Karl Marx on "The North American Civil War" (1861 article)

Please follow the link to read a great article that -- as well as anything you may find today -- reviews the history leading up to the Civil War and dismantles the apologia for the slave states.

I hear there are still those who debate his status as a theorist of capitalism (curious, given recent events), but there's little doubt Marx was a great journalist, scholar and historian.

I believe five paragraphs of a much longer article is legit in this case, given it was written in 1861. And the most important part is in the last paragraph quoted here, though please: Follow link & read the whole thing!

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"It is above all to be remembered that the war did not emanate from the North, but from the South."

http://www.tenc.net/a/18611025.htm

The North American Civil War

by Karl Marx

Die Presse (Vienna), October 25, 1861 *

==========================================

London, October 20, 1861.

For months the leading weekly and daily papers of the London press have been reiterating the same litany on the American Civil War. While they insult the free states of the North, they anxiously defend themselves against the suspicion of sympathizing with the slave states of the South. In fact, they continually write two articles: one article, in which they attack the North, and another article, in which they excuse their attacks on the North. Qui s'excuse s'accuse.

In essence the extenuating arguments read: The war between the North and South is a tariff war. The war is, further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery and in fact turns on Northern lust for sovereignty. Finally, even if justice is on the side of the North , does it not remain a vain endeavor to want to subjugate eight million Anglo-Saxons by force! Would not the separation of the South release the North from all connection with Negro slavery and assure to it, with its twenty million inhabitants and its vast territory, a higher, hitherto scarcely dreamt of, development? Accordingly must not the North welcome secession as a happy event, instead of wanting to put it down by a bloody and futile civil war?

Point by point we will probe the plaidoyer of the English press.

The war between North and South -- so runs the first excuse -- is a mere tariff war, a war between a protection system and a free trade system, and England naturally stands on the side of free trade. Shall the slaveowner enjoy the fruits of slave labor in their entirety or shall he be cheated of a portion of these by the protectionists of the North? That is the question which is at issue in this war. It was reserved for The Times to make this brilliant discovery. The Economist, The Examiner, The Saturday Review and tutti quanti expounded the theme further. It is characteristic of this discovery that it was made, not in Charleston, but in London. Naturally, in America everyone knew that from 1846 to 1861 a free trade system prevailed, and that Representative Morrill carried his protectionist tariff in Congress only in 1861, after the rebellion had already broken out. Secession, therefore, did not take place because the Morrill tariff had gone through Congress, but, at most, the Morrill tariff went through Congress because secession had taken place. When South Carolina had its first attack of secession in 1831, the protectionist tariff of 1828 served her, to be sure, as a pretext, but also only as a pretext, as is known from a statement of General Jackson. This time, however, the old pretext has in fact not been repeated. In the Secession Congress at Montgomery all reference to the tariff question was avoided, because the cultivation of sugar in Louisiana, one of the most influential Southern states, depends entirely on protection.

But, the London press pleads further, the war of the United States is nothing but a war for the maintenance of the Union by force. The Yankees cannot make up their minds to strike fifteen stars from their standard. They want to cut a colossal figure on the world stage. Yes, it would be different, if the war was waged for the abolition of slavery! The question of slavery, however, as, among others, The Saturday Review categorically declares, has absolutely nothing to do with this war.

It is above all to be remembered that the war did not emanate from the North, but from the South. The North finds itself on the defensive. For months it had quietly looked on, while the secessionists appropriated to themselves the Union's forts, arsenals, shipyards, customs houses, pay offices, ships and supplies of arms, insulted its flag and took prisoner bodies of its troops. Finally the secessionists resolved to force the Union government out of its passive attitude by a sensational act of war, and solely for this reason proceeded to the bombardment of Fort Sumter near Charleston. On April 11 (1861) their General Beauregard had learnt in a parley with Major Anderson, the commander of Fort Sumter, that the fort was only supplied with provisions for three days more and accordingly must be peacefully surrendered after this period. In order to forestall this peaceful surrender, the secessionists opened the bombardment early on the following morning (April 12), which brought about the fall of the place in a few hours. News of this had hardly been telegraphed to Montgomery, the seat of the Secession Congress, when War Minister Walker publicly declared in the name of the new Confederacy: "No man can say where the war opened today will end." At the same time he prophesied "that before the first of May the flag of the Southern Confederacy would wave from the dome of the old Capitol in Washington and within a short time perhaps also from the Faneuil Hall in Boston." Only now ensued the proclamation in which Lincoln summoned for 75,000 men to defend the Union. The bombardment of Fort Sumter cut off the only possible constitutional way out, namely, the summoning of a general convention of the American people, as Lincoln had proposed in his inaugural address. For Lincoln there now remained only the choice of fleeing from Washington, evacuating Maryland and Delaware and surrendering Kentucky, Missouri and Virginia, or of answering war with war.

LONG & EXCELLENT ARTICLE - CONTINUED AT LINK

had no idea what they were doing.

Trying to suddenly start a government, raise an Army, FEED IT, and fight a war are not easy...that being said they did a horrible job of all of them

However, this is another case where "incompetence theory" should not obscure the fact of motivated behavior.

The slave states had forced their barbaric policies on the rest of the country for decades, to the point of an attempted violent coup against the majority in Kansas, and by the time of Lincoln's election faced the demographic reality that their power would inevitably decline to reflect their status as an ever-smaller minority.

The secessionist states initiated the hostilities of 1861 and posed a real and declared threat to the security of the northern states. As Marx says, Lincoln's choices were defense in a war that had already started, or surrendering DC and the border states to the CSA. The CSA would have continued the war they had already begun so as to claim the US territories as future slave states, regardless of any other consideration.

whatever that is called

It starts

In the momentous step, which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery - the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product, which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.

http://www.civil-war.net/pages/mississippi_declaration.asp

They also mention the "Lost Cause" element to the instant revisionism of the Southern apologists.

Great book.

Also Mississippi (the main focus of "State") didn't approve the the 13th Amendment until...... March 16, 1995

:wow:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

I am posting all of this because I agree with you.

They just raised it up to fight for the stupidest cause that ever was.

especially in Vicksburg. Didn't rotate the troops in any way out of the hot sun. Eventually giving up without a fight (aside from a few runs at it by Grant) due simply to attrition.

AND their officer corp was based on social and economic status not on ability.

especailly at Vicksburg. I was only adding that, by standards of the day, it was a world class professional army, despite being underfed and poorly led.

...also remember that textiles was England's great industry at the time and the Civil War disrupted the trade in cotton from the south that England needed. The establishment view in England was that cotton should begin flowing from the south as soon as possible.

Herr Marx's observations on that time are invaluable.

As an aside, Mr. Fitzhugh, in 'Cannibals All, or, Slaves Without Masters', probably the most impish and entertaining work of apologia for slavery produced at the South, relies heavily on Herr Marx for his illustrations in attack on 'Free Society'....

Pro-slavery forces were in fact on the march in the latter half of the 1850s. IN 1855. William Walker invaded Nicaragua- Nicaragua for fuck's sake! - to establish a "slave republic" down there. The war in which one third of Mexico was seized for the United States was a fresh memory in the 1850s, no more than a decade old. The whole of the Missouri Territory was bigger than either what we call the antebellum North or the South, and it was being opened to slavery through many decades of legislative tugs-of-war. Then the Dred Scot decision authored for a southern majority of the Supreme Court by Chief Justice Roger Taney (of a plantation owning Maryland family), made citizenship for anyone of African descent impossible, declaring no black man had any rights that any white man was obliged to respect. Slavery would be legal under Federal law, wherever a slave owner took his slaves from that day on - no matter what the state law had to say about it.

Now in that time, LAND still was and had been regarded as the only source of wealth. And credit as we know it nowadays did not exist so far as the ordinary citizen was concerned. Planters though had access to bank credit. They could take loans out from NY banks on land in Alabama - or on land in states carved from the Missouri Territory , or even in states north of the Mason-Dixon line. 85-90% of the country were small dirt farmers and they had to regard the spread of PLANTATION SYSTEM agriculture as a threat to their way of life. They could look down south to see what the dominance of Plantation landowners meant for democracy. It was a transparent oligarchy, not a democracy. Any middle aged man among them could remember a time also when people like themselves were not allowed to vote. The spread of plantation agriculture into the North and West would bring with it slavery and the end of any voice for the common man in his state government. Truly then the Dred Scot decision delivered in 1858 was the first shot fired in the Civil War. There had always been a small but vocal, religiously motivated Abolitionist movement in the North (and even in the South). But as the developments Marx outlines in this article show, expansionist dreams of the southern slaveholding elite put them on a collision course with the economic security of the average citizen of the North and also the recently settled West (Illinois, Indiana, Ohio). It wasn't primarily a great "moral cause" on behalf of the slave: it was a great moral cause on behalf of democracy, in which some were willing to include the slave, and some not. Southern expansion of the plantation system and slavery threatened their political stake--universal male suffrage--in the system as well as their livelihood, and they responded to the threat. First they responded by electing Lincoln (Lincoln said he would pack the Supreme Court to reverse Dred Scot) and when Lincoln's election precipitated Southern secession and armed aggression followed, a large majority in the North were well-motivated to respond in kind. It was not something to take lying down and they didn't.

People who say the South could have been allowed to go its own way or should have been allowed are just speaking nonsense. The South was on the march and felt history was on its side. Even if the South did not have conquest of the North as its goal, which is a dubious claim since its early moves were to attack the national capital, it is unthinkable that South and North would not immediately begin battling for control of the outstanding parts of the Missouri Territory, and for parts of "New Spain". They had been all but killing each other over it since the end of the War of 1812. If somehow the first engagement over the Territorial lands had been kept limited it's unimaginable that there would not be rematches, as there were between France and Germany from 1800-1940 and that at least one of these would have escalated to winner-take-all total war. Since the southern planters refused to live with even the possibility that one day slavery would be declared unConstitutional, either one great decisive war or a century of war was unavoidable.

You've obviously studied this a good deal.

Especially indicative were the filibusters, including Walker's private invasion of Nicaragua and the "Ostend Manifesto" with Buchanan's approval: a plan to take over Cuba and carve it into several states with an attendant number of senators.

The slaveholding elites were never and could never have stopped at simple secession of their own states. They were determined to expand the system to new territories, and, as Marx ably explains, that system required expansion to forestall its own inevitable declikne. By any means, including violence and war, they were out to force slavery on the territories, and even on the North (the latter as illustrated by the Dred Scott decision and the forced inclusion of northern states in the South's system of policing escaped slaves).

as a prelim, and the issue was slavery.

What sickens me is that many people do not understand this little factoid.

The south relied on a CASTE system, and in many ways still does.

And if anybody says I am bashing the south for stating a fact, so be it.

That said, the Caste system is not as ingrained as it used to be, but it is still there.

and wonder if you're saying that the Federalists weren't asking for a war. If so, why would the North accept an attack on its capital as little more than a one-off battle? Surely, it was asking for full-scale war. Anyway, I've perhaps misunderstood it entirely. Tell me.

This did fascinate me though. I'll try and dig up the cutting of the review:

"The slaveholding elites were never and could never have stopped at simple secession of their own states. They were determined to expand the system to new territories, and, as Marx ably explains, that system required expansion to forestall its own inevitable declikne. By any means, including violence and war, they were out to force slavery on the territories, and even on the North (the latter as illustrated by the Dred Scott decision and the forced inclusion of northern states in the South's system of policing escaped slaves)."

Actually, this seems to be a blueprint for the Nazis' Triumph of the Book-keeper's Will, as a Guardian book-reviewer once put it. They were obliged to keep conquering.

I don't know what truth there is in this, but I also read on the Internet that white people were getting caught up in the slavery, as slaves, too. Of course, that, too, would have been a major concern in the North for all but the far right.

IMO the South was doomed from the start because it was the north that had the industrial power and popular enthusiasm. That combo was the Republican Party's original power base, Industry, Rural Populism, and Middle Class Abolitionism. The Aristocrats were screwed from the start, they didn't have a chance. The Civil War was in reality the 2nd American Revolution, which completed the first. Crushing the Southern Aristocracy and forging the US and a unified nation-state. The US Civil War was in that sense equivalent to the contemporary wars in Europe that created Germany and Italy, it was our "Liberal Revolution".

an essay by Karl Marx? Won't they feel foolish when they read what he had to say about it?

if it means we must always tiptoe around their ever-offended sensibilities, and therefore avoid simple truths.

Nor is that the point of this thread. I'm recommending a damn good article, and if it's by Karl Marx, so much the better for those who might discover that he was indeed a great thinker with things to say that remain important today.

By the way, did you read the article?

to be really dim to be the size of the Confederacy and pick a fight with the Union, who beat them like a red-headed step-child, "while keeping one arm behind their back", as Shelby Foote, himself, a loyal Southerner, pointed out. It seems incredible.

"Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Will he not first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand men to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand? If he is not able, he will send a delegation while the other is still a long way off and will ask for terms of peace." Luke 14: 31-32.

Not if he's a Dixiecrat, evidently. No, Siree.

IN BRIEF: An address, plea, or argument made by an advocate in court.

I had to look it up...haha.

too bad those currently on the far right of the American poilitcal spectrum fail to understand this.

refreshing, compared to the pablum that usually passes as political commentary

that produce this unacceptable situation. Here is the history that colors all current thinking about the situation. Now let us examine the politics. We can identify various groups; we can predict what various outcomes they should want based on their interests; and so we can plan our strategy in a scientific manner

Thanks for posting it.

I wish I could go through school again and relearn some history. I've been taught to remember the salient points but not the flow, the reasons.