On April 12, 1861, the American Civil War began when Confederate soldiers attacked Fort Sumter and started a bloody conflict that eventually ended in 1865, with a combined total of at least 620,000 dead from combat and disease. The war involved rival sections of the American bourgeois class in the 19th century.
It is often said of the Civil War that it was a “rich man’s battle” but a “poor man’s war.” This saying applied to both sides equally. It wasn't rhetoric. A man in the Union states could purchase a substitute to take his place for as little as $300, sometimes less. In the South, a man could gain an exemption from service if he had at least 20 slaves on his plantation or farm, or he could also pay for a substitute soldier to take his place. Men on both sides were literally buying others to take their places, to lay their lives on the line and face death, if need be, for someone else. Take the case of Andrew Carnegie, the rail and steel magnate, whose wealth was measured in billions. He paid a poor Irish immigrant the sum of $850 to fight in his place. He was but one of a number of rich men of his generation who would ultimately be referred to as “robber barons,” since in addition to physically not serving, they would make money by providing the Union armies with everything that was needed, from uniforms and shoes to rifles. Then there was J. Pierpont Morgan, who came by his wealth by having been born into it. When the Civil War came, he shelled out the $300 to buy a substitute to serve in his stead. While Morgan stayed home, evading military service and the draft, he made enormous profits by providing war materiel. The erstwhile benefactor bought 5,000 rifles for $3.50 each from an arsenal, and then turned around to provide them to a field general for $22.00 each. The cheap price he paid for them was due to a defective mechanism, since any unwitting soldier who attempted to fire one, lost his thumb.A future president Grover Cleveland paid George Beniski, a Polish immigrant six years his senior to go and serve for him in the Seventy-Sixth New York Infantry. Apparently it did not hurt his future presidential bid in the slightest. Other rich draft dodgers - John D. Rockefeller, Philip Armour (of the giant Armour Meatpacking firm), and Jay Gould, a leading American railroad developer. Jim Fisk was another interesting baron. He became rich during the war by smuggling Southern cotton through Union blockades and selling Confederate bonds to Europeans. He used both sides of the War when it was most beneficial to him. George Pullman was the developer of the plush sleeping cars on trains, since regular rail cars were uncomfortable for overnight trips. After paying a substitute to serve in his place, Pullman became a wealthy man and after the War’s end, he began hiring blacks for waiter and porter positions on his trains. He was known to work them harder and longer than non-black workers and, of course, paid them what was described as “a fraction of what he paid whites.”
But it was more importantly upon the backs of the Negroes that was built the whole of the Southern slave-system, a system based on the land, and more particularly, on cotton and tobacco, two crops which require large supplies of human labour for their cultivation. To meet this ever-growing demand for human labour, millions of Negroes were transported from Africa to work as slaves on the plantations. The very system was falling apart largely as a result of Congressional laws which favoured Northern interests and made chattel slave labour too costly. 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.
Also, the cotton planters kept taking virgin land, cropping it to exhaustion with imported slave labour, threatening the free labour of the northern industrialists. The South, which desperately needed new land to replace that used up by their wasteful one-crop system, was losing out in its bid to bring in frontier areas as slave states. Cotton was king in the South, and it made slavery profitable as long as new lands were available for expansion. The demand for cotton from overseas and from the North became so great that the South made every effort to produce it on an ever-larger scale. By 1850 the cotton output had increased thirtyfold and by 1860 - just a year before the outbreak of the Civil War - more than fiftyfold compared with 1800, and represented seven-eighths of the world's supply. This extraordinary growth tended to fasten slavery more firmly upon the South since it was held that this type of forced labour was absolutely necessary for growing cotton. As demands for cotton steadily mounted, the planters demanded more slaves and more lands - the more land the more slaves.
So the South was on a collision course with the North and it was they who struck the first blow at Fort Sumter
A moral justification for slavery was naturally provided by the Southern churches for the benefit of their aristocratic "sponsors" But then too, the opposition to slavery on moral grounds was as ridiculous when 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.
Marx, writing about the 1860 election that brought Lincoln to the White House, stated that “if Lincoln would have had Emancipation of the Slaves as his motto at that time, there can be no doubt that he would have been defeated.”
Lincoln would never have been nominated if he were a radical abolitionist. He was chosen because he was a moderate in the Republican Party. It is probable that he found slavery objectionable, but he most certainly would not have gone to war over the issue. We find Lincoln writing to Alexander H. Stephens in 1860:
"I fully appreciate the present peril the country is in, and the weight of responsibility on me. Do the people of the South really entertain fears that a Republican administration would, directly or indirectly, interfere with the slaves, or with them about slaves? It they do, I wish to assure you...that there is no cause for such fears..."
Again Lincoln writes:"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. It I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it.... "
In fact, the Emancipation Proclamation was issued as a war measure against the rebels and did not apply to those slaves loyal to the Union. The Republican Party made quite plain the fact that it was not opposed to the continuation of slavery in the South provided it was not spread into the frontier areas in which the Northern industrialists wished to establish their own slave system - wage labour. 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 the 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. In William Appleman Williams in The Contours of American History he wrotes that:
"The Civil War was not the first modern or industrial war. It was the last merchant-agrarian war. It produced an industrial system rather than being fought with one."
To summarise, the North's politico-economic programme was directly opposed to the South's. The North was
1 For protective tariffs,
2 For a third Bank,
3 For internal improvements to link the East and West.
4 Opposed to slavery extension into the territories.
Marx supported campaigns to establish political democracy or which he felt would have the effect of stabilizing or protecting it. Marx keenly followed politics in America, and believed the founding of the Republican Party and the election of Lincoln to be major, ground-shifting events in American history. So we find him supporting the North in the American Civil War since he felt that a victory for the slave-owning South would slow down the development of capitalism in America. Marx viewed the war as one of Southern aggression through which the slaveocracy hoped to preserve its political dominance. Marx and Engels contributed dozens of articles for the newspapers. His pronounced attacks on the British press coverage of the Civil War stemmed from what he saw as rife hypocrisy on their part. The textile industry was a huge engine of the British economy, and it depended on cheap cotton from the slave-holding American south. And when the British press criticized Lincoln for either being too radical or not radical enough (a common observation was that the North was not really seeking to abolish slavery, but merely to protect the union, which meant protecting slave-holding rights in those states where they still existed), Marx pounced on the hypocrisy as a mere cover to keep cheap cotton flowing.
In seeking to counteract the influential English press's categorical and repeated denial that slavery was an issue in the war, as well as overcoming other related purse-oriented propaganda, Marx over-emphasized slavery's active role. He correctly perceived that the subsidiary issue of slave labour versus free labour would be the most decisive factor in arousing positive working class feelings and action in Britain and on the European continent, and that consequently the various governments, for this and other reasons, would be less apt to tender material assistance to the South in the face of unified working-class opposition. Hence, he blazoned this issue of slave labour versus free labour in the spoken and written words to the exclusion of the obvious economic factors, such that the Southern plantation-owning capitalists tried to secede from the American federal union of states because they wanted no taxes and free trade with Europe for their cotton goods, while the Northern states wanted protective tariffs for their new manufacturing industries and a banking system that would allow investment in railways and other large undertakings to proceed. After four years the industrial might of the northern states prevailed Marx sympathies for the North can be seen in this comment: "Lincoln is not the product of a popular revolution. This plebeian, who worked his way up from stone-breaker to Senator in Illinois, without intellectual brilliance, without a particularly outstanding character, without exceptional importance—an average person of good will, was placed at the top by the interplay of the forces of universal suffrage unaware of the great issues at stake. The new world has never achieved a greater triumph than by this demonstration that, given its political and social organisation, ordinary people of good will can accomplish feats which only heroes could accomplish in the old world!" Marx October 12, 1862, Die Presse
Marx would have the working class unmistakeably know that in his view slave labour as it existed in the Southern states impeded the mission of capitalism and interfered with its historic role of economic development, and in so doing braked the advent of socialism and the emancipation of wage slaves. Marx concisely summed up the American struggle in these words:
"The present struggle between South and North...nothing else than a struggle between two systems: the system of slavery and the system: of free labour. Because both systems cannot any longer exist on the American continent without friction, the present war broke out. It can only end with the victory of one system or the other." (The Civil War in America.)
When the Civil War ended in 1865, and laws supporting slavery were abolished, conditions began to change. In theory, the negro became a “free man” but in practice, he found that the fetters he had worn under slavery had become even more closely riveted to his limbs. Under the slave-system, he had been to a considerable extent protected. It was in the slave-owner’s own interests to keep his slaves reasonably fed, housed, and clothed. As a “free man”, however, the Negro now found himself exposed to all the rigours of capitalism. He found an ever-growing economic barrier being thrown up against him by the white man, who feared his competition. Although under slavery he had done the skilled as well as the unskilled work, he was now pushed more and more into the hard, dirty and routine jobs. In a very short while, he found himself relegated to the lowest runs of the occupational ladder. As a farmer, too, he was discriminated against, being compelled to cultivate the poorest land or finally ending up as a “share-cropper”, a particularly vicious form of exploitation in which he did all the work of growing the crop for the privilege of receiving a share of it when, and if, it was harvested. America, as it emerged from the Civil War, would not have been essentially different had Abraham Lincoln never existed. At some stage slavery would have been ended in America and modern industrial Capitalism would have taken over. The abolition of slavery might have taken longer, but the victory of northern industrial capitalism would have happened some time. What we can concede, however, is that Lincoln’s assassination at that particular point made possible a policy of the Federal Government towards the defeated Southern States which, had Lincoln lived, would probably not have happened. His assassination involved a certain setback which had to be recovered later on in American development.
With slavery's defeat, the struggle between capital and labor emerged into full view. Infamous capitalists of the Gilded Age started to amass their fortunes in the Civil War, and their wealth would grow tremendously in the following decades. Huge factories, employing thousands of workers, spraung up, as the United States began its climb to become the world’s leading economic power. As Marx would famously write in Capital, “In the United States of America, every independent workers’ movement was paralysed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the republic. Labor in white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in black skin. However, a new life immediately arose after the death of slavery. The first fruit of the American Civil War was the eight hours’ agitation.”
For further information see our earlier blogs on the American Civil War:
American Civil War & Slavery
Marx & the American Civil War
No comments:
Post a Comment