Yes, the Civil War Was About Slavery

(Letters)

15 May 2017

Comrades

While we give credit for the emancipation proclamation, it must be noted that the American civil war was not fought over slavery.

Marx’s conclusion was that capitalist wars are fought over markets and sources of raw material. Cotton was needed for the budding textile industry in New England. It is doubtful that the capitalists would have financed a war just over slavery.

It would be interesting to see how Marx’s conclusion fits into the 21st century.

Best wishes
E.T.

WV replies: It takes either willful ignorance or malice to obscure the fact that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were unequivocal supporters of the North against the South in the U.S. Civil War of 1861-65, precisely because the war was fought over slavery! Wittingly or not, E.T. echoes the racists and bourgeois scholars who have long sought to rewrite the history of the war by denying that the Confederacy was fighting in defense of the barbaric institution of black chattel slavery. This lie stems from the post-war myth of the “Lost Cause,” which was concocted in order to disappear the horrors of slavery and facilitate “reconciliation” between the North and South.

Marx wrote extensively about the Civil War, actively rallying workers internationally to the side of the Union Army. He underscored early on that “events themselves drive to the promulgation of the decisive slogan—emancipation of the slaves” (“The Civil War in the United States” [1861]). From its origins, the U.S. was increasingly rent by two distinct socioeconomic systems—slavery in the South and capitalist wage labor in the North. As Marx explained in the same article:

“The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other.”

Marx understood that the defeat of the South and abolition of slavery represented a victory for the workers as well as the slaves. Writing after the war in the first volume of Capital (1867), he noted: “In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.”

At the time of the Civil War, everyone knew that the war was about slavery. That’s why abolitionists fought to have the Northern Army open its ranks to black soldiers. That’s why 200,000 black men joined the Union Army and Navy, helping to turn the tide of the war. It’s also why multitudes of slaves fled the plantations to U.S. Army lines throughout the South, with many of them later becoming soldiers themselves. They all recognized that what was at stake was black freedom. For its part, the Confederacy never denied the nature of the war. The 1861 declaration of secession by Mississippi baldly stated, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery.”

It also quickly became clear to President Abraham Lincoln and Union general Ulysses S. Grant that slavery had to be smashed. Asked in 1878 by German chancellor Otto von Bismarck whether saving the Union had been more important than eliminating slavery, Grant replied: “In the beginning, yes, but as soon as slavery fired upon the flag it was felt, we all felt, even those who did not object to slaves, that slavery must be destroyed. We felt that it was a stain on the Union that men should be bought and sold like cattle.” Grant went on to explain: “We were fighting an enemy with whom we could not make a peace. We had to destroy him. No convention, no treaty was possible—only destruction” (quoted in Joan Waugh, U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth [2009]).

The Civil War was the Second American Revolution, a bourgeois revolution. It was the last progressive act of the U.S. capitalists, who subsequently betrayed the promise of black freedom and reconciled with the former slaveowners in order to prop up the capitalist profit system. As we wrote in “The Civil War Smashed Slavery!” (WV No. 1111, 5 May), the article to which E.T. objects, the fight for black equality and integration demands “the sweeping away of the capitalist order through proletarian revolution, a third American revolution in which black workers are slated to play a leading role.” Finish the Civil War! For black liberation through socialist revolution!