Mark and Lincoln: And Unfinished Revolution

A series of articles entitled “Man’s Rights, or How Would you 
Like It?” explored the idea of women taking leading positions in 
economic aff airs while it became the turn of men to be “house-
keepers and kitchen girls.”
119
 Other articles sought to reconcile a 
needed collectivism with the rights of the individual. Th
 e banks 
and the corporations should be taken into truly public ownership, 
and democratic institutions should ensure “the personal participa-
tion of each in the preparation, administration, and execution of 
the laws by which all are governed.” But the state should not seek 
to prescribe how people lived: “Social freedom means the absolute 
immunity from impertinent intrusion in all aff airs of exclusively 
personal concernment, such as scientifi c or religious belief, the 
sexual relationship, habits of dress, diet or the like.”
120
With her sister, Woodhull was the founder of Wall Street’s fi rst 
female brokerage, and used her rewards from this to fi nance  the 
Weekly, “the lady broker’s paper.” Eclectic and radical, the Weekly 
showed a lively interest in socialism and new forms of collective self-
government and published a special edition of Marx’s “Address on 
the Civil War in France.” Marx wrote a friendly note to Woodhull 
and suggested that his daughter Jenny could supply an article on 
her experiences in France following the suppression of the Paris 
Commune.
121
 
After the European panic occasioned by the Commune upris-
ing, Marx and his followers had moved the IWA’s headquarters to 
New York. Th
  is is often seen as a ploy by Marx and his followers 
to prevent the IWA failing into the hands of the anarchists. No 
doubt there is truth in this. Yet there was indeed, as Marx claimed, a 
promising opening in the United States in which the International 
could begin to sink real roots in North America. 
119  “Man’s Rights, or How Would You Like It?” ibid., September 8, 
1870. 
120 “Th
  e International: Appeal of Section No. 12,” ibid., September 23, 
1871.
121  Unfortunately this cordial tone was not maintained. Primed by the doc-
trinaire Internationalists, in a later letter Marx casually refers to Woodhull 
as “a banker’s woman, free lover and general humbug”; so far as sexual 
matters were concerned, Marx, the likely father of Frederick Demuth, was 
more deserving of the term “humbug” than Woodhull. 
76  an unfinished revolution

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In Europe, respectable opinion was outraged by the supposed 
excesses of the Communards in 1871. But in the United States it 
was the bloody suppression of the Commune that provoked out-
rage, and sympathy for the victims. Marx’s Civil War in France was 
widely read by reformers and radicals. Th
  e IWA mustered a demon-
stration of 70,000 or more in New York in December 1871 to pay 
tribute to the Commune’s tens of thousands of martyrs. Th
 e parade 
brought together the Skidmore Guards (a black militia), the female 
leadership of Section 12 (Woodhull and Clafl in), an Irish band, a 
range of trade unions, supporters of Cuba’s fi ght for independence 
marching under the Cuban fl ag, and a broad spectrum of socialist, 
feminist, Radical, and Reform politics. In its aftermath, Section 12 
and its supporters in the Equal Rights Association, a new reform 
body, proposed running a ticket in the forthcoming presidential 
election, with Victoria Woodhull and Frederick Douglass as the 
candidates. For a brief moment an attempt was made to present a 
progressive alternative in the 1872 elections, but it passed.
122
 
Many of Marx’s US followers distrusted Woodhull. She was 
president of the American Society of Spiritualists, and her Wall 
Street brokerage had the support of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the rich-
est man in America. Th
  e IWA Council declared that wage earners 
should comprise at least 60 percent of the membership in all sec-
tions. Section 12 was suspended for failing to reach this fi gure. Th
 e 
failure to distinguish between trade union and party was part of the 
problem here. So, too, was the conception that workers’ interests 
were somehow natural and sociologically given without benefi t of 
ideology or politics. Th
  e sectarian exclusion of Section 12 weak-
ened the International, though in the short run the dissension 
it aroused was eclipsed when Woodhull and her Weekly became 
embroiled in an unrelated obscenity suit. Incensed by hypocritical 
attacks on her philosophy of “free love,” she ran a story in the Weekly 
exposing the extramarital aff air of New York’s most prominent 
preacher. Th
  e scandal briefl y led to Woodhull’s imprisonment and 
prevented her from developing her political profi le. Feminist and 
122 Th
  e classic study is Montgomery’s Beyond Equality; the IWA is dis-
cussed on pp. 414–21. But see also Herbert Gutman, Work, Culture and Society 
in Industrializing America, Oxford 1976, pp. 293–343, and Samuel Bernstein, 
Th
  e First International in America, New York 1962.
introduction  77

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spiritualist leaders followed the socialists in keeping their distance 
from her.
123
Th
  ere was to be a legacy of distrust and factional strife between 
those of Marx’s German American followers who believed that party 
building was the priority, and others who saw the trade unions as 
the priority. Both “Yankee” and German Internationalists deplored 
racial violence and supported female enfranchisement, but the 
trade unionists gave low priority to such issues, and many Socialists 
despised the narrowness and caution of the trade union leaders. 
On the other hand the rumblings of class confl ict split the radi-
cal Republicans, as some sided with the employers, others with the 
workers, some supporting the eight-hour demand, and others hos-
tile to it. Th
  en the postwar boom was brought to a shuddering halt 
by the crash of 1873. Th
  e wages of workers had been eroded by the 
depreciating purchasing power of greenbacks. With their own living 
standards falling by as much as a third in a few years, the workers of 
the North and West were fi rst and foremost concerned about bread-
and-butter issues. Th
 e Republicans lost ground, as they seemed 
incapable of defending either the wages of Northern workers or the 
political gains of Southern freedmen. Ultimately the Republicans 
had deferred to the large property holders in both sections. 
AN EXPLOSION OF CLASS STRUGGLE: 
1877 AND AFTER
Th
  e presidential election of 1876 was deadlocked in the electoral 
college. Th
 e Republicans had failed to fi nd anyone with even 
remotely Grant’s appeal and received many fewer votes, but there 
was an even tie in the college. Th
  is eventually led to a deal—the 
Wormley House pact of 1877—whereby the Republican went 
to the White House but the Federal Army was withdrawn from 
the South. Th
  e last Reconstruction governments there collapsed, 
to be replaced by white “Redeemers,” but the spirit of radicalism 
unleashed by the Civil War and its outcome had not yet been laid 
to rest.
123  For a rounded assessment see Amanda Frisken, Victoria Woodhull’s 
Sexual Revolution, Philadelphia 2004. 
78  an unfinished revolution

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