Mark and Lincoln: And Unfinished Revolution

Belgium separated from the Netherlands, nor would it be in 
1905 when Norway split from Sweden. Had the Netherlands or 
Sweden resorted to war to defend these unions, they would have 
been widely condemned. Consider, also, that Garibaldi began his 
career as a freedom fi ghter in the late 1830s as a partisan of the 
Republic of Rio Grande do Sul, a breakaway from the Empire of 
Brazil. Marx himself denounced Britain’s dominion over Ireland. 
In December 1860, Horace Greeley, who had just replaced Dana 
as editor of the New York Tribune, wrote an editorial arguing that 
though the Secession was very wrong, it should not be resisted by 
military means. Th
  ere were also minority currents in the European 
labor and socialist movement who preferred Southern agrarianism 
to the commercial society of the North. 
Th
  e attitude toward the war of many outside North America 
greatly depended on whether or not slavery was seen as a crucial 
stake in the confl ict. Some members of the British government were 
inclined to recognize the Confederacy, and if they had done so this 
would have been a major boost to the South. But ever since 1807, 
when Britain abolished its Atlantic slave trade, the British govern-
ment had made suppression of Atlantic slave traffi
  cking central to 
the Pax Britannica. When Lord Palmerston, as foreign secretary, 
negotiated a free trade agreement with an Atlantic state, he invari-
ably accompanied it with a treaty banning slave trading. During the 
Opium Wars, British war ships were sent by Palmerston to demand 
that China should allow the drug traffi
  c to continue in the name 
of free trade and pay compensation to British merchants whose 
stock they had seized.
8
 Marx found the hypocrisy of “Pam” and the 
British breathtaking: 
Th
 eir fi rst main grievance is that the present American war is 
“not one for the abolition of slavery’ and that, therefore, the high-
minded Britisher, used to undertake wars of his own and interest 
himself in other people’s wars only on the basis of ‘broad humani-
tarian principles,” cannot be expected to feel any sympathy for his 
Northern cousins.
9
8 Jasper 
Ridely, 
Lord Palmerston, London 1970; see especially pp. 329–30, 
346–7, 375–6, 403–4.
9 Karl 
Marx, 
”Th
  e American Question in England,” New York Daily Tribune, 
October 11, 1861.
6  an unfinished revolution

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Withering as he was about the British government’s humbug, he 
was well aware that large sections of the British people, includ-
ing much of the working class, were genuinely hostile to slavery. 
Th
  e slaves in the British colonies had been emancipated during 
1834–8, following a slave uprising in Jamaica and sustained, large-
scale popular mobilizations in Britain itself. Public opinion was 
sensitized to the issue and uncomfortably aware of the country’s 
dependence on slave-grown cotton. If it became apparent that the 
secessionists really were fi ghting simply to defend slavery, it would 
be extraordinarily diffi
  cult for the London government to recog-
nize the Confederacy. 
MARX REJECTS ECONOMIC 
EXPLANATIONS OF THE WAR
From the beginning, Marx was intensely scornful of those who sup-
ported what he saw as basically a slaveholders’ revolt. He insisted 
that it was quite erroneous to claim, as some did, that this was a 
quarrel about economic policy. Summarizing what he saw as the 
wrongheaded view espoused by infl uential British voices, he wrote: 
Th
  e war between North and South [they claim] is a mere tariff  war, 
a war between a tariff  system and a free trade system, and England 
naturally stands on the side of free trade. It was reserved to the 
Times [of London] to make this brilliant discovery…Th
 e Economist 
expounded the theme further…Yes [they argued] it would be dif-
ferent if the war was waged for the abolition of slavery! Th
 e question 
of slavery, however, [they claim] has absolutely nothing to do with 
this war. Th
  en as now, the Economist was a tireless advocate of the 
“free market.”
Marx’s unhesitating support for the North did not mean that he 
was unaware of its grave defects as a champion of free labor. He 
openly attacked the timidity of its generals and the venality of 
many of its public servants. Nevertheless he saw the Civil War as 
a decisive turning point in nineteenth-century history. A victory 
for the North would set the scene for slave emancipation and be 
a great step forward for the workers’ cause on both sides of the 
introduction  7

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Atlantic. Support for the North was a touchstone issue, he believed, 
and it became central to his eff orts to build the International 
Workingmen’s Association. 
Marx’s political choice stemmed from an early analysis of the roots 
of the war in which he refused to defi ne the struggle in the terms 
fi rst adopted by the belligerents themselves. Marx’s well-known 
conviction that politics is rooted in antagonistic social relations led 
him to focus on the structural features of the two sections, and the 
emergence therein of contradictory interests and forms of social 
life. Marx and Engels were quite well informed about US develop-
ments. Many of their friends and comrades had emigrated to the 
United States during the years of reaction that followed the failure 
of the European revolutions of 1848. With few exceptions those 
émigrés had gone to the North, especially the Northwest, rather 
than to the South. Marx and Engels corresponded with the émigrés 
and wrote for, and read, their newspapers.
Marx and Engels were well aware of the privileged position of 
slaveholders in the structure of the American state, but believed 
that this privilege was menaced by the growth of the North and 
Northwest. Lincoln’s election was a threat to the Southern strangle-
hold on the republic’s central institutions, as embodied in Supreme 
Court rulings, cross-sectional party alignments, and fugitive slave 
legislations. In July 1861 Marx writes to Engels:
I have come to the conclusion that the confl ict between the South 
and the North—for 50 years the latter has been climbing down, 
making one concession after another—has at last been brought to 
a head…by the weight which the extraordinary development of 
the Northwestern states has thrown into the scales. Th
 e popula-
tion there, with its rich admixture of newly arrived Germans and 
Englishmen and, moreover, largely made up self-working farmers, 
did not, of course, lend itself so readily to intimidation as the gen-
tlemen of Wall Street and the Quakers of Boston.
10
 
One might wish this expressed a little more delicately and appre-
ciatively—the Quakers had played a courageous role in resisting 
10  Marx to Engels, July 1, 1861, from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’s 
Collected Works, Volume 41, Marx and Engels 1860–64, London 1985, p. 114. 
8  an unfinished revolution

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