The North American Civil War
by Karl Marx
, London, October 20, 1861 , Die Presse No. 293, October
For months the leading weekly and daily papers of the London press
have been reiterating the same litany on the American Civil War.
While they insult the free states of the North, they anxiously defend
themselves against the suspicion of sympathising with the slave states
of the South. In fact, they continually write two articles: one article,
in which they attack the North, and another article, in which they excuse
their attacks on the North.
In essence the extenuating arguments read: The war between the North
and South is a tariff war. The war is, further, not for any principle,
does not touch the question of slavery and in fact turns on Northern lust
for sovereignty. Finally, even if justice is on the side of the North ,
does it not remain a vain endeavour to want to subjugate eight million
Anglo-Saxons by force! Would not separation of the South release the North
from all connection with Negro slavery and ensure for it, with its twenty
million inhabitants and its vast territory, a higher, hitherto scarcely
dreamt-of, development? Accordingly, must not the North welcome secession
as a happy event, instead of wanting to overrule it by a bloody and futile
Point by point we will probe the plea of the English press.
The war between North and South -- so runs the first excuse -- is a
mere tariff war, a war between a protectionist system and a free trade
system, and Britain naturally stands on the side of free trade. Shall
the slave-owner enjoy the fruits of slave labour in their entirety or shall
he be cheated of a portion of these by the protectionists of the North?
That is the question which is at issue in this war. It was reserved for
The Times to make this brilliant discovery. The Economist, The Examiner,
The Saturday Review and tutti quanti expounded the theme further. It is
characteristic of this discovery that it was made, not in Charleston, but
in London. Naturally, in America everyone knew that from 1846 to 1861 a
free trade system prevailed, and that Representative Morrill carried his
protectionist tariff through Congress only in 1861, after the rebellion
had already broken out. Secession, therefore, did not take place because
the Morrill tariff had gone through Congress, but, at most, the Morrill
tariff went through Congress because secession had taken place. When South
Carolina had its first attack of secession in 1831, the protectionist tariff
of 1828 served it, to be sure, as a pretext, but only as a pretext, as
is known from a statement of General Jackson. This time, however, the old
pretext has in fact not been repeated. In the Secession Congress at Montgomery
all reference to the tariff question was avoided, because the cultivation
of sugar in Louisiana, one of the most influential Southern states, depends
entirely on protection.
But, the London press pleads further, the war of the United States is
nothing but a war for the forcible maintenance of the Union. The Yankees
cannot make up their minds to strike fifteen stars from their standard.
They want to cut a colossal figure on the world stage. Yes, it would be
different if the war was waged for the abolition of slavery! The question
of slavery, however, as The Saturday Review categorically declares among
other things, has absolutely nothing to do with this war.
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.
On April 11 (1861) their General Beauregard had learnt in a meeting with
Major Anderson, the commander of Fort Sumter, that the fort was only
supplied with provisions for three days more and accordingly must be peacefully
surrendered after this period. In order to forestall this peaceful surrender,
the secessionists opened the bombardment early on the following morning
(April 12), which brought about the fall of the fort in a few hours. News
of this had hardly been telegraphed to Montgomery, the seat of the Secession
Congress, when War Minister Walker publicly declared in the name of
the new Confederacy: No man can say where the war opened today will end.
At the same time he prophesied that before the first of May the flag
of the Southern Confederacy will wave from the dome of the old Capitol
in Washington and within a short time perhaps also from the Faneuil
Hall in Boston. Only now ensued the proclamation in which Lincoln called
for 75,000 men to defend the Union. The bombardment of Fort Sumter cut
off the only possible constitutional way out, namely the convocation of
a general convention of the American people, as Lincoln had proposed in
his inaugural address. For Lincoln there now remained only the choice of
fleeing from Washington, evacuating Maryland and Delaware and surrendering
Kentucky, Missouri and Virginia, or of answering war with war.
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?
Under the presidency of Buchanan the sway that the South had gradually
usurped over the Union through its alliance with the Northern Democrats
attained its zenith. The last Continental Congress of 1787 and the first
Constitutional Congress of 1789 -90 had legally excluded slavery from all
Territories of the republic north-west of the Ohio. (Territories, as is
known, is the name given to the colonies lying within the United States
itself which have not yet attained the level of population constitutionally
prescribed for the formation of autonomous states.) The so-called Missouri
Compromise (1820), in consequence of which Missouri became one of the
States of the Union as a slave state, excluded slavery from every remaining
Territory north of 36 degrees latitude and west of the Missouri.
By this compromise the area of slavery was advanced several degrees of
longitude, whilst, on the other hand, a geographical boundary-line to its
future spread seemed quite definitely drawn. This geographical barrier,
in its turn, was thrown down in 1854 by the so-called Kansas-Nebraska
Bill, the initiator of which was Stephen A. Douglas, then leader of
the Northern Democrats. The Bill, which passed both Houses of Congress,
repealed the Missouri Compromise, placed slavery and freedom on the same
footing, commanded the Union government to treat them both with equal indifference
and left it to the sovereignty of the people, that is, the majority of
the settlers, to decide whether or not slavery was to be introduced in
a Territory. Thus, for the first time in the history of the United States,
every geographical and legal limit to the extension of slavery in the Territories
was removed. Under this new legislation the hitherto free Territory of
New Mexico, a Territory five times as large as the State of New York, was
transformed into a slave Territory, and the area of slavery was extended
from the border of the Mexican Republic to 38 degrees north latitude. In
1859 New Mexico received a slave code that vies with the statute-books
of Texas and Alabama in barbarity. Nevertheless, as the census of 1860
proves, among some hundred thousand inhabitants New Mexico does not yet
count half a hundred slaves. It had therefore sufficed for the South to
send some adventurers with a few slaves over the border, and then with
the help of the central government in Washington and of its officials and
contractors in New Mexico to drum together a sham popular representation
to impose slavery and with it the rule of the slaveholders on the Territory.
However, this convenient method did not prove applicable in other Territories.
The South accordingly went a step further and appealed from Congress to
the Supreme Court of the United States. This Court, which numbers nine
judges, five of whom belong to the South, had long been the most willing
tool of the slaveholders. It decided in 1857, in the notorious Dred Scott
case, that every American citizen possesses the right to take with him
into any territory any property recognized by the Constitution. The Constitution,
it maintained, recognises slaves as property and obliges the Union government
to protect this property. Consequently, on the basis of the Constitution,
slaves could be forced to labour in the Territories by their owners, and
so every individual slaveholder was entitled to introduce slavery into
hitherto free Territories against the will of the majority of the settlers.
The right to exclude slavery was taken from the Territorial legislatures
and the duty to protect pioneers of the slave system was imposed on Congress
and the Union government.
If the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had extended the geographical boundary-line
of slavery in the Territories, if the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854 had
erased every geographical boundary-line and set up a political barrier
instead, the will of the majority of the settlers, now the Supreme Court
of the United States, by its decision of 1857, tore down even this political
barrier and transformed all the Territories of the republic, present and
future, from nurseries of free states into nurseries of slavery.
At the same time, under Buchanan's government the severer law on the
surrendering of fugitive slaves enacted in 1850 was ruthlessly carried
out in the states of the North. To play the part of slave-catchers for
the Southern slaveholders appeared to be the constitutional calling of
the North. On the other hand, in order to hinder as far as possible the
colonisation of the Territories by free settlers, the slaveholders' party
frustrated all the so-called free-soil measures, i.e., measures which were
to secure for the settlers a definite amount of uncultivated state land
free of charge.
In the foreign, as in the domestic, policy of the United States, the
interest of the slaveholders served as the guiding star. Buchanan had in
fact bought the office of President through the issue of the Ostend Manifesto,
in which the acquisition of Cuba, whether by purchase or by force of arms,
was proclaimed as the great task of national policy. Under his government
northern Mexico was already divided among American land speculators, who
impatiently awaited the signal to fall on Chihuahua, Coahuila and Sonora.
The unceasing piratical expeditions of the filibusters against the states
of Central America were directed no less from the White House at Washington.
In the closest connection with this foreign policy, whose manifest purpose
was conquest of new territory for the spread of slavery and of the slaveholders'
rule, stood the reopening of the slave trade, secretly supported by the
Union government. Stephen A. Douglas himself declared in the American
Senate on August 20, 1859: During the last year more Negroes have been
imported from Africa than ever before in any single year, even at the time
when the slave trade was still legal. The number of slaves imported in
the last year totalled fifteen thousand.
Armed spreading of slavery abroad was the avowed aim of national policy;
the Union had in fact become the slave of the three hundred thousand slaveholders
who held sway over the South. A series of compromises, which the South
owed to its alliance with the Northern Democrats, had led to this result.
On this alliance all the attempts, periodically repeated since 1817, to
resist the ever increasing encroachments of the slaveholders had hitherto
come to grief. At length there came a turning point.
For hardly had the Kansas-Nebraska Bill gone through, which wiped out
the geographical boundary-line of slavery and made its introduction into
new Territories subject to the will of the majority of the settlers, when
armed emissaries of the slaveholders, border rabble from Missouri and
Arkansas, with bowie-knife in one hand and revolver in the other,
fell upon Kansas and sought by the most unheard-of atrocities to dislodge
its settlers from the Territory colonised by them. These raids were supported
by the central government in Washington. Hence a tremendous reaction. Throughout
the North, but particularly in the North-west, a relief organisation was
formed to support Kansas with men, arms and money. Out of this relief organisation
arose the Republican Party, which therefore owes its origin to the struggle
for Kansas. After the attempt to transform Kansas into a slave Territory
by force of arms had failed, the South sought to achieve the same result
by political intrigues. Buchanan's government, in particular, exerted its
utmost efforts to have Kansas included in the States of the Union as a
slave state with a slave constitution imposed on it. Hence renewed struggle,
this time mainly conducted in Congress at Washington. Even Stephen A.
Douglas, the chief of the Northern Democrats, now (1857 - 58) entered the
lists against the government and his allies of the South, because imposition
of a slave constitution would have been contrary to the principle of sovereignty
of the settlers passed in the Nebraska Bill of 1854. Douglas, Senator for
Illinois, a North-western state, would naturally have lost all his influence
if he had wanted to concede to the South the right to steal by force of
arms or through acts of Congress Territories colonised by the North. As
the struggle for Kansas, therefore, called the Republican Party into being,
it at the same time occasioned the first split within the Democratic Party
The Republican Party put forward its first platform for the presidential
election in 1856. Although its candidate, John Fremont, was not victorious,
the huge number of votes cast for him at any rate proved the rapid growth
of the Party, particularly in the North-west. At their second National
Convention for the presidential election (May 17, 1860), the Republicans
again put forward their platform of 1856, only enriched by some additions.
Its principal contents were the following: Not a foot of fresh territory
is further conceded to slavery. The filibustering policy abroad must cease.
The reopening of the slave trade is stigmatised. Finally, free-soil laws
are to be enacted for the furtherance of free colonisation.
The vitally important point in this platform was that not a foot of
fresh terrain was conceded to slavery; rather it was to remain once and
for all confined with the boundaries of the states where it already legally
existed. Slavery was thus to be formally interned; but continual expansion
of territory and continual spread of slavery beyond its old limits is a
law of life for the slave states of the Union.
The cultivation of the southern export articles, cotton, tobacco, sugar
, etc., carried on by slaves, is only remunerative as long as it is conducted
with large gangs of slaves, on a mass scale and on wide expanses of a naturally
fertile soil, which requires only simple labour. Intensive cultivation,
which depends less on fertility of the soil than on investment of capital,
intelligence and energy of labour, is contrary to the nature of slavery.
Hence the rapid transformation of states like Maryland and Virginia, which
formerly employed slaves on the production of export articles, into states
which raise slaves to export them into the deep South. Even in South Carolina,
where the slaves form four-sevenths of the population, the cultivation
of cotton has been almost completely stationary for years due to the exhaustion
of the soil. Indeed, by force of circumstances South Carolina has already
been transformed in part into a slave-raising state, since it already sells
slaves to the sum of four million dollars yearly to the states of the extreme
South and South-west. As soon as this point is reached, the acquisition
of new Territories becomes necessary, so that one section of the slaveholders
with their slaves may occupy new fertile lands and that a new market for
slave-raising, therefore for the sale of slaves, may be created for the
remaining section. It is, for example, indubitable that without the acquisition
of Louisiana, Missouri and Arkansas by the United States, slavery in Virginia
and Maryland would have been wiped out long ago. In the Secessionist Congress
at Montgomery, Senator Toombs, one of the spokesmen of the South, strikingly
formulated the economic law that commands the constant expansion of the
territory of slavery. "In fifteen years," said he, "without a great increase
in slave territory, either the slaves must be permitted to flee from the
whites, or the whites must flee from the slaves."
As is known, the representation of the individual states in the Congress
House of Representatives depends on the size of their respective populations.
As the populations of the free states grow far more quickly than those
of the slave states, the number of Northern Representatives was bound to
outstrip that of the Southern very rapidly. The real seat of the political
power of the South is accordingly transferred more and more to the American
Senate, where every state, whether its population is great or small, is
represented by two Senators. In order to assert its influence in the Senate
and, through the Senate, its hegemony over the United States, the South
therefore required a continual formation of new slave states. This, however,
was only possible through conquest of foreign lands, as in the case of
Texas, or through the transformation of the Territories belonging to the
United States first into slave Territories and later into slave states,
as in the case of Missouri, Arkansas, etc. John Calhoun, whom the slaveholders
admire as their statesman par excellence, stated as early as February 19,
1847, in the Senate, that the Senate alone placed a balance of power in
the hands of the South, that extension of the slave territory was necessary
to preserve this equilibrium between South and North in the Senate, and
that the attempts of the South at the creation of new slave states by force
were accordingly justified.
Finally, the number of actual slaveholders in the South of the Union
does not amount to more than three hundred thousand, a narrow oligarchy
that is confronted with many millions of so-called poor whites, whose numbers
have been constantly growing through concentration of landed property and
whose condition is only to be compared with that of the Roman plebeians
in the period of Rome's extreme decline. Only by acquisition and the prospect
of acquisition of new Territories, as well as by filibustering expeditions,
is it possible to square the interests of these poor whites with those
of the slaveholders, to give their restless thirst for action a harmless
direction and to tame them with the prospect of one day becoming slaveholders
A strict confinement of slavery within its old terrain, therefore, was
bound according to economic law to lead to its gradual effacement, in the
political sphere to annihilate the hegemony that the slave states exercised
through the Senate, and finally to expose the slaveholding oligarchy within
its own states to threatening perils from the poor whites. In accordance
with the principle that any further extension of slave Territories was
to be prohibited by law, the Republicans therefore attacked the rule of
the slaveholders at its root. The Republican election victory was accordingly
bound to lead to open struggle between North and South. And this election
victory, as already mentioned, was itself conditioned by the split in the
The Kansas struggle had already caused a split between the slaveholders'
party and the Democrats of the North allied to it. With the presidential
election of 1860, the same strife now broke out again in a more general
form. The Democrats of the North, with Douglas as their candidate, made
the introduction of slavery into Territories dependent on the will of the
majority of the settlers. The slaveholders' party, with Breckinridge as
their candidate, maintained that the Constitution of the United States,
as the Supreme Court had also declared, brought slavery legally in its
train; in and of itself slavery was already legal in all Territories and
required no special naturalisation. Whilst, therefore, the Republicans
prohibited any extension of slave Territories, the Southern party laid
claim to all Territories of the republic as legally warranted domains.
What they had attempted by way of example with regard to Kansas, to force
slavery on a Territory through the central government against the will
of the settlers themselves, they now set up as law for all the Territories
of the Union. Such a concession lay beyond the power of the Democratic
leaders and would only have occasioned the desertion of their army to the
Republican camp. On the other hand, Douglas's settlers' sovereignty could
not satisfy the slaveholders' party. What it wanted to effect had to be
effected within the next four years under the new President, could only
be effected by the resources of the central government and brooked no further
delay. It did not escape the slaveholders that a new power had arisen,
the North-west, whose population, having almost doubled between 1850 and
1860, was already pretty well equal to the white population of the slave
states -- a power that was not inclined either by tradition, temperament
or mode of life to let itself be dragged from compromise to compromise
in the manner of the old North-eastern states. The Union was still of value
to the South only so far as it handed over Federal power to it as a means
of carrying out the slave policy. If not, then it was better to make the
break now than to look on at the development of the Republican Party and
the upsurge of the North-west for another four years and begin the struggle
under more unfavourable conditions. The slaveholders' party therefore played
va banque. When the Democrats of the North declined to go on playing the
part of the poor whites of the South, the South secured Lincoln's victory
by splitting the vote, and then took this victory as a pretext for drawing
the sword from the scabbard.
The whole movement was and is based, as one sees, on the slave question.
Not in the sense of whether the slaves within the existing slave states
should be emancipated outright or not, but whether the twenty million free
men of the North should submit any longer to an oligarchy of three hundred
thousand slaveholders; whether the vast Territories of the republic should
be nurseries for free states or for slavery; finally, whether the national
policy of the Union should take armed spreading of slavery in Mexico, Central
and South America as its device.
In another article we will probe the assertion of the London press that
the North must sanction secession as the most favourable and only possible
solution of the conflict.
Remark: As you can see in the last sentence this was supposed to be continued a month later, but instead Marx reacted on a politic conflict between the USA
and wrote about The Trent Case
and later "The Anglo-American Conflict",the "Controversy Over the Trent Case", "Progress of Feelings in England", "The Crisis Over the Slavery Issue", "News From America", "The Civil War in the United States" and "The Dismissal of Frémont"