Mark and Lincoln: And Unfinished Revolution

Marx believed that the polity favored by the Southern slave-
owners was very diff erent from the republic aspired to by Northerners. 
He did not spell out all his reasons, but he was essentially right about 
this. Southern slaveholders wished to see a Federal state that would 
uphold slave property; that would return and deter slave runaways, 
as laid down in the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850; and that would 
allow slaveholding Southerners access to Federal territories. Th
 e 
planters were happy that the antebellum state was modest in size 
and competence, since this meant low taxes and little or no inter-
ference with their “peculiar institution.”
16
 Th
  ey did not favor either 
high tariff s or expensive internal improvements. But this restricted 
view of the state was accompanied by provisions that aff ected the 
lives of Northerners in quite intimate ways. Th
  e fugitive slave law 
of 1850 required all citizens to cooperate with the Federal mar-
shals in apprehending runaways. In the Southern view, slaveholders 
should be free to bring slaves to Federal territories, an importation 
seen as an unwelcome and unfair intrusion by migrants from the 
Northern states, whether they were antislavery or simply antiblack. 
Southerners had favored censorship of the Federal mail, to prevent 
its use for abolitionist literature. Th
  ey supported a foreign policy that 
pursued future acquisitions suitable for plantation development. But 
they did not want a state that had the power to intervene in the 
special internal arrangements of the slave states themselves. For 
them, a Republican president with the power to appoint thousands 
of Federal offi
  cials in the Southern states and with no intention of 
suppressing radical abolitionists spelled great danger.
Marx did not support the North because he believed that its vic-
tory would directly lead to socialism. Rather, he saw in South and 
North two species of capitalism—one allowing slavery, the other 
not. Th
  e then existing regime of American society and economy 
embraced the enslavement of four million people whose enforced 
toil produced the republic’s most valuable export, cotton, as well as 
much tobacco, sugar, rice, and turpentine. Defeating the slave power 
was going to be diffi
  cult. Th
  e wealth and pride of the 300,000 sla-
veholders (there were actually 395,000 slave owners, according to 
the 1860 Census, but at the time Marx was writing this had not yet 
16 Robin 
Einhorn, 
American Slavery, American Taxation, Berkeley 2008.
12  an unfinished revolution

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been published) was at stake. Th
  ese slaveholders were able to cor-
rupt or intimidate many of the poor Southern whites, and they had 
rich and infl uential supporters among the merchants, bankers and 
textile manufacturers of New York, London and Paris. Defeating 
the slave power and freeing the slaves would not destroy capitalism, 
but it would create conditions far more favorable to organizing and 
elevating labor, whether white or black. Marx portrayed the wealthy 
slave owners as akin to Europe’s aristocrats, and their removal as 
a task for the sort of democratic revolution he had advocated in 
the  Communist Manifesto as the immediate aim for German 
revolutionaries.
LINCOLN ON MOB VIOLENCE AND 
THE RIGHT OF REVOLUTION 
Lincoln, as a Whig brought up in Kentucky and southern Illinois, 
was quite familiar with the tensions created by slavery in the bor-
derlands between South and North. His wife’s close relatives were 
slaveholders; one of his great uncles owned forty slaves. As a mod-
erate Whig and, later, moderate Republican, Lincoln was ready to 
uphold the legal and constitutional rights of slaveholders. But he 
worried about the nation’s coherence and integrity. Th
 e earliest state-
ment of his political philosophy, his speech “On the Perpetuation 
of Our Political Institutions,” delivered at the Young Men’s Lyceum 
in Springfi eld in 1838, gives expression to his pride in US politi-
cal institutions. But it also expresses deep dismay at the growing 
streak of lawlessness he sees in American life. He was alarmed at 
rising antagonism stemming from race, slavery and abolition, citing 
the summary execution of blacks believed to be plotting rebellion; 
the wanton killing of a mulatto; and attacks on law-abiding abo-
litionists by violent mobs, leading to the death of Elijah Lovejoy, 
editor of an antislavery paper. Th
  ese events violated the rule of law 
that should be every citizen’s “political religion.”
17
 As he will have 
17 Lincoln, 
“Th
  e Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” in Abraham 
Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings, Roy Basler, ed., New York 1946, pp. 76–84, 
81. See also Eric Foner, Th e Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, 
New York 2010, pp. 26–30.
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been aware, such mob actions were orchestrated by self-described 
“men of property and standing,” the supposedly patriotic allies of 
Southern politicians—at this point all parties were cross-sectional 
in their support. Th
  e rioters portrayed the Abolitionists as the pawns 
of a foreign—specifi cally British—plot against America.
18
 Here 
were disturbing signs that the republic’s institutions were infected 
by an uncontrollable and deep-seated malady. Lincoln feared for a 
future in which some aspiring tyrant would establish his personal 
rule “at the expense of emancipating slaves or enslaving free men.”
19
 
Th
  e lawless threat might come either from slaveholders or from 
abolitionists. 
Lincoln’s stress on the republic of laws and due process was 
accompanied by a defense of the need for a National Bank to collect 
and disburse the public revenues and by his consequent hostility to 
Van Buren’s proposal that revenues should instead be entrusted to 
local “sub-treasuries.” In a major speech he gave as a member of the 
Illinois state legislature Lincoln attacked this scheme. In Lincoln’s 
view the Bank, run as a privately-owned public corporation, had 
two decisive advantages. Firstly, it put the money deposited with it 
to work, earning interest and furnishing credit, where the unspent 
revenue would simply rust away in the network of sub-treasury lock 
boxes. Secondly the National Bank better served align the “duty” 
and the “interest” of Bank offi
  cials than would a dispersed chain 
of sub-treasuries. As a permanent corporation the Bank knew that 
it would only continue to be entrusted with the public revenues if 
it proved a faithful custodian. Th
  e shifting personnel of a scattered 
network of sub-treasury offi
  cials in each state would be far more 
vulnerable to individual frailty or fecklessness (leading to the wry 
comment: “it may not be improper here to add, that Judas carried 
the bag, was the Sub-Treasurer of the Savior and his disciples”
20
). 
18 Leonard 
Richards, 
Gentlemen of Property and Standing: Anti-Abolition 
Mobs in Jacksonian America, New York 1971. See also David Grimstead, 
American Mobbing, 1828–61: Towards Civil War, Oxford 1998, pp. 11–2. 
Several of the riots were directed at the lecture tour of George Th
 ompson, a 
British abolitionist.
19 “Th
  e Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions”, p. 83.
20 Lincoln, 
“Th
 e Sub-Treasury,” 26 December 1839, in Basler, Abraham 
Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings, pp. 90–112, 98.
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