[Peace-discuss] legacy of lincoln

[Carl G. Estabrook]

"A house divided against itself cannot stand." I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.

Abraham Lincoln
Springfield, IL
1858


The US Civil War (1861-5) was a murderous and unnecessary conflict in which a Southern ruling class, who lived by extracting surplus labor from direct producers by means of chattel slavery, were attacked and defeated by a Northern ruling class, who lived by extracting surplus labor from direct producers by means of wage slavery.

"All modes of production in class societies prior to capitalism extract surplus labour from the immediate producers by means of extra-economic coercion.  Capitalism is the first mode of production in history in which the means whereby the surplus is pumped out of the direct producer is 'purely' economic in form - the wage contract: the equal exchange between free agents which reproduces, hourly and daily, inequality and oppression" [Perry Anderson].

It was thought that the two systems could not exist in juxtaposition ("half slave and half free"), and the dominant social groups came into conflict after the Mexican War over the vast increase of US territory taken from Mexico. After the a dozen years of contestation, war was precipitated by Lincoln, a minion of the Northern ruling class.

"Both groups wanted to control the western half of the continent, and the Northern agrarians became increasingly anti-slavery as they faced the prospect of competing against a forced-labor system.  But favoring free soil did not mean agitating to free the black man.  The majority of Western farmers were not abolitionists ... Their objective was to exclude both the white planter and the black [workers] from the trans-Mississippi marketplace.  That goal, and the attitude which produced it, gave Abraham Lincoln his victory over the abolitionist element in the newly rising Republican party" [W. A. Williams]. 

Although chattel slavery was abolished, the war did not result in material improvements for the working classes in either the North or the South. (See now Douglas A. Blackmon, "Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II," 2009.) The ruling classes coalesce to some degree  in opposition to working class demands (cf. "Compromise [sic] of 1877"). The American 'robber baron' Jay Gould (1836-92) is supposed to have said, "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half." 

But t will take another trumped-up war, 50 years after Appomattox, to stymie popular demands. (See Randolph Bourne, "War Is The Health of the State," 1918.)

<http://newsfromneptune.com/2009/02/13/lincoln-cult-february-2008/#more-109>


On Nov 27, 2012, at 2:37 PM, "E. Wayne Johnson 朱稳森" <ewj at pigsqq.org> wrote:

> 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; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together 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.
> 
> Abraham Lincoln
> Charleston, IL
> 1858
> _______________________________________________
> Peace-discuss mailing list
> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
> http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20121127/de4a075f/attachment-0001.html>