[Peace-discuss] Civil War...

[John W.]

At 02:46 PM 3/16/2007, C. G. Estabrook wrote:

>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


Lincoln was a complex man - as complex, perhaps, as life itself.  It 
strikes me that Lincoln may have been just about as adept as Barack Obama 
at emphasizing to each audience what he felt it wanted to hear.

J.W.




>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.
> > ...