[Peace-discuss] Lincoln et all

[C. G. Estabrook]

How can an account, purportedly in the tradition of historical 
materialism, fail to consider the class composition of the Union 
government?  Without that, it remains largely mythological.  --CGE

Joseph Parnarauskis wrote:
> Friends,
> 
> I send an excellent artilcle regarding this discussion.  Putting hope
> into this two party system--and yours in the Democratic Party-- is a
> useless and historical dead end.  The history of our times shows us
> that.
> 
> Understand the class struggle and the Marxist analysis of such.  Read
> our website. Give up your opportunism that leads your struggle,
> always towards the Democratic Party.  Such struggle offers no hope to
> or for the working class.  It is a blind and dead alley.  Only the
> revolution of the working class, under the direction of the Socialist
> Equality Party, in opposition to the rich and ruling class can end
> such banter.  I find it long overdue.
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Joe Parnarauskis
> 
> In honor of the bicentenary of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin 12
> February 2009
> 
> It is among the most remarkable coincidences of history that Abraham
> Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the same date, February 12,
> 1809. Lincoln, as the 16th president of the United States, made an
> immense contribution to the political liberation of mankind. Darwin,
> in the sphere of science, contributed mightily to its intellectual
> liberation. Today the World Socialist Web Site pays tribute to the
> memory of these two very great men. Abraham Lincoln Abraham Lincoln 
> Abraham Lincoln's place in history rests upon his leadership of the
> US during the Civil War (1861-1865) and his central role in the
> drafting of the Emancipation Proclamation, which laid the legal basis
> for the destruction of slavery. But slavery, and the Southern
> oligarchy that depended upon it, were ultimately destroyed only by
> the victory of the Union army in the South, which transformed the
> longstanding sectional conflict into what historian James McPherson
> has aptly called the second American Revolution. More has been
> written about Lincoln than any other figure in US history. Virtually
> every aspect of his extraordinary political career has been covered
> in detail. So vast is the legend that surrounds his name that it
> becomes difficult to abstract the real individual from the icon. But
> the manner in which Lincoln's life and character became bound up with
> the greatest historical questions of his time—slavery and the fate of
> the union—merits particular attention. Lincoln played a central role
> in one of the great progressive struggles of modern history. The
> Civil War arose inexorably out of the fundamental contradictions left
> unresolved by the first American Revolution, which had proclaimed in
> stirring language the equality of man, and which had sanctioned the
> use of revolution to destroy all forms of tyranny. The revolutionists
> of 1776, though they were aware of the contradiction between their
> rhetoric of equality and the existence of slavery, compromised their
> principles when it came to "the peculiar institution." No doubt many
> hoped that the problem of slavery would resolve itself in time. But
> in the aftermath of the revolution the slave-owning class gradually
> increased its power over the institutions of the state, even as the
> social weight and industrial might of the North grew. Territorial
> expansion in the early Republic persistently raised the problem of
> the balance of power between slave and free states. The Southern
> planter class jealously fought to maintain its politically privileged
> position by seeing to it that new slave territories would at least
> match in number and voting strength states where slavery was
> outlawed. Elements among the increasingly deranged Southern elite
> even entertained visions of a slave empire stretching into the
> Caribbean. The provocative US war on Mexico in 1846, which aimed to
> benefit the "slave power" with vast new territory from Texas to the
> Pacific Ocean, set into motion a series of events that would
> ultimately lead to the Civil War. It was in response to this war that
> Lincoln, then a Congressman from Illinois, gave one of his most
> noteworthy speeches, condemning it as a false "military glory—that
> attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood." Lincoln
> subjected to scrutiny all of President James K. Polk's pretexts for
> war, exposing them as false and the war as unconstitutional. In the
> wake of the Mexican-American War, Lincoln left Congress in disgust,
> returning to his law practice in Springfield, Illinois. During the
> 1850s, the Southern elite consolidated its political domination over
> the levers of state power, controlling the presidency, the Congress,
> and the Supreme Court. This power it translated into provocative acts
> that increasingly incensed Northern opinion. The Kansas-Nebraska Act
> of 1854 was ushered through Congress by Illinois' Democratic Senator
> Stephen Douglas. The law essentially overturned the Missouri
> Compromise of 1820, allowing for the expansion of slavery into
> Northern territory based on "popular sovereignty," and creating a
> civil war in the Kansas territory between its anti-slavery majority
> and pro-slavery forces from neighboring Missouri. Then in 1857 came
> the infamous Dred Scott case, in which the Supreme Court of Chief
> Justice Roger Taney ruled that people of African descent, slave or
> free, had no rights as citizens or as people, and that Congress had
> no authority to outlaw slavery anywhere in the US. The
> Kansas-Nebraska Act brought Lincoln back to political life and gave
> the impetus for the creation of the Republican Party. Lincoln
> articulated his opposition to the extension of slavery to new
> territories in his Peoria Speech of 1854. From that point on, his
> political star rose in tandem with that of the Republican Party and
> the growing Northern opposition to slavery, which hardened after the
> Dred Scott decision. Accepting the Republican nomination for Senate
> in 1858, Lincoln campaigned against Douglas at a series of legendary
> debates in Illinois. Thousands of Illinoisans traveled days to attend
> these hours-long duels. The burning question was slavery. Douglas
> favored a conciliatory policy toward the South, while Lincoln opposed
> the further extension of slavery and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The
> Lincoln-Douglas debates were followed closely throughout the nation,
> suggesting that history had not only laid hold of Lincoln, but masses
> of Northerners as well. And though he narrowly lost the election,
> Lincoln emerged as a figure of national political importance. What
> catapulted Lincoln toward national leadership of the Republican
> Party, however, was his Cooper Union speech delivered in New York
> City in late February 1860. The speech was a brilliant and carefully
> measured exposition of the futility of Douglas's advocacy of popular
> sovereignty. The speech demonstrated not only the force of Lincoln's
> intellect, but his immense political skills. These talents allowed
> him to best better-known candidates Senator William Seward of New
> York and Governor Salmon Chase of Ohio for the Republican
> presidential nomination in 1860. Lincoln won a presidential election
> split in four ways in 1860, beating Democrat Stephen Douglas, whose
> dreams of compromise were shattered by the withdrawal of the Southern
> Democrats from his own party behind the nomination of John
> Breckinridge of Kentucky. The remnants of the Whig Party nominated
> John Bell. The polarization of the country was such that Lincoln won
> every Northern state except for New Jersey, but was barred from the
> ballot in all but two Southern states. Lincoln's victory was met with
> the secession of most of the Southern states within three months.
> Then, in April 1861, Southern forces attacked a federal military base
> at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. In response, Lincoln immediately
> called for a popular mobilization to defeat what Lincoln would
> henceforth refer to as a rebellion. He faced a daunting political
> task. Lincoln's unwillingness to compromise over the survival of the
> union was met by incomprehension and opposition among many in the
> North, who believed that it would be impossible, or unwise, to defeat
> the Southern insurrection. Among these were leading members of the
> military brass, including its top general, George McClellan, whose
> refusal to prosecute the war with the necessary level of
> determination approached the level of treachery. It is well known
> that Lincoln's initial intention was not the destruction of slavery,
> which he personally opposed, but the preservation of the union. He
> famously wrote to abolitionist Horace Greeley in 1862, "If I could
> save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I
> could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could
> save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do
> that." Abolitionists, such as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd
> Garrison, found this position inadequate and doomed to failure.
> Ultimately the abolitionists were proven correct. Lincoln eventually
> came to recognize that the defeat of the Southern insurrection
> required that the union adopt revolutionary policies; that the union
> could not be saved without destroying the Southern oligarchy and the
> slave system. Once he arrived at this conclusion, the determination
> with which he pursed this revolutionary objective elevated him to be
> one of the great political leaders, not only of the US, but of modern
> history. Lincoln proved himself to be a politician of extraordinary
> agility. He demonstrated an ability to size up a situation and its
> likely course of development, allowing crucial questions to mature
> before making a decision. At moments, his patience in allowing events
> to develop appeared to approach the level of temporizing. Karl Marx,
> who reported on the American Civil War for a German newspaper, noted
> this quality as early as 1862, after Lincoln dismissed McClellan,
> writing "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' realizes that such a turning point
> has been reached, he surprises friend and foe alike by a sudden
> operation executed as noiselessly as possible." It was because of his
> determined prosecution of the Civil War that the figure of Lincoln
> became identified with the great historical cause of emancipation. On
> January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which
> proclaimed that "all persons held as slaves" within the Confederacy
> "are, and henceforward shall be free." The Emancipation Proclamation
> was necessitated by the military exigencies of the war. But it
> frankly acknowledged, for the first time, the war's revolutionary
> character. By legally freeing the slaves—the largest state seizure of
> private property in world history prior to the Russian
> Revolution—Lincoln aimed a death blow at the entire social order in
> the South. The class conscious workers of Europe viewed Lincoln as
> the leader of a great progressive cause—the destruction of slavery—to
> which they fully identified and gave their political solidarity. This
> was true especially of the English working class, even though the
> Civil War starved their textile mills of cotton. Though the English
> capitalists had accrued enormous profits from the American South, the
> British workers' hatred of slavery made intervention in the war on
> the side of the South—a distinct consideration until 1864—politically
> impossible. Upon his reelection, Marx addressed congratulations to
> Lincoln on behalf of the First International. It fell to Lincoln,
> Marx wrote, "the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his
> country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained
> race and the reconstitution of a social world." Marx's letter was
> graciously received, and replied to, by Lincoln's ambassador to
> Britain, Charles Francis Adams, the grandson of John Adams. The
> strength of integrity that underlay his actions accounts for the
> extraordinary and simple eloquence with which he articulated the
> ideals of the union to an international audience. Standing alongside
> Thomas Jefferson's prose in the Declaration of Independence,
> Lincoln's speeches have lost none of their vitality; his memorable
> formulations remain among the most eloquent of the English language.
>  Lincoln emerged just as American literature was establishing an
> artistic presence of world note; Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman
> Melville were his contemporaries. Lincoln's primary literary
> influences were the King James Bible and Shakespeare, though his
> interest in the former was entirely literary. He never joined a
> church, and once declared, "The Bible is not my Book and Christianity
> is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long complicated
> statements of Christian dogma." His associates remember that Lincoln
> could recount by heart long passages from Shakespeare's histories and
> tragedies. Biblical metaphor and the Poet's grasp of historical drama
> suffused Lincoln's prose. In the Gettysburg address of 1863, Lincoln
> identified the struggle as a war to ensure "that government of the
> people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the
> earth." In 1858, in a debate with Douglas, Lincoln said "as I would
> not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of
> democracy." In accepting the Republican nomination for US Senator
> from Illinois in 1858, Lincoln prophetically warned, "A house divided
> against itself cannot stand." In his second inaugural address,
> Lincoln noted with sardonic incredulity the religious overtones of
> the Civil War. "Both [sides] read the same Bible and pray to the same
> God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange
> that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing
> their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge
> not, that we be not judged." Lincoln was genuinely humane. To the
> consternation of his generals, he suspended the death sentences of
> hundreds of soldiers accused of fleeing battles. In the largest
> single act of executive clemency in US history, he personally
> reviewed and commuted the death sentences of 269 Sioux men, Native
> Americans, who were sentenced to hang for an 1862 uprising in
> Minnesota. He was also known as a master storyteller and man of
> unusual wit and humor. But cohabitating with these characteristics
> was a profound melancholy, always evident in photographs of the man's
> visage. During the Civil War, Lincoln would wait in Washington at a
> telegraph office for word on the results of battles and casualties.
> The war that lasted four years and claimed the lives of over 600,000
> weighed heavily on Lincoln, as did the personal tragedies that beset
> his family and the turbulence of his wife, Mary Todd. Death took two
> young children from the couple; Lincoln was especially attached to
> the second, Willie, who died in 1862 at the age of 11, likely of
> typhoid. In poetic tragedy, Lincoln himself was fatally shot on April
> 14th, 1865, one week after the surrender of the Confederacy at
> Appomattox Court House in Virginia. Lincoln was attending a comedy at
> Ford's Theater in Washington when John Wilkes Booth, a well-known
> actor, entered his box and shot him in the back of the head. In the
> wake of Lincoln's assassination, Marx again took up his pen on behalf
> of Europe's socialist workers, this time addressing himself to Andrew
> Johnson, Lincoln's far lesser vice president. Lincoln was a man, Marx
> wrote, "neither to be browbeaten by adversity, nor intoxicated by
> success, inflexibly pressing on to his great goal, never compromising
> it by blind haste, slowly maturing his steps, never retracing them,
> carried away by no surge of popular favor, disheartened by no
> slackening of the popular pulse, tempering stern acts by the gleams
> of a kind heart, illuminating scenes dark with passion by the smile
> of humor, doing his titanic work as humbly and homely as Heaven-born
> rulers do little things with the grandiloquence of pomp and state; in
> one word, one of the rare men who succeed in becoming great, without
> ceasing to be good. Such, indeed, was the modesty of this great and
> good man, that the world only discovered him a hero after he had
> fallen a martyr." Perhaps it was the combination of his conviction
> and humanity in prosecuting the great cause of the Civil War that
> maintains Lincoln's hold on our sentiments. It is hard to think of
> another figure in modern history whose memory arouses such genuine
> feeling of profound affection 144 years after his death. Lincoln's
> assassination in 1865 is still deeply felt as a great historical
> tragedy. However, within a generation of his death, official
> celebrations of Lincoln provided the US ruling class a means of
> sanitizing the revolutionary significance of his life and papering
> over new contradictions that the North's victory in the Civil War had
> brought to the fore. By 1877, the conflict of social classes had
> erupted in the US, punctuated by massive and bloody strikes
> throughout the remainder of the 19th century. This new conflict would
> be the central driving force of US history from that point on. Not
> coincidentally, in that same year, 1877, the policy of Reconstruction
> in the South was abandoned. Northern capitalists, operating through
> the Republican Party, concluded a pact with the defeated Southern
> elite, allowing for the latter's political rehabilitation in exchange
> for the unfettered dominance of industrial capitalism and its
> policies throughout the land. Lincoln's assassination leaves forever
> unanswered how he would have responded to the political crisis that
> emerged during Reconstruction. Yet the development of the union along
> capitalist lines was a historically determined process, with all that
> that entailed. It is difficult to imagine that Lincoln would have
> been able to prevent the ultimate betrayal of Reconstruction. Over
> the course of the ensuing decades, the great mass of the
> African-American population was deprived of its civil rights and
> subjected to the humiliations of an apartheid regime enforced by
> lynching and every manner of cruelty. The systematic denial of civil
> rights to African Americans would continue into the 1960s—100 years
> after the Civil War. But this history in no way detracts from
> Lincoln's position as the leader of a genuinely progressive and
> democratic revolution. Like every great historical figure, Lincoln
> bears the imprint and limitations of his time. But every progressive
> historical cause, in a certain sense, rises above its own time and
> speaks to the generations that follow. Lincoln's actions, and the
> language he used to justify and explain them, continue to inspire. 
> Tom Eley Charles Darwin Charles Darwin Charles Darwin's publication
> of On the Origin of Species heralded a revolution in our
> understanding of the natural world. Assimilating the scientific
> accomplishments of the Enlightenment, Darwin discovered the
> dialectical laws of nature governing the emergence of complex forms
> in natural history. Two hundred years after his birth, Darwin's
> Evolution by Natural Selection remains the unifying theory of an
> ever-expanding array of biological sciences. The discovery of
> Evolution by Natural Selection must be understood within the context
> of the growth of Enlightenment naturalism, of which Darwin's theory
> is an epic culmination. Advances in optics had allowed Copernicus,
> Bruno and Galileo to replace theological cosmology with the
> scientific conception of a universe governed by laws derived through
> observation, rather than scripture. Similarly, the law of Natural
> Selection as outlined in Darwin's On the Origin of Species
> synthesized a vast body of knowledge accumulated through anatomical
> sciences, experimentation in breeding, taxonomy, geology and
> scientific expeditions global in scale. Great collections of
> organisms discovered through voyages in the 18th and 19th centuries
> were categorized according to their anatomical distinctions by
> naturalists such as Carl Linnaeus, Geoffrey St. Hilaire, Georges
> Cuvier and Robert Owen. Organisms were hierarchically sorted
> according to their anatomical affinities, which recognizably
> corresponded to their respective conditions of existence. Some
> naturalists, including the Comte de Buffon, Lamarck, Robert Chambers
> and Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus, had postulated long before Darwin
> that organisms changed over time. Geologist Charles Lyell, commenting
> on the bones of extinct organisms buried in the mantle of the earth,
> recognized that life had altered substantially during the earth's
> long history, but having no mechanism by which to explain these
> alterations he suggested their creation by God. Following his voyage
> aboard the HMS Beagle in 1836, Darwin came to recognize that living
> and extinct species "had not been independently created, but had
> descended, like varieties, from other species." Darwin observed that
> variation characterized all organisms, and that these variations
> could be passed on through generations by the principle of heredity.
> He also saw that in the struggle for existence, certain varieties
> were apt to survive, while others were not. He famously concluded his
> 1859 Origin of Species: "Thus, from the war of nature, from famine
> and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of
> conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly
> follows. There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several
> powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one;
> and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the
> fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most
> beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." 
> Darwin's discovery immediately produced an uproar, and to this day is
> at the center of countless intellectual and political controversies.
> The name of Darwin remains anathema to the religious right and all
> those who encourage and cultivate, for one or another reactionary
> purpose, ignorance and superstition. The theory of Evolution by
> Natural Selection does not merely overturn the Biblical story of
> creation, a "manifestly false history of the world" according to
> Darwin, but places the emergence of mankind and thought firmly within
> the domain of natural history. "Everything in nature is the result of
> fixed laws," wrote Darwin, including humanity and the "organs of the
> mind." He postulated that through an understanding of evolution,
> "psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary
> acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation." Darwin's
> achievement closely parallels that of Marx and Engels, who were among
> the first to understand the significance of his work. The writing of
> Capital and discovery of the historical laws underlying social
> development equally reflect the culmination of Enlightenment
> achievement. Darwin looked with confidence to the future, to young
> and rising naturalists, and wrote that through an understanding of
> evolution, "we can dimly foresee that there will be a revolution in
> natural history." He could not have been more correct. Darwin's
> theory has since flourished, and become enriched through Mendelian
> genetics, the Modern Synthesis, the discovery of DNA and a vast array
> of modern biological disciplines. His theory is more alive today than
> ever: No field of biology can be understood without evolution,
> certainly the unifying theory of life. Evolution is at the heart of
> biochemistry, genetics and microbiology, developmental biology,
> epidemiology and modern medicine. Evolution has continued along
> traditional paths such as paleontology, but also expanded into
> exciting new realms including neurobiology and biopsychology. Two
> hundred years after his birth, the scientific and intellectual
> revolution inspired by Charles Darwin's work continues to unfold and
> gather strength. Daniel Douglass
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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