Mark and Lincoln: And Unfinished Revolution

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 con-
fi ded 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 fi nd 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 unifi cation, 
French fi nancial 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, fi nding 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 confl ict unfolding in 
North America; most of the longer articles reprinted in this book 
fi rst 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 
4 Th
  ese remarks are quoted in the introduction to an interesting selection 
of the articles, James Ledbetter’s Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected 
Journalism of Karl Marx, London 2006, p. 8.
5  British military expeditions that forced China to open its ports to British 
suppliers of the drug, which was produced in dismal circumstances by exploited 
Indians.
introduction  3

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father’s farm until the age of twenty-one. Indeed, the elder Lincoln 
would hire out Abraham’s services to other farmers, without hand-
ing 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 can-
didate and vouch that he was of good character. Working for a law 
fi rm 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 fi rst  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 aff ectionate 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 slavehold-
ers 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 diff erent light. Its institutions, how-
ever fl awed, 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 
diff erent worlds and held contrary views nevertheless coincided 
on an issue of historic importance and even brought those worlds 
into fl eeting contact with one another, and how the Civil War and 
6 Eric 
Foner, 
Th
  e Fiery Trail: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, New 
York 2010.
4  an unfinished revolution

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Reconstruction—which Eric Foner has called America’s unfi nished 
revolution
7
—off ered 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. Th
  e 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 defi nite 
appeal to liberals and radicals, partly because many of them dis-
trusted strong states and championed the right of small nations to 
self-determination. Lincoln himself insisted in 1861 that the North 
was fi ghting 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. Th
 e 
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 
7 Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfi nished  Revolution, New York, 
1989. For further discussion of whether these events amounted to a revolu-
tion, fi nished or otherwise, see Philip Shaw Paludan, “What Did the Winners 
Win?” in Writing the Civil War: the Quest to Understand, James McPherson and 
William Cooper, eds., Columbia, SC, 1998, pp. 174–200. However, Foner’s 
conclusions concerning the winners seem to me closer to the mark than 
Paludan’s, as I will explain below.
introduction  5

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