Mark and Lincoln: And Unfinished Revolution

Mathilda Anneke published a German-language women’s paper. 
Margarete Schurz was infl uential in the introduction of public 
kindergartens. Sometimes Marx’s German American followers are 
portrayed as deferring to the prejudices of white, male trade union-
ists, but this is unfair. When Joseph Wedemeyer, Marx’s longtime 
friend and comrade, helped to found the American Workers League 
(Amerikanische Arbeitersbund) in Chicago in 1853, its founding 
statement of principles declared that “all workers who live in the 
United States without distinction of occupation, language, color, or 
sex can become members.”
35
 Today such a formula sounds entirely 
conventional, but in 1853 it was very fresh. Indeed, this may have 
been the fi rst occasion on which a workers’ organization adopted 
it. Th
  e revolutionary German Americans did not invent this stance 
all by themselves, but they did readily adopt a critique of racial 
and gender exclusion pioneered by radical abolitionists. Like other 
exiles, the German Americans quarreled with one another, some 
inclining to the Republicans and others opting for purely labor-
oriented groups, and Marx’s followers shared this division. Many 
saw the founding of a labor party as the long-term goal, but even 
some of those closest to Marx, like Wedemeyer, also saw a tacti-
cal need to strengthen the Republicans and attack the slave power. 
Indeed, August Nimtz concludes that “the Marx party, specifi cally 
through Wedemeyer…played an important role in winning the 
German émigré community to the Republican cause.”
36
 
Th
  e mass of German Americans were naturally hostile to the 
35 Levine, Th e Spirit of 1848, p. 125. In later decades some German 
Americans did indeed soft-pedal women’s rights when seeking to recruit Irish 
American trade unionists, but while this should be duly noted, it is far from 
characterizing all German Americans, whether followers of Marx or not. For 
an interesting study that sometimes veers towards caricature, see Timothy 
Messer-Kruse, Th e Yankee International, 1848–76: Marxism and the American 
Reform Tradition, Chapel Hill 1998. Th
  is author has a justifi able pride in the 
native American radical tradition and some valid criticisms of some of the 
positions adopted by German American “Marxists,” but he is so obsessed with 
pitting the two ethnic political cultures against one another that he fails to 
notice how eff ectively they often combined, especially in the years 1850–70. 
See Paul Buhle, Marxism in the United States, New York 1983, for a more 
balanced assessment.
36 Nimtz, 
Marx and Engels, p. 170. 
24  an unfinished revolution

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nativist chauvinism of the Know Nothings (or American Party). 
Th
  e Republican Party only emerged as the dominant force in the 
North in the 1850s by defeating the Know Nothings and repu-
diating its own nativist temptation. While some Republican 
leaders fl irted with nativist prejudice, the party itself attacked—even 
demonized—“the Slave Power” and not the immigrants. Th
 e pres-
ence of hundreds of thousands of German American voters helped 
to ensure this orientation.
37
As the Civil War unfolded, German Americans and their over-
seas friends furnished vital support to the Northern cause. At 
the outbreak of the war, a German American militia in St. Louis 
played a key role in preventing Missouri’s governor from deliv-
ering the state—and the city’s huge arsenal—into Confederate 
hands. Wedemeyer became a colonel, served as a staff   offi
  cer  in 
St. Louis for General John Frémont, and was put in charge of 
the city’s defenses. Eventually 200,000 Germans fought for the 
Union, with 36,000 fi ghting in German-speaking units. Carl 
Schurz became a major general, and later a senator. Franz Sigel and 
Alexander Schimmelfennig became generals. Two other members 
of the Communist League who also became Unionist offi
  cers were 
August Willich and Fritz Anneke. Indeed, the correspondence of 
Marx and Engels is studded with references to the military progress 
of these friends and acquaintances. Th
  e imperative to rally against 
the “Slave Power” also alleviated the sometimes bitter diff erences of 
émigré politics. 
Th
 e military resources represented by the wider German-
American enrollment were very signifi cant, but the same could be 
said of the Irish American contingents, which grew to be just as 
large. Th
  e German Americans brought with them an openness to 
the antislavery idea that was to promote a new sense of the charac-
ter of the war and the way it should be fought. Reviewing a recent 
collection of hundreds of letters written by German American vol-
unteers, Kenneth Barkin writes: “the major reason for volunteering 
37  For the role of antislavery in swinging German Americans to the 
Republican Party in upstate New York, see Hendrik Booraem, Th e Formation 
of the Republican Party in New York: Politics and Conscience in the Antebellum 
North, New York 1983, pp. 204–5.
introduction  25

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[for the Union army] was to bring slavery to an end.”
38
 Th
 is new 
research very much vindicates Levine’s argument in Th e Spirit of 
1848. 
Th
  e veterans of 1848 saw themselves as social revolutionaries but 
also as exponents of a national idea and movement. Whatever their 
ambivalence—and it was considerable—they were aware of the les-
sons of the Napoleonic epoch and of the nationalist renewal that 
it had provoked in Germany. One of the most striking expressions 
of this movement had been the doctrines of Carl von Clausewitz—
his contention that war was the continuation of politics by other 
means, his attention to moral factors, and his insistence on the 
priority of destroying the enemy’s social basis rather than captur-
ing territory or capital cities. Clausewitz’s magnum opus, On War, 
had been published in 1832, and its ideas had currency among 
the 1848 veterans. Unionist military strategy at fi rst ignored the 
Clausewitzian imperatives and instead preferred the doctrine of 
Antoine Jomini, a Swiss military theorist who had sympathized 
with the French Revolution.
39
 With few exceptions, Northern 
commanders were determined to avoid resorting to revolutionary 
measures, fearing that this would lead to race war. Instead, they 
relied implicitly on a strategy of blockade and cordons to exhaust 
the Confederacy and on the capture of Richmond (a strategy that 
Marx questioned in his article for the March 27, 1862, issue of 
Die Presse). 
At a diff erent level, Francis Lieber, a teacher at Columbia 
College and a German American of pre-1848 vintage, helped to 
shape the Union response to the war. Th
 e War Department looked 
to him when devising its rules of military conduct. Lieber played 
an important role in the Loyal Publication Society. He had been 
a strong exponent of the need for a party system in the antebel-
lum period, but thought a new approach was needed once fi ghting 
began. His pamphlet No Party Now But All for Our Country stressed 
the wartime need to suppress party confl ict and devote all energies 
to defeating the rebellion. His program for a more thoroughgoing 
38  Kenneth Barkin, “Ordinary Germans, Slavery and the US Civil War,” 
Journal of African American History, March 2007, pp. 70–9.
39  Gary Gallagher, “Blueprint for Victory,” in Writing the Civil War, James 
McPherson and William Cooper, eds., Charlottesville 1998, pp. 60–79. 
26  an unfinished revolution

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