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Chapter three

The Civil War

The election of Abraham Lincoln, the Republican Party’s presidential candidate in 1860, was greeted with horror by the Southern slaveholders. For the Southern ruling class, a Republican presidency was a “revolution” threatening “to destroy their social system,” above all slavery.1 Rather than submit to Republican rule, they decided to secede from the Union. In February 1861, a convention of slave owners established the Confederate States of America (CSA), and elected a provisional government. The secession of eleven slave states precipitated a crisis that led to the outbreak of war between North and South.

The Civil War was a titanic four-year struggle that had a profound effect on the United States. Often described as the “first modern war,” it completed the bourgeois revolution2 of 1776. The war abolished slavery and “as a continuation of the bourgeois revolution begun during the Revolution/founding period, swept away those obstacles to pure market relations in the North and West and established the dominance of the cash nexus in social relations, making this perhaps the most purely bourgeois of all countries.”3 The revolutionary nature of the war stemmed from the increasingly irreconcilable coexistence of Southern slave labor and an expanding Northern capitalism based on free wage labor. “The present struggle between the South and the North,” wrote Karl Marx shortly after the outbreak of war, “is...nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labor. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other.”4

These two systems, of free labor and slave labor, had co-existed for decades. Far from being incompatible, they had been a necessary complement to one another. Capitalist development in the North depended on a slave South, which in turn fuelled the growth of slavery. “Northern merchants helped finance and export the Southern cotton crop” to the British textile industry. British capitalists provided credit for Northern exports and for imports of British-made manufactured goods.5 But there was a growing contradiction between the two economies. The rapid growth of Northern industry and agriculture, combined with large-scale immigration, transformed the North and its relation to the South. A new coalition of forces emerged, united in its opposition to the expansion of slavery. Composed of industrial capitalists, Midwest farmers, workers, and artisans, this coalition formed the basis of the new Republican Party. The chief slogan the Republicans advanced was “free soil, free labor,” embodying the aspiration of a modern economy based on widespread property ownership (“free soil”) and artisanal enterprise (“free labor”). The main impediment to achieving either of these goals, argued the Republicans, was the slaveocracy’s domination of government and the continued expansion of slavery into new territories. For Northern capital, slavery had become an impediment to capitalist development. Consolidation of political and economic power required limiting the further expansion of slavery.

The South was economically backward compared to the North, but its political power was greater. Of sixteen presidents elected between 1788 and 1848, half were Southern slaveholders.6 The slaveholders’ power stemmed from the Constitution’s provision that three-fifths of the disenfranchised slave population would be counted in determining a state’s representation in Congress and the allocation of electoral votes.

The economic divergence between North and South grew more stark in the decades leading up to the war. As the historian James McPherson describes it, “More striking was the growing contrast between farm and nonfarm occupations in the two sections. In 1800, 82 percent of the Southern labor force worked in agriculture compared with 68 percent in the free states. By 1860 the Northern share had dropped to 40 percent, while the Southern proportion had actually increased slightly, to 84 percent.”7 When it came to race, the demographics were clear: “[T]he most crucial demographic difference between North and South resulted from slavery. Ninety-five percent of the country’s Black people lived in the slave states, where Blacks constituted one-third of the population in contrast to their 1 percent of the Northern population.”8

The North-South conflict also expressed the growing competition between American and British capitalism. On the eve of the Civil War, the South’s output of cotton amounted to three-quarters of the world’s output. Cotton was the country’s most important export and source of foreign exchange, with most of the profits from shipping, warehousing, and manufacturing ending up in Northern hands. During the cotton boom of the 1850s, Southern planters demanded the South build its own fleet to ship cotton directly to England so it wouldn’t have to depend on Yankee shippers.9 The fortunes of the Southern ruling class were therefore completely tied to British, not Northern, capitalism. Northern capital could only fully establish itself by imposing its interests over those of the South. Above all, this meant breaking the slaveholders’ control of the state.

The Republican Party was able to unite otherwise antagonistic classes against the slaveocracy. The Republican Party, however, did not oppose slavery as such—only its expansion. Lincoln’s 1860 election campaign repeatedly stressed that the Republican Party did not wish to end slavery or grant social and political rights to Blacks. Lincoln’s views are representative of the Republican Party’s approach: “I will say then, that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and Black races—that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.”10 So long as there were Blacks in the United States, he added, “there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”11 “All I ask for the Negro,” Lincoln explained, “is that if you do not like him, let him alone. If God gave him but little, that little let him enjoy.”12

Lincoln’s initial response to secession included several attempts to avoid an escalation of the conflict. He was especially concerned to maintain the loyalty of the border slave states, insisting that restoration of the Union could be achieved without any challenge to slavery. Indeed, as historian Cedric Robinson writes,

As late as August 1862, in a meeting with Black leaders, Lincoln appealed for support for voluntary emigration. “Not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours....”

The abolitionists were sorely disappointed in the president. Wendell Phillips, perhaps the leading white abolitionist orator, who had cautiously championed Lincoln’s election (“not an abolitionist, hardly an antislavery man, Mr. Lincoln consents to represent an antislavery idea”), now characterized him as “stumbling, halting, prevaricating, irresolute, weak, besotted.”13

In August 1862, Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune,14 wrote to Lincoln, “We think you are strangely and disastrously remiss.”15 In a public reply, Lincoln explained, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery.... What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.”16

Since the 1960s, many historians have clearly exposed the myth that Lincoln “fought the war to free the slaves,” stressing his belief in colonization, his desire to conciliate with the South, and his attempts to limit the scope of the conflict. This is indeed a necessary critical corrective to the mythic view of Lincoln. By the same token, however, many of these historians fail to grasp the revolutionary character of the Civil War and the period of Reconstruction that followed it. A revisionist effort that began as a challenge to the dominant racist histories of the Civil War is today used to justify pessimistic and conservative ideas. As Eric Foner argues, historians who began by challenging the portrayals of Reconstruction as a “tragic era,” now portray

change in the post–Civil War years as fundamentally “superficial.” Persistent racism, these postrevisionist scholars argued, had negated efforts to extend justice to Blacks, and the failure to distribute land prevented the freedmen from achieving true autonomy and made their civil and political rights all but meaningless. In the 1970s and 1980s, a new generation of scholars, Black and white, extended this skeptical view to virtually every aspect of the period. Recent studies of Reconstruction politics and ideology have stressed the “conservatism” of Republican policymakers, even at the height of Radical influence.... Summing up a decade of writing, C. Vann Woodward observed in 1979 that historians now understood “how essentially nonrevolutionary and conservative Reconstruction really was.”17

Such interpretations of the Civil War and Reconstruction downplay the significance and impact of these events, and crucially dismiss the possibility of any outcome other than the one that occurred. But the importance of this period is precisely that it showed that racism was not immutable and that ideas can change rapidly in periods of social upheaval. Lincoln, for example, was forced to move left during the course of the war, much as Oliver Cromwell and Maximilien Robespierre did during the English and French Revolutions. As James McPherson describes Lincoln, “Although it may seem like an oxymoron, Lincoln can best be described as a conservative revolutionary. That is, he wanted to conserve the Union as the revolutionary heritage of the founding fathers. Preserving this heritage was the purpose of the war; all else became a means to achieve this end.”18

Karl Marx’s assessment of the situation was astute. Describing Lincoln as “a first-rate, second-rate man,” Marx wrote, “All Lincoln’s acts appear like the mean pettifogging conditions which one lawyer puts to his opposing lawyer. But this does not alter their historic content.... The events over there [the United States] are a world upheaval.”19 An assault on slavery was the inevitable precondition for a Union victory. “Events themselves,” he wrote in 1861, “drive to the promulgation of the decisive slogan—emancipation of the slaves.”20

That “events themselves” forced the war to take on the character it did was admitted by Lincoln himself: “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”21 A number of factors made emancipation the key question of the war. The role of slaves in the Southern economy was decisive. Summing up the views of both sides at the start of the war, historian Cedric Robinson writes:

The majority of the civilian and military leaders on both sides expected a quick, three-month conflict. They anticipated no major battles, rather a few decisive skirmishes that would demonstrate the cause of secession as being too tenuous militarily (as loyalists anticipated) or the Union as without the resources or resolve to end the rebellion (as Southerners hoped). That the war extended into a protracted struggle spelled the end of only one side, however: the slave regime was undone. Being a slave regime, constantly on alert for threats from the domestic enemy, the white South had the advantage in military readiness and the habit of mobilizing armed militias. But they mistakenly imagined that they could call up a good portion of the white males without disrupting the economy; that Black coerced labor would release sufficient free laborers and small farmers for war duties; that their human property would manage the production of staple crops, construct fortifications, transport supplies, and serve as support in the battle camps; that slaves would go on, according to the Southern racist mantra, being dependent, loyal, and simple.22

Almost any comparison of forces appeared to favor an easy victory for the North. Its population numbered twenty-two million, compared with nine million in the Confederacy, four million of them slaves. In every measure of economic strength, the North also proved dominant. But the North’s initially half-hearted prosecution of the war—and above all its refusal to appeal to the four million slaves behind enemy lines—soon led to significant losses and demoralization. Radical elements within the Republican Party began to urge the war be turned into a war for emancipation, and raised the demand that Blacks be brought into the Union Army. Reluctantly at first, and later more decisively, Lincoln began to move toward abolition.

In September 1862, Lincoln issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. It was conceived primarily as a military move. It gave the South four months to stop rebelling and threatened to emancipate their slaves if the Confederates continued to fight. At the same time, it promised to leave slavery untouched in states that came over to the North.

Of course, the Confederacy did not surrender. In response, Lincoln lifted the four-month time limit and issued the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. The proclamation read in part: “That on the 1st day of January, AD 1863, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State the people thereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward and forever free.”23 Even at this time, the Emancipation Proclamation was essentially a military measure. In the words of radical historian Richard Hofstadter, the proclamation had “all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading. It contained no indictment of slavery, but simply based emancipation on ‘military necessity.’” This led a cynical London Spectator writer to put it bluntly: “The principle is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the U.S.”24

The Proclamation did not affect 450,000 slaves in border states loyal to the Union (Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri), or in Southern territory occupied by the Union Army (in Louisiana, Tennessee, Virginia), but it declared the more than three million Southern slaves “are henceforth and shall be free.”25 The practice of returning escaped slaves to their former owners was halted, and slaves joined the Union Army in the thousands. By the war’s end, 189,000 slaves had served in the army, out of a force of 2.1 million.26

The new policy transformed the course of the war. “A single Negro regiment would have a remarkable effect on Southern nerves,” Marx predicted correctly. “A war of this kind must be conducted on revolutionary lines while the Yankees have thus far been trying to conduct it constitutionally.”27

But by 1863 Lincoln was clearly tying the Emancipation Proclamation to the North’s military success. “My enemies pretend I am now carrying on this war for the sole purpose of abolition,” Lincoln wrote in 1863. “So long as I am President, it shall be carried on for the sole purpose of restoring the Union. But no human power can subdue this rebellion without the use of the emancipation policy, and every other policy calculated to weaken the moral and physical forces of the rebellion. Freedom has given us two hundred thousand men raised on Southern soil. It will give us more yet. Just so much it has subtracted from the enemy.”28

The transformation of the Civil War into a war of emancipation was greeted enthusiastically by Blacks, abolitionists, and the nascent socialist movement. Frederick Douglass took to the pages of his newspaper, Douglass Monthly, to urge Blacks to enlist in the Union Army:

The chance is now given you to end in a day the bondage of centuries, and to rise in one bound from social degradation to the place of common equality with all other varieties of men. Remember Denmark Vesey of Charleston—-remember Nathaniel Turner of Southampton, remember Shields Green, and Copeland, who followed noble John Brown, and fell as glorious martyrs for the cause of the slave—-Remember that in a contest with oppression, the Almighty has no attribute which can take sides with oppressors. The case is before you. This is our golden opportunity.29

Blacks proved themselves to be able and brave fighters. In fact, James McPherson concludes that the North would not have won the war as quickly as it did without Black soldiers—and it may not have won the war at all.30 The courage and fighting spirit of the Black soldiers also affected their white comrades. A surgeon in a Black artillery regiment, writing to his wife, spoke of how the term “rabid Abolitionist” used to be considered an insult. “[B]ut now, if you will substitute the adjective earnest, which is all that was meant then by ‘Rabid’ it is a title of honor. We are all Abolitionists, unless we are copperheads, which is now a contemptuous epithet.”31

But despite the great advances made in the fight against racism, its legacy also found expression in brutal race riots. Needing to replenish the ranks of the Union Army, the federal government initiated the military draft in 1863. In response to the enforcement of conscription in July 1863, thousands of New York workers, most of them Irish immigrants and their descendents, protested by launching a virtual insurrection and pogrom against Blacks. Tired of the war and its financial burden, they were hostile to conscription. But their hostility to the rich, who could buy a deferment for $300, was combined with anti-Black hatred. The five-day riot was one of the most violent and graphic examples of the hold racist ideas exercised, even among groups of workers who were themselves the victims of racist pogroms. The New York riots against Blacks in 1863 left more than 100 dead.32

That racism persisted should not blind us to how the victory of the North over the South smashed the hideous system of slavery and marked a dramatic advance for freedom and equality. The key to the Civil War was the role that the Black slaves themselves played in achieving their own emancipation. As W. E. B. Du Bois puts it in his seminal work, Black Reconstruction:

The Negro became in the first year contraband of war; that is, property belonging to the enemy and valuable to the invader. And in addition to that, he became, as the South quickly saw, the key to Southern resistance. Either these four million laborers remained quietly at work to raise food for the fighters, or the fighters starved. Simultaneously, when the dream of the North for man-power produced riots, the only additional troops that the North could depend on were 200,000 Negroes, for without them, as Lincoln said, the North could not have won the war.

But this slow, stubborn mutiny of the Negro slave was not merely a matter of 200,000 Black soldiers and perhaps 300,000 other Black laborers, servants, spies and helpers. Back of this half million stood 3 1/2 million more. Without their labor the South would starve. With arms in their hands, Negroes would form a fighting force which could replace every single Northern white soldier fighting listlessly and against his will with a Black man fighting for freedom.33

The surrender of Southern forces in 1865 spelled the end of slavery. But another war broke out, North and South, to determine the position freed Blacks would now occupy.