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	Workers Vanguard No. 1022	19 April 2013

Spartacist Forum

150 Years Since the Emancipation Proclamation

Finish the Civil War!

Part Two

Part One of this article, which concludes here, appeared in WV No. 1021 (5 April).

A hundred days elapsed between the announcement of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862, and when it was to take effect on January 1, 1863. Did the Army support the Emancipation Proclamation? A resounding “yes.” The old vets in particular wanted to strike at the heart of the rebellion. And many in the North greeted it heartily, such as the abolitionists, the Radicals. And Northern public opinion followed the Army’s. Northerners were getting radicalized en masse as well.

The Emancipation Proclamation was an unprecedented assertion of presidential and federal power, altering forever the constitutional balance of powers. Congress had challenged Lincoln’s authority to control war policy and military appointments, but now, with the stroke of a pen, $3.5 billion worth of property was legally annihilated. In purely economic terms it approaches Henry VIII’s seizure of church properties during the Reformation and the Bolsheviks’ nationalization of the factories and farms after the Russian Revolution. The preliminary emancipation also stated of the freed slaves that the government “will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.”

Oh, the howls of protest! Echoing the concerns of the rebels, the London Times wrote that this was an incitement to servile insurrection. Well, the British ruling class was maybe a little paranoid. They had just finished putting down the 1857 Sepoy mutiny, the massive rebellion across the Indian subcontinent sparked by the Sepoys, who were the Indian soldiers in service to the British military. The abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner’s nice riposte to this was that if servile insurrection happens, they’re only getting what they deserve. But that phrase was taken out and replaced with an admonition to the freedmen “to abstain from all violence unless in necessary self defense.”

This was still quite radical. That a slave could never raise his hand against the master was fundamental to slavery. And then the preliminary emancipation stated that blacks “will be received into the armed service of the U.S.” The abolitionists had been fighting for that since the beginning of the war. By extending the right to join in common defense through the use of federal power, it fundamentally altered the civil status of blacks in the North as well as the South, setting a precedent and stimulating a political movement for equal citizenship.

The preliminary decree had a call for continued colonization efforts. But by January 1, 1863, when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln changed his mind. The final proclamation was silent about colonization, and Lincoln would never again mention it in public.

The Emancipation Proclamation was a pledge, a promise. It only freed slaves in areas that were not yet controlled by Union armies, true enough. But in that sense it was like the Declaration of Independence in 1776, which didn’t make any of the colonies free—it took a victorious war to free the colonies from British rule. The Emancipation Proclamation bound the defense of the Union to the destruction of slavery. Given the rebel determination to defend slavery, the war could not be prosecuted as anything but a war of subjugation. Once the power of the government was enlisted on the side of freedom in one place, it couldn’t be restricted in another. Over three million slaves were affected by the Emancipation Proclamation; 830,000 were exempted, but nothing anywhere was untouched. Slaves in the exempted areas voted with their feet as well.

The Emancipation Proclamation did not sound like much; it was a pretty dry document. The abolitionists were disappointed because the proclamation was only issued on account of military necessity; they wanted some high-sounding phrases about advancing the cause of freedom. It was only because Salmon Chase said he should put something in there that Lincoln actually put in a sentence saying that it was sincerely believed to be an act of justice. Nevertheless, as Karl Marx wrote in Comments on the North American Events (October 1862): “The manifesto abolishing slavery, is the most important document in American history since the establishment of the Union, tantamount to the tearing up of the old American constitution.” The only way the war could end was by the outright victory of one side over the other, and the victory of the North meant a revolutionary transformation of American society.

Since the beginning of the war there was a threat that Britain and France would enter on the side of the South. But once emancipation was proclaimed, Britain especially was unable to intervene. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and others organized support for the Union among workers in Britain, then the most powerful capitalist country in the world. They were quite successful, too, despite the desperate attempts of the ruling class to win the workers to the side of the slavocracy. British textile workers in particular exercised militant and heroic solidarity with their white and black brothers and sisters across the Atlantic. Impoverished to begin with, many endured years of unemployment due in part to the war. But they never wavered. Marx wrote:

“The English working class has won immortal historical honour for itself by thwarting the repeated attempts of the ruling classes to intervene on behalf of the American slaveholders by its enthusiastic mass meetings, even though the prolongation of the American Civil War subjects a million English workers to the most fearful sufferings and privations.”

—Proclamation on Poland by the German Workers’ Educational Society in London (October 1863)

Who Freed the Slaves?

Lincoln both led and responded to a transformation in public sentiment. He was later quoted as saying, “It is my conviction that, had the proclamation been issued even six months earlier than it was, public sentiment would not have sustained it.” The same was true with enlisting black men. He said, “The step taken sooner could not, in my judgment, have been carried out.” So was Lincoln too slow in proclaiming emancipation, turning the Civil War into an abolition war? Well, fast and slow are relative terms. Perhaps he agonized too long on the border states. Perhaps he fretted too long about the Northern Democrats. But by the standards of the American people as a whole, Lincoln’s pace was radical and swift.

The bulk of the Northern populace, and particularly white soldiers, came to see the need to fight for black freedom. The soldiers came to that understanding much sooner. That’s not to say that the Army was free from prejudice, far from it. But especially once blacks proved themselves in battle, they earned the respect of their white comrades-in-arms.

Of course, there was opposition to the Emancipation Proclamation from the Democrats, the most rabid of whom were known as Copperheads, after the poisonous snake. The antiwar Democrats escalated racist hysteria among workers and immigrants, with Democratic politicians and newspapers declaring that the freed slaves would steal the jobs of white workers. We’ve heard that before, haven’t we? I mean, the ruling class is whipping up that same hysteria over immigrant workers today. Then in 1863 the anti-draft riots in New York City turned into a racist pogrom. In 1864, during a period of defeat and demoralization in the North in the lead-up to the elections, the Democrats fomented racist opposition to emancipation. They actually coined the word miscegenation and published material replete with lurid racist cartoons. McClellan was the Democrats’ presidential candidate in 1864.

Starting in the 1960s and 1970s, many in the black nationalist movement and the New Left questioned Abraham Lincoln’s role: Did he free the slaves? The short answer is yes, because without a Civil War victory there would be no emancipation. And Lincoln was the primary architect of that victory. Lincoln has also been slandered as a racist by, for example, the historian Lerone Bennett and the so-called Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). The RCP has a sordid history in the fight against black oppression anyway, most notoriously in Boston during the 1974 busing crisis when they sided with white racists against the fight for integration. Lincoln was not a racist—the racists were the ones Lincoln was fighting against.

And then there is the Spark organization. They’re agnostic on the Civil War. They say it was a civil war in the South against Yankee capitalist oppression and they have no problem with the Confederate flag. Progressive Labor (PL), similarly, ignores the centrality of the fight against slavery. Even worse, PL lauds the New York City draft riots without mentioning slavery.

They all imbibe the racist myth, born out of the defeat of Reconstruction and perpetuated by generations of historians and defenders of the Confederacy, that the Civil War was not about slavery. Lincoln changed and the aims of the war changed. The Abraham Lincoln who said he was against “remorseless revolutionary struggle” in 1861 is not the same Lincoln who, at his second inaugural in 1865, said:

“Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether’.”

But we are not uncritical of Lincoln. I would like to quote Frederick Douglass from a speech he delivered in April 1876 at the dedication of the freedmen’s memorial to Abraham Lincoln in Washington, D.C. You had all the luminaries of the Republican Party there: President Ulysses S. Grant, Salmon Chase, who was at this point chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. And Frederick Douglass says:

“Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man....

“Abraham Lincoln saved for you a country, he delivered us from a bondage, according to Jefferson, one hour of which was worse than ages of the oppression your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose....

“Abraham Lincoln was at the head of a great movement, and was in living and earnest sympathy with that movement, which, in the nature of things, must go on until slavery should be utterly and forever abolished in the United States.”

—The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Vol. 4

The Role of Black Troops

A key provision of the Emancipation Proclamation was the arming of the slaves. Black troops played a critical role in the Union victory. With the recruitment of regiments of former slaves against their former masters, it was clear that a revolution was in progress. The Black Spartacus was on the march! It was very demoralizing to the slaveholders.

But it was a question: Would the former slaves fight? Would they be good soldiers? Many doubted that after the degradation of slavery blacks could be good soldiers and not just humble, subservient, oppressed people. But the heroic Massachusetts 54th Regiment decisively settled that question when they charged into the guns of Fort Wagner, South Carolina, incurring massive casualties. Black soldiers became some of the best fighters for the Union, fighting for freedom, fighting for the freedom of their families, fighting with nooses around their necks. They were sent back into slavery if they were captured and their white officers faced execution if they were captured.

If black soldiers surrendered, the Confederates often massacred them. One of the worst examples was at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, a federal garrison composed of black regiments and white regiments. When the garrison surrendered after being attacked by the cavalry of Nathan Bedford Forrest, scores of black soldiers were massacred. Forrest was a slave trader before the war, a dealer in convict labor after the war, and he was a founder of the KKK. But after the massacre, black soldiers seldom surrendered. When they went into battle, they would fight like hellcats, with a battle cry on their lips: “Remember Fort Pillow!”

The 54th was a great black regiment. But there were not a whole lot of blacks in the North where the 54th was recruited. So Lincoln and Secretary of War Stanton sent Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas to the Mississippi Valley to recruit black soldiers and dispel the opposition of white soldiers. I like to use Lorenzo Thomas as an example of how people change during a revolution. Thomas was a 60-year-old paper-pusher, a bureaucrat in Washington, D.C., for years and years. He had not seen the field of battle for ages. But he got sent to the Mississippi Valley to recruit black soldiers, and he did it. He would go from camp to camp and make speeches to the white soldiers. What he would say to them about the black people coming into the lines was to “receive them kindly and cordially. They are to be encouraged to come to us; they are to be received with open arms; they are to be fed and clothed; they are to be armed.” He was instrumental in recruiting 100,000 black soldiers. Two hundred thousand black soldiers were recruited, all told.

Also illustrative of the contradictions of this bourgeois revolution is William Tecumseh Sherman, who was a stone racist. He sabotaged the effort to recruit black troops to the point of insubordination, all the while dealing some of the deadliest military blows to the Confederacy. He refused to allow the recruitment of black troops near his armies because he wanted blacks only as laborers. Lincoln tolerated this because Sherman could win battles. With his march to the sea and then up through South Carolina, Sherman did more than any other Union general to burn the heart out of slavery. Sherman epitomized the hard war that Lincoln and Grant had pushed.

It’s not about the ideas in people’s heads but what they do. As materialists, we understand that social being determines social consciousness—that is, most people can only transcend their own history to a limited degree. So banish moralism and focus on the act! I’m sure the modern-day fans of the Confederacy don’t care very much what Sherman thought. But they sure can’t forget what he did!

The Dawn of Reconstruction

Bourgeois mythology would have it that it was a straight shot from the Emancipation Proclamation to Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement to Obama. No! The Chicago Tribune (3 February) had a little piece on the Emancipation Proclamation headlined: “Lincoln’s Proclamation Inspired Slaves to Leave Plantations, Embrace Hope.” Embrace hope? Please! Where have we heard that before? Obama’s campaign literature, of course. It conjures up images of tear-stained black faces turning their eyes to the sky, when the reality was war and revolution!

At the end of the war, emancipated slaves, many with guns in their hands, were at the very center of the Second American Revolution, pushing ahead, without organization, toward the redistribution of land and toward political liberty. These measures necessitated turning the entire structure of the old South upside down. The confiscation of the land owned by the big proprietors and its partition and distribution among the landless laborers meant an agrarian revolution. The triumphant capitalists wanted to perpetuate their grip upon the national government, increase their control over industry and agriculture and grab natural resources. In order to promote this program, their political representatives had to maneuver with other forces in the country.

What started out at the close of the Civil War as an alliance between the Northern capitalists and the black and white plebeians of the South against the landed aristocracy terminated in 1876 with a union between the capitalist magnates and the planters against the Southern masses, particularly the black freedmen. In 1865, aside from the military and the Freedmen’s Bureau, which had been established by the federal government, there was no government in the South. Everything was up in the air. The 13th Amendment was on the books, but little else was settled.

There were several hundred thousand black people either in the Army or recently demobilized. They felt it was time to cash in on what was due them. Perhaps the most idealized version of what black people thought Reconstruction was supposed to turn into was “40 acres and a mule.” This comes from Sherman’s Special Order No. 15, which he issued in Savannah in 1865, right after he finished his march through Georgia. That order gave 40 acres of abandoned land and also unneeded old Army mules to newly freed black families.

The way this happened is that Secretary of War Stanton had come down to visit Sherman’s army in Savannah. He and Sherman met with black preachers from the area. Sherman was very well known for his hot temper. I can see him just seething, having to sit down with all these black preachers and talk with them man to man. But out of that meeting came the Special Orders. This relieved Sherman of the problem of what to do with the thousands of former slaves who had followed in his train. Then Stanton ordered Sherman to add a black regiment to his army, which he did, except that regiment was abused all the way from Georgia up through South Carolina. I told you that Sherman was hardly a racial egalitarian. Yet and still, despite his subjective beliefs, Sherman was caught up in a revolution. And he wrote that Order, which put land into the hands of black freedmen and helped to inspire the fight for black freedom.

Radical Reconstruction

In the summer of 1865, the redistribution of abandoned and confiscated land was Freedmen’s Bureau policy, supported by the military. But it was very quickly turned around. Many Southern states passed Black Codes. This was slavery in everything but name—vagrancy laws, forced apprenticeships, forced contracts—to regulate and control black labor. The precedent for Black Codes was set in the North where, despite the abolition of slavery prior to the Civil War, there were many legal proscriptions against black people. But the Black Codes were not rigorously or uniformly enforced, unlike the Jim Crow laws that came later. Things were still volatile and were so much up in the air, with lots of victorious black soldiers with guns roaming around.

Let me note the importance of the right to bear arms, and how important that has always been for the defense of black rights. The right of self-defense was key. We say, “Gun control kills blacks.” Obama and a whole section of the ruling class are bemoaning gun violence. But the whole history of gun control in this country is the story of the ruling class trying to disarm the population, particularly in periods of social struggle. Hence the reactionary Black Codes passed in various Southern states tried to outlaw the possession of firearms by black people. In response, the Freedmen’s Bureau widely distributed circulars that read in part: “All men, without distinction of color, have the right to keep and bear arms to defend their homes, families or themselves.”

Every gain that black people have made was a battle. In a letter to Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, on behalf of the First International, Marx wrote: “Yours, Sir, has become the task to uproot by the law what has been felled by the sword, to preside over the arduous work of political reconstruction and social regeneration.” But Johnson did exactly the opposite. He tried to restore the old social order in everything but name. Johnson started amnestying former slaveowners and weeded radicals out of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Johnson had an all-consuming hatred of black people. He was a former slaveowner with the mentality of poor white trash, a racist appeaser of remnants of the slavocracy. Johnson was really fearful of a link-up of black and white poor. The idea of real social and political equality repelled him. Johnson’s amnesty proclamations were an abrogation of Sherman’s Field Order No. 15. Forty thousand freedmen were deprived of 485,000 acres of land.

The hallmark of any revolution is the independent mobilization of the masses in defense of their rights and aspirations. That occurred all over the South, with committees, councils and armed self-defense groups springing up. Could black people, arms in hand, have seized the land? In some cases they did. But they were mostly forced off the land. Thaddeus Stevens, probably the most consistent American Jacobin, recognized that land was the key. By being landholders, black freedmen would have an economic basis to defend their rights instead of being beholden to the landlords. Most others, including Frederick Douglass, focused more on the right to vote.

The bourgeoisie was horrified by the thought of confiscation. The free-soil ideology meant that through thrift and hard work you could own a little shop or a farm. As if 250 years of unrequited toil didn’t count. The bourgeoisie was quite class-conscious. It paid close attention to the restive working class in Europe, where, in 1871, the French proletariat seized power in Paris and held it for some months—the Paris Commune. The American bourgeoisie recoiled from that. The New York Times, then as now a mouthpiece for that class, wrote: “An attempt to justify the confiscation of Southern land under the pretense of doing justice to the freedmen, strikes at the root of all property rights in both sections. It concerns Massachusetts quite as much as Mississippi.”

During Johnson’s presidency, blacks were beaten and shot down by the hundreds. Black people were no longer anybody’s property, so life was cheap. The slaughter of black and white Republicans led directly to military Reconstruction. Many in the North started to be alarmed. They had just finished a brutal civil war and did not want the slaveholders back in power. There was a polarization. The moderates were driven into the arms of the Radicals. The Chicago Tribune, hardly known today as a radical journal, wrote that the North would convert Mississippi “into a frog pond” before allowing slavery to be reestablished.

The Radicals got the majority of support in Congress and began to set the tone of Reconstruction. The South was placed under military control by Congress. As General-in-Chief, U.S. Grant appointed the generals running each district. Grant was allied with the Radicals on many issues and was generally sympathetic to the struggles of black people, even if like Lincoln he did not personally believe in social equality. During his presidency, starting in 1868, his policy was a real mixed bag.

It took a battle to preserve black rights. There were the Freedmen’s Bureau, the Union Leagues, black militias. But federal troops were the key. Reconstruction could not have succeeded as much as it did absent even a halfhearted commitment to smash and crush forces of reaction by the federal government. Congress wanted to readmit the former Confederate states to the Union. But the only way these states could be admitted was on the Union’s terms. And the only way those terms would be met was if black people got the vote. Under military Reconstruction, with the passage of the Reconstruction Acts and the 14th Amendment, blacks were given the vote and elected to state constitutional conventions and Reconstruction governments.

Once black people gained the franchise, the Republicans dominated Reconstruction governments across the South. The majority of officeholders were white with a significant minority of blacks, based on the support of blacks and some poor whites. Black Republicans became the major focus for political, social and economic justice in the South. They agitated for more political rights, more schools, more hospitals, more land, more debtors’ relief—things that benefitted the vast majority of Southern labor, black and white. The passage of the 15th Amendment in 1870 codified the right to vote, all across the North as well as the South.

Racist Reaction

But Northern capitalists had other interests: profit. They were willing to invest in the capital-starved South, but when those profits were threatened by agitation and unrest, they pulled the plug. Reconstruction governments and black people were always under attack by the KKK and similar groups that wanted social and economic control of the black population. Black schools were particularly a target, and scores went up in flames. Intimidation and murder were rampant. Congress adopted all sorts of paper measures protecting blacks, including the 14th Amendment that guarantees “equal protection of the laws.” But the government betrayed the promise of black liberation in the Compromise of 1877, when almost all the remaining Union troops were withdrawn from the South. Reconstruction was defeated by blood and fire.

The post-Reconstruction period, called Redemption by the racists, was marked by a political counterrevolution aimed at black people and enforced by racist terrorists. A new system of racist exploitation was established by restricting the rights of freedmen across the board. In 1896, the Supreme Court codified “separate but equal” segregation as the law of the land in Plessy v. Ferguson. Segregation took the place of chattel slavery as the main prop of the new racist order. This rigid system of legally enforced racial segregation, called Jim Crow, was imposed and maintained by police-state repression and the terror of the KKK which, in the words of Civil War historian James McPherson, “became in effect armed auxiliaries of the Democratic party.” It took a long and often bloody struggle for the civil rights movement 80 years later to restore some of the rights black people won during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

With the triumph of capitalism across the continent also came the creation of the class destined to become the gravediggers of that same system, the working class. Once freed from the retarding effects of the slavery question, the labor movement took off with agitation for the eight-hour day, agitation for unions. This culminated in the Great Rail Strike of 1877, which was brutally suppressed by the Army that was no longer defending black people in the South. However, concomitant with the entrance of the American bourgeoisie onto the world stage as an imperialist power in the 1890s, there developed a layer of hardcore trade-union bureaucrats bought off by the spoils of imperialism and sharing the values of the ruling class. They imported and continued to import this retrograde consciousness into the working class.

Now I would like to acknowledge the debt we owe to Dick Fraser, a leading member of the Socialist Workers Party in the 1940s and ’50s, when it was still a revolutionary organization. Fraser developed a trenchant Marxist analysis of slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, of the origins of the racist system in this country and the material basis for black oppression. Fraser wrote: “After the Civil War and Reconstruction destroyed the old slave owning class, northern capital, from economic and political motives, betrayed its promises and created a revised, capitalist form of race relations, based upon many of the traditions and social relations of slavery” (“Revolutionary Integration: the Dialectics of Black Liberation,” Revolutionary Age, Vol. 1, No. 1 [1968]).

Fraser took as a starting point the lessons he had learned from studies of the 1917 Russian Revolution, particularly Bolshevik Party policies on the many nationalities in Russia. And that is the point on which I want to conclude—the Bolshevik Revolution. The Bolsheviks united the struggles of all the oppressed behind the banner of the working class, and that is what we must do. Today, we take up struggles for immigrant rights, for women’s rights, and we fight to replace the trade-union misleaders with a militant, class-struggle leadership.

We wrote in one of our basic documents, “Black and Red,” in 1967:

“Only common struggle for common aims can unite the working class and overcome the lifelong racial prejudices of American workers. A victory of the socialist revolution in this country will be achieved through the united struggle of black and white workers under the leadership of the revolutionary vanguard party. In the course of this struggle, unbreakable bonds will be forged between the two sections of the working class. The success of this struggle will place the Negro people in a position to insure at last the end of slavery, racism and super-exploitation.”

The forcible segregation of black people, integral to American capitalism, has been resisted by the black masses whenever a perceived possibility for such struggle has been felt. The entire history of mass black struggle—from the abolitionists through the Civil War and Radical Reconstruction to the civil rights movement—has been in the direction of integration, not separation.

While combating every manifestation of racist oppression, fighting in particular to mobilize the social power of the multiracial labor movement, we underline that full equality for the black masses requires that the working class rip the economy out of the hands of the racist capitalist rulers and reorganize it on a socialist basis. Only then will it be possible to eliminate the material roots of black oppression through the full integration of black people into an egalitarian socialist society based on a collective economy with quality jobs, housing, health care and education for all. You see, it was the Russian working class led by the Bolsheviks who carried out the first and thus far only successful socialist revolution. We aim to build a vanguard party that will fight for the next one.

In the midst of the Second American Revolution, Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address, “It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” Well, there is still a lot of unfinished work. Join us in the fight for a Third American Revolution. Join us in the fight to build a revolutionary party. Finish the Civil War—For black liberation through socialist revolution!