. 20.46. McPherson 1996; see especially, inter alia, Part IV, ‘The Enduring Lincoln’. The historian

Herbert Mitgang quotes the following from Lincoln: ‘Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights.’ (The Nation 1996, p. 6.)


not – at least in their lifetimes. It is not possible in the confines of an article to convey the richness of Marx and Engels’s assessment of developments in the US following the victory of the Union – views that spanned almost two-and-a-half decades. Suffice it to summarise their commentary as it relates to Marx’s congratulatory message to Lincoln of 1864, more specifically, his claim at the end that the overthrow of slavery would initiate a ‘new era of ascendancy for . . . the working classes’.

Marx was cheered by news that within weeks of the victory over the slavocracy, American workers had launched a nationwide campaign to win the eight-hour work-day. The initiative had not just theoretical but also political import for the class-struggle in Europe as well as the US. In his ‘Instructions’ to the first congress of the IWA in 1866 in Geneva, Marx pointed to the vanguard-actions of the US workers as an example to be emulated. ‘We propose 8 hours work as the legal limit of the working day. This limitation being generally claimed by the workmen of the United States of America, the vote of the Congress will raise it to the common platform of the working classes all over the world.’47 Thus began the first international campaign to institute the eight-hour work-day. In the Preface to Capital Marx wrote, again: ‘Just as in the eighteenth century the American War of Independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle class, so in the nineteenth century the American Civil War did the same for the European working class’ – a variant of what Marx had said to Lincoln three years earlier. Working-class ascendancy did not mean that socialist revolution was on the agenda. That required the existence of a hereditary proletariat. The abolition of slavery helped to accelerate that process by enabling the deepening and expansion of capitalist relations of production throughout the US. Nothing Marx and Engels ever said about the consequences of the War in this regard went further than this affirmation of orthodoxy.

What about the outcome for ‘labour in black skin’? In this instance, the optimism that Marx and Engels expressed in fragmented comments was not rewarded in their lifetimes. ‘Nigger-hatred’ and the ‘mean whites’ proved to be more resilient than they expected. The brief experiment in, if not racial equality, then something moving in that direction, Radical Reconstruction, came to a bloody end within a decade or so after the end of the War. What they had urged Washington to do, employ stern duties to ‘sunder all the chains of freedom’, fell largely on deaf ears.

47. Marx and Engels 1975–2004g, p. 187. David Roediger (Roediger 1999, p. 174) argues persuasively that ‘what made the eight-hour movement itself possible, was the spectacular emancipation of slaves between 1863 and 1865.’


They did envision what it would take for real racial equality to be realised in the US. The context was what labour-historian Philip Foner called the ‘first nationwide rebellion of labor’, the massive railway-strike of 1877.48 ‘What do you think of the workers of the [US]?’, Marx asked Engels.

This, the first outbreak against the associated capital oligarchy that has arisen since the civil war, will, of course, be suppressed, but may well provide a point of departure for the constitution of a serious workers’ party in the [US]. There are two favourable circumstances on top of that. The policy of the new President will turn the negroes, just as the big expropriations of land . . . for the benefit of the Railway, Mining, etc. companies will turn the peasants of the West – whose grumbling is already plainly audible – into militant allies of the workers.49

Engels replied: ‘I was delighted by the business of the strike in America. The way they throw themselves into the movement has no equivalent on this side of the ocean. Only twelve years since slavery was abolished and already the movement has got to such a pitch.’50

Marx’s comment suggests that he was aware that Washington, with its ‘new President’, Rutherford B. Hayes, had turned its back on Black America. More importantly, it suggests that Marx felt it would take a viable workers’ party to bring about an alliance between black and white labour, on the one hand, and workers and farmers on the other. This was clearly consistent with the struggle for independent working-class political action that he had waged in the now-defunct IWA. Engels’s response is also instructive, particularly his usage of ‘already’. It means that he and Marx were surprised by the upheaval, owing, no doubt, to their longue durée approach to the US class-struggle. While certainly encouraged and supportive of the strike, Marx correctly foresaw that it would, ‘of course, be suppressed’. Again, not until a hereditary proletariat was in place would the working class be able to really put its stamp on American politics. Only with the victory of the Second Reconstruction a century later would Marx’s forecast look like a real possibility. The other aforementioned claim in Capital in 1867, also a variant of the important point that Marx made to Lincoln, ‘Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded’, still has, I argue, currency.

The overthrow of Radical Reconstruction explains, in my opinion, the understandable scepticism in progressive circles today, almost de rigueur, about the Civil War and Lincoln. Was it really an advance for working people, as

48. Foner 1977b, p. 9.49. Marx and Engels 1975–2004l, p. 251.50. Marx and Engels 1975–2004l, p. 255.


Marx and Engels argued, and does Lincoln really deserve their praise? But such leeriness confuses a real social revolution with its defeat. To diminish the significance of what took place in that brief space in time would be equivalent to diminishing another, and related, social revolution that also went down to bloody defeat, the Paris Commune of 1871, the first time the modern proletariat was able to seize power. Although Parisian workers held power for less than three months, what they were able to do in that short space constitutes one of the historic conquests of the working class – crucial lessons, for example, for the young Lenin.

Interestingly – and intriguingly – the individual who helped lead the charge that ended Radical Reconstruction, Republican Party leader Carl Schurz, was an old opponent of Marx and Engels from the German Revolution of 1848–9. I say, ‘intriguingly’, because there is circumstantial evidence that suggests Schurz was motivated to act as he did because of the same fears he harboured in 1849 that put him and Marx at odds – the latter’s effort to make the overthrow of slavery, as the Manifesto put it in reference to the fight to overthrow the feudal régime in Germany, ‘the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution’.51 Recent research reveals that the events in Paris in 1871 were very much on the minds of Schurz and his sympathisers in their desire to put the genie of Radical Reconstruction back into the bottle.52

The focus of this article is Marx’s political analysis as informed by his method. But precisely because Marx was an historical materialist he understood that historical developments are not inevitable, but influenced by political contingency and human intervention. Thus, the reason that he did everything he could – from helping to organise mass-protests against British intervention on behalf of the Confederacy, ‘the struggle in the press’ to shape public opinion, and, of course, leading the IWA – to influence the outcome from the other side of the Atlantic. His political activities, which cannot be detailed here for reasons of space, are as important as his analysis; they compliment one another.53

To conclude, Marx’s writings on the Civil War, along with those of Engels, offer a most valuable window onto how they employed their ‘materialist conception of history’. I argue that, together, they are even richer than Marx’s analysis of Bonaparte’s coup d’état in The Eighteenth Brumaire. The War and its outcome is the only successful social revolution that Marx and Engels saw

51. See Nimtz 2003, pp. 164–8, for details. 52. Richardson 2001.53. Nimtz 2003, pp. 118–30, provides details. Foner 1977a, pp. 39–42, charges that Marx

and Engels did not do enough to defend Radical Reconstruction. See Nimtz 2003, pp. 171–8, for a response.


in their own lifetimes. Also, their analysis took place in real time over a longer period. The differences the two had over the course and outcome of the War reveal that their method was not a template, but one that required deft usage. Being armed with it was no guarantee for clarity. Finally, and to repeat, their method allowed Marx to grasp the revolutionary tasks before Lincoln – the need to transform the defensive War for preservation of the Union into a revolutionary one to overthrow slavery – at least six months earlier than the President himself, and with the firm conviction that would be the road to victory. Herein lay the advantage that Marx derived from his historical-materialist perspective, the revolutionary experiences of 1848–9, and the revolutionary optimism which issued from the combination of revolutionary theory and practice.

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Marx and Engels on the US Civil War: The 'Materialist Conception of History' in Action

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