I am in the midst of teaching a four part course through conference calls, Highlights in U.S. History from a Maxist Persepctive suggested by the education collective of the CPUSA. So far, We have had two very interesting sessions on the American Revolution as a Revolutionary War and the Civil War as a revolutionary war. I have also sent to the students video clips highlighting major points and suggested readings. I thought I would begin to share what we have been doing with our readers. Below is the second part of this four part course, The Civil War as a Social Revolutionary War
Unfortunately, the video clips do not seem to be going through in this format. I will send them separately
Norman Markowitz
The Civil War as a Social Revolutionary War
Last week we looked at the American Revolution as a revolutionary process,
beginning in he1760s and ending nearly 60 years later. There were three
sectors of the ruling class, all capitalist in 1820, merchant capitalists, landowning
gentry and large slaveholders, and the bankers who financed their activities.
They would be joined by a fourth, manufacturers, industrialist later called.
The slaveholders were the most backward and reactionary group, but they
wielded great political power, over the presidency, the congress, and the Courts.
As industrial capitalism developed, the slaveholders became a fetter, a chain, as Marx would argue, on its development; they used their power to retard national investment in transportation especially, to develop a large internal market since they were producing goods for export. They actively opposed land reform policies to advance Western settlement and to expand land ownership in their states, because this would benefit the masses in the North and the non slaveholding whites of the South, who were 80 percent of the white population of t he South. They actively opposed the free school movement and lagged far behind in all categories of education, not only for the slaves, who were mostly completely illiterate, but for the overwhelming majority of the white population, whose literacy and time of schooling was far behind the Northern white population. They didn’t need an educated work force or a work force of consumers to buy their products since they owned their work force, and fed and clothed them at a subsistence level to keep them alive and working. The credit system that they had through New York banking houses and British finance was not geared to the accumulation of either foreign or domestic investment capital for development, because development was something that they opposed. Sending their sons to Northern private colleges like Princeton, importing luxury goods from England and Europe, even with their debts, the large plantation owners came to see themselves like 17th century English aristocrats, cavaliers.
The system though as it became more lucrative, became more brutal. Always fearful of slave rebellions, a control system after 1831, when the Nat Turner rebellion,, the greatest of took place, came into existence with vigilante slave patrols, spies and informers among the slaves on the large plantations, the ruthless suppression of anti-slavery literature, meetings, statements, and threats of secession in the face of abolitionist activities and also attempts in the free states to advance legislation that was against their class interests.
As universal suffrage advanced in the North and in national elections(it was like everything else retarded in the slave states) the slave holders found it convenient to identify themselves with “democracy” and gained their greatest influence in the party founded by the slaveholder president Andrew Jackson in 1836, the Democratic Party, which Jackson saw as standing on two pillars a “democracy based on the common man(whom Jackson flattered while opposing public education, land reform, infrastructure development and virtually every other thing that really benefitted the common man) and, as Jackson sad the white man’s country, a democracy based on exclusion and territorial expansion.
Both political parties of the time supported what I would call the political economy of the first Republic before the civil war, where, whatever their differences, the slave-owners, landlords, and merchant capitalists co-existed with each other and supported each other, although most of the supporters of anti-slavery, and various other peoples movements in defense of democracy where much more likely to be found in the Whig party, just as today both parties support a larger capitalist system which has become more and more parasitic, but most of the people who support the regulation of capital, the restoration of progressive taxation, the establishment of legislation to strengthen the labor movement and protect workers, the restoration of social welfare legislation and the creation of new legislation to protect the people are in the Democratic party.
Jackson was hugely popular in spite of his disastrous policies. Jackson and his successors sought to sustain the first Republic by Westward expansion, in the form of conquest—Indian removal” which expelled most of all the native peoples of the deep South to make way for the new large plantations, attempts t o suppress the abolitionist movement in the North by blocking abolitionist petitions in Congress and encouraging violence against abolitionist papers and society. By the 1840s, as industrial capitalist development began to speed up and there was great economic and social instability in the country, including the establishment of many communities, much more so than in Europe which Marx and Engels would call Utopian Socialist Communities, Manifest Destiny became of war of aggression to conquer much of the Northern half of the Republic of Mexico, “annex” the slaveholder Republic of Texas, which had been established by American settlers, especially the Jackson protégée Sam Houston, and gain control of California and its port of San Francisco, the jewel in the ‘crown of Manifest Destiny. Another Jackson protégée, James K. Polk, implemented this policy after his election to the Presidency in 1844, launching a war of conquest against Mexico after the Mexican government refused to sell California.
Everyone would get a piece of the action. The slaveholders would get Texas and the possibility of expanding their system into the South West. Merchant capital would get San Francisco as a great port to the trade of Asia and the Pacific. The Republic would stretch from sea to Shining Sea and the Mississippi Valley would become the “Valley of Democracy,” where the slave ships of the internal slave trade would co-exist with t he commercial ships and Cities like St. Louis grow to foster a greatly expanded Republic to be settled by the “Anglo Saxon race,” a safeguard against abolitionism, “agrarianism,” even a new movement socialism, and of course all the cold European powers.
But the victory in the Mexican War sounded the death knell of the old Republic, bringing on the crisis of the 1805s and 1860s, which would produce a new mass party, a revolutionary civil war that would be the bloodiest war ever fought in North America, the destruction of the slaveholders as a class within the larger capitalist class, and essentially a new Republic advancing industrial capitalism.
How did this happen. Let’s look at the abolitionists
Against the background of “Jackson Ian Master Race Democracy,” in the 1830s, an abolitionist movement grew, as the vanguard of a larger anti-slavery movement, rejecting the racist “moderate colonizationists as they were called, who sought compensating the slaveholders and colonizing the slaves back to Africa. Free Blacks and escaped slaves played an important role in this movement from the beginning along with activist women who were denied citizenship rights in the Republic, what I would call revolutionary intellectuals like William Lloyd Garrison, circuit riding radical protestant ministers, even some wealthy merchant capitalists like Lewis Tappan, Gerrit Smith, and others
In the 1830s, mobs often directed by the local rich in the Middle West and the North East launched riots and lynching against abolitionists, but the movement grew, established a Liberty Party in 1840 and used the political symbols of the time brilliantly. A bell in Philadelphia with a crack in it was turned by abolitionist propagandists into the Liberty Bell, the crack symbolizing slavery’s deformation of Liberty. All established forces denounced the abolitionists, and it is true that in 1844, there campaign took away votes from Henry Clay and directly helped to elect Polk by far the greater of the two evils.
But the Liberty party was a beginning. Abolitionists mobilized against the Mexican war, which they denounced as a slaveholders war, a war to expand slavery. As such they began to work within a larger anti-slavery movement around the slogan and policy of free soil, bringing into Congress the “Wilmot Proviso,” which would bar slavery from any territory taken from Mexico. When the slaveholders, in exchange for permitting California to enter the union as a free state, exacted from leaders of both parties a “fugitive slave law” a monstrous law, abolitionists greatly expanded an underground railroad to aid escaped slaves in fleeing to Canada, invoked the states’ rights doctrine to fight the fugitive slave law, and black and white abolitionists joined in armed attacks to free captured slaves(and free Blacks) before they could be forced back into or for the first time in slavery, This agitation became a foundation for a broad anti-slavery coalition, a majority coalition that turned its back on the Whig party, whose compromises and betrayals were leading the progressive forces within it to gain political independence.
The abolitionists also developed a large agitational press and publications, publishing the narratives of escaped slaves, famously the narrative of Solomon Northrup, a free black captured by slave catchers and forced into slavery until he was finally able to free himself.. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the novel by the abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, sister of the prominent Brooklyn Minister and abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, a powerful anti-slavery novel, reached a large national audience and became in the 1850s
Karl Marx was later to see that the slaveholders, threatened by the growth of industry in the free states, were fighting to control the West, to expand their capital, their system, into the conquered territories of the Mexican war and the previously purchased territories of the Louisiana Purchase, demanding more and more in the form of concessions from their traditional allies. By the way, in the 1850s, the first denunciations of socialism were launched in the Congress by slave state politicians, who connected it with “agrarianism,” and abolitionism.
For years the slaveholders had obstructed the development of a transcontinental railroad which with the new territories now became essential. The representatives of the slave states pushed for as Southern route. Steven Douglas, the powerful Illinois Senator, representing merchant and landed real estate interests in the state and particularly the city of Chicago, then a very minor city, was the champion of a Northern with Chicago as its hub. This Northern route would make Douglas’s backers millions in a great Chicago land boom and make Chicago they believed a major commercial city to rival St. Louis(in the aftermath of the war though, Chicago would become the great industrial city of the Mississippi Valley). To close on this deal, Douglass over a “compromise,” one that would permit slavery into the new territories that would be along the route, the Kansas Nebraska territory, if the settlers voted for it. This was democracy, people’s sovereignty Douglas said, Abolitionists mobilized against these policies throughout the Free states where there was mass opposition to them. Abolitionists in Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states, participated in the founding of organizations with manufacturers, various other reformers from various movements, anti-slavery politicians from the collapsed Whig Party to found the Republican Party, a party which embodied a whole series of these reform movements, economic policies in terms of banking, trade, that would advance industrial capitalism by “protecting: home industrial and subsidizing in a variety of ways its development and actively rejecting any expansion of slavery.
In competition with both the Democrats and the anti-immigration, anti-Catholic American party (whose enemies called them no nothings) ran second
However, the new president, Buchanan, a craven appeaser of the slaveholders who saw abolitionists as his great enemy, actively supported the attempt by pro slavery elements to use force and violence in the Kansas territory to force a pro slavery constitution onto the people of the territory. Abolitionist societies fought back, raising funds to provide arms for the anti-slavery settlers, and it is through this armed struggle, a dress rehearsal in many ways for the later civil war, that John Brown, gained great fame as a leader of the armed struggle among abolitionists. The slaveholder forces were defeated in Kansas, but the Supreme Court in 1857, gave them their greatest judicial victory in the Dred Scott Case, a test Case brought by abolitionists to end all compromises by barring slavery in all territories. Instead, the court ruled that slavery in principle was legal in all territories, possibility legal in all states, and for good measure, declared that the “founding fathers” never intended any Black to be a citizen of the United States. This was even too much for the pro slavery appeasers in the Democratic Party like Douglas, but not for President Buchanan, who did not oppose the decision
But the Republican Party ran against it through the country, and, in the midst of a mini depression used it to win a majority in Congress. Intensifying slaveholder fears. The slaveholders now demanded enforcement of the Dred Scott Decision, the fugitive slave law, their property rights through the Republic/ In the free states, abolitionist and anti-slavery revolution mounted so much so that John Brown received pledges of support from leading abolitionists to fund his plan to launch a guerrilla war against slavery first in Virginia, to seize arms from the federal arsenal at Harpers ferry, raid plantations and free slaves, establish a mountain base area and expand the attacks, freeing and arming more and more slaves and bringing about a general slave rebellion. While the Harpers Ferry Raid failed and Brown was hanged, an interesting thing happened. The Democrats attempt to link the Republicans to the raid and launch a new Red Scare, failed. Moderate anti-slavery Republicans like Abraham Lincoln developed the party line that they agreed with Brown’s antislavery ideals but rejected his methods.
Now came the great revolutionary crisis, where the old Republic could no longer contain the new revolutionary forces and the counter revolutionary demands of the slaveholders and burst asunder. The slaveholders demanded in the Democratic party complete acceptance of the Dred Scott decision and then bolted, forming a dissident Southern Democratic Party that nominated the Vice President, John Breckinridge, as the Northern Democrats nominated Douglas. Desperately centrist forces sought to create a union party that would concede a great deal to the slaveholders, but lied by a Virginian John Bell would be the semblance of a national party. In 1860 a Republican had the same freedom in the South that a Communist would have in 1960
Lincoln’s victory convinced the slaveholders to use their political power to secede, which they did. Within the system of the first Republic, there were desperate attempts to appease the slaveholders, including inside Lincoln’s cabinet, from those who previously were considered to be to the Left of Lincoln, but he held his ground, and led the secessionists to fire the first shot at Fort Sumter. As Dubois would write, when Edmund Ruffin, old and half mad defender of slavery and the slave power fired that shot, he freed the slaves, are rather began the process of emancipation.
The war as a revolutionary war.
Now the abolitionists inside the Republican Party, a minority but with real power, acted. Thaddeus Stevens in the House and Charles Sumner in the Senate fought to define the war as a war in which the preservation of the union demanded the abolition of slavery. These forces, without Lincoln’s support of opposition, grew stronger as the war continued. The Confederates failure to either mobilize the slaves for economic purposes or use them for military purposes doomed them in the long run, as did their anti-industrial policies. Dubois wrote of the decisive role of the million slaves in sabotaging the confederate economy and in using the war to escape into the country side as the control system declined. Lincoln for military purposes instituted the Emancipation Proclamation and pulled back from emancipation carried forward by the military, but as the war went into its final stages the 13th amendment abolishing slavery, advanced by abolitionists and considered impossible even in 1860, became a reality. Nearly 200,000 free blacks and escaped slaves were brought into the union army and played a really important role in the final campaigns against Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, in the Eastern Theater, even though they fought in segregated units and were often used as cannon fodder by Grant and his commanders...
Faced with defeat the confederates and their allies in the North launched a massive hysterical racist ideological attack on the Lincoln administration. The term Miscegenation was invented to explain what would happen in the South and the Country if the slaves were freed. The term “Black Republican was used as an epithet. Through the nation. The Democrats nominated George McClellan, the general whom Lincoln cashiered and who had acted to block any freeing of slaves in Liberated Areas with a platform that specifically called for peace without the Emancipation proclamation
In Europe, the fledging labor and socialist movements, the first international at London whose general secretary of course was Karl Marx, railed to the side e of the union, while various bourgeois politicians, including English opponents of Slavery refused to do so. The British and French Empires particularly could profit from a confederate victory. The Republicans, to use the language of the later Communist movement, “hid the face of the party,” ran as the National Union Party, and Lincoln chose as his running mate, a pro union Democrat from the confederate state of Tennessee, Andrew Johnson, who had represented non slaveholding poor whites, but whose hostility to the slaveholders was more envy than anything else and whose racist hatred of the slaves was great. This was the situation when Richmond fell, the Confederate state collapsed, Lincoln was assassinate in a plot by racist confederate sympathizers to murder him and other leaders of the government, and the confederate armies surrendered in the Spring of 1865
What had the war produced? In essence a sweeping victory for the forces of industrial capitalism symbolized by a National Banking Act, a Protective tariff, the Homestead Act establishing the land reform policy that was long advocated, a Pacific Railway Act, making railroad construction and the transcontinental railroad a reality, and a new class of men who would within two decades be called Robber Barons, John D, Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Leland Stanford, and others who became the great victors of the war, not only gaining wealth through war contracts but being in position strategically to use the new political power structure in development to create in the twenty five years which followed the civil war, the modern corporation, trusts, holding companies, what their enemies called monopolies, as the U.S surpassed Britain by 1890 to become the leading industrial nation of the world.
For a short time, the interests of these industrial capitalists coincided with the interests of the now powerful abolitionist radical Republicans. Thad Stevens seized upon this to oppose Johnson’s policy of permitting the former slave states back into the union once they had on paper ratified the 13th amendment, fought to enact civil rights legislation and, faced with vetoes by Johnson, a Constitutional Amendment to establish federal supremacy over the states and also to prevent the states from taking away the rights of the former slaves, not yet citizens, so they were referred to as persons in the amendment. Stevens and his fellow radical Republicans pointed t o the enormous loss of life and devastation that the war had produced, all of which would be in vain if the former slaveholders would be permitted to use the so-called “Black Codes” to tie the former slaves to their plantations and regain their power in the Congress. Johnson campaigned against the amendment, comparing the Radical Republicans to the Jacobins in the French Revolution and hurling vile racist slurs at them, using the N word widely, saying of Frederick Douglass that like any other N, he would slit the throat of a white man
Nationalism triumphed over racism and radical Republicans were able to establish what was in effect what for a short time was a revolutionary dictatorship in the South, dividing the slave states into military districts, not permitting the states to return to the union until they had established new state constitutions ratifying the 13th and 14th amendments, enfranchising hundreds of thousands of former slaves and disenfranchising nearly 200,000 whites who had been part of the slave holder confederate power structure. However, Stevens attempt to rally support for a revolutionary policy of land reform, one that would could it have been enacted, changed American history, his call to redistribute millions of acres of land from the large plantations of the deep south, rich productive land, to the former slaves who had worked the land, was defeated decisively. Stevens died in 1868. In despair, as he saw the national Republican party moving away from his abolitionist principles. In the South, radical Republican governments, supported by Blacks and in some areas poor whites and also by urban capitalist elements that advocated Southern industrial development, carried out important reforms in education, taxation, etc, but faced a relentless war launched by the KKK, which functioned as a guerilla terrorist army to terrorize former slaves, whites who were seen as collaborators with the Yankee army, and the Democratic Party, which rallied around white Supremacy.
In the Grant administration, factional struggles within the Republican party, the emergence of what in Communist terms might be called a generation of careerists and opportunists, living off the issues of the war but selling out the principles on which the party had been founded, and most all, the effects of rapid industrialization that led the industrial capitalists to fear the Northern workers much more than the Southern slaveholders, to in effect consolidate their power through the National Republican party, their first party, by yielding to the white Supremacists of the South the “home rule,” they were calling for, withdrawing federal troops, and also withdrawing federal support for the implementation of the civil rights acts which had been passed and for the 14th amendment. The presidential election of 1876 was the occasion in which these deals, called the Great Betrayal by the liberal Southern historian, C Van Woodward, were carried forward. And, the soldiers withdrawn from the last states under occupation, Florida,, Louisiana, and South Carolina in 1877 were in a matter of months used to suppress railroad workers in the first national strike in U.S. history, the great railroad strike of 1877, in which the word Communist in its negative sense, deriving from the Paris Commune was used widely against America Workers.
Let me conclude with some final points. Was the Civil War a revolutionary social war? Yes, industrial capitalism had triumphed and within a generation would change the face of t he country as a factory system, large industrial cities, a greatly expanded population through mass immigration, an industrial urban proletariat, all came into existence. You might call this a second Republic, one that a time traveler from 1840 for example would not recognize
The former slave states lost their power in the Republic but retained their power over the former slaves and the poor whites, the former losing the civil rights that they had won and being forced into a dehumanizing system of segregation which the federal government and its courts tolerated. Now, the South became something like a colonial region, exporting raw materials to the North and also cheap labor, largely poor white but in the 2oth century black, an a semi feudal system of sharecropping would in effect keep millions, much more Black then white, tied to the land, and in debt and extreme forms of poverty.
And just as the slave power functioned as a huge weight, holding back all peoples movements in the United States, the “solid South of cotton, mining, mass illiteracy and poverty, served to undermine all peoples and labor struggles for nearly another century and today the neo white Supremacy solid South provides the most reactionary elements of the Republican party with the equivalent of a large handicap in golf, that is, they start with these states in the pocket in presidential and congressional elections,
