Mark and Lincoln: And Unfinished Revolution

played their part is an extension of such views, but Daniel Crofts 
points to the diffi
  culty of pinpointing the exact moment of their 
birth: 
It is tempting to project back onto the prewar months the fi ercely 
aroused nationalisms that appeared in mid-April [1861]. To do so 
would not be entirely in error, but it invites distortion. Th
 e irrec-
oncilably antagonistic North and South described by historians 
such as Foner and Genovese were much easier to detect after 
April 15. Th
  en and only then could Northerners start to think in 
terms of a confl ict urged on behalf of “the general interests of self-
government” and the hopes of humanity and the interests of 
freedom among all peoples and for ages to come.
31
But this account gives too much to Unionist rhetoric. Th
 e Union’s 
war aim was quite simply the preservation of the Union, and the 
frustration of “the interests of self-government” as understood by 
the majority of Southern whites. Both nationalisms had a markedly 
expansive character, but the Union’s was purely continental at this 
stage, whereas the Confederacy’s looked toward South America 
(notably to Cuba) as well as to the west. Th
  e clash was thus one of 
rival empires as well as competing nations. 
It was the election of Abraham Lincoln that precipitated 
Secession. Lincoln’s positions on slavery, as we have seen, were 
moderate—he took his stand only against any expansion of slavery, 
as he carefully explained in his exchanges with Stephen Douglas in 
the 1850s. But he represented a dangerous fi gure for Southern sla-
veholders nonetheless, because he attacked slavery as a wrong and 
because he concentrated on this issue to the virtual exclusion of any 
other. If Marx was right about the inherently expansionist char-
acter of Southern slavery, then Lincoln’s modest but fi rm  stance 
against it was enough to provoke them to the desperate expedi-
ent of secession. As I have already noted, there was no real space 
constraint—and if there had been, Kansas was not the right place 
the Civil War” in Politics and Ideology; John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism and 
Politics in the Antebellum Republic, 2 vols., Cambridge 1998 and 2007; Bruce 
Levine, Half Slave and Half Free: the Roots of Civil War, New York 1992.
31  Daniel Crofts, “And the War Came,” in A Companion to the Civil War and 
Reconstruction, Lacy Ford, ed., Oxford 2005, pp. 183–200; p. 197.
introduction  21

---

for cotton plantations—but Lincoln’s presidency rankled for other 
reasons. 
Th
 e vehement speeches that defi ned Lincoln’s emergence as 
a Republican challenger were insulting as well as alarming to 
Southern ears. He was not more radical than other Republicans in 
his conclusions—rather the reverse—but he was more consistent 
and unwavering in his focus, and that was very unsettling.
32
 How 
could his appointees be trusted? How would he and they respond to 
any future John Brown–style adventure? Many leading Southerners, 
though exercised by such dangers, nevertheless still at fi rst opposed 
secession (Alexander Stephens, the future Confederate vice presi-
dent, being a case in point), on the grounds that it was fraught with 
even worse danger—revolutions invariably destroy those who start 
them. But the more moderate Southerners were at the mercy of 
the more extreme. Th
  e departure of one slave state, let alone fi ve 
or more, would decisively weaken the remaining Southern states’ 
position in Washington. Such a conclusion belongs to the realm of 
rational calculation, but at a certain point, the clash of two incom-
patible nationalisms—and the sense of rightfulness and justifi cation 
they entail—is needed to explain the willingness to engage in a life-
and-death struggle.
 Marx had scorn for national one-sidedness and self-satisfaction, 
but he did see a sequence of national revolutions as necessary to 
the war against aristocracy and monarchy. He may not have been 
fully aware of the extent to which he saw both German nationalism 
and North American nationalism as progressive forces. In 1861 his 
options stemmed from a conviction that the Civil War had a good 
prospect of destroying the world’s major bastion of chattel slavery 
and racial oppression. But he was also aware that ideas produced 
by the German national revolution were helping to redefi ne  the 
Union.
32  Lincoln’s steady focus on slavery after 1854 emerges clearly in Foner’s 
Th
 e Fiery Trial.
22  an unfinished revolution

---

THE GERMAN AMERICANS 
Th
 is brings us to the too often neglected contribution of the 
German Americans. Bruce Levine’s study Th e Spirit of 1848 shows 
the transformative impact of the huge German immigration around 
the midcentury.
33
 At this time the level of immigration was rising 
to new heights, and Germans comprised between a third and a 
half of all newcomers. In the single year 1853, over a quarter of 
a million German immigrants arrived. Th
 e German Americans 
soon became naturalized and formed an important pool of votes 
for those who knew how to woo them. To begin with, Democratic 
rhetoric had some impact on them, but by the mid-1850s many 
German Americans were attracted to the Republicans, and they in 
turn helped to make Republicanism and the antislavery position 
more broadly attractive. 
Protestant evangelicalism strongly infl uenced US abolitionism. Th
 e 
evangelical repudiation of slavery was very welcome, but eventually 
too close an association between the two served to limit antislav-
ery’s base. Th
  e evangelicals twinned antislavery with temperance 
and Protestantism, and this diminished the appeal of abolitionism 
in the eyes of many Catholics and not a few freethinkers. Already 
in the 1830s William Lloyd Garrison and William Channing were 
seeking to root the antislavery critique in more rationalist varie-
ties of Protestant Christianity. Th
  ere was also a current of radical 
English immigration that inclined to antislavery and the secular 
politics of Tom Paine.
34
 But the large-scale German infl ux greatly 
strengthened the secular culture of antislavery. With their brewer-
ies, beer gardens, musical concerts, and turnverein (exercise clubs), 
the German radicals furnished a strong secular current in the anti-
slavery movement, and even the German Protestants had concerns 
which diff erentiated them from the US Methodists and Baptists. 
Th
 e temperance cause loomed large for evangelicals but had 
no charm for German and Nordic immigrants. Th
  e more radical 
German Americans supported women’s rights and female suff rage; 
33 Bruce 
Levine, 
Th
  e Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Confl ict, and 
the Coming of the Civil War, Urbana, IL, 1992.
34 Th
  e overrepresentation of British immigrants among antislavery activists 
in the 1830s is noted in Richards, Gentlemen of Property and Standing.
introduction  23

---