Given the reputation of America today as a bulwark of reaction and imperialism, it may surprise many to know that Marx and Engels were great supporters of the United States in their own day. For them, the United States was not a great power opposed to the interests of the various peoples worldwide as today, but it represented capitalism in its most pure and its most historically progressive form. America did not have any feudal history or any aristocratic remnants, and as such was the clearest and most energetic example of capitalism’s powers. Moreover, the colonization of the Americas in the first place was the genesis of the capitalist mode of production, by launching Europe beyond its feudal confines. As Engels put it in a lecture for the London German Workers’ Educational Society as early as 1847 (that is, before they became ‘Marxists’ proper):
Citizens! When Christopher Columbus discovered America 350 years ago, he certainly did not think that not only would the then existing society in Europe together with its institutions be done away with through his discovery, but that the foundation would be laid for the complete liberation of all nations; and yet, it becomes more and more clear that this is indeed the case. Through the discovery of America a new route by sea to the East Indies was found, whereby the European business traffic of the time was completely transformed; the consequence was that Italian and German commerce were totally ruined and other countries came to the fore; commerce came into the hands of the western countries, and England thus came to the fore of the movement. Before the discovery of America the countries even in Europe were still very much separated from one another and trade was on the whole slight. Only after the new route to the East Indies had been found and an extensive field had been opened in America for exploitation by the Europeans engaged in commerce, did. England begin more and more to concentrate trade and to take possession of it, whereby the other European countries were more and more compelled to join together. From all this, big commerce originated, and the so-called world market was opened. The enormous treasures which the Europeans brought from America, and the gains which trade in general yielded, had as a consequence the ruin of the old aristocracy, and so the bourgeoisie came into being. The discovery of America was connected with the advent of machinery, and with that the struggle became necessary which we are conducting today, the struggle of the propertyless against the property owners. (…) Thus, through the discovery of America all society has been divided into two classes, and without the rise of the world market this would not have happened. The workers of the whole world have everywhere the same interests; everywhere the different classes disappear and the different interests coincide. When, therefore, a revolution breaks out in one country it must necessarily affect the other countries, and only now can real liberation take place.
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More than in any other historical issue, this was reflected in their attitude towards the American Civil War. Skepticism towards the claims of ‘official America’ in its history lessons and a general dislike of the victorious American government have caused some socialists to question support for the Union in this great conflict. Some argue that the war was not worth it, since it merely abolished slavery to replace it by sharecropping and the victory of capitalism in the north; others say that it should be seen as another example of American tyranny repressing anything that stands in its way, regardless of how vile that opponent is himself. Again some have been inclined to follow some of the arguments of the so-called ‘Lost Cause’ movement, which propagandizes post festum for the Confederate cause, for example by arguing that in reality the Northern politicians cared little about slavery and less about blacks and therefore the war was ‘really’ about tarriffs, or about ‘states’ rights’, or the like.
None of these were the views of Marx or Engels. They enthousiastically supported the Union, supported their war efforts against the Confederacy, and saw this as one of the great historical wars of the 19th century. In their own day, the British ruling classes, both bourgeois and aristocratic, on the whole tended to support the Confederacy, and this meant that all the arguments that now rise from their grave again when invoked by Lost Cause proponents were buried in the first place by Marx and Engels’ refutations of the British conservative press. Since in his attack on this miserable connivance with the Confederates on the part of the ‘official’ British press, Marx set out their shared views on the issue so profoundly by means of an article in Die Presse (in those days a popular Austrian tabloid-type paper for the lower middle class), it is worth quoting this despite its considerable length. It will provide in this manner also the necessary context for Marx & Engels’ further analysis of the American Civil War itself once it broke out, which we shall examine in depth. Marx wrote:
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 civil war?
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. (…) 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 St[ephen] 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. (…)
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. (…)
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. St[ephen] 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. (…)
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.” (…)
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.
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It is not unimportant to note that this analysis was already on the table in late 1861, when the American Civil War was yet to get into full swing. Yet even so soon into the war neither Marx nor Engels were ever fooled about its real meaning, and as they carefully followed and discussed developments over the first half of the 1860s, their analysis was borne out by events. To show this, it is necessary to go into more detail, and discuss the American Civil War itself as it proceeded.
With secession having taken place, the new government under Jefferson Davis formed, and the seizure of the federal Fort Sumter having taken place, the war had in practice started. It would nonetheless take quite a while before any events truly would come to a head, and first it was necessary for all observers to take stock of the situation. Marx did so in a successor article to the prior one, titled “The Civil War in the United States”, also for Die Presse.(3) In this, he sets out the situation quite clearly.
The advice of an amicable separation presupposes that the Southern Confederacy, although it assumed the offensive in the Civil War, at least wages it for defensive purposes. It is believed that the issue for the slaveholders’ party is merely one of uniting the territories it has hitherto dominated into an autonomous group of states and withdrawing them from the supreme authority of the Union. Nothing could be more false: “The South needs its entire territory. It will and must have it.” With this battle-cry the secessionists fell upon Kentucky. By their “entire territory” they understand in the first place all the so-called border states-Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri and Arkansas. Besides, they lay claim to the entire territory south of the line that runs from the north-west corner of Missouri to the Pacific Ocean. What the slaveholders, therefore, call the South, embraces more than three-quarters of the territory hitherto comprised by the Union. A large part of the territory thus claimed is still in the possession of the Union and would first have to be conquered from it. None of the so-called border states, however, not even those in the possession of the Confederacy, were ever actual slave states. Rather, they constitute the area of the United States in which the system of slavery and the system of free labour exist side by side and contend for mastery, the actual field of battle between South and North, between slavery and freedom. The war of the Southern Confederacy is, therefore, not a war of defence, but a war of conquest, a war of conquest for the spread and perpetuation of slavery.
Marx at once recognized the importance of the border states to the Union and the Confederacy both, and the degree to which they would be the battlefield over which the civil war to come would be fought. Within the border states, Marx noted there was great division of opinion; some border states had only small slavery sections or were too much within Union territory, and could therefore easily be kept in the union. Delaware and Maryland were clearly in this category. Then there were the border states with the greatest slavery sentiment, such as Tennessee and Kentucky, whereby in the latter case he observed the antislavery party to be strong, but overwhelmed by the rule of the proslavery section. A similar situation prevailed in Missouri. Marx pointed out on this basis the hypocrisy of the ‘states’ rights’ arguments:
From the south-west and south-east its corps of free-booters simultaneously invaded the “neutral” state. Kentucky awoke from its dream of neutrality, its legislature openly took sides with the Union, surrounded the traitorous Governor with a committee of public safety, called the people to arms, outlawed Breckinridge and ordered the secessionists to evacuate the invaded territory immediately. This was the signal for war. An army of the Southern Confederacy is moving on Louisville, while volunteers from Illinois, Indiana and Ohio flock hither to save Kentucky from the armed missionaries of slavery.
The attempts of the Confederacy to annex Missouri and Kentucky, for example, against the will of these states, prove the hollowness of the pretext that it is fighting for the rights of the individual states against the encroachments of the Union. On the individual states that it considers to belong to the “South” it confers, to be sure, the right to separate from the Union, but by no means the right to remain in the Union.
Finally, it was important to note the dictatorial and undemocratic means by which secession in the first place was forced through. It has been argued that Marx underestimated the support for secession after Lincoln’s victory in 1860, but he was in any case right enough to show how false the arguments against the Union’s supposed undemocratic methods were. As he wrote:
Indeed, the oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders utilised the Congress of Montgomery not only to proclaim the separation of the South from the North. It exploited it at the same time to reshape the internal constitutions of the slave states, to subjugate completely the section of the white population that had still preserved some independence under the protection and the democratic Constitution of the Union. Between 1856 to 1860 the political spokesmen, jurists, moralists and theologians of the slaveholders’ party had already sought to prove, not so much that Negro slavery is justified, but rather that colour is a matter of indifference and the working class is everywhere born to slavery.
One sees, therefore, that the war of the Southern Confederacy is in the true sense of the word a war of conquest for the spread and perpetuation of slavery. The greater part of the border states and Territories are still in the possession of the Union, whose side they have taken first through the ballot-box and then with arms. The Confederacy, however, counts them for the “South” and seeks to conquer them from the Union. In the border states which the Confederacy has occupied for the time being, it is holding the relatively free highlands in check by martial law. Within the actual slave states themselves it is supplanting the hitherto existing democracy by the unrestricted oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders.
When the war really started, it was clear to all involved that the industrial, infrastructural etc. advantage was greatly on the side of the Union. The United States outpaced the Confederacy 10 to 1 in value of industrial production; 14 to 1 in textile goods; 2.4 to 1 in railroad mileage; 25 to 1 in naval ship tonnage, and it besides had 2.5 times the population of the Confederacy.(4) Yet this should not be taken as implying that it was obvious the Union was going to win, nor that the Union’s strategic position was necessarily better. Not only was the standing army of the Union virtually negligible (some 15.000 men, some of whom had gone over to the Confederacy), but more importantly, to win the war the Union had to totally defeat the secessionists, while the Confederacy only had to defend itself against northern assaults to be safe. The result of a stalemate would inevitably be a treaty on the basis of the status quo of secession, which would mean the Confederacy would succeed in its primary aim. Nobody quite knew in what manner the war would be fought, there having never been any great wars on that subcontinent and the military methods having changed so greatly since the Napoleonic Wars. Therefore, it was considered quite possible by supporters of both sides that the war would peter out into small-scale conflicts, and the subjugation of the entirety of the vast Confederate territory, almost as large as Western Europe altogether, would seem impossible. This impression seemed confirmed when the two hastily created volunteer armies clashed for the first time in Virginia, at the Battle of Bull Run. The Union armies, some 30.000 strong under McDowell attacked the Confederates, some 22.000, under P.G.T. Beauregard. The result was a feckless disaster for the Union troops, which were quickly thrown back after the Confederates shipped in reinforcements through rail, proving the importance of railway lines to the internal strategic position. After this event, Lincoln replaced McDowell with George McClellan as overall commander.
For the Union, McClellan represented at once two things. He was a very popular general; he was also (like many Union generals), a Northern Democrat, and as such represented a defensive approach against the Confederacy. This approach sought only to defeat the Confederate encroachments against federal power, but did not seek to overthrow the institutions of the Confederacy itself. Lincoln and his party had explicitly supported this line during the election of 1860, in order to gain the support of the border states (though futilely) and to placate the conservative sections of northern society, many of whom had interests in the South to protect or feared the possibility of abolition. McClellan therefore at the time wholly fitted Lincoln’s line. So did his famous ‘Anaconda plan’, which was devised to strangle the Confederacy passively without having to wage any direct assaults upon their strongholds – it would starve them of supplies through naval blockade, and it would slowly encircle them and so keep them out of the territories. Although both parts of this strategy were followed, it was not clear from this that actual victory for the Union would result, merely a staving off of Confederate victory. This, as we have discussed, was not enough. The political implications of this were clear to Marx and Engels before they were clear to many people in the United States itself. The McClellan approach, although it would strengthen the Union against the Confederacy, politically made it impossible to defeat the Confederacy’s war aims. Lincoln’s support for it therefore implied Lincoln’s natural lawyer-like moderation and his anxiety about the border states would make him refrain from those measures which Marx and Engels felt were necessary to truly win the Civil War – and as it turned out later, they were correct in this. The affair of John C. Frémont’s invasion of Missouri and his repression of the slaveholding usurpers there by freeing slaves under his military control showed this particularly well: Frémont’s order was immediately revoked by Lincoln, and he was relieved of his post. Marx was livid about this, and blamed Lincoln and Seward’s passive attitude in Die Presse:
Frémont’s dismissal from the post of Commander-in-Chief in Missouri forms a turning point in the history of the development of the American Civil War. Fremont has two great sins to expiate. He was the first candidate of the Republican Party for the presidential office (1856), and he is the first general of the North to have threatened the slaveholders with emancipation of slaves (August 30, 1861). He remains, therefore, a rival of candidates for the presidency in the future and an obstacle to the makers of compromises in the present. During the last two decades the singular practice developed in the United States of not electing to the presidency any man who occupied an authoritative position in his own party. The names of such men, it is true, were utilised for election demonstrations, but as soon as it came to actual business, they were dropped and replaced by unknown mediocrities of merely local influence. In this manner Polk, Pierce, Buchanan, etc., became Presidents. Likewise Abraham Lincoln. General Andrew Jackson was in fact the last President of the United States who owed his office to his personal importance, whilst all his successors owed it, on the contrary, to their personal unimportance. (…)
As a matter of fact, Lincoln was hardly President-elect, when Seward secured the Secretaryship of State. Immediately a singular change took place in the attitude of the Demosthenes of the Republican Party, whom the prophesying of the “irrepressible conflict” between the system of free Labour and the system of slavery had made famous. Although elected on November 6, 1860, Lincoln took up office as President only on March 4, 1861. In the interval, during the winter session of Congress, Seward made himself the central figure of all attempts at compromise; the Northern organs of the South, such as the New York Herald, for example, whose bête noire Seward had been till then, suddenly extolled him as the statesman of reconciliation and, indeed, it was not his fault that peace at any price was not achieved. Seward manifestly regarded the post of Secretary of State as a mere preliminary step, and busied himself less with the “irrepressible conflict” of the present than with the presidency of the future. He has provided fresh proof that virtuosos of the tongue are dangerously inadequate statesmen. (…)
For Seward, therefore, Frémont was the dangerous rival who had to be ruined; an undertaking that appeared so much the easier since Lincoln, in accordance with his legal tradition, has an aversion for all genius, anxiously clings to the letter of the Constitution and fights shy of every step that could mislead the “loyal” slaveholders of the border states. Frémont’s character offered another hold. He is manifestly a man of pathos, somewhat high-stepping and haughty, and not without a touch of the melodramatic. First the government attempted to drive him to voluntary retirement by a succession of petty chicaneries. When this did not succeed, it deprived him of his command at the very moment when the army he himself had organised came face to face with the foe in south-west Missouri and a decisive battle was imminent. Frémont is the idol of the states of the North-west, which sing his praises as the “pathfinder.” They regard his dismissal as a personal insult. Should the Union government meet with a few more mishaps like those of Bull Run and Ball’s Bluff, it has itself given the opposition, which will then rise up against it and smash the hitherto prevailing diplomatic system of waging war, its leader in John Frémont.
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A not unimportant side consequence of McClellan and Lincoln’s defensive political approach would be the recognition of the Confederacy by Britain and France, something which was seriously feared by the supporters of the Union. Recognition as such would not yet mean that much, but it would greatly strengthen the pro-Confederate sections in the British upper class and make trade with the blockaded Confederacy easier, which might lead to war. Even worse was the distant possibility of an intervention by either country in favor of the Confederacy, especially given the presence of the troops of the various great powers in Mexico and the creation of a French vassal state there. Such an intervention against the United States was seen as a potential great blow against the progressive anti-slavery and free labor cause of the Union. In this context, such almost-war events as the Trent Affair led to great consternation, with Marx somewhat unfairly blaming Seward’s “characteristic act of tactlessnesses by self-conscious weakness simulating strength”.(6) The Trent Affair, in which two Confederate envoys were intercepted over-enthousiastically by a Union naval captain, fortunately fizzled out. Nonetheless, the political threat from that angle remained, and Marx and Engels were acutely aware of it.
The war only started properly in the course of early 1862. In April of that year, Union naval forces under Farragut captured New Orleans, the largest city and slave trading center of the South. The first skirmishes in the west saw the Confederates, supported by some internally divided Indian irregulars, driven from Arkansas and New Mexico. The western theater of the war opened fully when Ulysses Grant, operating as commander of a Union army under the overall leadership of Henry W. Halleck, in a swift and effective maneouvre against incompetent Confederate opposition took the forts on the northern Mississippi, Ft. Henry and Ft. Donelson. However, Grant’s subsequent assault southwards on the great railway nexus at Shiloh, TN, failed. Grant’s Army of the Tennessee joined up with Don Carlos Buell’s Army of the Ohio to assault the Confederate position, but they were intercepted in a surprise counterattack by the Confederate Army of the Mississippi under A.S. Johnston and Beauregard. The initial clash went for the Confederates, but after reinforcements, the Union counterattack drove the Confederates back. Nonetheless it was a problematic battle, because of the enormous casualties (some 23.000) – more than in all of the United States’ three prior wars put together.(7) For the Union, this was problematic in the short run, because it might all the more encourage McClellan and others to follow the strategy of not destroying the enemy forces, but attempting to drive them back with minimal loss of life – a noble idea, but not one that would win the war for the Union. Grant was one of the few to draw the opposite conclusion, when he wrote: “I gave up [after Shiloh] all idea of saving the Union except by complete conquest.”(8) McClellan was finally ordered to move, and undertook a succesful landing in the peninsula in eastern Virginia on the way to the Confederate capital at Richmond, coming to within seven miles of the city. But after J.E. Johnston, the Confederate commander, was wounded at Fair Oaks where his troops did not succeed in halting McClellan’s advance, the Confederate President replaced him with Robert E. Lee. Lee, who had opposed secession but had joined the Confederacy (being an aristocratic Virginian), now divided his troops: he sent an army under ‘Stonewall’ Jackson to tempt the Union troops away, and then directly attacked with the remainder McClellan’s exposed position. This so-called ‘Seven Days Campaign’ drove McClellan all the way back to the coast until the battle of Malvern Hill’s stalemate led to McClellan’s orderly redeployment to Washington. Total losses of the Seven Days Campaign were 20.614 for the Union and 15.849 for the Confederacy, and it made clear no swift end of the war was in sight.
Since the preponderance of the war at the end of 1862 gave no indication of Union success, Marx and Engels worked hard to prevent British interference in the war in favor of the Confederacy. One thing they emphasized for this purpose was the British working class’ opposition to any pro-Confederate activity, such as considered by the British government of Lord Palmerston, the old Tory-turned-Liberal. Palmerston had always opposed slavery, but strongly supported the Confederacy, fearing the threat of the United States to the power of the British landowners and industrialists. The British working class, although pressured by the industrial crisis caused by the lack of cotton imports from the Confederacy, gained nothing by support for the latter, and made this clear against the Palmerston government. Marx effusedly praised them for doing so:
Wherever public meetings took place in England, Scotland, or Ireland, they protested against the rabid war — cries of the press, against the sinister designs of the Government, and declared for a pacific settlement of the pending question. In this regard, the two last meetings held, the one at Paddington, London, the other at N ewcastle-upon-Tyne, are characteristic. The former meeting applauded Mr. Washington Wilkes’s argumentation that England was not warranted in finding fault with the seizure of the Southern Commissioners’; while the Newcastle meeting almost unanimously carried the resolution — firstly, that the Americans had only made themselves guilty of a lawful exercise of the right of search and seizure; secondly, that the captain of the Trent ought to be punished for his violation of English neutrality, as proclaimed by the Queen. In ordinary circumstances, the conduct of the British workingmen might have been anticipated from the natural sympathy the popular classes all over the world ought to feel for the only popular Government in the world.
Under the present circumstances, however, when a great portion of the British working classes directly and severely suffers under the consequences of the Southern blockade; when another part is indirectly smitten by the curtailment of the American commerce, owing, as they are told, to the selfish “protective policy” of the Republicans; when the only remaining democratic weekly, Reynolds’s paper, has sold itself to Messrs. Yancey and Mann, and week after week exhausts its horse-powers of foul language in appeals to the working classes to urge the Government, for their own interests, to war with the Union — under such circumstances, simple justice requires to pay a tribute to the sound attitude of the British working classes, the more so when contrasted with the hypocritical, bullying, cowardly, and stupid conduct of the official and well-to-do John Bull.
(9)
Marx noted that the Confederate policy to force Britain’s hand by embargoing their cotton exports was failing, both because of existing cotton stocks and because of the British industrialists’ possession of India and Egypt. These could be considered as British-controlled suppliers, when employed for that purpose. In “On the Cotton Crisis”, Marx cited the comments of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce on the issue:
What, then, does the Chamber of Commerce recommend? The English government ought to remove all the obstacles of an administrative character that still impede cotton cultivation in India. In particular, it ought to lift the import duty of 10 per cent with which English cotton yarns and textile fabrics are burdened in India. The régime of the East India Company had hardly been done away with, East India had hardly been incorporated in the British Empire, when Palmerston introduced this import duty on English manufactures through Mr. Wilson, and that at the same time as he sold Savoy and Nice for the Anglo-French commercial treaty. Whilst the French market was opened to English industry to a certain extent, the East Indian market was closed to it to a greater extent.
(10)
In order to spur on the Union government, Marx and Engels also fulminated against McClellan, whom they abhorred as incapable of seeing the political consequences of his vaccillation, his at once defensive and maneouvre-based mode of warfare. Marx summarized the attitude as follows:
McClellan and most of the officers of the regular army who got their training at West Point are more or less bound by esprit de corps to their old comrades in the enemy camp. They are inspired by the same jealousy of the parvenus among the “civilian soldiers”. In their view, the war must be waged in a strictly businesslike fashion, with constant regard to the restoration of the Union on its old basis, and therefore must above all be kept free from revolutionary tendencies and tendencies affecting matters of principle. A fine conception of a war which is essentially a war of principles. The first generals of the English Parliament fell into the same error.
In fact, Marx almost accused McClellan of aiding traitors and actively hindering the war effort, and called on Lincoln to replace him as commander-in-chief. He also praised Lincoln for putting the War Department in charge over and above McClellan. Sarcastically, he described the general:
The requisite material for an estimate of McClellan’s Fabian tactics on the Potomac is still lacking. That his influence, however, acted as a brake on the general conduct of the war, is beyond doubt. One can say of McClellan what Macaulay says of Essex:
“The military errors of Essex were produced for the most part by political timidity. He was honestly, but by no means warmly, attached to the cause of Parliament; and next to a great defeat he dreaded nothing so much as a great victory.”
(11) Most importantly perhaps however, he assessed Lincoln himself in this way:
President Lincoln never ventures a step forward before the tide of circumstances and the general call of public opinion forbid further delay. But once “Old Abe” realises that such a turning point has been reached, he surprises friend and foe alike by a sudden operation executed as noiselessly as possible.
(12) This would prove to be a constant during the Civil War, and although on the one hand it led to much frustration, it also meant that Lincoln would always eventually move when required to by the pressure of the circumstances. This was something Marx and Engels considered of great significance, given the manner in which the President in this way embodied their ideas about history, generally known as ‘historical materialism’.
Halfway 1862, Engels, with some additions by Marx, provided in Die Presse a general overview of the military situation, and his predictions for the course of the war. Together with the earlier two major articles by Marx, they form the main corpus of general strategic analysis of the American Civil War by the two authors, and therefore this too is worth citing at some length. It will close this section of our discussion of Marx, Engels, and the Civil War, with Engels’ brilliant analysis of the war situation foreshadowing as early as March 1862 how the war would progress towards its end in reality.
From whatever standpoint one regards it, the American Civil War presents a spectacle without parallel in the annals of military history. The vast extent of the disputed territory; the far-flung front of the lines of operation; the numerical strength of the hostile armies, the creation of which hardly drew any support from a prior organisational basis; the fabulous cost of these armies; the manner of commanding them and the general tactical and strategic principles in accordance with which the war is being waged, are all new in the eyes of the European onlooker.
The secessionist conspiracy, organised, patronised and supported long before its outbreak by Buchanan’s administration, gave the South a head-start, by which alone it could hope to achieve its aim. Endangered by its slave population and by a strong Unionist element among the whites themselves, with two-thirds less free men than in the North, but readier to attack, thanks to the multitude of adventurous idlers that it harbours — for the South everything depended on a swift, bold, almost foolhardy offensive. If the Southerners succeeded in taking St. Louis, Cincinnati, Washington, Baltimore, and perhaps Philadelphia, they might then count on a panic, during which diplomacy and bribery could secure recognition of the independence of all the slave states. If this first onslaught failed, at least at the decisive points, their position must then become worse from day to day, while the North was gaining in strength. This point was rightly understood by the men who in truly Bonapartist spirit had organised the secessionist conspiracy. They opened the campaign in the corresponding manner. Their bands of adventurers overran Missouri and Tennessee, while their more regular troops invaded eastern Virginia and prepared a coup de main against Washington. If this coup were to miscarry, the Southern campaign was lost from a military point of view.
The North came to the theatre of war reluctantly, sleepily, as was to be expected considering its higher industrial and commercial development. The social machinery there was far more complicated than in the South, and it required far more time to get it moving in this unusual direction. The enlistment of volunteers for three months was a great, but perhaps unavoidable mistake. It was the policy of the North to remain on the defensive in the beginning at all decisive points, to organise its forces, to train them through operations on a small scale and without risk of decisive battles, and, as soon as the organisation had become sufficiently strong and the traitorous element had simultaneously been more or less removed from the army, to go on to an energetic, unflagging offensive and, above all, to reconquer Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina. The transformation of civilians into soldiers was bound to take more time in the North than in the South. Once effected, one could count on the individual superiority of the Northern men.
By and large, and allowing for the mistakes that arose more from political than from military sources, the North acted in accordance with those principles. The guerilla warfare in Missouri and West Virginia, while protecting the Unionist population, accustomed the troops to field service and to fire without exposing them to decisive defeats. The great disgrace of Bull Run was, to a certain extent, the result of the earlier error of enlisting volunteers for three months. It was absurd to let raw recruits attack a strong position, on difficult terrain and having an enemy scarcely inferior in numbers. The panic, which seized the Union army at the decisive moment, and the cause of which has yet to be established could surprise no one who was at all familiar with the history of people’s wars. Such things happened to the French troops very often from 1792 to 1795; this did not, however, prevent these same troops from winning the battles of Jemappes and Fleurus, Montenotte, Castiglione and Rivoli. The only excuse for the silliness of the jests of the European press with regard to the Bull Run panic is the previous bragging of a section of the North American press.
The six months’ respite that followed the defeat at Manassas was utilised to better advantage by the North than by the South. Not only were the Northern ranks replenished in greater measure than the Southern ones. Their officers received better instructions; the discipline and training of the troops did not encounter the same obstacles as in the South. Traitors and incompetent interlopers were increasingly removed, and the period of the Bull Run panic is a thing of the past. The armies on both sides are naturally not to be measured by the standard of the great European armies or even of the former regular army of the United States. Napoleon could in fact train battalions of raw recruits in the depots during the first month, have them on the march during the second and during the third lead them against the enemy, but then every battalion received a sufficient reinforcement of experienced officers and non-commissioned officers, every company some old soldiers, and on the day of the battle the new troops were brigaded together with veterans and, so to speak, framed by the latter. All these conditions were lacking in America. Without the considerable amount of people of military experience who had immigrated to America in consequence of the European revolutionary unrest of 1848-49, the organisation of the Union army would have required a much longer time still. The very small number of killed and wounded in proportion to the total of the troops engaged (usually one in every twenty) proves that most of the engagements, even the most recent ones in Kentucky and Tennessee, were fought mainly with firearms at fairly long range, and that the occasional bayonet charges either soon halted in the face of enemy fire or put the adversary to flight before it came to a hand-to-hand encounter. Meanwhile, the new campaign has been opened under more favourable auspices with the successful a advance of Buell and Halleck through Kentucky and Tennessee.
After the reconquest of Missouri and West Virginia, the Union opened the campaign with the advance on Kentucky. Here the secessionists held three strong positions, fortified camps: Columbus on the Mississippi to their left, Bowling Green in the centre, and Mill Springs on the Cumberland River to the right. Their line stretched for 300 miles from west to east. The extent of this line prevented the three corps from rendering each other support and offered the Union troops the chance of attacking each individually with superior forces. The great mistake in the disposition of the secessionists sprang from their attempt to occupy all the ground.
A single fortified, strong central camp, chosen as the battlefield for a decisive engagement and held by the main body of the army, would have defended Kentucky far more effectively. It was bound either to attract the main force of the Unionists or put them in a dangerous position, had they attempted to march on, disregarding so strong a concentration of troops.
Under the given circumstances the Unionists resolved to attack those three camps one after another, to manoeuvre their enemy out of them and force him to fight in open country. This plan, which conformed to all the rules of the art of war, was carried out with energy and dispatch. Towards the middle of January a corps of about 15,000 Unionists marched on Mill Springs, which was held by 10,000 secessionists. The Unionists manoeuvred in a manner that led the enemy to believe he only had to deal with a weak reconnoitring body. General Zollicoffer at once fell into the trap, sallied from his fortified camp and attacked the Unionists. He soon realised that a superior force confronted him. He fell and his troops suffered as complete a defeat as the Unionists at Bull Run. This time, however, the victory was exploited in quite another fashion. The defeated army was hard pressed until it arrived broken, demoralised, without field artillery or baggage, in its encampment at Mill Springs. This camp was pitched on the north bank of the Cumberland River, so that in the event of another defeat the troops had no retreat open to them save across the river by way of a few steamers and river boats. We find in general that almost all the secessionist camps were pitched on the enemy side of the river. To take up such a position is not only according to rule, but also very practical if there is a bridge in the rear. In such a case, the encampment serves as the bridgehead and gives its holders the chance of throwing their fighting forces at will on both banks of the river and so maintaining complete command of these banks. Without a bridge in the rear a camp on the enemy side of the river, on the contrary, cuts off the retreat after an unsuccessful engagement and compels the troops to capitulate, or exposes them to massacre and drowning, a fate that befell the Unionists at Ball’s Bluff on the enemy side of the Potomac, whither the treachery of General Stone had sent them.
When the beaten secessionists reached their camp at Mill Springs, they at once understood that an enemy attack on their fortifications must be repulsed or capitulation must follow in a very short time. After the experience of the morning, they had lost confidence in their powers of resistance. Accordingly, when the Unionists advanced to attack the camp next day, they found that the enemy had taken advantage of the night to cross the river, leaving the camp, the baggage, the artillery and stores behind him. In this way, the extreme right of the secessionist line was pushed back to Tennessee, and east Kentucky, where the mass of the population is hostile to the slaveholders’ party, was reconquered for the Union.
At about the same time — towards the middle of January — the preparations for dislodging the secessionists from Columbus and Bowling Green commenced. A strong fleet of mortar vessels and ironclad gunboats was held in readiness, and the news was spread in all directions that it was to serve as a convoy to a large army marching along the Mississippi from Cairo to Memphis and New Orleans. All the demonstrations on the Mississippi, however, were merely mock manoeuvres. At the decisive moment, the gunboats were brought to the Ohio and thence to the Tennessee, up which they sailed as far as Fort Henry. This place, together with Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River, formed the second line of defence of the secessionists in Tennessee. The position was well chosen, for in case of a retreat beyond the Cumberland the latter river would have covered its front, the Tennessee its left flank, while the narrow strip of land between the two rivers was sufficiently covered by the two forts mentioned above. But the swift action of the Unionists broke through even the second line before the left wing and the centre of the first line had been attacked.
In the first week of February the Unionists’ gunboats appeared in front of Fort Henry, which surrendered after a short bombardment. The garrison escaped to Fort Donelson, since the land forces of the expedition were not strong enough to encircle the spot. The gunboats now sailed down the Tennessee again, upstream to the Ohio and thence up the Cumberland as far as Fort Donelson. A single gunboat sailed boldly up the Tennessee through the very heart of the State of Tennessee, skirting the State of Mississippi and pushing on as far as Florence in northern Alabama, where a series of swamps and banks (known by the name of the Muscle Shoals) prevented further navigation. The fact that a single gunboat made this long voyage of at least 150 miles and then returned, without experiencing any attack, proves that Union sentiment prevails along the river and will be very useful to the Union troops should they push forward as far as that.
The boat expedition on the Cumberland now combined its movements with those of the land forces under generals Halleck and Grant. The secessionists at Bowling Green were deceived over the movements of the Unionists. Accordingly they remained quietly in their camp, while a week after the fall of Fort Henry, Fort Donelson was surrounded on the land side by 40,000 Unionists and threatened on the river side by a strong fleet of gunboats. Just as in the case of the camp at Mill Springs and Fort Henry, the river lay beyond Fort Donelson, without a bridge for retreat. It was the strongest place the Unionists had attacked up to the present. The works had been carried out with greater care; moreover, the place was capacious enough to accommodate the 20,000 men who occupied it. On the first day of the attack the gunboats silenced the fire of the batteries trained towards the river side and bombarded the interior of the defence works, while the land troops drove back the enemy outposts and forced the main body of the secessionists to seek shelter close under the guns of their own defence works. On the second day, the gunboats, which had suffered severely the day before, appear to have accomplished but little. The land troops, on the other hand, had to fight a long and, in places, hard battle with the columns of the garrison, which sought to break through the right wing of the enemy in order to secure their line of retreat to Nashville. However, an energetic attack by the Unionist right wing on the left wing of the secessionists and considerable reinforcements received by the left wing of the Unionists decided the victory in favour of the assailants. Various outworks had been stormed. The garrison, pressed back into its inner lines of defence, without the chance of retreat and manifestly not in a position to withstand an assault next morning, surrendered unconditionally on the following day.
II
With Fort Donelson the enemy’s artillery, baggage and military stores fell into the hands of the Unionists; 13,000 secessionists surrendered on the day of its capture ; 1,000 more the next day, and as soon as the advance guard of the victors appeared before Clarksville, a town that lies further up the Cumberland River, it opened its gates. Here, too, considerable supplies had been accumulated for the secessionists.
The capture of Fort Donelson presents only one riddle: the flight of General Floyd with 5,000 men on the second day of the bombardment. These fugitives were too numerous to be smuggled away in steamers during the night. If certain precautions had been taken by the assailants, they could not have got away.
Seven days after the surrender of Fort Donelson, Nashville was occupied by the Federals. The distance between the two places is about 100 English miles, and a march of 15 miles a day, on very bad roads and in the most unfavourable season of the year, redounds to the honour of the Unionist troops. On receipt of the news that Fort Donelson had fallen, the secessionists evacuated Bowling Green; a week later, they abandoned Columbus and withdrew to a Mississippi island, 45 miles south. Thus, Kentucky was completely reconquered for the Union. Tennessee, however, can be held by the secessionists only if they give and win a big battle. They are said in fact to have concentrated 65,000 men for this purpose. Meanwhile, nothing prevents the Unionists from bringing a superior force against them.
(…)
Halleck and Grant, in particular, offer good examples of resolute military leadership. Without the least regard either for Columbus or Bowling Green, they concentrate their forces on the decisive points, Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, launch a swift and energetic attack on these and precisely thereby render Columbus and Bowling Green untenable. (…)
In consequence of the clearing of Missouri and the reconquest of Kentucky, the theatre of war has so far narrowed that the different armies can co-operate to a certain extent along the whole line of operations and work to achieve definite results. In other words, for the first time the war is now assuming a strategic character, and the geographical configuration of the country is acquiring a new interest. It is now the task of the Northern generals to find the Achilles’ heel of the cotton states.Before the capture of Nashville, no concerted strategy between the army of Kentucky and the army on the Potomac was possible. They were too far apart from each other. They stood in the same front line, but their lines of operation were entirely different. Only with the victorious advance into Tennessee did the movements of the army of Kentucky become important for the entire theatre of war.
The American papers influenced by McClellan are full of talk about the “anaconda” envelopment plan. According to it, an immense line of armies is to wind round the rebellion, gradually tighten its coils and finally strangle the enemy. This is sheer childishness. It is a rehash of the so-called cordon system… devised in Austria about 1770, which was employed against the French from 1792 to 1797 with such great obstinacy and with such constant failure. (…)
Cast a glance at the geographical shape of the secessionists’ territory, with its long stretch of coast on the Atlantic Ocean and its long stretch of coast on the Gulf of Mexico. So long as the Confederates held Kentucky and Tennessee, the whole formed a great compact mass. The loss of both these states drives an enormous wedge into their territory, separating the states on the North Atlantic Ocean from the States on the Gulf of Mexico. The direct route from Virginia and the two Carolinas to Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and even, in part, to Alabama leads through Tennessee, which is now occupied by the Unionists. The sole route that, after the complete conquest of Tennessee by the Union, connects the two sections of the slave states goes through Georgia. This proves that Georgia is the key to the secessionists’ territory. With the loss of Georgia the Confederacy would be cut into two sections, which would have lost all connection with one another. A reconquest of Georgia by the secessionists, however, would be almost unthinkable, for the Unionist fighting forces would be concentrated in a central position, while their adversaries, divided into two camps, would have scarcely sufficient forces to put in the field for a joint attack.
Would the conquest of all Georgia, with the seacoast of Florida, be required for such an operation? By no means. In a land where communication, particularly between distant points, depends much more on railways than on highways, the seizure of the railways is sufficient. The southernmost railway line between the States on the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic coast goes through Macon and Gordon near Milledgeville.
The occupation of these two points would accordingly cut the secessionists’ territory in two and enable the Unionists to beat one part after another. At the same time, one gathers from the above that no Southern republic is viable without the possession of Tennessee. Without Tennessee, Georgia’s vital spot lies only eight or ten days’ march from the frontier; the North would constantly have its hand at the throat of the South, and, at the slightest pressure, the South would have to yield or fight for its life anew, under circumstances in which a single defeat would cut off every prospect of success.
From the foregoing considerations it follows:
The Potomac is not the most important position in the war theatre. The seizure of Richmond and the advance of the Potomac army further south — difficult on account of the many rivers that cut across the line of march -could produce a tremendous moral effect. From a purely military standpoint, they would decide nothing.
The outcome of the campaign depends on the Kentucky army, now in Tennessee. On the one hand, this army is nearest to the decisive points; on the other hand, it occupies a territory without which secession cannot survive. This army would accordingly have to be strengthened at the expense of all the rest and the sacrifice of all minor operations. Its next points of attack would be
Chattanooga and Dalton on the Upper Tennessee, the most important railway junctions of the entire South. After their occupation, the link between the eastern and western states of Secessia would be limited to the lines of communication in Georgia. The further problem would then be to cut off another railway line, with Atlanta and Georgia, and finally to destroy the last link between the two sections by the capture of Macon and Gordon.
On the contrary, should the anaconda plan be followed, then, despite all the successes gained at particular points and even on the Potomac, the war may be prolonged indefinitely, while the financial difficulties together with diplomatic complications acquire fresh scope.
(13)
In the next section, we will discuss the failure of the Union forces to follow Engels’ plan, and Marx and Engels’ exchange of letters on the subject of the Civil War, which they increasingly followed battle by battle after ceasing to write for the major papers.
1) Friedrich Engels, “The Discovery of America”, in: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, MECW Vol. 6 (London 1976 [1847]), p. 627.
2) Karl Marx, “The North American Civil War”. In: Marx and Engels, MECW Vol. 19 (London 1984 [1861]), p. 32-42.
3) Karl Marx, “The Civil War in the United States”. In: Marx and Engels 1984, p. 43-52.
4) Norton et al., A People and a Nation: Eighth Edition (Boston, MA 2008), p. 400.
5) Karl Marx, “The Dismissal of Frémont”, in: Marx and Engels 1984, p. 86-88.
6) Karl Marx, “The Trent Case”, in: Marx and Engels 1984, p. 89-91.
7) Norton et al., p. 400.
8 ) Ibid.
9) Karl Marx, “English Public Opinion”. New York Daily Tribune (Feb. 1, 1862).
10) Karl Marx, “On the Cotton Crisis”, in: Marx and Engels 1984, p. 160.
11) Karl Marx, “American Affairs”, in: Marx and Engels 1984, p. 178.
12) Ibid.
13) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The American Civil War”, in: Marx and Engels 1984, p. 186.