[Peace-discuss] Civil War...

[C. G. Estabrook]

As you say, the Civil war was indeed about slavery, Tom, but you surely 
don't mean that Zinn's account is "crude economic determinism."  He 
describes the war as chosen by elites in pursuit of their perceived 
interests.  The Republican party was founded explicitly to prevent the 
extension of slavery into the territories, to the interest of Northern 
industrialists and land owners, who exploited labor by the wage 
contract.  When a Republican president was elected, Southern landowners 
and industrialists ("the slave interest") saw their method of extracting 
labor, chattel slavery, threatened; their response was to withdraw the 
states they controlled from the union.

You're right that Marx saw the Northern victory as progressive, but in 
the sense that it clarified the class struggle.  Marx wrote a lot about 
the war while it was happening, much of it for Greeley's New York 
Tribune, but his most concise comment was a letter drafted in London in 
November of 1864 for the recently-formed International Working Men's 
Association, congratulating Lincoln on his re-election.  In it he makes 
it clear that he saw slavery in the US as retarding the worker's 
movement, and that the defeat of slavery would make the struggle between 
capital and labor clearer.

So long as slavery existed in the U.S., Marx wrote, workers "boasted it 
the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and 
choose his own master," in contrast to slaves, who were already sold and 
couldn't choose their own masters (i.e, "I may be a poor worker, but at 
least I'm not a salve.")  Under these conditions, workers "were unable 
to attain the true freedom of labor" -- which is the "struggle for 
emancipation."

Incidentally, this letter was delivered to Charles Francis Adams, the US 
Ambassador in England, who transmitted Lincoln's response courteously 
and referred to the ongoing war as "the present conflict with slavery." 
  Almost two years before, Lincoln himself had written to workers of 
Manchester who supported the Union and referred to the war as "the 
attempt to overthrow this Government, which was built upon the 
foundation of human rights, and to substitute for it one which should 
rest exclusively on human slavery." --CGE


Thomas Mackaman wrote:

 > Zinn's quote has some truth behind it, but the attempt to reduce the
 > Civil War to such crude econonomic determinism should be resisted.
 > No less an observer than Karl Marx considered the Civil War to be a
 > truly progressive war.  I believe one of his oft-cited quotes was
 > that "labor in the white skin could never be freed so long as labor
 > in the black was branded."  The war was indeed about slavery.
 > McPherson's "Battle Cry of Freedom" is worth the read.  To paraphrase
 > his memorable quote, Americans shot in 1861 the way they had voted in
 > 1860.
 > ...