Mark and Lincoln: And Unfinished Revolution

picture of the fi rst reading of the Proclamation to Lincoln’s cabinet. 
Th
  e painting makes it clear that the measure was backed by the 
cabinet’s weightiest members, with Seward prominently depicted 
addressing his colleagues. Lincoln was obviously proud of the 
Proclamation—he described it as “the central event of my adminis-
tration and the great event of the nineteenth century”—but he also 
wanted to display the backing it enjoyed from all his distinguished 
colleagues. Seward himself saw matters diff erently, explaining to 
the painter that the Emancipation Proclamation was “merely inci-
dental” and that the most important cabinet meeting was the one 
that followed the fi ring on Fort Sumter. However, the painting, 
usually in a lithograph version, was to be widely adopted, becoming 
one of the most widely diff used of national images in subsequent 
decades.
67
 
 Lincoln’s course following the Emancipation Proclamation 
aimed not just to maintain and invigorate the Unionist coalition 
but also to appeal to public opinion in the wider Atlantic world and 
to head off  the inclination of the governments in Paris and London 
to recognize the Confederacy or, later, to off er mediation. Lincoln’s 
carefully constructed appeals to abolitionism were a vital part of 
this. Since the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) 
embraced several British and French trade unions, it was evidently 
worthy of some diplomatic acknowledgment. Th
 e General Council 
of the IWA asked Karl Marx to draft a message of congratulation 
to Lincoln on the occasion of his reelection. Th
  e Republican watch-
word “Free Labor, Free Soil, Free Men” was designed to indict the 
“Slave Power” and, however vaguely, to off er rights, land, and rec-
ognition to the laborer. Th
  is was not anticapitalism, but it was, in 
Marx’s terms, a step in the right direction. 
Marx found drafting the International’s Address to Lincoln more 
diffi
  cult than he had anticipated. He complained to Engels that 
such a text was “much harder [to draft] than a substantial work,” 
since he was anxious that “the phraseology to which this sort of 
scribbling is restricted should at least be distinguished from the 
67  Harold Holzer, “Picturing Freedom,” in Th e Emancipation Proclamation, 
Harold Holzer, E. G. Medford and Frank Williams, eds., Baton Rouge 2006, 
pp. 83–136. 
introduction  47

---

democratic, vulgar phraseology …”
68
 Nevertheless he allowed him-
self the following resonant, if complex, paragraph: 
When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for 
the fi rst 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 fi rst sprung up, 
whence the fi rst Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and 
the fi rst impulse given to the European revolution of the eight-
eenth century … then the working classes of Europe understood 
at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes 
for the Confederate gentry had given warning, that the slavehold-
ers’ rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of 
property against labor …
Th
  e address also warned that so long as the republic was “defi led by 
slavery,” so long as the Negro was “mastered and sold without his 
concurrence,” and so long as it was “the highest prerogative of the 
white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master,” 
they would be “unable to attain the true freedom of labor.” 
69
Th
  e repeated invocation of the cause of labor in the address thus 
gave its own more radical twist to the “free labor” argument char-
acteristic of Lincoln and other Republicans. In the address, Marx 
observed: 
Th
  e 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. Th
  ey 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 matchless struggle for 
the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of the social 
world.
70
 
68  Marx and Engels, Th e Civil War in the United States, p. 273.
69 “Th
 e Address,” Marx and Engels, Th e Civil War in the United States, 
pp. 260–1.
70 Ibid, 
p. 
281. 
Th
  e meanings of the address are rarely addressed, so it is 
all the more regrettable to fi nd it interpreted in a tendentious way, as it is in 
Timothy Messer-Kruse’s book Th e Yankee International, 1846–1876: Marxism 
and the American Reform Tradition, Chapel Hill 1998, pp. 54–6. Th
 is author 
48  an unfinished revolution

---

Th
  e US ambassador to Britain, Charles Francis Adams, replied to 
the address, on behalf of the president, a month later, writing, “I am 
directed to inform you that the address of the Central Council of 
your Association, which was duly transmitted through this legation 
to the President of the United States, has been received by him. So 
far as the sentiments expressed by it are personal, they are accepted 
by him with a sincere and anxious desire that he may be able to 
prove himself not unworthy of the confi dence which has recently 
been extended to him by his fellow citizens.” Adams went on to 
declare that “the United States regard their cause in the present 
confl ict with slavery-maintaining insurgents as the cause of human 
nature and…they derive new encouragement to persevere from the 
testimony of the workingmen of Europe.”
71
 Th
  us both the address 
and the reply refer to labor with the greatest respect and both assert 
the rights of labor, embedding them in, respectively, the “rights of 
man” and “the cause of human nature.”
THE STATUS OF THE FREEDMEN AND WOMEN
As emancipation advanced on the military and legislative fronts, 
the question was raised were the freedmen and women US citi-
zens and did they have the vote? In the months before he unveiled 
his emancipation policy, Lincoln had gone out of his way to reit-
erate his support for colonization of those freed from slavery. He 
had invited black leaders to the White House to lecture them on 
the wisdom of leaving a land where they would never be accepted 
as real equals. Th
  is was the summer of 1862 and may charitably 
be interpreted as an attempt to placate Northern racism. But in 
1864–5, as the emancipation policy led to large-scale escapes and as 
notes Marx complaining at the “bother” of having to write something of such 
little importance as this address and claims that he only consented to do so 
because “[in] Marx’s view, slavery had to be destroyed in order to allow for 
the historical development of the white working class” (p. 54). Th
 is illogically 
insinuates that Marx was privileging the white workers by insisting that the 
more oppressed blacks should be freed fi rst. In reality, Marx was rejecting the 
idea of a preordained sequence.
71 “Th
  e American Ambassador’s Reply,” in Th e Civil War in the United States, 
Marx and Engels, pp. 262–3.
introduction  49

---