Mark and Lincoln: And Unfinished Revolution

quite broadly among farmers, artisans, and small businessmen, in 
contrast to the South, where the cotton boom enriched a narrower 
circle of slave owners and their hangers-on.
25
 Lincoln believed that 
the broad prosperity of the North and the Northwest was rooted 
in its free labor system, a view shared by Marx. Republican pride 
in the progress of the free states repelled the Southern mainstream. 
Lincoln won 40 percent of the popular vote in 1860, but all of these 
votes came from the free states. 
Th
  at Lincoln detested slavery was clear from his speeches and 
writings, and it is not surprising that he sketched half a dozen dif-
ferent key arguments on the topic in his notebooks.
26
 He was also 
willing to talk about complex and gradual schemes of compensated 
emancipation. But as a national leader, what he off ered was not an 
attack on slavery but implacable resistance to its territorial expan-
sion. Th
  e puzzle here can only be resolved by identifying what else 
it was about his outlook and deepest convictions that restrained 
his evidently sincere opposition to slavery. Th
  e answer is probably 
his profound attachment to the Constitution and his awareness 
that within that Constitution it would be extraordinarily diffi
  -
cult to change the historic compromise the document represented 
between North and South, slavery and freedom. Lincoln’s patriot-
ism was even stronger than his dislike of slavery and obliged him, 
he believed, to accommodate to the latter out of due regard for a 
nation established by, and catering to, Southern slaveholders. 
RIVAL NATIONALISMS?
Th
  e Republican Party was founded to defend the rights of “free 
labor” and to fi ght for a ban on slavery in Federal territories. Th
 e 
Republicans also adopted the “agrarian” stakeholder view, a semi-
socialist idea that any man wishing to become a farmer should be 
given land for a homestead in the Federal territories, a proposal 
Stephen Conway, eds., Th e Market Revolution in America: Social, Political and 
Religious Expressions, Charlottesville 1996. 
25 Gavin 
Wright, 
Slavery and American Economic Development, London 
2004.
26  For example, those in Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings, Basler, 
pp. 278–9, 427, 477–8, and 513.
18  an unfinished revolution

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that was to be translated into legislation in 1862. Lincoln had 
worked hard, educated himself, and become a prominent attorney 
and political fi gure. Th
  is background reinforced his belief that the 
free labor system allowed a man to make his way in the world. Th
 e 
Republicans also supported a system of public education for all 
and the foundation of a chain of “land grant” colleges, namely col-
leges endowed with revenue from the sale of public land. Lincoln 
believed that the pacts that had made the United States must be 
respected, but he also held that in the long run the nation could not 
remain half slave and half free. 
Marx did not directly compare the claims of North and South as 
competing nationalisms. Instead he questioned whether the South 
was a nation, writing, “ ‘Th
  e South,’ however, is neither a territory 
strictly detached from the North geographically, nor a moral unity. 
It is not a country at all, but a battle slogan.” Many who were much 
closer to the situation than Marx entered the same judgment in the 
years before 1861, yet soon had to acknowledge that the Confederacy 
did rapidly acquire many of the ideological trappings of a nation, 
complete with a claimed “moral unity” based on exaltation of the 
racial conceits and values of a slave society and of the conviction 
that white Southerners were the true Americans. Th
  eir values were 
a strange mixture of traditional patriotism and paternalism and—
for whites alone—libertarianism. Hundreds of thousands of white 
Southerners who owned no slaves nevertheless fought and died for 
the rebellion, seeing the Confederacy as the embodiment of their 
racial privileges and rural civilization. Th
  e rebels were fi ghting for 
a cause that embodied a way of life, one that embraced minimal 
taxation and extensive “states’ rights.” Th
  e mass of slaveless whites 
not only had the vote but also enjoyed the “freedom of the range,” 
which is to say that they could graze their animals on vast tracts 
of public land and on uncultivated private land. Th
  ey also enjoyed 
signifi cant hunting rights. Such privileges allowed them to live, as 
they put it, “high on the hog.” Engels pointed out to Marx that the 
secession movement had backing from the generality of whites in 
the more developed and populous parts of the South.
27
 
27  Engels to Marx, July 3, 1861, from Marx and Engels, Th e Civil War in the 
United States, p. 326.
introduction  19

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Southern nationalism itself responded to, and stimulated, Unionist 
or Yankee nationalism.
28
 Whereas patriotism was about the past, 
the new nationalist idea, a refl ection of modernity, was about the 
future. Even at a time when truly industrial methods only aff ected 
a few branches of society, “print capitalism” and the “market revo-
lution” were already transforming public space and time. Th
 e new 
steam presses poured out a torrent of newspapers, magazines, and 
novels, all of them summoning up rival “imagined communities.”
29
 
Rail and cable further accelerated the dynamics of agreement and 
contradiction. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared 
fi rst as serial installments in a newspaper, then as a book. It moved 
the Northern reader to tears, but seemed a grotesque libel to 
Southerners. Th
  e North’s imagined community could not embrace 
the slaveholder, let alone the degraded slave traders, and the South’s 
drew the line at the abolitionist and the radical newspaper editor. 
Th
  at incompatible national imaginings played a part in precipi-
tating the confl ict by no means takes away from the underlying 
discrepancy between the two social formations. 
Th
  at the Civil War was an “irrepressible confl ict,” that its roots 
lay in the diff erent labor regimes of the two sections, and that these 
diff erences crystallized in opposing images of the good society are 
not novel propositions. Diff erent versions of them have been enter-
tained by, among many others, such notable historians as David 
Potter, Don Fehrenbacker, Eric Foner, Eugene Genovese, John 
Ashworth and Bruce Levine.
30
  Th
 e idea that rival nationalisms 
28  Many historians reject out of hand, as Marx did, the idea that there was a 
Southern nationalism. Often they do so because they do not wish in any way 
to endorse the Confederacy or the later cult of Dixie. Th
  is is understandable, 
but wrong, as Drew Gilpin Faust has argued in an important study of the 
topic. Nationalism can be fl awed and self-destructive, and it can change for 
better or worse. See Faust’s Th e Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology 
and Identity in the Civil War South, Baton Rouge 1989. See also Manisha 
Sinha’s Th e Counter-Revolution of Slavery, Chapel Hill 2000, pp. 63–94. For 
the general argument, see Tom Nairn, Faces of Nationalism, London 1995.
29 Th
  e classic study is, of course, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 
second ed., London 1993. 
30 David 
Potter, 
Th
  e Impending Confl ict, Don Fehrenbacker, ed., New York 
1976; Eugene Genovese, Th e Political Economy of Slavery, New York 1967; Eric 
Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, New York 1970 and Foner, “Causes of 
20  an unfinished revolution

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