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    Vol.62/No.3           January 26, 1998 
 
 
Civil War Opened New Era For U.S. Class Struggle  

BY KARL MARX
Over the next several weeks, this column will feature a series of excerpts that explain the conditions that gave rise to U.S. imperialism and the struggle against it. We begin here with the second American revolution - the Civil War of 1861- 65 - which destroyed the system of chattel slavery in the southern United States. Other columns will take up the period of Radical Reconstruction and struggle for land by Black former slaves; the bloody counterrevolution that halted this process; the Cuban wars for independence; and the Spanish-American war of 1898. We encourage our readers to send in any suggestions for this series.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote extensively on the Civil War, and their co-thinkers in the United States fought with the Union Army against the slavocracy. Below are major excerpts of two letters by Karl Marx. The first is addressed to Abraham Lincoln, president of the United States, just after his reelection in 1864. The second letter was written in 1865 following Lincoln's assassination and is addressed to President Andrew Johnson. It was sent on behalf of the Central Council of the International Workingmen's Association. The letters appear in the collection Marx and Engels on the United States, published by Progress Publishers and distributed by Pathfinder.

To Abraham Lincoln, president of the United States of America
Sir, - We congratulate the American people upon your re- election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war-cry of your reelection is Death to Slavery.

From the commencement of the Titanic American strife the working men of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labour of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave-driver?

When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe for the first time in the annals of the world "slavery" on the banner of Armed Revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man(1) was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on those very spots counter-revolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding "the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old constitution", and maintained "slavery to be a beneficent institution", indeed, the only solution of the great problem of "the relation of capital to labour", and cynically proclaimed property in man "the corner-stone of the new edifice", - then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labour, and that for the men of labour, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis,(2) opposed enthusiastically the pro-slavery intervention - importunities of their betters - and, from most parts of Europe, contributed their quota of blood to the good cause.

While the working men, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned labourer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labour, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.

The working men of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Anti-Slavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single- minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.

*****

To Andrew Johnson, President of the United States

Sir, The demon of the "peculiar institution",(3) for the supremacy of which the South rose in arms, would not allow his worshippers to honourably succumb in the open field. What he had begun in treason, he must needs end in infamy...

Yours, Sir, has become the task to uproot by the law what has been felled by the sword, to preside over the arduous work of political reconstruction and social regeneration. A profound sense of your great mission will save you from any compromise with stem duties. You will never forget that, to initiate the new era of the emancipation of labour, the American people devolved the responsibilities of leadership upon two men of labour - the one Abraham Lincoln, the other Andrew Johnson.

Notes
1. The reference is to the Declaration of Independence.

2. The cotton crisis was caused by the stoppage of cotton deliveries from America due to the blockade of the Southern slave states by the Federal fleet. Most of the European cotton industry was paralyzed, and this worsened the condition of the workers.

3. The phrase is from a speech in defense of slavery by Alexander Stephens, a Confederate leader, on March 19, 1861.

 
 
 
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