While doing some research concerning a paper for my American Revolution graduate class I stumbled on this article “Karl Marx and the American Civil War”, by Gerald Runkle in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Jan., 1964). Runkle stated in his article that his goal(s) were:
“…to discuss Marx’s views on the American Civil War. What did he think was taking place on this side of the Atlantic? Where were his sympathies? What was the theoretical significance of the War? How accurate was Marx historically? How consistent was he ideologically?”
Marx was of course alive during the Civil War and though he never visited America, he wrote several articles for New York Daily Tribune. He also wrote over 30 articles for The Vienna Presse. I also did some searching and found some of Marx’s writing on the Civil War and it’s interesting that he was able to see the causes of the Civil War far differently than did the British and other Europeans.
Here’s an article he wrote for The Vienna Presse in October of 1861, and in it he writes that the London Press has incorrectly defined the “war between the North and South [as] 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…The question of slavery, however, as The Saturday Review categorically declares among other things, has absolutely nothing to do with this war. ”
Marx’s class struggle ideology clearly aided him in seeing the struggle over slavery and especially the situation dealing with slavery as a cause of the Civil War, he writes:
“…the number of actual slaveholders in the South of the Union does not amount to more than three hundred thousand, a narrow oligarchy that is confronted with many millions of so-called poor whites, whose numbers have been constantly growing through concentration of landed property and whose condition is only to be compared with that of the Roman plebeians in the period of Rome’s extreme decline.”
After reviewing the trail of events leading to the Civil War, Marx comes to one conclusion:
“The whole movement was and is based, as one sees, on the slave question. Not in the sense of whether the slaves within the existing slave states should be emancipated outright or not, but whether the twenty million free men of the North should submit any longer to an oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders; whether the vast Territories of the republic should be nurseries for free states or for slavery…”
That Marx could see the Civil War so clearly at the time when so many others could not is very interesting, but perhaps should not be, especially when considering his political and social beliefs. I find his ideas interesting, but not appealing. Though in this instance they helped him see something that not a lot of people did see in 1861.
There has to be a way for me to incorporate some of this into my AP U.S. History class this coming Fall. I’ll probably use Marx’s article and then find something to compare it with.
Interesting article, Chris. Do you really think that Marx’s opinion on the U.S. Civil War is historically significant enough to include in an AP U.S. History class?
Ben, I have not thought it through yet. Maybe you’re absolutely correct and there will be no good way to present it. Obviously I can’t just throw it at them without a reason for comparison. I’ll have to give it more thought. I just found it fascinating that he could see the conflict with clarity.
Chris
I believe, without being scholar enough to look it up, that Marx remarked that the recruitment of black soldiers into the Union army turned the war from a “constitutional” struggle to a “revolutionary” struggle.
I don’t know about the AP(literally), but that’s a worthwhile question for students generally, do you agree with this statement or disagree, explain why.
I adgree with Marx this civil war is much more than slavery, I think Marx was hinting upon weather this was a revolution of the plantation owner of the south or the industrialist of the North.But the offensive was the south taking over fort sumter.Therefore if Marx says if a black person joined the union it would be a revolution.In my view yes there was a power or class war sort of like the Russian revolution of 1917 it was first labled as a civil war,then a russian revolution. Look at rome it was a democrary first a dictatorship and had a civil war
The American civil war was the true bourgeois revolution in this part of the world. *The party of the northern capitalist class broke the domination of the southern landed aristocracy in the elections of 1860; *the Confederacy was a last-ditch attempt to save an old ruling class from destruction.
All the rhetoric you may have seen about “the union”, “anti-slavery”, “self-determination”. “the peculiar institution”, etc. was window dressing. * Not that some of the abolitionists were not brave and sincere fighters; *but you can readily see just how “sincere” most of them really were by looking at what happened to black people AFTER the civil war.
Not to even mention the fact that very few slave-owners were deprived of their property at the conclusion of the war (except their human property). *The plantations were not broken up and distributed to the former slaves; *instead northern capitalists came in and bought up a fair amount of land themselves (“the carpetbaggers”). * For the most part, the old southern aristocracy were permitted to survive and even prosper…on the understanding that they were permanently subordinate to the new ruling class in New York (“Wall Street”).
Since the US Citizenship test will take either “Slavery” or “States Rights” as the answer to why the south seceded, this point is important. For years, the importance of slavery as the root cause of the war has been buried under the rhetoric of “states rights,” even though it was the right of the states of allow slavery to which they refer.
That said, one of the best books I’ve used in freshmen US history classes is Charles Dew’s “Apostles of Disunion” in which Dews clearly demonstrates that, throughout the South, every southern knew that slavery was the issue before the states broke their ties with the Union. The articles by Marx (and others) demonstrate that this was well known, as the cause of the war, around the world. Marx is writing in England to a European paper about the causes of the war. There’s even a better, more clearly stated article that Marx wrote, at about the same time, for the New York Daily Tribune (it’s included in the Penguin “Dispatches” compilation). So, should you include this evidence in an AP history class — definitely because it addresses the attempt by some to rewrite history to cloud the real reasons behind this war. This was only about states’ rights as those rights pertained to slavery, and that the “peculiar institution” of slavery and it’s continuation, into the future, was the sole reason for the South’s attempt to dissolve the union.
You can then tie this to the expunged material of the Declaration of Independence, the provisions institutionalizing slavery in the Constitution, the various “compromises,” the role slavery played when a bunch of Mexican citizens (southern immigrants to Mexico) committed treason rather than free their slaves, thus creating the republic of Texas as a slaveholding nation (because the US couldn’t bring it in as a slave state until there was another free state with which to balance it). In fact, there is so much in US History prior to 1877 that can ONLY make sense if you keep slavery at the heart of the question.
Marx’s articles show a connection between U.S. and British, or World History. He notices that the British ruling class supports the South, and their own power, while the British working class supports the North, and their own rights. He sees the U.S. as a “colony” of the British Empire at that time still. From an economic point of view, that probably makes sense.
Dear Sirs,
I am no expert on the subject but I did see Amanda Foreman on Book TV. She’s a British historian who wrote , “A world on Fire,” about Britain’s role during the US Civil War. I believe she mentioned that Engels wrote many of the pieces attributed to Marx. best, Paul
But Karl Marx did visit US during Civil War.
Source: Ken Burns “Civil War” documentary mentions this fact.
Also he was instrumental in launchibg AFL-CIO as subversive organization.