The American Civil War (1959)

From the January 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Conflict Defined

The American Civil War was a savage affair. It lasted for four years and it caused the deaths of 600,000 of the young men of America. It wrote such names as Gettysburg, Bull Run and Shiloh into the history of human conflict.

It was a war, we were told, over slavery. If you were humane, liberal and democratic you fought for the North, against slavery. If you were brutal, despotic and contemptuously aristocratic you fought for the South, for slavery. If there are any legends of history which for their own sakes are worth preserving, this is not one of them.

In truth, the Northern States had little use for slavery. Their agriculture produced anything from lumber to livestock, for which they needed workers who were knowledgeable, adaptable and freely moving. Such workers were also needed by the modern industry, which was developing in the North. In contrast, the South, with its warmer climate, raised settled crops like indigo, sugar, tobacco—and cotton. It was profitable to work these crops by ignorant slaves, under a few overseers. This difference in economic needs was at the root of the clash over slavery.

The first negro slaves came to America at the beginning of the 17th century. Before this, workers were employed under indentures—and they moved on to settle new lands when their term expired. This was not a convenient system for the Southern planters, who needed a settled labour force. Even so, they did not immediately use the Negroes as slaves; at first they were treated as indentured servants (although they had no indentures) and when their term ran out they often themselves bought another Negro. (It is interesting that the recognition of this right was the first legal sanction of slavery in America). When the planters realised that the Negroes had no legal rights they dropped the indenture formalities and openly bought and worked them as slaves. This was the stimulus to the West Indian slave mart, with its history of cold-blooded cruelly.

Slavery takes root

When slavery was not economical the white colonists tried to abolish it, but were often prevented by the English slave-running interests. Any anti-slavery movement based on moral grounds, without good commercial reasons, was doomed, as in the State of Georgia, which banned slavery when it was founded only to see the law ignored and evaded. The reason was that the Southern economy was being boosted by the demand from Europe for fresh foods and new materials; cotton was of increasing importance and the planters would not allow it to be disturbed. The invention in 1793 of the Whitney Cotton Gin (which automatically combed and separated the cotton), stimulated production and increased the demand for slaves. The cotton plantations spread from the Old South (Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky) into the Deep South (Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi), whose red clay was ideal for this crop. The Old South traded slaves into the new plantations—in 1836 Virginia alone sent 40,000. The Negroes did not like their new conditions—the song Carry Me Back to Old Virginia is the lament of the slave who had been moved from the comparatively genteel Old South to the harshness of the Deep South. This area became heavily dependent on its cotton, and its pro-slavery sentiment became that much more fanatical and its planters that much more brutal. This attitude, although outdated, lingers on in the Southern States. It causes the riots in places like Clinton and Little Rock.

As we can see from a few dry figures, the 17th and 18th centuries saw a remarkable growth in the American Negro slave population. Over the 20 years up to 1671 the white population of Georgia increased from 15,000 to 40,000 and its Negros from 300 to 2,000. In 1760 the North American population was about 1½ million, 300,000 of them slaves; at this time the average slave holding in Virginia was 10 (largest 250). When the war started in 1861 there were about four million slaves in the Confederacy and some 230,000 free Negroes.

It was during the first half of the 19th century that the Southerners’ aristocratic pretensions became so objectionable, with the notion that they represented the gracious, hospitable elements of American society, whilst the Northerners stood for all that was brash and cheap. The uniformity of productive (that is, agricultural) , methods and organisation of property ownership tended to unite the South politically and gave it an important—possibly over-important—influence in American politics. On the other hand the North was comparatively disunited, with many economic factions each having its own functional and property rights. In the 1850’s the Capitalists of the North were stricken by a financial crisis and this, with the usual depression of the workers’ conditions and the greed of the industrialists, strengthened the Southerner’s conviction in his superiority. (The romantic novels of Sir Walter Scott went down well with this conviction!) Inevitably, the white men in the South looked on the Negro as a docile, dim-witted, sub-human; even the poor whites tried to get on the band wagon. Although they lived in appalling poverty on their tiny plots, trying to compete with the big plantations, they had their pride. Their skin—when they washed it—was white; so they could join the pro-slavery chorus.

Slave Empire

If the poor whites had little reason to get on their high horse, the wealthy Southern planters could offer strong justification for their attitude. They had invested good money in their Negroes, which they would lose if the slaves were freed. They wanted to expand the slave-lands into a great empire to take in the new lands in the West, Cuba, Central America and even Brazil. This empire, they thought, would supply the food and raw materials which the developing industries of Europe needed. But the Northern industries also had designs on the West and it was here that the conflict was defined. To win their point, the South rigged their elections, sending numbers of representatives to Congress based on population returns which included slaves who were not allowed to vote. They became more and more aggressive and impatient of the interference from the government. As the quarrel grew fiercer, one compromise after another was tried, but all failed. The Southern States wanted the right to run their affairs as they liked. And they were getting ready to fight for it. 

Jack Law

(To be continued.)

Link to Part II

The American Civil War — II (1959)

From the February 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part I

No Compromise

Neither side rushed blindly into the American Civil War. North and South made many efforts to compromise on their disputes, but each settlement only flung up more problems, making the war seem more certain.

Louisiana Purchase

In 1803 it was proposed that the Louisiana lands, recently purchased from France, should be recognised as a State of the Union. This proposal roused the jealousy of the New Englanders, not because Louisiana was a slave State but because they feared the addition of a Southern State on the other side of the political balance. This dispute promoted the agreement that free and slave States should be admitted to the Union alternately. This compromise worked well until 1820, when Missouri, a slave State, applied to join the Union. (Indiana. Illinois, and Maine had joined as free States and Mississippi and Alabama as slave States.) Although it meant breaking their agreement, the North bitterly opposed the entry of Missouri, for they were coming to the opinion that no more slave States should be admitted to the Union. This dispute was shelved by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which recognised Missouri as a slave State, but ruled that no slave State should exist north of a parallel 36' 30' N., and that any State south of this line should be allowed to decide its own status.

The Missouri Compromise was broken by the refusal to extend the line across the Continent when California joined the Union, and further trouble developed over the admission of Kansas and Nebraska. These two States were brought into the Union to carry the railways which were pushing into the West. Under the terms of the Missouri Compromise both should have been free States, but in the event only Nebraska was recognised as such. Kansas, whose wild and lawless settlers were violently pro-slavery, was allowed to choose its own status and the whole procedure was legalised by the Kansas/Nebraska Bill of 1854, which finally wiped out the Missouri Compromise.

The first elections in Kansas were chaotic. First, heavily armed Border ruffians from Missouri came into the State and drowned the election in illegal votes. When the pro-slavery candidate was declared elected, John Brown led a counter invasion of Abolitionists. Civil war broke out between the two sides, with each setting up its own government and holding its own elections. In the end, the slavers won, and they passed the most stringent measures to protect their system. Another compromise had failed. 

The Republican Party

Tempers on both sides were now rising fast, aggravated by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. This Act allowed Marshalls from the Southern States to arrest runaway slaves, who had previously been granted refuge in the North, and return them to their masters. The dispute over this Act was highlighted by the case of Dred Scott, a runaway slave, who legally contested his return. His case dragged on for years, until in 1857 the Supreme Court ruled that he was a piece of property without the right to sue in Federal Courts and that anyway he had lost his case in the Missouri courts, which had sole authority to deal with it. This decision stung opinion in the North, and the extreme anti-slavery attitude of the Abolitionists became more acceptable. In Boston, Lloyd Garrison had earned from the State of Georgia a $5,000 price on his head for publishing the Abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator. Respectable Northerners, after the Dred Scott case, looked upon Garrison’s paper with a less hostile eye.

Still, the Abolitionists could not win a Presidential election; in 1856 John C. Fremont lost to the Democrat, Buchanan. In truth, the Abolitionists could never fulfil the needs of the North’s rising capitalists. As the railways grew out and the link-up of the Middle West destroyed local prejudices, as the struggle between industry and the Southern landowners became more acute, so opinion in the North became more solid. In 1856 the Republican Party was formed and the Northern capitalists had a political organisation strong enough to counter the aristocratic planters. The Republicans did not at first intend to abolish slavery, or to sharpen the conflict with the South. They wanted to expand American industry, develop the West and control the country’s political affairs. But each successive dispute, and the planters’ notion of their inborn superiority, made civil war seem unavoidable.

Abraham Lincoln

The Bourbon planters were blind to the fact that the South was falling behind economically. Two-thirds of the country’s banking and financial investments were in the North, with Massachusetts alone said to hold more money in her banks than the whole of the Confederacy in 1861. Other estimates put the North's manufactures as worth nearly ten times all the crops of the South, and reckoned the Northern hay crop more valuable than all the Southern cotton, tobacco and sugar. (The planters over-estimated the importance of the world’s demand for cotton right through the war, many Southerners expected Lancashire opinion to force England to declare war on the North). They were convinced of their strength, and America slithered towards civil war, with the feeble President, Buchanan, incapable of doing anything about it.

In 1860 another Presidential election fell due, with Abraham Lincoln representing the Republican Party. There were only 30,000 slave-owning families in the South, with about 10,000 of them large owners. But these were the influences in Southern public opinion and, although Lincoln was plainly moderate in his opinion on the slavery dispute, they had no desire to put political power into his hands. He did not receive one vote south of Virginia (where he polled 2,000). In the border State of Missouri he got just 17,000. In 1856 the cotton States had plainly said that, if the Abolitionist Fremont were elected, they would leave the Union. (There had been several such threats during the past 60 years’ political struggles, not all of them from the South.) The planters recognised that Lincoln’s victory broke their last link with the Union, which they regarded as a collection of sovereign States which they could leave at will. They would suffer no coercion from a central government.

Secession

In December, 1860, South Carolina led the way out of the Union, and by February of the following year Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida and Texas had joined her in a Confederacy formed at Montgomery, Alabama. Jefferson Davis was the President and Alexander Stephens the Vice-President. Civil War seemed a hardening certainty.

              Jack Law

(To be continued.)

Link to Part III

The American Civil War — III (1959)

From the March 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part II

Preparation and Prospects

As the year 1861 opened the future opponents of the American Civil War stood glowering at each other.

The war was only a few months away, but it was still difficult to descry any clear-cut differences between North and South. The Confederacy’s President—Jefferson Davis—had been strongly Unionist, until he saw control of the Union slipping from the South’s hands. His Vice-President —Alexander Stephens—had opposed secession right until the moment when his own State of Georgia contracted out. There was also confusion on the issue of slavery, many prominent Southerners opposing it, whilst the Lincoln Government had often slated that it had no intention of abolishing it. Perhaps the most famous Southerner to oppose slavery was General Robert E. Lee—the North actually invited him at the start of the war to take command of its forces., but he refused. Especially confused was the Northern State of Maryland, where there was much sympathy for the Confederates. Plenty of Americans thought that the seceded States had taken a perfectly legal and constitutional action and that, whatever military precautions the two sides may take, the quarrel would blow over.

Fort Sumpter Falls

The first important dispute after secession came as each side began to draw up its strength, and was about the possession of military forts and recruitment of manpower. First, the Union Government ordered all the border States to place their troops under Washington’s control. Promptly, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina joined the rebels, as a protest against this attempt at federal coercion. More ominous were the rumblings around the army forts in the Southland.

The Confederates argued that, although the forts were occupied by United States troops, the land on which they stood had only been leased to the Government. Now that the Southern States had left the Union, their occupation by Federal forces was illegal and intolerable. Interest became centred on Fort Sumpter at Charleston, which the Governor of South Carolina had been planning to take over since December, I860. Southern Congressmen warned Lincoln that any attempt to relieve Sumpter would lead to war and sure enough on January 9th, 1861, the steamer, Star of the West, sent to the fort, was fired on and forced to withdraw. An uneasy peace brooded over Fort Sumpter until April, when Confederate General Beauregard, learning of a Union convoy on the way to raise the siege, bombarded it into surrender. Although many other forts had been taken in the South, Sumpter had become an important symbol, and its fall touched off a unifying passion in the Union. It may also be said to have marked the start of the war.

Since February, the South had been seriously preparing its war effort. After Sumpter, Lincoln replied by calling for 75,000 militia, to serve for three months (later altered to three years) and announcing a blockade of every Southern port from South Carolina to Texas. On May 6th the Confederate Congress passed an Act which recognised the existence of a state of war with the Union and shots were exchanged in Virginia and at Camp Jackson, St. Louis. There had been almost a year of increasing tension and bitterness. That was at an end. Hope was finished, too. The world’s first modern war had started, with its savagery and terror.

Prospects

What were the strength, the weaknesses and prospects of either side ? The Northern population was about 22 million; the Southern between 5 and 6 million, plus about 4 million negroes. In 1860 the United States Army had numbered about 16,000; of these, the Southern States had the nucleus of an army in the forces controlled by each State. About 3 million men served in the war in the Union forces, 2 million of them 23 years old or younger—an ideal age for soldiers. On the other hand, the Confederates' smaller population forced them to conscript all men between 17 and 55. When the war opened the volunteers on both sides were numerous, but as the thing dragged on the spirit declined. In the South, poor dirt farmers joined open combat with Confederate patrols and draft officials, whilst in the North, Chicago suffered anti-conscription riots.

The South was full of hope. Although the Act of Secession had cut them off from the new lands in the West, they thought that their raw materials could be traded for manufactures from the growing capitalist powers of Europe. These manufactures, ran the optimistic argument, would compensate for the rebels’ lack of industrial power. Here lay the South’s weakness, for as the agricultural area of the United States, they had left manufacturing to the North. They had next to no factories and what they had were mainly worked by Northerners, who returned to their home States when the war started: this was disastrous to the railway repair shops. The rebels had only one works—at Tredegar, in Richmond—where they could cast a gun or make a marine engine: the States Armouries were deficient, and at the start of the war there were no powder mills. There was hardly any iron and unseasoned wood had to be used in shipbuilding. All of this meant that, among other things, the rebels would not be able to break the blockade which the Union Navy kept on its ports. It also meant that recognition of the Confederacy by the European Powers was a wild dream. But the South was blind to all this; their population may have been only a quarter that of the North, but they had plenty of men who got their living planting and hunting, who were used to horseback and hardened to a spartan outdoor life They could handle guns and, apart from a dislike of organised discipline, were ideal material for soldiers. When the time came, they were to fight hard and tenaciously. The aristocratic pretensions of the South had bred a group of accustomed leaders: men like Lee and Johnston, Stonewall Jackson and Jeb Stuart, all brilliant commanders. Yes, the South was full of hope: one rebel, they said, was worth any ten Yankees.

The Yankees

And the North? Industrially, they had it all. But they needed a machine—the sort to which the 20th century has become accustomed—to change their population of factory and merchanting workers into soldiers. It took them a few years; but in the end they did it, reaching their peak of organisation when Sherman’s troopers blasted their way across the heart of the Confederacy, like any crack Commando brigade. “The Yankees dare not fight,” said many a cocky Southerner at the war’s beginning. The next few years showed that the Yankees could not only fight—they could also march and plunder, and hound an entire army to destruction.

Jack Law.

(To be concluded.)

Link to Part IV

The American Civil War — IV (1959)

From the April 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part III

Victory and what it was worth
Ask that approachable fellow, the man-in-the-street, to name a battle of the American Civil War and he will almost certainly mention Gettysburg; if history was one of his subjects at school he may remember Antretam and Manassas. These battles were all fought in the east, where the more glamorous—if that is the proper word—campaign of the war took place. If the western theatre was less famous, its effect was of greater consequence.

The Campaigns

In the north and the east, around the Potomac river, in Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania, the two armies grappled for each other's capital city. Washington and Richmond spent an unquiet war in consequence, always afraid of attack and pillage. The early Unionist tactics in this area were notable for their lack of aggressiveness, which allowed Lee and Jackson to gain some spectacular victories. Fortunately for the Union, these victories were rarely pressed home, because of the Confederates’ heavy losses and their shortage of ammunition; they paid dearly for their industrial shortcomings. Lincoln fumed and fretted at his generals and changed them many times, until Grant’s appointment as commander brought a new conception to Northern tactics. Grant kept a constant pressure on his opponents, chasing them and forcing them to battle until in the end he destroyed them.

In the south and the west the vital part of the war was forged and fought. The Union armies moved down the Mississippi river from Missouri, whilst their navy landed troops at the river’s mouth to capture New Orleans. Vicksburg--an important junction of railway and river—was taken after a siege and the Union armies then moved cast through the mountain gaps into Georgia. They captured Atlanta and swept on to Savannah on the Atlantic coast, plundering as they went, and cut the Confederacy in two. Although this campaign earned Grant the leadership of the Union forces, it is General Sherman's name which is always linked with the march through Georgia. His men were a harum-scarum lot. who cared little for the niceties of military dress and discipline. But they could march and fight and destroy, and this they did, through 200 miles of enemy territory. “Sherman's dashing Yankee boys," the song called them, and that was what they were. More than any other their ruthless campaign won the war for the Union. 

Peace and Problems

On April 9th, 1865. General Robert E. Lee, commander of the starving and ragged Confederate army, dressed himself in his best uniform and went out to surrender. Ulysees S. Grant cut a poor figure beside the resplendent Southerner, but there was no hint of spite in the surrender terms which he offered. Washington’s policy was to draw the Southland back into the Union and to rebuild it on a sound economic basis. On April 26th Johnston—in the West—gave up and through May and June the surrenders dribbled on. Jefferson Davis was himself captured at Irwinsvillc. Georgia, on May 10th. From May 22nd to 25th the Northern victory was celebrated in Washington with a mass review of the armies of Grant and Sherman. Abraham Lincoln was not there to take the salute; a month before he had been shot to death in Ford's theatre by the actor John Wilkes Booth, a vain and passionate man, and a fanatical rebel.

Now that the war had been won, what was to happen about slavery? Northern policy had not been consistent. Back in November, 1861, General Fremont had proclaimed his intention of confiscating the property of rebels and setting their slaves free. Lincoln’s government had been elected for its Unionist policy and was uncommitted to abolition of slavery: it found Fremont’s declaration embarrassing and removed him from his command. Two things changed the government’s mind. The early successes of the Confederates strengthened abolitionist sentiment in the North. And it became necessary to draw up a co-ordinated policy on emancipated slaves, for each Union commander was dealing with them in his own way. Amid the chaotic conditions then existing in Washington, Lincoln issued his Proclamation of Emancipation. When the North won, this declaration gave the American Negro the hope of a life free from chattel slavery.

Ku-Klux-Klan

The emancipation measures broke down the plantation system and many Negroes took advantage of this and went to the Northern cities to look for work. The cities were partly unwilling and, anyway, unable to accept these immigrants, and thousands of them died of hunger and cold. Eventually, New York and Chicago eased the problem with their “black reconstruction” schemes. When power was handed back to the Southern States the whites soon look control again and the right of Negroes to vote vanished beneath a blanket of trickery. Prohibitive poll taxes, tests which could prove the most learned Negro to be illiterate and open violence were often used to prevent the black man from voting. We have all heard of the Ku-Klux-Klan, who are said to put three questions to their applicants for membership: “Do you hate Niggers? Do you hate Jews? Have you got three dollars? ” These were —and are—typical of the Southland, still largely carrying on its old agricultural economy with the Negroes and the poor whites barely scratching a living from the earth. The bloodshed and the tearfulness of the civil war was over, but the loud-voiced, colourful, racial-phobia politicians still lorded it over the land of the magnolia.

But the American Civil War did not leave things all unchanged, for it was the first modern war the world has seen and it introduced several things which we have since become familiar with. Grant's strategy of incessant pressure on his enemy was a tactic repeated in World War 1, in the slaughter at Passchendaele and Verdun and at Stalingrad in 1943. There was an official policy of conscription to counteract the large scale desertions from both sides, and an intensive propaganda campaign to sweeten the battering which the civilian population took through the Union blockade, the burning of Atlanta, the looting of the Shenandoah valley, and so on. London and Coventry and other English cities got similar treatment in the last war. And there was the lesson that a modern war is a social tragedy, not to be won by brilliant generals alone. The best commanders fought for the South, but the North had the industrial power and developed the necessary social organisation.

Integration
What of the present, and the future? American industry is expanding into Dixieland and needs the Negro to work in the factories alongside white people. It also requires that Negroes school themselves in the technicalities of modern industry. This expansion of productive and social knowledge is the force—more powerful than any war—which will, to use an overworked word, integrate the black and white American. Knowledge will destroy the Crufts of the human race and their theories of inborn superiority. Society's needs and progress will win. They always have.

Jack Law

(Concluded.)

The McMasters (1971)

Film Review from the July 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

The McMasters (Directed by Alf Kjellin.)

Benjie, a negro, returns after four years civil-warring on the side of the North to the ranch of his adopted father, McMaster in the deep south.

McMaster (Burl Ives) is the only one to offer a welcome, since Benjie’s blue uniform is resented in the Bible-thumping, Reconstruction — pulverised, poverty stricken, secessionist, racist cattle community.

Benjie gets half the ranch from McMaster, who realises he is past managing it alone. The ranch hands leave in disgust. Benjie saves some half-starved Indians from a lynching for cattle-rustling, and offers them work which they accept. Benjie’s generosity to his employees is partly fired by his realisation that he himself is, to the hostile community, scum like the Indians: "Everyone knows them niggers aint people— they aint got souls”, is how the town storekeeper justifies riding with the local Ku Klux Klan, and brainwashes his young son, who already longs to watch his first lynching.

Benjie gets an Indian squaw as "a gift"(!) from the tribe of grateful wage-slaves. Finally Benjie’s incongruous landowner status, his bloody defence of his cattle from salt-poisoning Klansmen, his marriage in the white man’s church to his squaw, his new found self-respect and refusal to be intimidated into selling-out drive the local Klan, led by Gilby, (Jack Palance) the confederate war-hero embittered by the loss of his arm, to attempt to lynch him. The first attempt ‘only’ gets Benjie’s wife, Robin, raped and two Klansmen killed before they are driven off the ranch.

The cattle season over, Benjie realises that with the Indians who have returned to their village, he and McMaster will be unable to protect the ranch or his wife in the event of further brawls. He sends Robin back to her tribe for safety, and tries to enlist the aid of the Indians but the tribal elders make it clear that Benjie is in their eyes the same as the whites, who, as property owners will spill blood for it, and they want no part in a property war . . . "The land belongs to no-one—you like us Benjie, you homeless”.

The inevitable showdown with the Klan follows—a burning cross is the signal for a bloodthirsty finale in which McMaster is shot dead, the ranch buildings are razed and Benjie himself is only saved from a coldblooded burning by the inexplicable intervention of the younger Indian braves—his former employees—led by the articulate primitive communist ideologist, brother of Benjie’s wife. Gilby is killed, the Klan are temporarily routed, but after Benjie recovers from his wounds at the Indian village, to the complete bewilderment of Robin’s brother he once again staggers back to rebuild his smallholding, to face the Klan and probable death with Robin.

Robin’s brother's cries ring out as the film closes: "You’re crazy Benjie, you got no home, you like us, you got no home”. . . but Benjie, pathetically mesmerised by his title deeds, already has his values fixed—property before his own, his friends, his wife, his Indian brothers’ lives.

All in all, a film expressing all the contradictions of the class and caste-ridden society of post civil war America. The Indian elders alone attract sympathy, with their humanism and refusal to sacrifice themselves for property. But they, one senses, are doomed to an ever-more precarious nomadic existence and probable extinction from starvation (despite their rustling activities) or from epidemic.

The film will appeal to all those who flock to watch ketchup being spilled in great quantities, who are titillated and thrilled by the depiction of inexorable violence. The stark scenes in it are overtly commercial. No relief from the all-pervading atmosphere of brutalising and dehumanising 1865 Bible Belt Society is offered, indeed the producer seems to want us to project the despair into the present day. Certainly no relief is realistically possible in the historical context of absolute scarcity and the dominance of property, status and compensatory racialist ideas do not lend themselves to any. But a hundred years later scarcity is a myth; competition and the hostility, mutual suspicion, atomization and savagery it engenders are archaic and unnecessary; the Benjies of the world need no longer cling to tangibles at such a cost; the day of the Indian is near again, at a much higher and more secure level of technology and culture.

C. H.

The War Between The States (1961)

From the April 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

100 years ago this month the American civil war began with the bombardment by the Confederate forces of the South of the Government held Ford Sumter. By the time it ended, four years later, it is estimated that out of a population of 31,000,000, between 750,000 and 1,000,000 men lost their lives, and many more wounded. The devastation was enormous. In many ways, it was the fore-runner of the total warfare we know today.

The revival of interest in the American Civil War is a phenomenon of the last decade. Chicago boasts of a successful book store where only Civil War items can be bought. Every week sees at least two new books on the War. What prompts this sustained interest is anybody's guess. Is it, perhaps, a search for a tranquilizer that will narcotize America to the many setbacks of recent years?

The Socialist searching through the mountain of Civil War books, is hard put to apply his yardstick of historical materialism. What seems to occupy the attention of the various authors, for the most part, is the spectacular bravery and dauntless courage displayed by Union warriors and Rebels alike. The social forces underlying the conflict, with the exception of the Slavery issue, are buried in a mass of drum and thunder history. It is easy for the casual reader to be left with the thought that the North was engaged in a crusade to wipe out slavery while the South was imbued with the "noble” ideal of saving it through secession. While this might have been typical of the average ideology of the War, it was certainly not a basic force in its origin.

If the abolition of slavery was an all important issue to the North, then why were Wendell Philips and William Lloyd Garrison mobbed in Boston, the centre of abolitionist ferment? Why was Lovejoy lynched in Illinois? Why was Douglass, friendly to the South and its institutions, elected to the Senate by the same State that started Lincoln on his road to fame?

Then too, the idea of opposition to slavery on moral grounds becomes ridiculous when one regards the low moral conscience of Northern industrialism. There was no revulsion at the horrible mills and mines where men, women and children toiled long hours for a pittance; at the miserable slums, unfit for human habitation in all the cities and towns; at the periodic crises which threw the workers on the streets to starve; at the universal blacklist for those who spoke of unionization.

Certainly it was not opposition to slavery on moral grounds, that prompted Massachusetts, in the early 18th century, to abolish it. John Adams wrote: “that the real cause was the multiplication of labouring white people who would not suffer the rich to employ these sable rivals so much to their injury." And the fact was that a committee appointed by the Massachusetts Council in 1706. recommended the abolition of slavery because “white servants were cheaper and more profitable than black slaves." Nor were Lincoln and his party, a century and a half later, concerned with the morals of slavery. In fact, the Emancipation Proclamation was issued as a war measure against the Rebels and did not apply to those slave States loyal to the Union. The Republican Party made quite plain the fact that it was not opposed to the continuance of slavery in the South provided that it was not spread into the frontier areas in which the Northern industrialists wished to establish their own slave system — wage labour.

Chattel slave labour has to fill certain requirements in order to be a practical substitute for "free" wage-labour: (a) it must be cheaper; (b) there must be a climate which permits the use of cheap, coarse and scanty clothing: (c) the product worked must require little, if any, skilled labour; (d) there must be no complex machinery; (e) there must be an unlimited supply of new and fertile land that can be brought into cultivation as the old land becomes exhausted; (f) a one crop system is desirable; and (g) employment must be steady because chattel slaves must be supported continuously.

Obviously, the conditions for this type of labour did not exist in the North, whereas in the South, the cultivation and ginning of cotton for nine months of the year filled the bill. There were, however, serious contradictions which prevented the peaceful co-existence of the Southern and Northern economic systems, and which caused the Southern system to disintegrate prior to 1860.

The American South, despite its slave labour, was basically a commodity society in which goods (including slaves) and services were produced for sale on the market with a view to profit. A more fitting designation for the system is Plantation Capitalism. Certainly the South fought to maintain the chattel status of its Negroes, hut mainly because this type of labour was vital to its economy and because its very system was falling apart largely as a result of Congressional laws which favoured Northern interests and which helped make chattel slave labour too costly. The moral justification for slavery was naturally provided by the Southern churches for the benefit of their aristocratic “partners."

It was largely because of the law against the importation of slaves and the consequent need of breeding these “vocal tools" that a field hand who in 1808 sold for 150 dollars, brought from two to four thousand dollars in 1860. The control of Congress by the North resulted in high tariffs on imported manufactured goods which interfered with the important trade of Southern raw cotton for English textiles. The development of Northern seaports and railways also brought about a loss of trade to the South from the Western agricultural regions—long ship hauls down the Mississippi to the Port of New Orleans became unnecessary. And the South, which desperately needed new land lo replace that used up by their wasteful one-crop system, was losing out in its bid to bring in frontier areas as slave states.

As its losing economic war with the North and its internal contradictions progressed, the beneficiaries of the Southern plantation system became fewer, their holdings ever larger. In 1860, only about one-half million of a population of 9 million Southern whites are reckoned to have made any profit from chattel slavery, of which a mere 10,000 were the actual ruling class. In this crumbling fabric of the South, the problem confronting the 10,000 was how to maintain dominance under universal white suffrage. Support came from the professional class and the clergy with their one or two personal slaves. Also from the poor, degraded “white trash” who squatted on the poorest land and fiercely defended the institution of chattel slavery which provided another economic groups over whom they could vaunt their “superiority.” As an added bonus, there was the lift to their spirits to be had by identifying themselves with the Southern aristocrats.

The elections of 1860 tore any remnants of control of the national government from the hands of the Southern rulers. Secession became necessary. The plantation capitalists knew that their social system could never prosper with a government they could not control. They had no more need for the North, since their system was barred by soil and climate from expanding in that direction. With a government they could control, expansion to the south could proceed, in harmony with the grand visions of the Southern “Manifest Destinators.” There was Mexico to be conquered, Central America, Cuba, and even the vast continent of South America —all offering vast areas of land for the smooth operation of their economy. Their backs were to the wall, they had nothing to lose, so they took the plunge and the hot war began.

The Armed Conflict

The South, as an oligarchy, was better prepared in 1861 to begin a war than the more industrialized, but highly disorganized North. Productive work falling on the Negroes, the Rebels could put their entire fighting strength into the field without disturbance, and they inflicted defeat after defeat upon the army of farmers, mechanics and sailors of the North. The united South was faced by a North, divided, and to a considerable extent dominated, by the border states which were loyal but which were certainly not in favour of Abolition. The North found it difficult to raise the 300,000 men requested by Lincoln. Conscription was introduced for the first time in American history but an escape clause which permitted a man to buy a substitute for $300.00 enabled the rich to become legal dodgers and brought about riots in New York City against conscription.

But the outcome was inevitable. In the long run, despite the terrible initial defeats and despite the manipulations of such crafty patriots as J. P. Morgan who made a fortune by selling thousands of previously condemned rifles to the War Dept with a profit of $18.00 on each, the relatively highly developed North prevailed, and under such ruthless and capable generals as Sherman and Grant, swept away the last vestiges of chattel slave labour in America.

The socialists of the period, for the most part, actively interested themselves in the cause of the North. In England, the ruling class gave sympathy and support to the South. Karl Marx worked within the International Workingmen’s Association to rally the workers to the support of Lincoln. During the period of Northern reverses, the pioneer of scientific socialism held firm in his belief that the “North will make war seriously, adopt revolutionary methods and throw over the domination of the border statesmen; that the defeats being suffered by the North were due to the conducting of the war on constitutional and diplomatic instead of revolutionary lines.” He also pointed out “the failure to take cognizance of slavery as a military weapon . . . that the slaves should be declared free and that a single Negro regiment would have a remarkable effect on Southern nerves.”

Whatever the validity of the motives which influenced the socialists of the period, they definitely gave their support to what they regarded as a progressive type of capitalism. Looking back, we can question some of their views and the emphasis they gave to the chattel slavery issue and show that their all-out support of Northern capitalism was unwarranted.

With peace, the youngsters who had fought in one of the bloodiest wars in history (more than half of the Union Army were under 19 years of age and more than 300,000 were between 15 and 16) went out in the world to resume or begin the task of earning a living. Many of them, having become quick with the gun, were shortly to dot the Boot Hills of the new towns and mining camps and to help write the blood history of the West.

Those who returned to the industries found a new foe, warlike and pitiless, but in industrial rather than military warfare. These were the “captains” of industry—the Fricks, Carnegies, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Hills, Huntingtons, Flaglers and, of course, the redoubtable J. P. Morgan.

With the 70's came the business panics and the great strikes. In the Pennsylvania coal fields a bloody war raged with pistol and dynamite between the owners and the Molly Maguires (a secret society of rebellious workers). Alan Pinkerton, a spy of Lincoln’s, now became the leading industrial spy and strike breaker in the land. By worming his way into the inner circle of the society, he was instrumental in bringing about the exposure of the Molly Maguires. Ten of their members were hanged and many more sent to prison, bringing to an inglorious end the careers of some of the former heroes of the Union Army. Many more of the veterans were to witness the same generals who had led them to “victory” now march upon them with their former brothers-in-arms, to shoot, kill and jail them. It was a rude awakening and was to teach them that the war was not fought for them, as they had thought, but to build an economic system that would enrich a handful.

Sam Orner

The Shadow over our Lives (1961)

Editorial from the April 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is not to satisfy historical curiosity that we publish in this issue of the Socialist Standard an article which marks the centenary of the outbreak of the American Civil War. The strategy of attrition of that war, and the way in which it organised the resources and population of' the Union into an all-out effort, was a foretaste of the two great wars of the twentieth century. It is hardly too much to say that modern warfare is one hundred years old this month.

Can we say that the bloodshed and misery have been worthwhile? That the world has been improved by the sacrifices which the working class have made during the wars? The bitter fact is that the world is no safer for peace today than it was in 1861. War, actual or potential, is as much a part of our lives as any other aspect of modern society. Although we are at present living in a period of peace, we know that all over the world national powers, great and small, have their bases and their forces in readiness for a future conflict. In Holy Loch, Proteus tends to her missile-carrying submarines. The Soviet Union has developed accurate intercontinental missiles of fearful destructive power.

By any standards of sanity, it is incredible that a society which possesses such enormous productive potential should devote so much of its effort to making weapons of destruction Should we, then, join the campaign to persuade the government to renounce nuclear weapons? That would be to approach the problem from the wrong end. Weapons are not produced to satisfy a government’s destructive impulses. They are produced to prosecute the armed conflicts which in turn are caused by the economic rivalries of capitalism. All of these are inseparable. What it amounts to is that weapons of war are an inevitable product of capitalist society. Those who support capitalism. yet wish that its governments would voluntarily deprive themselves of the most powerful weapons available. are baying for something even more remote than the moon.

Into this category fall the unilateralists. the pacifists and some members of the Labour and similar parties. Some of these accuse the Socialist Party of turning our backs on capitalism’s day to day troubles. It is true that we refuse to be sidetracked from our purpose of Socialist propaganda in order to advocate some reform of capitalism, although during our fifty-odd years of existence we have heard many appeals to do so. Unemployment. Nazi Germany, nuclear weapons these are only some of the issues upon which we have been urged to concentrate our efforts at the expense of our Socialist integrity.

We have rejected these appeals because we know that such problems find their roots in capitalism's property basis To end them, we must establish a Socialist society in which the world’s wealth is owned by the world. Such an objective is the only thing worth demonstrating for.

Heyday, Mayday (2017)

Book Review from the September 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Heyday: the 1850s and the Dawn of the Global Age', by Ben Wilson. (Weidenfeld & Nicolson £8.99)

This history covers the period from 1851 to 1862, from the Great Exhibition in London to the early part of the American Civil War. Britain was at the height of its power at this time, producing 70 percent of the world’s steel in 1851, for instance, and the book’s original hardback edition was subtitled ‘Britain and the making of the modern world’. But there were challenges to this pre-eminence, mainly from Germany and the USA.

One of the themes is technological progress, from the development of the telegraph to the growth of railways, and how this related to the expansion of production, the emergence of a global market and the rapid dissemination of news and other information. The discovery of gold, in California and Australia, resulted in massive population movements, appalling consequences for native peoples and enormous riches (though usually not for those who dug the gold). The gold rush also led to the development of faster ships and an international market for grain and other goods, as there was little agriculture in the areas where the gold was to be found.

Behind all this, however, was slavery, and the dependence of much of the industrialised world on cotton grown in the American south. Over a billion pounds of raw cotton was shipped from ports such as New Orleans to the mills of Lancashire, and arguments over the future of slavery and the possible secession of the slave states resulted in much uncertainty. When the Civil War cut off supplies, the production of cotton on a mass scale spread to countries such as Egypt and India, where the price of cotton rose so much that local manufacturers could no longer afford to purchase it as a raw material.

The other commodity that exerted a global influence was opium, which Wilson claims ‘dictated geopolitics’. Britain had already gone to war with China to enforce its own terms on the opium trade, and this continued with the shelling of Guangzhou in 1856 and the military occupation of Beijing in 1860. Hong Kong had become ‘one of the key hubs of global trade and finance’. Lord Palmerston won a big parliamentary majority in the so-called Chinese Election of 1857, as British electors backed his bellicose policies in the Far East. ‘Free’trade was one of the rallying cries of nineteenth-century capitalism, but it was generally imposed and maintained at the point of a gun.

The 1840s had been a period of economic depression and food shortages, but the 1850s were seen as a decade of boom. Yet in 1857 there was a global financial crash, with bumper grain harvests leading to a big drop in prices, and a realisation that plenty of bank loans would not be repaid. A New York-based bank failed, and many businesses collapsed.

Wilson gives a vivid picture of all these developments and more, including the Crimean War, Russian expansion in the Far East, the Indian Rebellion, and events in Japan. Capitalism expanded on the way to becoming a truly global system, but hundreds of millions of people suffered from poverty and war while this was happening.  

Paul Bennett

Marx’s Address for the International, 1864 (1937)

From the May 1937 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reprint of a Famous Speech

(Concluded: first instalment published in April issue) 

We have dwelt so long upon these “facts so astonishing as to be almost incredible" because England heads the Europe of commerce and industry. It will be remembered that some months ago one of the refugee sons of Louis Phillippe publicly congratulated the English agricultural labourer on the superiority of his lot over that of his less florid comrade on the other side of the Channel. Indeed, with local colours changed, and on a scale somewhat contracted, the English facts reproduce themselves in all the industrious and progressive countries of the Continent. In all of them there has taken place since 1848 an unheard-of development of industry, and an undreamed-of expansion of imports and exports. In all of them “the augmentation of wealth and power entirely confined to classes of property" was truly “intoxicating." In all of them, as in England, a minority of the working classes got their real wages somewhat advanced; while in most cases the monetary rise of wages denoted no more real access of comforts than the inmate of the metropolitan poor-house or orphan asylum, for instance, was the least benefited by his first necessaries costing £9 15s. 8d. in 1861 against £7 7s. 4d. in 1852. Everywhere the great mass of the working classes were sinking down to lower depths, at the same rate at least that those above them were rising in the social scale. In all countries of Europe it has now become a truth demonstrable to every unprejudiced mind, and only denied by those whose interest it is to hedge other people in a fool’s paradise, that no improvement of machinery, no appliance of science to production, no contrivances of communication, no new colonies, no emigration, no opening of markets, no free trade, nor all these things put together, will do away with the miseries of the industrious masses; but, that on the present false base, every fresh development of the productive powers of labour must tend to deepen social contrasts and point social antagonisms. Death by starvation rose almost to the rank of an institution, during this intoxicating epoch of economical progress, in the metropolis of the British Empire. That epoch is marked in the annals of the world by the quickened return, the widening compass and the deadlier effects of the social pest called a commercial and industrial crisis.

After the failure of the revolutions of 1848, all party organisations and party journals of the working classes were, on the Continent, crushed by the iron hand of force, the most advanced sons of labour fled in despair to the Transatlantic republic, and the short-lived dreams of emancipation vanished before an epoch of industrial fever, moral marasmus, and political reaction. The defeat of the Continental working classes, partly owed to the diplomacy of the English Government, acting then as now in fraternal solidarity with the Cabinet of St. Petersburg, soon spread its contagious effects to this side of the Channel. While the rout of their Continental brethren unmanned the English working classes, and broke their faith in their own cause, it restored to the landlord and money lord their somewhat shaken confidence. They insolently withdrew concessions already advertised. The discoveries of new gold-lands led to an immense exodus, leaving an irreparable void in the ranks of the British proletariat. Others of its formerly active members were caught by the temporary bribe of greater work and wages, and turned into “political blacks." All the efforts made at keeping up, or remodelling, the Chartist Movement, failed signally, the Press organs of the working class died one by one of the apathy of the masses, and, in point of fact, never before seemed the English working class so thoroughly reconciled to a state of political nullity. If, then, there had been no solidarity of action between the British and the Continental working classes, there was, at all events, a solidarity of defeat.

And yet the period passed since the revolutions of 1848 has not been without its compensating features. We shall here only point to two great facts.

After a thirty years' struggle, fought with most admirable perseverance, the English working classes, improving a momentous split between the landlords and the money lords, succeeded in carrying the Ten-Hours Bill. The immense physical, moral and intellectual benefits hence accruing to the factory operatives, half-yearly chronicled in the reports of the inspectors of factories, are now acknowledged on all sides. Most of the Continental governments had to accept the English Factory Act in more or less modified forms, and the English Parliament itself is every year compelled to enlarge its sphere of action. But besides its practical import, there was something else to exalt the marvellous success of this working men’s measure. Through their most notorious organs of science, such as Doctor Ure, Professor Senior and other sages of that stamp, the middle class had predicted, and to their hearts' content proved, that any legal restriction of the hours of labour must sound the death knell of British industry, which, vampire-like, could but live by sucking blood, and children’s blood, too. In olden times, child murder was a mysterious rite of the religion of Moloch, but it was practised on some very solemn occasions only, once every year perhaps, and then Moloch had no exclusive bias for the children of the poor. This struggle about the legal restrictions of the hours of labour raged the more fiercely since, apart from frightened avarice, it told indeed upon the great contest between the blind rule of the supply and demand laws which form the political economy of the middle class, and social production controlled by social foresight, which forms the political economy of the working class. Hence the Ten-Hour Bill was not only a great practical success; it was the victory of a principle; it was the first time that in broad daylight the political economy of the middle class succumbed to the political economy of the working class.

But there was in store a still greater victory of the political economy of labour, over the political economy of property. We speak of the co-operative movement, especially the co-operative factories raised by the unassisted efforts of a few bold “hands." The value of these great social experiments cannot be over-rated. By deeds, instead of argument, they have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands'; that to bear fruit, the means of labour need not be monopolised as a means of dominion over, and of extortion against, the labouring man himself; and that, like slave labour, like serf labour, hired labour is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labour plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart. In England, the seeds of the co-operative system were sown by Robert Owen; the working men's experiments, tried on the Continent, were, in fact, the practical upshot of the theories, not invented, but loudly proclaimed in 1848.

At the same time the experience of the period from 1848 to 1864 has proved beyond doubt that however excellent the principle, and however useful in practice, co-operative labour, if kept within the narrow circle of the casual efforts of private workmen, will never be able to arrest the growth in geometrical progression of monopoly, to free the masses, nor even to perceptibly lighten the burden of their miseries. It is perhaps for this very reason that plausible noblemen, philanthropic middle class spouters and even keen political economists, have all at once turned nauseously complimentary to the very co-operative labour system they have vainly tried to nip in the bud by deriding it as the Utopia of the dreamer, or stigmatising it as the sacrilege of the Socialist. To save the industrious masses, co-operative labour ought to be developed to national dimensions, and, consequently, to be fostered by national means. Yet the lords of land and the lords of capital will always use their political privileges for the defence and perpetuation of the economical monopolies. So far from promoting, they will continue to lay every possible impediment in the way of the emancipation of labour.

Remember the sneer with which, last session, Lord Palmerston put down the advocates of the Irish Tenants’ Right Bill. The House of Commons, cried he, is a house of landed proprietors. To conquer political power has therefore become the great duty of the working classes. They seem to have comprehended this, for in England, Germany, Italy and France there have taken place simultaneous revivals, and simultaneous efforts are being made at the political reorganisation of the working men’s party.

One element of success they possess—numbers: but numbers weigh only in the balance if united by combination and led by knowledge. Past experience has shown how disregard of that bond of brotherhood which ought to exist between the workmen of different countries, and incite them to stand firmly by each other in all their struggles for emancipation, will be chastised by the common discomfiture of their incoherent efforts. This thought prompted the working men of different countries assembled on September 28th, 1864, in public meeting at St. Martin's Hall, to found the International Association.'

Another conviction swayed that meeting.

If the emancipation of the working classes requires their fraternal concurrence, how are they to fulfil that great mission with a foreign policy in pursuit of criminal designs, playing upon national prejudices, and squandering in piratical wars the people's blood and treasure? It was not the wisdom of the ruling classes, but the heroic resistance to their criminal folly by the working classes of England that saved the West of. Europe from plunging headlong into an infamous campaign for the perpetuation and propagation of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic. The shameless approval, mock sympathy, or idiotic indifference, with which the upper classes of Europe have witnessed the mountain fortress of the Caucasus falling prey to and heroic Poland being assassinated by Russia: the immense encroachments of that barbarous power, whose head is at St. Petersburg, and whose hands are in every Cabinet in Europe, have taught the working classes the duty to master themselves the mysteries of international politics; to watch the diplomatic acts of their respective governments; to counteract them, if necessary, by all means in their power; when unable to prevent, to combine in simultaneous denunciations, and to vindicate the simple laws of morals and justice, which ought to govern the relations of private individuals, as the rules paramount of the intercourse of nations.

The fight for such a foreign policy forms part of the general struggle for the emancipation of the working classes.

Proletarians of all countries, Unite!

The Book's background (1967)

From the September 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1847 Karl Marx wrote The Poverty of Philosophy. It was written in French and was a criticism of Proudhon’s Philosophy of Poverty. Of the Poverty of Philosophy Engels remarks that it was written “when Marx had just elucidated the principles of his new historical and economic theory”. In 1859 Marx wrote his Critique of Political Economy which was the forerunner of Capital. Vol. I of the latter was published in 1867, and was the only volume of Capital that he himself saw through the press.

Thus twenty years of preparation elapsed between his first book on the subject and the publication of Capital. During those twenty years many changes occurred in the world signifying the development of modem capitalism.

Now let us take a brief look at the background of the times in which Marx was writing his book.

It was the birthtime of modern industry, with the industrial capitalists just coming to power. The Bessemer process of making steel was soon to be patented and shortly afterwards the first steel ship was launched. In the factories and on the land hours of labour were long and the exploitation of women and children was widespread. Everywhere the expression of revolutionary opinion, and even radical criticism of existing evils, met with ruthless suppression, and the spokesmen were frequently imprisoned by the governments of the time. Here and there groups of workers exchanged expressions of international brotherhood but, for the most part, workers were too concerned with their own local troubles to have time to worry about the hardships of their fellows abroad.

In 1848 oppressive conditions had led to a wave of revolutions throughout Europe; a mixture that included working class and nationalist revolts. The real basis of the struggles was the movement of the industrial capitalist for elbow room and political power; the other classes were just pawns, sometimes awkward ones, in this struggle. The spark that set the movement alight was a commercial crisis which, starting in England in 1847, upset production and trade. It affected every economic group, each of which hoped to solve its difficulties in the various uprisings. The most troublesome element in these struggles was the working class, the only really energetic class in the movement, which pushed its claims to the front at the beginning and eventually frightened some of the revolutionary fervour out of the other groups.

The outcome of these uprisings was the suppression, for the time being, of incipient working class movements like the Chartists movement in England and similar movements in France and Germany. At the same time, in France, the uprising enabled Napoleon’s nephew, Louis, to get into the seat of power and inaugurate the Third Empire. The latter came to an ignominious end with the defeat of France in the war of 1871. The uprisings also elevated the power of the Prussian state, leading to the unification of Germany, and the nationalist movement in Italy that led to the unification of Italy.

The instabilities and suppressions of the Forties, along with the discoveries of gold in California and Australia, started the emigration of large numbers of people from Europe to America, where they hoped to start a new, less frustrated and more comfortable, life; a hope that often met with defeat. The Irish famine of the late forties, together with abortive nationalist uprisings, drove a large number of Irish abroad, most of them to America.

America at this time was roughly split into two different sections; the industrial North and the agricultural South. The South supplied cotton and other agricultural products to the Northern manufacturers but had the principal influence in political control. Development of the North was hampered by burdens put upon them by Southern enactments. Resentment grew until it finally boiled over in the bitter Civil War that broke out in 1861. Although, on the northern side, it was extolled as a war to end slavery, it was in fact a war waged by the North for control of political power by the industrialists in order to remove obstacles in the way of their expansion. One among the many ways in which the South was obstructing the march of the North was in land hunger. The Southern planters needed to constantly extend their landholdings for their cotton and tobacco plantations, and were coming up against, and trying to swallow, the lands of Northern cattle and sheep farmers.

At the beginning of the Civil War the incipient labour movements were opposed to it, but they eventually gave up their opposition and lined up with the North. The outcome of the war, and the victory of the North, released a rapid movement of expansion in industry, fanning and transport. The West was opened up, working class exploitation on a grand scale began to flourish and, along with this the basis was laid for a growing group of American tycoons to accumulate large fortunes by the most ruthless methods.

In the meantime in Europe the spread of the ideas contained in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, and the growing contact of English and Continental workers, led to discussions which were instrumental in establishing the International Working Mens Association in 1864, in which Marx played a leading part. It had an uneasy existence and collapsed after a few years, partly through the opposition of English trade union leaders and the machinations of the Anarchists, but mainly because the workers were not yet ready to accept the principles laid down by the International. However a movement was growing in Germany and other countries which brought about the establishment of a number of social democratic parties, the flimsy basis of which, in working class understanding, was not finally disclosed until they fell to pieces in the First World War.

During the twenty years Marx worked on Capital, English governments were acquiring territory by war or trickery in various parts of the world, and building up the empire that has since largely disintegrated. In three wars with China it pierced the Chinese wall and opened up ports to European trade. In the second war, 1854-1860, the Chinese were forced to legalise the importation of Opium.

One of the outstanding events of the period was the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species which gave a solid foundation to the theory of evolution. Another was the first successful laying of the Atlantic Cable in 1866.

Two acts passed, one in 1864 and the other in 1868, are indications of the extent of the exploitation of children. In 1864 the employment of child chimney sweeps was forbidden. The children used to be pushed up the chimneys to clear the soot. Like all such acts its implementation was constantly infringed. In 1868 gang labour of children under eight years of age in agriculture was prohibited.

In 1867, the year the first volume of Capital was published, the Court of Queens Bench decided that trade unions were illegal associations acting in restraint of trade!

During the twenty years Marx was engaged in writing his book, the world had undergone upheavals and changes in the course of which some of the remaining relics of Feudalism were swept away, the owners of land and industry grew richer but the working class still remained a subject and exploited class.

Gilmac.

The Great(er) Emancipator — Frederick Douglass (2013)

From the March 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

If Hollywood is ever ready to demystify the Civil War, it should give Frederick Douglass the star treatment.

How can you make a film about Abraham Lincoln and the abolition of slavery and leave out Frederick Douglass? Steven Spielberg found a way, apparently, in his recent film Lincoln.

The film’s screenwriter, Tony Kushner, reportedly said that he had to leave out ‘dramatic scenes with Frederick Douglass’ as a ‘trade-off’ for focusing the plot on Lincoln’s 1865 effort to round up enough lame-duck Democrats in the House of Representatives to pass the Thirteenth Amendment (abolishing slavery). Kushner recalled that when Spielberg suggested limiting the film to this topic, both laughed at what seemed ‘an insane idea’ because the ‘whole movie was just going to be a bunch of guys talking.’

The insane part, though, is not the bunch of guys talking—a refreshing change from the bloody bore of the war itself—but the relative insignificance of an abolition debate at the very moment Sherman and Grant’s armies were uprooting slavery in fact. Spielberg chooses the denouement, after Gettysburg and Lincoln’s landslide re-election, and just a few months before General Lee’s surrender.

Spielberg and Kushner, by most accounts, have made the best of their material, but their ‘trade-off’ sounds like a bum deal. Why not keep Frederick Douglass and choose a more dramatic episode? Any number of points during the Lincoln administration could shed a sharper light on his politics and the debate over slavery, and the presence of Douglass in each case would heighten understanding. 

Setting the film even a few months earlier, to look at Lincoln’s re-election campaign, would have raised the dramatic tension: the stakes then were still high. Douglass feared that an election victory for the ‘revived’ Democratic Party, led by Gen. George B McClellan, would prevent a ‘final settlement’ to the conflict, leaving it ‘to tear and rend the country again at no distant future’—and he campaigned vigorously for Lincoln.

Even more interesting is the 1860 Presidential campaign, whose outcome sparked the war. Douglass campaigned for Lincoln in that election, too, but with many reservations. ‘With the single exception of the question of slavery extension’, he wrote at the time, ‘Mr. Lincoln proposes no measure which can bring him into antagonistic collision with the traffickers in human flesh,’ and offered the prediction that, ‘The Union will, therefore, be saved simply because there is no cause in the election of Mr. Lincoln for its dissolution.’ This illustrates the wide gap between Lincoln and the abolitionists at the time. Douglass’s prediction was wrong, of course, but only because, ‘the South was mad, and would listen to no concessions.’

And then there are the eventful months leading up to the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. A film set then could examine how the war’s necessities, more than high-blown principles, led the Lincoln administration to (finally!) take the first cautious steps toward abolition. Douglass welcomed the Proclamation, but found it ‘extremely defective’ and ‘not a true proclamation of liberty but one marked by discriminations and reservations.’ Including his views would help brush a few cobwebs off Lincoln’s much-praised but half-hearted executive order.

Any one of these settings seems more promising than Spielberg’s odd choice, but there is probably method to his madness. Narrowing his film down to the Republicans’ debate with the demoralized Democrats at war’s end, rather than with principled abolitionists at its outset, would seem to spare the director the ordeal of grappling with Lincoln’s evolving policy. Instead, he can present viewers with the more familiar sight of political arm-twisting and horse-trading over an issue that is, by that point, a near formality. That level of politics may be more ‘relevant’ to our own, but really that is an argument against choosing it, dramatically speaking.

Better Fred than Abe

An even better idea (Steven, if you’re listening): Why not cut out Abe Lincoln altogether and make Frederick Douglass the star?

His life, stretching from 1817 to 1895, is full of gripping, conflict-ridden tales, intertwined with the drama of slavery’s demise and the rise of industrial capitalism. For dramatic plot lines and entertaining dialogue, the screenwriter need look no further than Douglass’s brilliant, overlapping accounts of his own life: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave (1845), My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), and The Life & Times of Frederick Douglass (1881).

The story of his life begins in eastern Maryland, where he was born in a ‘dull, flat, and unthrifty district . . . surrounded by a white population of the lowest order, indolent and drunken to a proverb, and among slaves, who seemed to ask, Oh! What’s the use? every time they lifted a hoe.’ His grandparents raised him several miles from the plantation where his mother and other slaves toiled, and where he was sent around age seven or eight to begin working himself. Douglass had the good fortunate to be removed from the plantation—‘before the rigors of slavery had fastened upon me’—and sent to the home of his master’s relative in Baltimore, where a somewhat freer atmosphere prevailed. Except for a harrowing period back on the plantation, where he worked in the fields and plotted a (failed) attempt to escape to the North, he remained in Baltimore. And in 1838, disguised as a sailor, Douglass escaped by train from the city to New York.

He settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, working on the shipbuilding docks as he had done in Baltimore. Within a few months of gaining his freedom he was a subscriber to The Liberator, the abolitionist newspaper of William Lloyd Garrison, whom Douglass met in 1841 at an anti-slavery convention in Nantucket. The impromptu speech Douglass delivered there created a sensation and launched his career as an abolitionist agitator, beginning with his work as an ‘agent’ and lecturer for Garrison’s Anti-Slavery Society.

Douglass, to the consternation of some, soon outgrew his role as ‘escaped slave,’ which his ever-growing eloquence as a writer and speaker made ‘unconvincing’ to many audiences. He also outgrew, or grew apart from, his mentor, Garrison, rejecting his general aloofness to politics and his insistence that the Constitution was a pro-slavery document. After returning from a tour of England, Douglass moved to Rochester, New York, away from the sphere of the ‘Garrisonians,’ and in 1847 began issuing his own newspaper, The North Star. He would continue to publish a weekly or monthly newspaper over the next fifteen or so years, under a number of different titles.

There is something thrilling, especially to socialists, about the abolitionist movement around the time Douglass entered it. Unlike typical reformists, with their laundry list of incremental improvements, the abolitionists aimed to uproot an entire (semi) mode of production, and would settle for nothing less! And they set about the task with passion and patience, using the written and spoken word as their weapons.

As the 1850s progressed, the abolitionists found that the tide of history was finally beginning to flow in a direction more favourable to their cause. The great national crisis was coming to a head. These are cinematic years of constant political and social upheaval: the disintegration of the Whig Party, the rapid rise and fall of the Free Soil and Know Nothing movements, and the birth of the Republican Party, while the nation staggered from one patched-together compromise and crisis to the next until the election of Lincoln. The Civil War itself is far less gripping than the decade that preceded it, and no one trained a keener eye on the political currents than Frederick Douglass.

Of course, the story of Douglass during the Civil War is also immensely instructive. His writings at the time and his later reflections reveal how reluctant Lincoln was to do more than merely preserve the Union. From the outset, Douglass urged the President to wage an ‘abolition war’ and was deeply frustrated by how long it was taking the ‘slow coach in Washington’ to get moving in that direction. He berated the Republicans because they ‘fought with the soft white hand, while they kept the black iron hand chained and helpless behind them; that they fought the effect, while they protected the cause.’ But Douglass believed the necessities of the war would turn Republicans into abolitionists, wisely appealing to their pragmatic interests rather than their sense of morality. His analysis proved correct in the end but the war also turned Douglass the abolitionist into a stalwart Republican, which he would remain until his death.

After the war, as Garrison was disbanding his Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass felt that there was still work to be done; that the aim had been ‘not merely to emancipate, but to elevate the enslaved class,’ and that the former slave was now ‘free from the old plantation’ but with ‘nothing but the dusty road under his feet’ and a ‘slave to society.’ But his efforts to aid black workers were hampered by his loyalty to the Republican Party. This blind support for the party of industrial capital painted black workers into a corner, and allowed the Republicans to take their votes for granted. The contradictory position Douglass found himself in, as black leader and diehard Republican, sets the tone for his last three decades—a period of history that revealed how the Civil War freed capital from its chains, too. 

An inspiration to wage slaves

Knowing Hollywood, and its hankering for hagiography and historical melodrama, it’s just as well, perhaps, that Douglass hasn’t been given the star treatment; I would hate to see him reduced to a saint or superhero. The curious are better off going straight to the source by reading his autobiographies.

All three books bring the history of nineteenth-century America alive. But what makes them even more powerful is that while slavery may officially be dead and buried, exploitation and class rule are very much alive. You may pick up one of his autobiographies with the intention of learning about the past, only to encounter passages that remind you of your own lack of freedom as a worker—a wage slave.

It would be ridiculous, of course, to ignore the differences between a wage worker and chattel slave—starting with the auction-block tragedies that broke up slave families—but Douglass himself noted the similarities: ‘The white slave had taken from him by indirection what the black slave had taken from him directly and without ceremony. Both were plundered, and by the same plunderers.’ We need to think of ourselves as wage slaves, not to belittle the past horrors of slavery, but to keep in mind our real position under capitalism today.

The great ‘advantage’ the slave has over the wage worker, although rooted in a bleaker situation, is in having no illusions about being free. Ever since Douglass, as a little boy, learned about a ‘mysterious personage’ named ‘Old Master’ who owned his grandmother and ‘all the little children around her’ (including himself), his state of bondage was a transparent fact, and gaining his freedom an obsession. This early revelation left young Frederick with ‘something to brood over after the play and in moments of repose.’

His restless, probing mind went straight to the heart of the matter, asking himself: ‘Why am I a slave. Why are some people slaves and others masters?’ The stock answer he was given—much like today’s ‘That’s just the way it is’—was that ‘God, up in the sky’ made everybody and ‘made white people to be masters and mistresses, and black people to be slaves.’ This struck Frederick as an odd thing for a benevolent God to do, and the source of the knowledge was unclear (‘Did they go up in the skies and learn it?’). Also, he knew of many whites who were not masters, and blacks who were not slaves.

But he wasn’t long in making his first great discovery that there were slaves brought directly from Guinea and those whose fathers or mothers were stolen from Africa. ‘It was a kind of knowledge,’ he recalled, ‘that filled me with a burning hatred of slavery, increased my suffering, and left me without the means of breaking away from my bondage. Yet it was knowledge quite worth possessing.’ From this he knew, ‘what man can make, man can unmake.’

How many workers today are asking themselves: Why am I a wage slave? How many would even accept that self-description? We can learn from the attitude of the young Douglass who already was scrutinizing his social world and taking the first steps toward emancipation.

Another great lesson Douglass learned at a tender age—dispelling the ‘painful mystery’ of the ‘white man’s power to perpetuate the enslavement of the black man’—was that slavery had to enforce ignorance. The lesson was driven home by his master in Baltimore who forbade his wife to continue teaching Frederick how to read, saying in front of him: ‘Learning will spoil the best nigger in the world.’ Douglass drew the appropriate conclusion from his master’s ‘exposition of the true philosophy of slavery,’ knowing from that moment knowledge is ‘the true pathway from slavery to freedom.’

Along with his hard-fought struggle to develop his mind as a tool for confronting slavery, Douglass throughout his life had to fight to protect his dignity—even as a ‘freeman’ in the North, where he confronted segregation on trains and in restaurants and hotels. Douglass ignored such ‘rules’ and if necessary physically resisted attempts to enforce them, believing that the ‘way to break down an unreasonable custom, is to contradict it in practice.’

His ‘take-no-crap’ attitude dates back to his earliest experiences as a slave, from which he learned, ‘He is whipped oftenest, who is whipped easiest.’ The great turning point in his own life, wonderfully narrated in his autobiographies, came the day he physically resisted the ‘Negro-breaker’ Edward Covey’s attempt to beat him into submission. Douglass fought back, giving his attacker (who never laid a hand on him again) the worst of it. ‘I was a changed being after that fight,’ he recalled. ‘I was nothing before; I was A MAN NOW. It recalled to life my crushed self-respect and my self-confidence, and inspired me with a renewed determination to be A FREEMAN.’

That fight (and the example of Douglass’s entire life) recalls lines from Byron that Douglass loved to quote, and which speaks to the working class today:

Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not

Who would be free, must strike the first blow?

Michael Schauerte