Mark and Lincoln: And Unfinished Revolution

attended conventions from that day to this, of one kind and another, 
and taken part in them. I have taken part in some in which our 
Comrade Debs had a part. I was at the organization that he orga-
nized in this city some eight or ten years ago. Now, the point I want 
to make is that these conventions are full of enthusiasm. And that 
is right: we should sometimes mix sentiment with soberness; it is a 
part of life.
But when you go out of this hall, when you have laid aside your 
enthusiasm, then comes the solid work. Are you going out of here 
with your minds made up that the class which we call ourselves, 
revolutionary Socialists so-called—that class is organized to meet 
organized capital with the millions at its command? It has many 
weapons to fi ght us. First, it has money. Th
  en, it has legislative tools. 
Th
  en, it has armories, and last, it has the gallows. We call ourselves 
revolutionists. Do you know what the capitalists mean to do to 
you revolutionists? I simply throw these hints out that you young 
people may become refl ective and know what you have to face at 
the fi rst, and then it will give you strength. I am not here to cause 
any discouragement, but simply to encourage you to go on in your 
grand work.
Now, that is the solid foundation that I hope this organization 
will be built on—that it may be built not like a house upon the sand, 
that when the waves of adversity come it may go over into the ocean 
of oblivion, but that it shall be built upon a strong, granite-hard 
foundation, a foundation made up of the hearts and aspirations of 
the men and women of this twentieth century, who have set their 
minds, their hands, their hearts, and their heads against the past 
with all its miserable poverty, with its wage slaves, with its children 
ground into dividends, with its miners away down under the earth 
and with never the light of sunshine, and with its women selling the 
holy name of womanhood for a day’s board. I hope we understand 
that this organization has set its face against that iniquity, and that 
it has set its eyes to the rising star of liberty that means fraternity, 
solidarity, the universal brotherhood of man. I hope that while poli-
tics have been mentioned here—I am not one of those who, because 
a man or woman disagrees with me, cannot act with them—I am 
glad and proud to say I am too broad-minded to say they are a faker 
or fool or a fraud because they disagree with me.
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My view may be narrow and theirs may be broad, but I do say to 
those who have intimated politics here as being necessary or a part 
of this organization, that I do not impute to them dishonesty or 
impure motives. But as I understand the call for this convention, 
politics had no place here; it was simply to be an economic organi-
zation, and I hope for the good of this organization that when we 
go away from this hall, and our comrades go some to the west, some 
to the east, some to the north, and some to the south, while some 
remain in Chicago, and all spread this light over this broad land and 
carry the message of what this convention has done, that there will 
be no room for politics at all.
Th
  ere may be room for politics—I have nothing to say about 
that—but it is a bread-and-butter question, an economic issue, upon 
which the fi ght must be made. Now, what do we mean when we say 
revolutionary Socialist? We mean that the land shall belong to the 
landless, the tools to the toiler, and the products to the producers. 
Now, let us analyze that for just a moment, before you applaud me. 
First, the land belongs to the landless. Is there a single landowner 
in this country, who owns his land by the constitutional rights given 
by the constitution of the United States, who will allow you to vote 
it away from him? I am not such a fool as to believe it. We say, 
“Th
  e tools belong to the toiler.” Th
  ey are owned by the capitalist 
class. Do you believe they will allow you to go into the halls of 
the legislature and simply say, “Be it enacted that on and after a 
certain day the capitalist shall no longer own the tools and the fac-
tories and the places of industry, the ships that plow the ocean and 
our lakes?”
Do you believe that they will submit? I do not. We say, “Th
 e prod-
uct belongs to the producers.” It belongs to the capitalist class as 
their legal property. Do you think that they will allow you to vote 
them away from them by passing a law and saying, “Be it enacted 
that on and after a certain day Mr. Capitalist shall be dispossessed?” 
You may, but I do not believe it. Hence, when you roll under your 
tongue the expression that you are revolutionists, remember what 
that word means. It means a revolution that shall turn all these 
things over where they belong—to the wealth producers.
Now, how shall the wealth producers come into possession of 
them? I believe that if every man and every woman who works, 
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or who toils in the mines, the mills, the workshops, the fi elds, the 
factories, and the farms in our broad America should decide in their 
minds that they shall have that which of right belongs to them, and 
that no idler shall live upon their toil, and when your new organiza-
tion, your economic organization, shall declare as man to man and 
woman to woman, as brothers and sisters, that you are determined 
that you will possess these things, then there is no army that is 
large enough to overcome you, for you yourselves constitute the 
army. Now, when you have decided that you will take possession of 
these things, there will not need to be one gun fi red or one scaff old 
erected.
You will simply come into your own, by your own independence 
and your own manhood, and by asserting your own individual-
ity, and not sending any man to any legislature in any State of the 
American Union to enact a law that you shall have what is your 
own—yours by nature and by your manhood and by your very pres-
ence upon this Earth. Nature has been lavish to her children. She 
has placed in this Earth all the material of wealth that is necessary 
to make men and women happy. She has given us brains to go into 
her storehouse and bring from its recesses all that is necessary. She 
has given us these two hands and these brains to manufacture them 
on a parallel with all other civilizations.
Th
  ere is just one thing we lack, and we have only ourselves to 
blame if we do not become free. We simply lack the intelligence to 
take possession of that hope, and I feel that the men and women 
who constitute a convention like this can come together and orga-
nize that intelligence. I feel that you will at least listen to me, and 
maybe you will disagree with it.
I wish to say that my conception of the future method of tak-
ing possession of this Earth is that of the general strike; that is 
my conception of it. Th
  e trouble with all the strikes in the past has 
been this: the workingmen, like the teamsters of our cities, these 
hardworking teamsters, strike and go out and starve. Th
 eir children 
starve. Th
  eir wives get discouraged. Some feel that they have to go 
out and beg for relief, and to get a little coal to keep the children 
warm, or a little bread to keep the wife from starving, or a little 
something to keep the spark of life in them so that they can remain 
wage slaves. Th
  at is the way with the strikes in the past.
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My conception of the strike of the future is not to strike and go 
out and starve, but to strike and remain in and take possession of the 
necessary property of production. If anyone is to starve—I do not 
say it is necessary—let it be the capitalist class. Th
  ey have starved 
us long enough, while they have had wealth and luxury and all that 
is necessary. You men and women should be imbued with the spirit 
that is now displayed in far-off  Russia and far-off  Siberia, where we 
thought the spark of manhood and womanhood had been crushed 
out of them. Let us take example from them.
We see the capitalist class fortifying themselves today behind 
their Citizens’ Associations and Employers’ Associations in order 
that they may crush the American labor movement. Let us cast our 
eyes over to far-off  Russia and take heart and courage from those 
who are fi ghting the battle there, and from the further fact shown 
in the dispatches that appear this morning in the news that carries 
the greatest terror to the capitalist class throughout the world—the 
emblem that has been the terror of all tyrants through all the ages, 
and there you will see that the red fl ag has been raised.
According to the Tribune, the greatest terror is evinced in Odessa 
and all through Russia because the red fl ag has been raised. Th
 ey 
know that where the red fl ag has been raised, whoever enroll them-
selves beneath that fl ag recognize the universal brotherhood of 
man; they recognize that the red current that fl ows through the 
veins of all humanity is identical, that the ideas of all humanity are 
identical, that those who raise the red fl ag, it matters not where, 
whether on the sunny plains of China or on the sun-beaten hills 
of Africa or on the far-off  snowcapped shores of the north, or in 
Russia or America, that they all belong to the human family and 
have an identity of interest. Th
  at is what they know.
So when we come to decide, let us sink such diff erences as nation-
ality, religion, politics, and set our eyes eternally and forever towards 
the rising star of the industrial republic of labor, remembering that 
we have left the old behind and have set our faces toward the future. 
Th
  ere is no power on Earth that can stop men and women who are 
determined to be free at all hazards. Th
  ere is no power on Earth so 
great as the power of intellect. It moves the world and it moves the 
Earth.
Now, in conclusion, I wish to say to you—and you will excuse 
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me because of what I am going to say and only attribute it to my 
interest in humanity. I wish to say that nineteen years ago on the 
fourth of May of this year, I was one of those at a meeting at the 
Haymarket in this city to protest against eleven workingmen being 
shot to pieces at a factory in the southeastern part of this city 
because they had dared to strike for the eight-hour movement that 
was to be inaugurated in America in 1886.
Th
 e Haymarket meeting was called primarily and entirely to 
protest against the murder of comrades at the McCormick factory. 
When that meeting was nearing its close someone threw a bomb. 
No one knows to this day who threw it except the man who threw 
it. Possibly he has rendered his account with nature and has passed 
away. But no human being alive knows who threw it. And yet in the 
soil of Illinois, the soil that gave a Lincoln to America, the soil in 
which the great, magnifi cent Lincoln was buried, in the State that 
was supposed to be the most liberal in the union, fi ve men sleep 
the last sleep in Waldheim under a monument that has been raised 
there because they dared to raise their voices for humanity. I say to 
any of you who are here and can do so, it is well worth your time 
to go out there and draw some inspiration around the graves of the 
fi rst martyrs who fell in the great industrial struggle for liberty on 
American soil.
I say to you that even within the sound of my voice, only two 
short blocks from where we meet today, the scaff old was erected 
on which those fi ve men paid the penalty for daring to raise their 
voices against the iniquities of the age in which we live.
We are assembled here for the same purpose. And do any of 
you older men remember the telegrams that were sent out from 
Chicago while our comrades were not yet even cut down from the 
cruel gallows?
“Anarchy is dead, and these miscreants have been put out of the 
way.”
Oh, friends, I am sorry that I even had to use that word, anar-
chy, just now in your presence, which was not in my mind at the 
outset.
So if any of you wish to go out there and look at this monu-
ment that has been raised by those who believed in their comrades’ 
innocence and sincerity, I will ask you, when you have gone out 
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and looked at the monument, that you will go to the reverse side 
of the monument and [read] there on the reverse side the words of 
a man, himself the purest and the noblest man who ever sat in the 
gubernatorial chair of the State of Illinois, John P. Altgeld. On that 
monument you will read the clause of his message in which he par-
doned the men who were lingering then in [prison in] Joliet.
I have nothing more to say. I ask you to read the words of Altgeld, 
who was at that time the governor, and had been a lawyer and a 
judge, and knew whereof he spoke, and then take out your copy-
books and copy the words of Altgeld when he released those who 
had not been slaughtered at the capitalists’ behest, and then take 
them home and change your minds about what those men were put 
to death for.
Now, I have taken up your time in this because I simply feel that 
I have a right as a mother, and as the wife of one of those sacrifi ced 
men, to say whatever I can to bring the light to bear upon this 
conspiracy and to show you the way it was. Now, I thank you for 
the time that I have taken up of yours. I hope that we will meet 
again some time, you and I, in some hall where we can meet and 
organize the wageworkers of America, the men and women, so that 
the children may not go into the factories, nor the women into the 
factories, unless they go under proper conditions.
I hope even now to live to see the day when the fi rst dawn of the 
new era will have arisen, when capitalism will be a thing of the past, 
and the new industrial republic, the commonwealth of labor, shall 
be in operation. I thank you.
June 29, 1905
258 lucy 
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Acknowledgments
Th
  anks to Audrea Lim for assembling and presenting the texts by 
Marx, Lincoln and others. Th
  e writings of both Karl Marx and 
Abraham Lincoln are voluminous and available in many forms. 
Th
  ose reprinted here are just a small sample to explain the onset 
and course of the Civil War in the United States. To these we 
have added a few writings by others who contributed to America’s 
postwar social radicalization, but without attempting to duplicate 
the extensive and important documentation of the black experience 
of the war or of Reconstruction.
All the Lincoln speeches can be found on the US Library of 
Congress website, www.loc.gov.
 
Marx’s “Th
  e North American Civil War” and “Th
  e Civil War in 
the United States” were taken from Marx’s Political Writings, 
Volume 2, Surveys From Exile (Verso, 2010). Th
  e remaining arti-
cles in the “Karl Marx” section were taken from Karl Marx & 
Frederick Engels’ Th
  e Civil War in the United States (International 
Publishers, 1861).
Th
 e “Letter from Marx to Annenkov” was taken from Marx 
Engels Collected Works, Volume 38 (International Publishers, 
1975). Th
 e remaining letters were taken from Karl Marx & 
Frederick Engels’ Th
  e Civil War in the United States (International 
Publishers, 1969).
“Independence vs. Dependence! Which?” is from Woodhull & 
Clafi n’s Weekly, June 25, 1870; “Th
  e Rights of Children” is from 
Woodhull & Clafi n’s Weekly, December 6, 1870; and “Interview 

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with Karl Marx” is from Woodhull & Clafi n’s Weekly, August 12, 
1871, all on microfi che. 
Th
  omas Fortune’s “Conclusion” to Black and White was taken 
from Th
 omas Fortune, Black and White (Washington Square 
Press, 2007).
Engels’ “Preface to the US Edition” was taken from Fredriech 
Engels, Th
  e Condition of the Working Class in England (Oxford 
University Press, 1999).
Lucy Parson’s “Speeches at the Founding Convention of the 
Industrial Workers of the World” was taken from Lucy Parsons, 
Freedom, Equality & Solidarity (Charles H. Kerr, 2004).
260 acknowledgments