The Election of Abraham Lincoln

[Starry Messenger]

THE ELECTION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

"The election in 1860 was the hardest fought in the history of the United States up to that time. The Republican Party made an all-out successful effort to win the decisive support of the great masses of turners, workers, immigrants, and free Negroes, who were all part of great new coalition under the leadership of the northern bourgeoisie. Philip S. Foner states that "It is not an exaggeration to say that the Republican Party fought its way to victory in the campaign of 1860 as the party of free labor."

Lincoln was a very popular candidate among the toiling masses. He was known to be an enemy of slavery; his many pro-labor expressions had won him a wide following among the workers; his advocacy of the Homestead bill had secured him backing among the farmers of the North and West; and his fight against bigoted native "know-nothingism" had entrenched him generally among the foreign-born. He faced three opposing presidential candidates—Stephen A. Douglas, John C. Breckinridge, and John Bell—representing the three-way split in the Democratic Party, and all supporting slavery in one way or another. Lincoln stood on a platform of "containing slavery" to its existing areas. There was no candidate pledged for outright abolition.

In the bitterly fought election the slavocrats, who also had many contacts and supporters in the North, denounced Lincoln with every slander that their fertile minds could concoct. The redbaiters of the time shouted against "Black Republicanism" and "Red Republicanism." Pro-slavery employers and newspapers tried to intimidate the workers by threatening them with discharge, by menacing them with a prospect of economic crisis, and by warning them that Negro emancipation would create a flood of cheap labor which would ruin wage rates. At the same time, the reactionaries tried to split the young Republican Party by cultivating "know-nothing" anti-foreign movements inside its ranks.

The Marxists were very active in this vital election struggle. The clarity of their anti-slavery stand and their militant spirit made up for their still very small numbers. Their key positions in many trade unions enabled them to be a real factor in mobilizing the workers behind Lincoln's candidacy. To this end they spared no effort, holding election meetings of workers in many parts of the North and East. Undoubtedly; the labor vote swung the election for Lincoln, and for this the Marxists were entitled to no small share of the credit.

The Marxists were energetic in winning the decisive foreign-born masses to support Lincoln. In 1860 the foreign-born made up 47.62 percent of the population of New York, 50 percent of Chicago and Pittsburgh, and 59.66 percent of St. Louis, with other cities in proportion. The Germans, by far the largest immigrant group in the country, were a powerful force in Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois, Wisconsin; Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. They heavily backed Lincoln. "Of the 87 German language newspapers, 69 were for Lincoln."

The Marxists were especially effective in creating pro-Lincoln sentiment among the German-American masses. This was graphically demonstrated at the significant Deutsches Haus conference held in Chicago two days before the opening of the nominating convention of the Republican Party. This national conference represented all sections of German-American life. The Marxists Weydemeyer and Douai, who led the working class forces at the conference, were of decisive importance in shaping the meeting's action. Douai, selected as head of the resolutions committee, wrote for the conference a series of resolutions demanding that "they be applied in a sense most hostile to slavery." These resolutions largely furnished the basis for the election platform of the Republican Party.

The fierce campaign of 1860 concluded with the election of Lincoln. The final tabulation showed: Lincoln, 1,857,710; Douglas, 1,291,574; Breckinridge, 850,082; Bell, 646,124."

~The History of the Communist Party of the United States, William Z. Foster 1947

[limpyhobbler]

1. Are you sure, because I don't remember that from history class in high school...

Just kidding. They didn't teach me that in school.

[limpyhobbler]

2. And on a related note...Marx's Letter to Abraham Lincoln, and the response.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1864/lincoln-letter.htm

Written: by Marx between November 22 & 29, 1864
First Published: The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 169, November 7, 1865;
Transcription/Markup: Zodiac/Brian Baggins;
Online Version: Marx & Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000.

Sir:

We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.

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

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

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

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

Signed on behalf of the International Workingmen's Association, the Central Council:

Longmaid, Worley, Whitlock, Fox, Blackmore, Hartwell, Pidgeon, Lucraft, Weston, Dell, Nieass, Shaw, Lake, Buckley, Osbourne, Howell, Carter, Wheeler, Stainsby, Morgan, Grossmith, Dick, Denoual, Jourdain, Morrissot, Leroux, Bordage, Bocquet, Talandier, Dupont, L.Wolff, Aldovrandi, Lama, Solustri, Nusperli, Eccarius, Wolff, Lessner, Pfander, Lochner, Kaub, Bolleter, Rybczinski, Hansen, Schantzenbach, Smales, Cornelius, Petersen, Otto, Bagnagatti, Setacci;

George Odger, President of the Council; P.V. Lubez, Corresponding Secretary for France; Karl Marx, Corresponding Secretary for Germany; G.P. Fontana, Corresponding Secretary for Italy; J.E. Holtorp, Corresponding Secretary for Poland; H.F. Jung, Corresponding Secretary for Switzerland; William R. Cremer, Honorary General Secretary.

And the American response...

Ambassador Adams Replies

Legation of the United States
London, 28th January, 1865

Sir:

I am directed to inform you that the address of the Central Council of your Association, which was duly transmitted through this Legation to the President of the United [States], has been received by him.

So far as the sentiments expressed by it are personal, they are accepted by him with a sincere and anxious desire that he may be able to prove himself not unworthy of the confidence which has been recently extended to him by his fellow citizens and by so many of the friends of humanity and progress throughout the world.

The Government of the United States has a clear consciousness that its policy neither is nor could be reactionary, but at the same time it adheres to the course which it adopted at the beginning, of abstaining everywhere from propagandism and unlawful intervention. It strives to do equal and exact justice to all states and to all men and it relies upon the beneficial results of that effort for support at home and for respect and good will throughout the world.

Nations do not exist for themselves alone, but to promote the welfare and happiness of mankind by benevolent intercourse and example. It is in this relation that the United States regard their cause in the present conflict with slavery, maintaining insurgence as the cause of human nature, and they derive new encouragements to persevere from the testimony of the workingmen of Europe that the national attitude is favored with their enlightened approval and earnest sympathies.

I have the honor to be, sir, your obedient servant,

Charles Francis Adams

This is the first time I have seen these. Found it when I just googled Marxists and Lincoln. This is such a cool little piece of history.

[Starry Messenger]

3. Isn't that cool?

Yeah, I didn't learn that in school either. Interestingly, the right-wing know about it. There are Libertarian and teabagger sites that basically call the legitimacy of Lincoln, the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves into question because "teh commies" were involved. *eyes* I won't link them, since they are all rankly racist.

Someone in GD remarked a few months ago that they couldn't see why Marxists would be interested in the elections in the US, and I've been meaning to scan this chapter from Foster's book ever since. Marx himself was deeply absorbed in the future of the US and encouraged mass coalitions of allies to GOTV.

[limpyhobbler]

4. Hell yeah that's awesome.

That must be the rightwinger's axis of evil... Karl Marx, Abe Lincoln and, I don't know, Nelson Mandela probably. Or MLK.

Socialists and Communists have always been at the forefront of racial emancipation struggles and played a major role in the 20th century civil rights struggles as well. And that history tends to get burried too, like this history about the election of 1860. This Marx and Lincoln connection is fascinating. I'd like to read more about it at some point.

[Starry Messenger]

6. Marx was a Civil War correspondent/journalist.

There's some more here, sometimes his prose is a little crunchy, but it is interesting to read US History through his eyes.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1861/10/25.htm

It is above all to be remembered that the war did not originate with the North, but with the South. The North finds itself on the defensive. For months it had quietly looked on while the secessionists appropriated the Union's forts, arsenals, shipyards, customs houses, pay offices, ships and supplies of arms, insulted its flag and took prisoner bodies of its troops. Finally the secessionists resolved to force the Union government out of its passive attitude by a blatant act of war, and solely for this reason proceeded to the bombardment of Fort Sumter near Charleston....<snip>

The question of the principle of the American Civil War is answered by the battle slogan with which the South broke the peace. Stephens, the Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy, declared in the Secession Congress that what essentially distinguished the Constitution newly hatched at Montgomery from the Constitution of Washington and Jefferson was that now for the first time slavery was recognised as an institution good in itself, and as the foundation of the whole state edifice, whereas the revolutionary fathers, men steeped in the prejudices of the eighteenth century, had treated slavery as an evil imported from England and to be eliminated in the course of time. Another matador of the South, Mr. Spratt, cried out: "For us it is a question of founding a great slave republic." If, therefore, it was indeed only in defence of the Union that the North drew the sword, had not the South already declared that the continuance of slavery was no longer compatible with the continuance of the Union?

Just as the bombardment of Fort Sumter gave the signal for the opening of the war, the election victory of the Republican Party of the North, the election of Lincoln as President, gave the signal for secession. On November 6, 1860, Lincoln was elected. On November 8, 1860, a message telegraphed from South Carolina said: Secession is regarded here as an accomplished fact; on November 10 the legislature of Georgia occupied itself with secession plans, and on November 13 a special session of the legislature of Mississippi was convened to consider secession. But Lincoln's election was itself only the result of a split in the Democratic camp. During the election struggle the Democrats of the North concentrated their votes on Douglas, the Democrats of the South concentrated their votes on Breckinridge, and to this splitting of the Democratic votes the Republican Party owed its victory. Whence came, on the one hand, the preponderance of the Republican Party in the North? Whence, on the other, the disunion within the Democratic Party, whose members, North and South, had operated in conjunction for more than half a century?

I love all of this buried history too! You're totally right about the ultimate right-winger's axis of evil. MLK or Frederick Douglass would probably complete the trio.

[limpyhobbler]

8. The prose can't sound crunchy to me

because I just finished reading Kapital Volume 1. Well I skimmed it and followed along with David Harvey's video lectures, but still you get use to Marx's style. I hate to call it 'propaganda' because of the negative connotation. But he definitely picks a side and tears the other side apart like a pit bull.

[Starry Messenger]

10. I've been making my way through Kapital, too!

I follow along with Brendan Cooney's video series on Value: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3F695D99C91FC6F7&feature=plcp
I have Harvey's series bookmarked, I want to watch them this summer when I have some more time.

I like that Marx is on our side.

[limpyhobbler]

5. So do you know if that Foster chapter is available online ?

No link in the OP...

[Starry Messenger]

7. Nope, I have the dead tree book. This is a world-wide exclusive. :)

I'll try to put more up this week. I keep waiting for someone to digitize it and figured I might as well take a whack at it. The Google Books listing for the book is here: http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q=foster+history+of+the+communist+party&hl=en&client=firefox-a&cid=4886906047210883048&os=contents

[limpyhobbler]

9. That's cool. One of the used book places in my town might have it.

[HiPointDem]

12. The liberal-conservative distinction really keeps us blind to a lot of history that's elided. I

grew up a good little liberal, which meant I was trained to discount anything coming from far-right sources. I'm sure conservatives are trained in the opposite way. But with the internet it's a lot easier to do detailed research because of the google. And I found out that some of the stuff from the hard right is factual -- they spin it weird, of course, but the basic facts seem to be correct. Like Lincoln having any connection to Marx, something I never would have believed, say, in high school or college. Probably there was some college course that might have noted the connection, but I daresay most students didn't take it.

Another interesting thing I've learned, though not from the far right, is that a lot of "southerners" were actually yankees who went south at the start of the cotton boom (early 1800s) and then reinvested the profits up north. Down south they were trading slave-grown cotton, up north they were starting up textiles mills using cheap exploited labor. The families of George Bush and John Kerry both have this kind of history, and in the same city -- savannah. They *knew* each other.

There's also the history of various capitalists giving aid and funding to various communist entities -- nations, parties, revolutionary groups, oversears and in the US. In our own day, various "left" media gets foundation money or is run by rich people's kids or CIA brats like Katherine van der Heuvel or people connected to the democratic party.

I recently read the book None Dare Call it Conspiracy, a big hit with the far-right in the 70s. In it I discover that what those people mean by "communism" doesn't have much relation to what people in this thread mean by communism. As best I can tell, what they mean by the word is something more like a collectivist "new world order" orchestrated and controlled by eastern elites. In their world view, talking about people like the Rockefellers being "communists" makes sense. And talking about Lincoln being a communist makes sense too, not only because of the facts you noted, but also because he was a lawyer for the big (eastern) railroad interests. And that connection is historically important, I think, even if they spin it weird.

As near as I can tell, underlying all this is a fight between various capitalist gangs. At any rate, the story I grew up with, ideological capitalists opposing ideological communists, doesn't make sense to me any more in light of all these odd facts that go against that story. I find that today's world seems much like Orwell's 1984. I could never have imagined myself thinking that when I read the book in high school.

I assume Orwell's prescience had something to do with his experiences in the Spanish Civil War (experiencing the betrayal of the left by the Soviets) and in British intelligence during WW2 (experiencing the totalitarian/propagandist aspect of his own government). It's a world where everything is fake, the news, the wars, the government proclamations and the revolutionary movement, and the hand of real power is unseen by the general population and thus immune to any actions by the general population. If you don't know who they are and can't correctly analyze their actions, their motivations, and the levers of their power, how do you combat them?

Throw in a bit of Huxley's orgy-porgy sex and drugs opium of the people stuff and it seems to me you've got the basic themes of our time.

[Starry Messenger]

13. Yeah, I've seen some of that kooky Bircher stuff too.

In the specific case I was thinking of, the right-winger explicitly wrote that Lincoln was displaying Bolshevik tendencies by helping to end slavery, that it was "big government interference", the market would have ended slavery (ha!), etc.

The fights between the different capitalist gangs are usually why we have large-scale warfare. They use the rest of us to fight each other. They also write the textbooks.

Sifting for accurate information and correlating it is a full-time job. Orwell in fact is an interesting example. Despite his criticism of "totalitarianism", he was an intelligence informer himself. I was just talking last month with an anti-fascist WW2 vet who said that if the US had spent money to arm the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, WW2 might not have had to happen.

I don't think everything is "fake", so much as it is written from the point of view and for the benefit of the ruling classes. I think many people can see there is a problem is our society, but with so much distortion and confusion, it is difficult to bring people together in unified concert unless there is a clear and immediate threat.

[jwirr]

11. Many of my German-American ancestors were Republican (I capitalize it in respect of those times)

and stayed that way until FDR. The richer branch of the family is still rethug. Thank you for the info.