Lincoln, Marx and the American Civil War
Abraham Lincoln, as president, chose to reply to an “Address” from the London-based International Workingmen’s Association. The “Address,” drafted by Karl Marx, congratulated Lincoln on his reelection for a second term. In some resonant and complex paragraphs, the “Address” heralded the world-historical significance of what had become a war against slavery. The “Address” declared that victory for the North would be a turning point for nineteenth-century politics, an affirmation of free labor, and a defeat for the most reactionary capitalists who depended on slavery and racial oppression.
Lincoln saw only a tiny selection of the avalanche of mail he was sent, employing several secretaries to deal with it. But the US Ambassador in London, Charles Francis Adams, decided to forward the “Address” to Washington. Encouraging every sign of support for the Union was central to Adams’s mission. The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863 had made this task much easier, but there were still many sections of the British elite who sympathized with the Confederacy and some who favored awarding it diplomatic recognition if only public opinion could be brought to accept this.
The “Address” carried, beside that of Marx, the signatures of several prominent British trade unionists as well as French socialists and German social democrats. The Ambassador wrote to the IWA, explaining that the president had asked him to convey his response to their “Address.” He thanked them for their support and expressed his conviction that the defeat of the rebellion would indeed be a victory for the cause of humanity everywhere. He declared that his country would abstain from “unlawful intervention” but observed that “The United States regarded their cause in the present conflict with slavery-maintaining insurgents as the cause of human nature, and they derived new encouragement to persevere from the testimony of the working men of Europe.”
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Lincoln may have recognized the name Karl Marx when he read the IWA “Address,” since Marx had been a prolific contributor to the New York Daily Tribune, the most influential Republican newspaper of the 1850s. Charles A. Dana, publisher of the Tribune, first met Marx in Cologne in 1848 at a time when he edited the widely read Neue Rheinische Zeitung. In 1852, Dana invited Marx to become a correspondent for the Tribune. Over the next decade he wrote — with some help from his friend Engels — over five hundred articles for the Tribune. Hundreds of these pieces were published under Marx’s name, but eighty-four appeared as unsigned editorials. He wrote on a global range of topics, sometimes occupying two or three pages of a sixteen-page newspaper.
much more:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/08/lincoln-and-marx/
Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln, Penpals
Karl Marx invented communism. Sort of. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves (not because he actually thought blacks were equal to whites, but because he thought “live and let live, right bro?”). So what the hell were these two writing to each other about? Apparently slavery, and how it sucked.
I first stumbled upon this letter from Karl Marx (on behalf of the International Working Men’s Association) congratulating Lincoln on his re-election. Marx acknowledges that working white folks have been pretty shitty to black slaves and that laborers everywhere should unite on behalf of the battle over slavery. He writes:
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.
And thank god the North won, because Europe was really missing their cotton. Marx tells Lincoln that the laborers in Europe have been patiently waiting out the “hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis” in support of their enslaved comrades.
much more http://www.critical-theory.com/karl-marx-and-abraham-lincoln-penpals/
I didn't realize Marx wrote many editorials in American Papers during the Civil War. I was aware of these two articles but they gave me more insight and info.
Republicans would faint if they knew the history of the man who started their party.
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