Mark and Lincoln: And Unfinished Revolution

opportunity to respond to Johnson’s conduct and to news of white 
brutality in the South, was a good year for Republicans in most parts 
of the North and West, and confi rmed the Republican Congress’s 
desire for black suff rage in the South. Where the Republican lead-
ership had the courage to fi ght for black male suff rage in the North 
and West, then they had a good prospect of winning it at home as 
well as for the South. Th
  e fact that so many African Americans had 
risked their lives for the Union carried great weight with Northern 
voters. In Iowa, a proposal to give black men the vote passed in a ref-
erendum in 1868 though a similar proposal had failed there in 1857. 
However, the skill and conviction with which the Iowa Republicans 
seized the “egalitarian moment” was not seen everywhere.
116
 
Th
  e vulnerability of the black communities in the South also 
furnished an added argument for black male enfranchisement. Th
 e 
women of the North and West had certainly rallied to support 
the war eff ort and were shortly to gain the right for themselves 
to vote for school boards in Kansas and elsewhere. But whereas 
the racial order was—at least momentarily—disputed, gender 
divisions had not been challenged by the war. (Th
  ough, as we will 
see below, this began to change with the advent of peace.) Th
 e 
dispute over this issue soon subsided, as most socialists and abo-
litionists did support votes for women. Th
  is cleared the way for 
new attempts in the 1870s to explore the makings of a progressive 
coalition.
117
Th
  e appearance of the labor movements encouraged the view that 
a fresh start could be made in the 1870s, with the emergence of new 
116  Robert Dykstra shows that military service was a trump card in the 
debate over enfranchising black men in Iowa. See Robert Dykstra, Bright 
Radical Star:  Black Freedom and White Supremacy on the Hawkeye Frontier, 
Cambridge, MA, 1993. 
117  Women had been lauded for their contributions to the war as nurses and 
homemakers, but the passage from this to enfranchisement proved more dif-
fi cult. See also Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Correspondence, 
Writings, Speeches, Ellen Dubois, ed., New York 1981, pp. 92–112; 166–9. 
Dubois, in her editorial presentation, argues that Anthony and Cady Stanton 
were, in diff erent ways, both trying to adapt the women’s movement to the 
need for wider alliances. While Anthony drew on “free labor” ideology to criti-
cize women’s dependence, Stanton sketched the programmatic basis for an 
alliance between the women’s and labor movements.
introduction  73

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issues and voices. Racism, sexism, and conscious or unconscious 
bourgeois ideology continued to hold much of the population 
in thrall and to weaken progressive movements. But much more 
remarkable than this predictable state of aff airs was the emergence 
of challenges to it: to racism, including institutional racism; to male 
privilege in the home and workplace as well as at the ballot box; and 
to the divine right of employers to dictate to their employees and to 
accumulate vast personal fortunes. 
For a brief span—about half a dozen years—the US sections 
of the IWA became the sounding board and banner for a diverse 
series of radical initiatives. Th
 e IWA and the National Labor 
Union were seen as sister organizations. Th
  e German American 
Marxists wielded what was then a very novel doctrine—the idea 
that if labor were only suffi
  ciently well organized it would became 
a mighty lever for social advances, opening the way to all sections 
of the oppressed. Th
  e privileges of white and male workers were not 
addressed: all attention was focused on the great concentration of 
privilege represented by capital. In theory, female and black workers 
were welcome to join the workers’ organizations and would enjoy 
equal rights within them, though the practice often lagged some 
way behind. Some of the IWA’s US sections developed a primi-
tive and sectarian Marxism that contrasts with the program and 
practice of the German Social Democratic Party. Marx and Engels 
were often uneasy at the narrow-mindedness of their American fol-
lowers, but they were themselves partly responsible for this, since 
they had not yet developed a conception of the diff erent character 
and goals of trade unions on the one hand and political parties on 
the other. Th
  e fact that the International embraced, or mixed, both 
types of organization was no bad thing, but because there had been 
no theorization of their distinct and diff erent purposes the result 
was often confusion and tension. Th
  ere was also the dilemma posed 
by the scope for social alliances. Th
  e workers needed to organize 
themselves as a distinct body, yet they also needed to reach out to 
potential allies—farmers, farm laborers, progressive members of the 
middle class, home workers—on a range of issues. Th
  e implicit labor 
metaphysic of some of the German American Marxists failed to 
tackle these issues. Nevertheless, in the short run the International 
actually thrived by avoiding a clear stance on such questions and 
74  an unfinished revolution

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simply allowing each section to organize in its own way and accord-
ing to its own priorities. 
Th
 e German American Marxists might have been narrow-
minded, but still they were committed to the principles of racial 
and gender equality, though they soft-pedaled these issues when 
seeking to recruit bona fi de wageworkers such as the Irish of 
Pennsylvania, New York, and elsewhere who did not share these 
principled commitments, arguing that it would be easier to educate 
them once they had joined the IWA. Marx and Engels, familiar 
with anti-Irish discrimination in England, readily agreed that spe-
cial eff orts should be made to win over the Irish workers. Th
 ey may 
not fully have realized that in the US the Irish workers—especially 
the Pennsylvania miners—had been stigmatized as “copperheads” 
and traitors because they were believed to have lacked enthusiasm 
for the Northern cause. Th
  e International’s strong Unionist cre-
dentials and welcoming attitude toward the Irish proved a good 
combination.
Th
  e IWA became a rallying point for many of the disparate forces 
of emancipation seeking to take part in the reconstruction of the 
social order. It attracted the attention of Victoria Woodhull—in 
some ways the Arianna Huffi
  ngton of the 1870s—who edited 
the widely selling and much discussed Woodhull & Clafl in’s Weekly 
and used it to publicize the initiatives of the IWA. Tennie Clafl in, 
Victoria’s sister, was elected colonel of a militia after urging that the 
workers would need a force to defend them in the struggles to come. 
In 1870 and 1871 the Weekly published several articles summarizing 
the Communist Manifesto or explaining the documents of the IWA. 
It exposed the schemes of the railway promoters and argued that the 
greed of the owners of the Staten Island ferry led them to skimp on 
safety, and their negligence eventually caused a disaster in which a 
hundred passengers perished. An editorial evoked the new spirit: 
Th
  is is the age of rights, when, for the fi rst time in human history, 
the rights of all living things are, in some way, recognized as exist-
ing. We are far enough yet from according to all their rights, but 
we talk about them, we see them, and thought is busy to determine 
how best they should be secured.
118
 
118 “Th
  e Rights of Children,” Woodhull & Clafl in’s Weekly, December 6, 1870.
introduction  75

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