American Civil War

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The American Civil War was a conflict fought in the United States from 1861 to 1865 between the federal government (the "Union") and the secessionist Confederate States of America (CSA), a faction of eleven Southern states which had left the Union in order to preserve the institution of slavery. The war killed a total of over 600,000 soldiers and tens of thousands of slaves and free civilians.[citation needed] The newly founded "free-soil" Republican Party had been ascendant in the few years since its founding on a base composed largely of Northern industrial proletarians and middle class abolitionists, especially as the continued coexistence of slavery with the emerging American working class depressed wages in the North.[citation needed] This contradiction only worsened as Whigs and Democrats carried out an endless series of hostile compromises, sharpening political antagonisms throughout the 1850s. When Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860 as the first Republican president, the states where the slave power was strongest began voting in their local legislatures to secede. By the time Lincoln had been inaugurated, it was evident that a rebellion was at hand. Fighting began on April 12, 1861, when rebel forces fired on a Union fort in South Carolina, and effectively ended with the surrender of Confederate general Robert E. Lee on April 9, 1865.

The proletarian character of the Northern cause, caused by an economic conflict of interests between worker and slave, led the British workers' movement to sympathize with the Union cause out of solidarity[1] and to vigorously protest the attempts of its bourgeoisie to provide support for the Confederacy. European leftists, including Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, followed the course of the war with great interest and advocated for a radical abolitionist program. Many leftists who had fled Europe following the defeat of the Revolutions of 1848 even fought for the Union cause, many becoming distinguished officers.

Although President Lincoln had at first advocated only a policy of containment rather than abolition (to the point of supporting a constitutional amendment in 1861 to ban abolition entirely[a]), the course of the war demonstrated that the liberation and integration of the slaves was necessary for a Union victory, first in order to cripple the Southern economy but later as a main objective. After the insurrection was defeated, these objectives were carried out in the period of occupation known as Reconstruction. The legacy of the Reconstruction era is complex, with many leftists holding that it fell short of necessary revolutionary change.

Origins

A capitalist slave economy had thrived in the American South since the 17th century thanks to the triangular trade, a robust network in the Atlantic which had fed the growth of the colonies of the Americas. Great Britain had abolished slavery in its territories in 1833, making the United States a consipicuous remnant of the once-ubiquitous slave system. The Northern states, however, developed an economy based on industrial capitalism, free labor, and independent farming. Capitalist industry demands a more educated and healthy workforce and therefore a higher quality of life, making free labor ideal for industry. The Northern colonies had always been more oriented toward a mercantile economy than the South, but this split accelerated with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution as Northern merchants began to build water-powered textile mills in New England, allowing for a new level of capital concentration. The north also was incentivized by a relative lack of agricultural land[citation needed] and its plentiful rivers to power industrial machines.

Although they were mutually dependent, with Northern textiles being manufactured out of Southern wool, the two modes of production led to sectional conflict. This conflict had already been present at the time of the Revolution, but as economic development advanced, there became less and less room for coexistence. Another serious trigger was the fate of Western territories and whether they would be admitted as "slave" or "free" states: Northern prosperity was allowing for an explosion of population and a steady westward spread of free states, but Southern slaveowners, due to factors like soil exhaustion, were forced to expand westward to Texas and beyond in order to maintain the slave system. This not only created a conflict between Northern and Southern labor but between the Congressional power of the slaveowners or the bourgeoisie. Congress was only able to respond with a series of unpopular compromises that maintained a perfect balance in Congress but only served to delay and worsen the conflict. When in 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska Act overturned a key term of the Missouri Compromise by allowing for territories in the northwest to theoretically permit slavery, outraged Northerners responded by forming the Republican Party.

Political character

Leftist support

Though the Union was a bourgeois force, it was progressive in that it ultimately brought America closer to a workers' revolution, on top of putting the enslaved proletariat on the road to better conditions under capitalism. It also pushed the United States to advance its technology and mechanize according to the more advanced economic relations now more oriented towards capitalism, given that the slaveowners had fallen from their position of power. As capitalism's dynamics compel the accumulation of capital in order to remain competitive and grow, the bourgeoisie is thus pressured into maximizing profit margins, and as cutting wages may backfire and is a limited measure, it is often made to develop the means of production and ultimately accelerate capitalism's own contradictions. This is a view held by Marx and Engels as well as America's earliest Marxists, most of which were German immigrants who arrived in the 1850s, supporting the Republican Party against slavery and joining the Union Army.

Communist military leadership

Colonel August Willich, photographed 1861. Willich would be promoted to major general by the war's end.

The failed Revolutions of 1848 resulted in a wave of immigration from central Europe, with many communist Germans among them. Around 700,000 Union conscripts were German immigrants, with some communists, including Joseph Weydemeyer, Alexander Schimmelfennig, Franz Sigel, and Louis Blenker, attaining officer ranks.

Perhaps the most prominent was August Willich (19 November 1810 – 22 January 1878) was Prussian Army officer and a leading early proponent of communism. He discarded his title of nobility in 1847 and took part in the Revolutions of 1848, where he was leader of a Free Corps, having Friedrich Engels as his personal aide. He was the leader of the left faction of the Communist League, who along with Schapper was leader of the anti-Karl Marx group when the League split in 1850. According to Wilhelm Liebknecht, he conspired with French revolutionary and political exile Emmanuel Barthélemy to kill Marx for being too conservative, with Wilhelm publicly insulting Marx and challenging him to a duel which Marx refused. Wilhelm emigrated to the United States in 1853 where he eventually became the editor of a German-language free labor newspaper that advocated for the right to labor on one's own terms. Upon the start of the civil war, he recruited German immigrants and joined the Army with the rank of first lieutenant and eventually became a Brigadier General, though suffered a severe wound in 1864 and served various administrative roles for the rest of the war. He returned to Germany in 1870 to offer his services to the Prussian Army in the Franco–Prussian War, though refused for his age, health, and communist views. He returned to Ohio where he died. Marx wrote that "In the Civil War in North America, Willich showed that he is more than a visionary".

Aftermath

Reconstruction

Following the war, Congress administered the occupied Southern states through the US military, a period now known as the Reconstruction era. Congressional Republicans led an effort to affirm the rights of the newly freed Black Americans, especially in the form of three constitutional amendments: the Thirteenth, which outlawed slavery (1865), the Fourteenth, guaranteeing citizenship to those born in the US (1868), and the Fifteenth, ensuring voting rights irrespective of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude" (1870). Abraham Lincoln had had a role in crafting this program of integration and was prepared to carry it out, but he was assassinated only days after the war had ended. Lincoln was succeeded by vice president Andrew Johnson, a Southern Democrat who had been added to Lincoln's ticket in the interest in unity. Predictably, Johnson fiercely resisted the Republicans in their efforts to carry out Reconstruction, for which he was impeached.

Johnson was followed by the Republican former Union general Ulysses S. Grant in 1869, an instrumental figure both in the prosecution of the war and the postwar occupation who proved more energetic in using the power of the presidency to enforce the rights of African-Americans. This included breaking the power of the Ku Klux Klan, an clandestine gang which had used terrorism to prevent Blacks from exercising their right to vote. Republicans in the South were one of the groups opposed to Reconstruction, and this growing inter-party tension was not resolved. As Southern Democrats and northern Republicans also soured on the occupation, the combined pressure proved overwhelming;[citation needed] after the disputed and controversial presidential election of 1876 came to a deadlock, the Democrats and Republicans negotiated the Compromise of 1877, allowing for the Republican candidate to take office in exchange for an end to federal occupation in the South. Thus Republicans abandoned the former slaves almost overnight. Racist groups which had taken over for the terroristic Klan, such as the Red Shirts and the White League, proliferated into openly violent political parties and began beating back Black political privileges. Lacking the powerful labor and immigrant movements that made up Northern politics, and having been abandoned by northern Republicans, poor Blacks and Whites required a cross-racial coalition in order to effect radical change. But this nascent alliance was broken by a combination of force and racial ideology as White elites disenfranchised both Blacks and Whites en masse and instituted a system of racial hierarchy. This succeeded in driving a wedge between the two movements and ushering in the Jim Crow era. Months after the end of Reconstruction, the Strike of 1877 broke out across the North and the newly recalled federal troops were deployed to shoot these strikers back to work.

African-Americans, though nominally emancipated, often ended up doing the same kind of labor for the same masters and with similar conditions under the oppressive sharecropper system, which forced them to provide their crops in exchange for seed corn and means of production. The Thirteenth Amendment explicitly abolished slavery "except as a punishment for crime". Prison labor, often disproportionately Black,[citation needed] thus became a major tool in Southern industrial growth. Some authors argue that modern prison labor in the US is effectively a continuation of the racist slavery system.

Legacy

The triumph of the bourgeoisie in the Civil War inaugurated the Gilded Age, where the bourgeoisie gorged itself on profits and corruption was given free rein. The Republican Party degraded from being a progressive force and generally became a "normal" bourgeois party, except in the South where the party's Radical wing was prominent and had to rely on ex-slaves and poor whites for political power. Liberal Republicans continued to exist well into the 20th century, and up to the 1930s there were self-styled "progressive" Republicans, from imperialist demagogues like Theodore Roosevelt to more substantive reformers like Senator Robert La Follette. Ultimately though the Republican Party was pretty much bound to degrade just as the Democratic Party had once its unintentionally progressive role in history was carried out, as bourgeois parties naturally tend to. The decline of the party led Alvan Bovay for one, the man credited with giving the Republicans their name and who had argued that Democrats had betrayed the legacy of Thomas Jefferson, ending up leaving the party after the Civil War in favor of other third-party efforts.

Notes

  1. The Corwin Amendment.

References

  1. Cockshott, Paul (2020-01-21). "3.3. Contradictions and Development". How the World Works: The Story of Human Labor from Prehistory to the Modern Day. NYU Press. ISBN 1-58367-780-1.

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