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Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Writings on the U.S. Civil War

Thursday 13 January 2022

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Writings on the U.S. Civil War

Karl Marx,

The North American Civil War

London, October 20, 1861

For months the leading weekly and daily papers of the London press have been reiterating the same
litany on the American Civil War. While they insult the free states of the North, they anxiously defend
themselves against the suspicion of sympathising with the slave states of the South. In fact, they
continually write two articles: one article, in which they attack the North, and another article, in which
they excuse their attacks on the North.

In essence the extenuating arguments read: The war between the North and South is a tariff war. The war
is, further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery and in fact turns on Northern lust
for sovereignty. Finally, even if justice is on the side of the North , does it not remain a vain endeavour to
want to subjugate eight million Anglo-Saxons by force! Would not separation of the South release the
North from all connection with Negro slavery and ensure for it, with its twenty million inhabitants and its
vast territory, a higher, hitherto scarcely dreamt-of, development? Accordingly, must not the North
welcome secession as a happy event, instead of wanting to overrule it by a bloody and futile civil war?

Point by point we will probe the plea of the English press.
The war between North and South — so runs the first excuse — is a mere tariff war, a war between a
protectionist system and a free trade system, and Britain naturally stands on the side of free trade. Shall
the slave-owner enjoy the fruits of slave labour in their entirety or shall he be cheated of a portion of
these by the protectionists of the North? That is the question which is at issue in this war. It was reserved
for The Times to make this brilliant discovery. The Economist, The Examiner, The Saturday Review and
tutti quanti expounded the theme further. It is characteristic of this discovery that it was made, not in
Charleston, but in London. Naturally, in America everyone knew that from 1846 to 1861 a free trade
system prevailed, and that Representative Morrill carried his protectionist tariff through Congress only in
1861, after the rebellion had already broken out. Secession, therefore, did not take place because the
Morrill tariff had gone through Congress, but, at most, the Morrill tariff went through Congress because
secession had taken place. When South Carolina had its first attack of secession in 1831, the protectionist
tariff of 1828 served it, to be sure, as a pretext, but only as a pretext, as is known from a statement of
General Jackson. This time, however, the old pretext has in fact not been repeated. In the Secession Congress at Montgomery all reference to the tariff question was avoided, because the cultivation of sugar
in Louisiana, one of the most influential Southern states, depends entirely on protection.

But, the London press pleads further, the war of the United States is nothing but a war for the forcible
maintenance of the Union. The Yankees cannot make up their minds to strike fifteen stars from their
standard. They want to cut a colossal figure on the world stage. Yes, it would be different if the war was
waged for the abolition of slavery! The question of slavery, however, as The Saturday Review
categorically declares among other things, has absolutely nothing to do with this war.

It is above all to be remembered that the war did not originate with the North, but with the South. The
North finds itself on the defensive. For months it had quietly looked on while the secessionists
appropriated the Union’s forts, arsenals, shipyards, customs houses, pay offices, ships and supplies of
arms, insulted its flag and took prisoner bodies of its troops. Finally the secessionists resolved to force
the Union government out of its passive attitude by a blatant act of war, and solely for this reason
proceeded to the bombardment of Fort Sumter near Charleston. On April 11 (1861) their General
Beauregard had learnt in a meeting with Major Anderson, the commander of Fort Sumter, that the fort
was only supplied with provisions for three days more and accordingly must be peacefully surrendered
after this period. In order to forestall this peaceful surrender, the secessionists opened the bombardment
early on the following morning (April 12), which brought about the fall of the fort in a few hours. News
of this had hardly been telegraphed to Montgomery, the seat of the Secession Congress, when War
Minister Walker publicly declared in the name of the new Confederacy: No man can say where the war
opened today will end. At the same time he prophesied that before the first of May the flag of the
Southern Confederacy will wave from the dome of the old Capitol in Washington and within a short time
perhaps also from the Faneuil Hall in Boston. Only now ensued the proclamation in which Lincoln called
for 75,000 men to defend the Union. The bombardment of Fort Sumter cut off the only possible
constitutional way out, namely the convocation of a general convention of the American people, as
Lincoln had proposed in his inaugural address. For Lincoln there now remained only the choice of
fleeing from Washington, evacuating Maryland and Delaware and surrendering Kentucky, Missouri and
Virginia, or of answering war with war.

The question of the principle of the American Civil War is answered by the battle slogan with which the
South broke the peace. Stephens, the Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy, declared in the
Secession Congress that what essentially distinguished the Constitution newly hatched at Montgomery
from the Constitution of Washington and Jefferson was that now for the first time slavery was recognised
as an institution good in itself, and as the foundation of the whole state edifice, whereas the revolutionary
fathers, men steeped in the prejudices of the eighteenth century, had treated slavery as an evil imported
from England and to be eliminated in the course of time. Another matador of the South, Mr. Spratt, cried
out: "For us it is a question of founding a great slave republic." If, therefore, it was indeed only in
defence of the Union that the North drew the sword, had not the South already declared that the
continuance of slavery was no longer compatible with the continuance of the Union?

Just as the bombardment of Fort Sumter gave the signal for the opening of the war, the election victory of
the Republican Party of the North, the election of Lincoln as President, gave the signal for secession. On
November 6, 1860, Lincoln was elected. On November 8, 1860, a message telegraphed from South
Carolina said: Secession is regarded here as an accomplished fact; on November 10 the legislature of
Georgia occupied itself with secession plans, and on November 13 a special session of the legislature of
Mississippi was convened to consider secession. But Lincoln’s election was itself only the result of a split in the Democratic camp. During the election struggle the Democrats of the North concentrated their
votes on Douglas, the Democrats of the South concentrated their votes on Breckinridge, and to this
splitting of the Democratic votes the Republican Party owed its victory. Whence came, on the one hand,
the preponderance of the Republican Party in the North? Whence, on the other, the disunion within the
Democratic Party, whose members, North and South, had operated in conjunction for more than half a
century?

Under the presidency of Buchanan the sway that the South had gradually usurped over the Union through
its alliance with the Northern Democrats attained its zenith. The last Continental Congress of 1787 and
the first Constitutional Congress of 1789 -90 had legally excluded slavery from all Territories of the
republic north-west of the Ohio. (Territories, as is known, is the name given to the colonies lying within
the United States itself which have not yet attained the level of population constitutionally prescribed for
the formation of autonomous states.) The so-called Missouri Compromise (1820), in consequence of
which Missouri became one of the States of the Union as a slave state, excluded slavery from every
remaining Territory north of 36 degrees latitude and west of the Missouri. By this compromise the area
of slavery was advanced several degrees of longitude, whilst, on the other hand, a geographical
boundary-line to its future spread seemed quite definitely drawn. This geographical barrier, in its turn,
was thrown down in 1854 by the so-called Kansas-Nebraska Bill, the initiator of which was St[ephen] A.
Douglas, then leader of the Northern Democrats. The Bill, which passed both Houses of Congress,
repealed the Missouri Compromise, placed slavery and freedom on the same footing, commanded the
Union government to treat them both with equal indifference and left it to the sovereignty of the people,
that is, the majority of the settlers, to decide whether or not slavery was to be introduced in a Territory.
Thus, for the first time in the history of the United States, every geographical and legal limit to the
extension of slavery in the Territories was removed. Under this new legislation the hitherto free Territory
of New Mexico, a Territory five times as large as the State of New York, was transformed into a slave
Territory, and the area of slavery was extended from the border of the Mexican Republic to 38 degrees
north latitude. In 1859 New Mexico received a slave code that vies with the statute-books of Texas and
Alabama in barbarity. Nevertheless, as the census of 1860 proves, among some hundred thousand
inhabitants New Mexico does not yet count half a hundred slaves. It had therefore sufficed for the South
to send some adventurers with a few slaves over the border, and then with the help of the central
government in Washington and of its officials and contractors in New Mexico to drum together a sham
popular representation to impose slavery and with it the rule of the slaveholders on the Territory.

However, this convenient method did not prove applicable in other Territories. The South accordingly
went a step further and appealed from Congress to the Supreme Court of the United States. This Court,
which numbers nine judges, five of whom belong to the South, had long been the most willing tool of the
slaveholders. It decided in 1857, in the notorious Dred Scott case, that every American citizen possesses
the right to take with him into any territory any property recognized by the Constitution. The
Constitution, it maintained, recognises slaves as property and obliges the Union government to protect
this property. Consequently, on the basis of the Constitution, slaves could be forced to labour in the
Territories by their owners, and so every individual slaveholder was entitled to introduce slavery into
hitherto free Territories against the will of the majority of the settlers. The right to exclude slavery was
taken from the Territorial legislatures and the duty to protect pioneers of the slave system was imposed
on Congress and the Union government.

If the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had extended the geographical boundary-line of slavery in the
Territories, if the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854 had erased every geographical boundary-line and set up a political barrier instead, the will of the majority of the settlers, now the Supreme Court of the United
States, by its decision of 1857, tore down even this political barrier and transformed all the Territories of
the republic, present and future, from nurseries of free states into nurseries of slavery.

At the same time, under Buchanan’s government the severer law on the surrendering of fugitive slaves
enacted in 1850 was ruthlessly carried out in the states of the North. To play the part of slave-catchers for
the Southern slaveholders appeared to be the constitutional calling of the North. On the other hand, in
order to hinder as far as possible the colonisation of the Territories by free settlers, the slaveholders’ party
frustrated all the so-called free-soil measures, i.e., measures which were to secure for the settlers a
definite amount of uncultivated state land free of charge.
In the foreign, as in the domestic, policy of the United States, the interest of the slaveholders served as
the guiding star. Buchanan had in fact bought the office of President through the issue of the Ostend
Manifesto, in which the acquisition of Cuba, whether by purchase or by force of arms, was proclaimed as
the great task of national policy. Under his government northern Mexico was already divided among
American land speculators, who impatiently awaited the signal to fall on Chihuahua, Coahuila and
Sonora. The unceasing piratical expeditions of the filibusters against the states of Central America were
directed no less from the White House at Washington. In the closest connection with this foreign policy,
whose manifest purpose was conquest of new territory for the spread of slavery and of the slaveholders’
rule, stood the reopening of the slave trade, secretly supported by the Union government. St[ephen] A.
Douglas himself declared in the American Senate on August 20, 1859: During the last year more
Negroes have been imported from Africa than ever before in any single year, even at the time when the
slave trade was still legal. The number of slaves imported in the last year totalled fifteen thousand.

Armed spreading of slavery abroad was the avowed aim of national policy; the Union had in fact become
the slave of the three hundred thousand slaveholders who held sway over the South. A series of
compromises, which the South owed to its alliance with the Northern Democrats, had led to this result.
On this alliance all the attempts, periodically repeated since 1817, to resist the ever increasing
encroachments of the slaveholders had hitherto come to grief. At length there came a turning point.

For hardly had the Kansas-Nebraska Bill gone through, which wiped out the geographical boundary-line
of slavery and made its introduction into new Territories subject to the will of the majority of the settlers,
when armed emissaries of the slaveholders, border rabble from Missouri and Arkansas, with bowie-knife
in one hand and revolver in the other, fell upon Kansas and sought by the most unheard-of atrocities to
dislodge its settlers from the Territory colonised by them. These raids were supported by the central
government in Washington. Hence a tremendous reaction. Throughout the North, but particularly in the
North-west, a relief organisation was formed to support Kansas with men, arms and money. Out of this
relief organisation arose the Republican Party, which therefore owes its origin to the struggle for Kansas.

After the attempt to transform Kansas into a slave Territory by force of arms had failed, the South sought
to achieve the same result by political intrigues. Buchanan’s government, in particular, exerted its utmost
efforts to have Kansas included in the States of the Union as a slave state with a slave constitution
imposed on it. Hence renewed struggle, this time mainly conducted in Congress at Washington. Even
St[ephen] A. Douglas, the chief of the Northern Democrats, now (1857 - 58) entered the lists against the
government and his allies of the South, because imposition of a slave constitution would have been
contrary to the principle of sovereignty of the settlers passed in the Nebraska Bill of 1854. Douglas,
Senator for Illinois, a North-western state, would naturally have lost all his influence if he had wanted to
concede to the South the right to steal by force of arms or through acts of Congress Territories colonised by the North. As the struggle for Kansas, therefore, called the Republican Party into being, it at the same
time occasioned the first split within the Democratic Party itself.
The Republican Party put forward its first platform for the presidential election in 1856. Although its
candidate, John Fremont, was not victorious, the huge number of votes cast for him at any rate proved
the rapid growth of the Party, particularly in the North-west. At their second National Convention for the
presidential election (May 17, 1860), the Republicans again put forward their platform of 1856, only
enriched by some additions. Its principal contents were the following: Not a foot of fresh territory is
further conceded to slavery. The filibustering policy abroad must cease. The reopening of the slave trade
is stigmatised. Finally, free-soil laws are to be enacted for the furtherance of free colonisation.
The vitally important point in this platform was that not a foot of fresh terrain was conceded to slavery;
rather it was to remain once and for all confined with the boundaries of the states where it already legally
existed. Slavery was thus to be formally interned; but continual expansion of territory and continual
spread of slavery beyond its old limits is a law of life for the slave states of the Union.

The cultivation of the southern export articles, cotton, tobacco, sugar , etc., carried on by slaves, is only
remunerative as long as it is conducted with large gangs of slaves, on a mass scale and on wide expanses
of a naturally fertile soil, which requires only simple labour. Intensive cultivation, which depends less on
fertility of the soil than on investment of capital, intelligence and energy of labour, is contrary to the
nature of slavery. Hence the rapid transformation of states like Maryland and Virginia, which formerly
employed slaves on the production of export articles, into states which raise slaves to export them into
the deep South. Even in South Carolina, where the slaves form four-sevenths of the population, the
cultivation of cotton has been almost completely stationary for years due to the exhaustion of the soil.
Indeed, by force of circumstances South Carolina has already been transformed in part into a
slave-raising state, since it already sells slaves to the sum of four million dollars yearly to the states of the
extreme South and South-west. As soon as this point is reached, the acquisition of new Territories
becomes necessary, so that one section of the slaveholders with their slaves may occupy new fertile lands
and that a new market for slave-raising, therefore for the sale of slaves, may be created for the remaining
section. It is, for example, indubitable that without the acquisition of Louisiana, Missouri and Arkansas
by the United States, slavery in Virginia and Maryland would have been wiped out long ago. In the
Secessionist Congress at Montgomery, Senator Toombs, one of the spokesmen of the South, strikingly
formulated the economic law that commands the constant expansion of the territory of slavery. "In
fifteen years," said he, "without a great increase in slave territory, either the slaves must be permitted to
flee from the whites, or the whites must flee from the slaves."
As is known, the representation of the individual states in the Congress House of Representatives
depends on the size of their respective populations. As the populations of the free states grow far more
quickly than those of the slave states, the number of Northern Representatives was bound to outstrip that
of the Southern very rapidly. The real seat of the political power of the South is accordingly transferred
more and more to the American Senate, where every state, whether its population is great or small, is
represented by two Senators. In order to assert its influence in the Senate and, through the Senate, its
hegemony over the United States, the South therefore required a continual formation of new slave states.
This, however, was only possible through conquest of foreign lands, as in the case of Texas, or through
the transformation of the Territories belonging to the United States first into slave Territories and later
into slave states, as in the case of Missouri, Arkansas, etc. John Calhoun, whom the slaveholders admire
as their statesman par excellence, stated as early as February 19, 1847, in the Senate, that the Senate alone placed a balance of power in the hands of the South, that extension of the slave territory was
necessary to preserve this equilibrium between South and North in the Senate, and that the attempts of
the South at the creation of new slave states by force were accordingly justified.

Finally, the number of actual slaveholders in the South of the Union does not amount to more than three
hundred thousand, a narrow oligarchy that is confronted with many millions of so-called poor whites,
whose numbers have been constantly growing through concentration of landed property and whose
condition is only to be compared with that of the Roman plebeians in the period of Rome’s extreme
decline. Only by acquisition and the prospect of acquisition of new Territories, as well as by filibustering
expeditions, is it possible to square the interests of these poor whites with those of the slaveholders, to
give their restless thirst for action a harmless direction and to tame them with the prospect of one day
becoming slaveholders themselves.

A strict confinement of slavery within its old terrain, therefore, was bound according to economic law to
lead to its gradual effacement, in the political sphere to annihilate the hegemony that the slave states
exercised through the Senate, and finally to expose the slaveholding oligarchy within its own states to
threatening perils from the poor whites. In accordance with the principle that any further extension of
slave Territories was to be prohibited by law, the Republicans therefore attacked the rule of the
slaveholders at its root. The Republican election victory was accordingly bound to lead to open struggle
between North and South. And this election victory, as already mentioned, was itself conditioned by the
split in the Democratic camp.

The Kansas struggle had already caused a split between the slaveholders’ party and the Democrats of the
North allied to it. With the presidential election of 1860, the same strife now broke out again in a more
general form. The Democrats of the North, with Douglas as their candidate, made the introduction of
slavery into Territories dependent on the will of the majority of the settlers. The slaveholders’ party, with
Breckinridge as their candidate, maintained that the Constitution of the United States, as the Supreme
Court had also declared, brought slavery legally in its train; in and of itself slavery was already legal in
all Territories and required no special naturalisation. Whilst, therefore, the Republicans prohibited any
extension of slave Territories, the Southern party laid claim to all Territories of the republic as legally
warranted domains. What they had attempted by way of example with regard to Kansas, to force slavery
on a Territory through the central government against the will of the settlers themselves, they now set up
as law for all the Territories of the Union. Such a concession lay beyond the power of the Democratic
leaders and would only have occasioned the desertion of their army to the Republican camp. On the other
hand, Douglas’s settlers’ sovereignty could not satisfy the slaveholders’ party. What it wanted to effect
had to be effected within the next four years under the new President, could only be effected by the
resources of the central government and brooked no further delay. It did not escape the slaveholders that
a new power had arisen, the North-west, whose population, having almost doubled between 1850 and
1860, was already pretty well equal to the white population of the slave states — a power that was not
inclined either by tradition, temperament or mode of life to let itself be dragged from compromise to
compromise in the manner of the old North-eastern states. The Union was still of value to the South only
so far as it handed over Federal power to it as a means of carrying out the slave policy. If not, then it was
better to make the break now than to look on at the development of the Republican Party and the upsurge
of the North-west for another four years and begin the struggle under more unfavourable conditions. The
slaveholders’ party therefore played va banque. When the Democrats of the North declined to go on
playing the part of the poor whites of the South, the South secured Lincoln’s victory by splitting the vote,
and then took this victory as a pretext for drawing the sword from the scabbard.

Karl Marx, The Trent Case

London, November 28, 1861

The conflict of the English mail ship Trent with the North American warship San Jacinto in the narrow
passage of the Old Bahama Channel is the lion among the events of the day. In the afternoon of
November 27 the mail ship La Plata brought the news of the incident to Southampton, where the electric
telegraph at once flashed it to all parts of Great Britain. The same evening the London Stock Exchange
was the stage of stormy scenes similar to those at the time of the announcement of the Italian war.

Quotations for government stock sank three-quarters to one per cent. The wildest rumours circulated in
London. The American Ambassador, Adams, was said to have been given his passport, an embargo to
have been imposed on all American ships in the Thames, etc. At the same time a protest meeting of
merchants was held at the Stock Exchange in Liverpool, to demand measures from the British
Government for the satisfaction of the violated honour of the British flag. Every sound-minded
Englishman went to bed with the conviction that he would go to sleep in a state of peace but wake up in a
state of war.

Nevertheless, the fact is well-nigh categorically established that the conflict between the Trent and the
San Jacinto brings no war in its train. The semi-official press, like The Times and The Morning Post,
strikes a peaceful note and pours juridically cool deductions on the flickerings of passion. Papers like the
Daily Telegraph, which at the faintest mot d’ordre roar for the British lion, are true models of
moderation. Only the Tory opposition press, The Morning Herald and The Standard, hits out. These facts
force every expert to conclude that the ministry has already decided not to make a casus belli out of the
untoward event.
It must be added that the event, if not the details of its enactment, was anticipated. On October 12,
Messrs. Slidell, Confederacy emissary to France, and Mason, Confederacy emissary to England, together
with their secretaries Eustis and MacFarland, had run the blockade of Charleston on the steamship
Theodora and sailed for Havana, there to seek the opportunity of a passage under the British flag. In
England their arrival was expected daily. North American warships had set out from Liverpool to
intercept the gentlemen, with their dispatches, on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. The British ministry
had already submitted the question whether the North Americans were entitled to take such a step to its official jurisconsults for their opinion. Their answer is said to have been in the affirmative.

The legal question turns in a narrow circle. Since the foundation of the United States, North America has
adopted British maritime law in all its rigour. A major principle of this maritime law is that all neutral
merchantmen are subject to search by the belligerent parties.
"This right, " said Lord Stowell in a judgment which has become famous, "offers the sole security that no
contraband is carried on neutral ships."
The greatest American authority, Kent, states in the same sense:
"The right of self-preservation gives belligerent nations this right. The doctrine of the British admiralty
on the right of visitation and search ... has been recognised in its fullest extent by the courts of justice in
our country."

It was not opposition to the right of search, as is sometimes erroneously suggested, that brought about the
Anglo-American War of 1812 to 1814. Rather, America declared war because England unlawfully
presumed to search even American warships, on the pretext of catching deserters from the British Navy.
The San Jacinto, therefore, had the right to search the Trent and to confiscate any contraband stowed
aboard her. That dispatches in the possession of Mason, Slidell and Co. come under the category of
contraband even The Times, The Morning Post, etc., admit. There remains the question whether Messrs.
Mason, Slidell and Co. were themselves contraband and might consequently be confiscated! The point is
a ticklish one and differences of opinion prevail among the doctors of law. Pratt, the most distinguished
British authority on "Contraband", in the section on "Quasi-Contraband, Dispatches, Passengers"
specifically refers to "communication of information and orders from a belligerent government to its
officers abroad, or the conveyance of military passengers". Messrs. Mason and Slidell, if not officers,
were just as little ambassadors, since their governments are recognised neither by Britain nor by France.
What are they, then? In justification of the very broad conceptions of contraband asserted by Britain in
the Anglo-French wars, Jefferson already remarks in his memoirs that contraband, by its nature,
precludes any exhaustive definition and necessarily leaves great scope for arbitrariness. In any event,
however, one sees that from the standpoint of English law the legal question dwindles to a Duns Scotus
controversy, the explosive force of which will not go beyond exchange of diplomatic notes.

The political aspect of the North American procedure was estimated quite correctly by The Times in
these words:
"Even Mr. Seward himself must know that the voices of the Southern commissioners, sounding from
their captivity, are a thousand times more eloquent in London and in Paris than they would have been if
they had been heard in St. James’s and the Tuileries."

And is not the Confederacy already represented in London by Messrs. Yancey and Mann?
We regard this latest operation of Mr. Seward as a characteristic act of tactlessnesses by self-conscious
weakness simulating strength. If the naval incident hastens Seward’s removal from the Washington
Cabinet, the United States will have no reason to record it as an "untoward event" in the annals of its
Civil War.

Karl Marx, The Anglo-American Conflict

London, November 29, 1861

The law officers of the Crown had yesterday to give their opinion on the naval incident in the Bahama
Channel. Their records of the case consisted of the written reports of the British officers who have
remained on board the Trent and of the oral testimony of Commodore Williams, who was on board the
Trent as Admiralty agent, but disembarked from the La Plata on November 27 at Southampton, whence
he was immediately summoned by telegraph to London. The law officers of the Crown acknowledged
the right of the San Jacinto to visit and search the Trent. Since Queen Victoria’s proclamation of
neutrality on the outbreak of the American Civil War expressly lists dispatches among articles of
contraband, there could be no doubt on this point either. There remained, then, the question whether
Messrs. Mason, Slidell and Co. were themselves contraband and therefore confiscable. The law officers
of the Crown appear to hold this view, for they have dropped the material legal question entirely.
According to the report of The Times, their opinion blames the commander of the San Jacinto only for an
error in procedure. Instead of Messrs. Mason, Slidell and Co., he should have taken the Trent herself in
tow as a prize, brought her to the nearest American port and there submitted her to the judgment of a
North American prize court. This is incontestably the procedure corresponding to British and therefore to
North American maritime law.

It is equally incontestable that the British frequently violated this rule during the anti-Jacobin war and
proceeded in the summary fashion of the San Jacinto. However that may be, the whole conflict is
reduced by this opinion of the law officers of the Crown to a technical error and consequently deprived
of any immediate import. Two circumstances make it easy for the Union government to accept this point
of view and therefore to afford formal satisfaction. In the first place, Captain Wilkes, the commander of
the San Jacinto, could have received no direct instructions from Washington. On the voyage home from
Africa to New York, he called on November 2 at Havana, which he left again on November 4, whilst his
encounter with the Trent took place on the high seas on November 8. Captain Wilkes’s stay of only two
days in Havana did not permit any exchange of notes between him and his government. The consul of the
Union was the only American authority with whom he could deal. In the second place, however, he had
obviously lost his head, as his failure to insist on the surrender of the dispatches proves.

The importance of the incident lies in its moral effect on the English people and in the political capital
that can easily be made out of it by the British cotton friends of secession. Characteristic of the latter is
the Liverpool protest meeting organised by them and previously mentioned by me. The meeting took
place on November 27 at three in the afternoon, in the cotton auction-rooms of the Liverpool Exchange,
an hour after the alarming telegram from Southampton had arrived.
After vain attempts to press the chairmanship on Mr. Cunard, the owner of the Cunard steamships plying
between Liverpool and New York, and other high trade officials, a young merchant named Spence,
notorious for a work he wrote in support of the slave republic, took the chair. Contrary to the rules of
English meetings, he, the chairman, himself proposed the motion to call on "the government to preserve
the dignity of the British flag by demanding prompt satisfaction for this affront." Tremendous applause,
clapping and cheers upon cheers! The main argument of the opening speaker for the slave republic was
that slave ships had hitherto been protected by the American flag from the right of search claimed by
Britain. And then this philanthropist launched a furious attack on the slave trade! He admitted that
England had brought about the war of 1812-14 with the United States by insisting on searching for
deserters from the British Navy on Union warships.

"But," he continued with wonderful dialectic, "but there is a difference between the right of search to
recover deserters from the British Navy and the right to seize passengers, like Mr. Mason and Mr. Slidell,
men of the highest respectability, regardless of the fact that they were protected by the British flag!"

He played his highest trump, however, at the close of his diatribe.
"The other day," he bellowed, "while I was on the European Continent, I heard an observation made as to
the course of our conduct in regard to the United States, and I was unable to reply to the allusion without
a blush — that the feeling of every intelligent man upon the Continent was that we would submit to any
outrage and suffer every indignity offered to us by the Government of the United States. But the pitcher
goes so often to the well that it is broken at last. Our patience had been exercised long enough! At last we
have arrived at facts: this is a very hard and startling fact [!] and it is the duty of every Englishman to
apprise the Government of how strong and unanimous is the feeling of this great community of the
outrage offered to our flag."

This senseless rigamarole was greeted with a peal of applause. Opposing voices were howled down and
hissed down and stamped down. To the remark of a Mr. Campbell that the whole meeting was irregular,
the inexorable Spence replied: "I perfectly agree with you that it is a little irregular but at the same time
the fact that we have met to consider is rather an irregular fact." To the proposal of a Mr. Turner to
adjourn the meeting to the following day, in order that "the city of Liverpool can have its say and not a
clique of cotton brokers usurp its name", cries of "Collar him, throw him out!" resounded from all sides.

Unperturbed, Mr. Turner repeated his motion, which, however, was not put to the vote, again contrary to
all the rules of English meetings. Spence triumphed. But, as a matter of fact, nothing has done more to
cool London’s temper than the news of Mr. Spence’s triumph.

The American Question in England

Karl Marx in the New-York Tribune 1861

London, Sept. 18, 1861

Mrs. Beecher Stowe’s letter to Lord Shaftesbury, whatever its intrinsic merit may be, has done a great deal of good, by forcing the anti-Northern organs of the London press to speak out and lay before the general public the ostensible reasons for their hostile tone against the North, and their ill-concealed sympathies with the South, which looks rather strange on the part of people affecting an utter horror of Slavery. Their first and main grievance is that the present American war is “not one for the abolition of Slavery,” and that, therefore, the high-minded Britisher, used to undertake wars of his own, and interest himself in other people’s wars only on the basis of “broad humanitarian principles,” cannot be expected to feel any sympathy with his Northern cousins.

“In the first place says The Economist, “the assumption that the quarrel between the North and South is a quarrel between Negro freedom on the one side and Negro Slavery on the other, is as impudent as it is untrue. “The North,” says The Saturday Review, “does not proclaim abolition, and never pretended to fight for Anti-Slavery. The North has not hoisted for its oriflamme the sacred symbol of justice to the Negro; its cri de guerre is not unconditional abolition.” “If,” says The Examiner, “we have been deceived about the real significance of the sublime movement, who but the Federalists themselves have to answer for the deception?”

Now, in the first instance, the premiss must be conceded. The war has not been undertaken with a view to put down Slavery, and the United States authorities themselves have taken the greatest pains to protest against any such idea. But then, it ought to be remembered that it was not the North, but the South, which undertook this war; the former acting only on the defense. If it be true that the North, after long hesitations, and an exhibition of forbearance unknown in the annals of European history, drew at last the sword, not for crushing Slavery, but for saving the Union, the South, on its part, inaugurated the war by loudly proclaiming “the peculiar institution” as the only and main end of the rebellion. It confessed to fight for the liberty of enslaving other people, a liberty which, despite the Northern protests, it asserted to be put in danger by the victory of the Republican party and the election of Mr. Lincoln to the Presidential chair. The Confederate Congress boasted that its new-fangled constitution, as distinguished from the Constitution of the Washingtons, Jeffersons, and Adams’s, had recognized for the first time Slavery as a thing good in itself, a bulwark of civilization, and a divine institution. If the North professed to fight but for the Union, the South gloried in rebellion for the supremacy of Slavery. If Anti-Slavery and idealistic England felt not attracted by the profession of the North, how came it to pass that it was not violently repulsed by the cynical confessions of the South?

The Saturday Review helps itself out of this ugly dilemma by disbelieving the declarations of the seceders themselves. It sees deeper than this, and discovers “that Slavery had very little to do with Secession;” the declarations of Jeff. Davis and company to the contrary being mere “conventionalisms” with “about as much meaning as the conventionalisms about violated altars and desecrated hearths, which always occur in such proclamations.”

The staple of argument on the part of the anti-Northern papers is very scanty, and throughout all of them we find almost the same sentences recurring, like the formulas of a mathematical series, at certain intervals, with very little art of variation or combination.

“Why,” exclaims The Economist, “it is only yesterday, when the Secession movement first gained serious head, on the first announcement of Mr. Lincoln’s election, that the Northerners offered to the South, if they would remain in the Union, every conceivable security for the performance and inviolability of the obnoxious institution — that they disavowed in the most solemn manner all intention of interfering with it — that their leaders proposed compromise after compromise in Congress, all based upon the concession that Slavery should not be meddled with.” “How happens it,” says The Examiner, “that the North was ready to compromise matters by the largest concessions to the South as to Slavery’, How was it that a certain geographical line was proposed in Congress within which Slavery was to be recognized as an essential institution? The Southern States were not content with this.”

What The Economist and The Examiner had to ask was not only why the Crittenden and other compromise measures were proposed in Congress, but why they were not passed? They affect to consider those compromise proposals as accepted by the North and rejected by the South, while, in point of fact, they were baffled by the Northern party, that had carried the Lincoln election. Proposals never matured into resolutions, but always remaining in the embryo state of pia desideria, the South had of course never any occasion either of rejecting or acquiescing in. We come nearer to the pith of the question by the following remark of The Examiner:

“Mrs. Stowe says: ‘The Slave party, finding they could no longer use the Union for their purposes, resolved to destroy it.’ There is here an admission that up to that time the Slave party had used the Union for their purposes, and it would have been well if Mrs. Stowe could have distinctly shown where it was that the North began to make its stand against Slavery.”

One might suppose that The Examiner and the other oracles of public opinion in England had made themselves sufficiently familiar with the contemporaneous history to not need Mrs. Stowe’s information on such all-important points. The progressive abuse of the Union by the slave power, working through its alliance with the Northern Democratic party, is, so to say, the general formula of the United States history since the beginning of this century. The successive compromise measures mark the successive degrees of the encroachment by which the Union became more and more transformed into the slave of the slave-owner. Each of these compromises denotes a new encroachment of the South, a new concession of the North. At the same time none of the successive victories of the South was carried but after a hot contest with an antagonistic force in the North, appearing under different party names with different watchwords and under different colors. If the positive and final result of each single contest told in favor of the South, the attentive observer of history could not but see that every new advance of the slave power was a step forward to its ultimate defeat. Even at the times of the Missouri Compromise the contending forces were so evenly balanced that Jefferson, as we see from his memoirs, apprehended the Union to be in danger of splitting on that deadly antagonism. The encroachments of the slaveholding power reached their maximum point, when, by the Kansas-Nebraska bill, for the first time in the history of the United States, as Mr. Douglas himself confessed, every legal barrier to the diffusion of Slavery within the United States territories was broken down, when, afterward, a Northern candidate bought his Presidential nomination by pledging the Union to conquer or purchase in Cuba a new field of dominion for the slaveholder; when, later on, by the Dred Scott decision, diffusion of Slavery by the Federal power was proclaimed as the law of the American Constitution, and lastly, when the African slave-trade was de facto reopened on a larger scale than during the times of its legal existence. But, concurrently with this climax of Southern encroachments, carried by the connivance of the Northern Democratic party, there were unmistakable signs of Northern antagonistic agencies having gathered such strength as must soon turn the balance of power. The Kansas war, the formation of the Republican party, and the large vote cast for Mr. Frémont during the Presidential election of 1856, were so many palpable proofs that the North had accumulated sufficient energies to rectify the aberrations which United States history, under the slaveowners’ pressure, had undergone, for half a century, and to make it return to the true principles of its development. Apart from those political phenomena, there was one broad statistical and economical fact indicating that the abuse of the Federal Union by the slave interest had approached the point from which it would have to recede forcibly, or de bonne grace b That fact was the growth of the North-West, the immense strides its population had made from 1850 to 1860, and the new and reinvigorating influence it could not but bear on the destinies of the United States.

Now, was all this a secret chapter of history? Was “the admission” of Mrs. Beecher Stowe wanted to reveal to The Examiner and the other political illuminati of the London press the carefully hidden truth that “up to that time the Slave party had used the Union for their purposes?” Is it the fault of the American North that the English pressmen were taken quite unawares by the violent clash of the antagonistic forces, the friction of which was the moving power of its history for half a century? Is it the fault of the Americans that the English press mistake for the fanciful crotchet hatched in a single day what was in reality the matured result of long years of struggle? The very fact that the formation and the progress of the Republican party in America have hardly been noticed by the London press, speaks volumes as to the hollowness of its Anti-Slavery tirades. Take, for instance, the two antipodes of the London press, The London Times and Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper, the one the great organ of the respectable classes, and the other the only remaining organ of the working class. The former, not long before Mr. Buchanan’s career drew to an end, published an elaborate apology for his Administration and a defamatory libel against the Republican movement. Reynolds, on his part, was, during Mr. Buchanan’s stay at London, one of his minions, and since that time never missed an occasion to write him up and to write his adversaries down. How did it come to pass that the Republican party, whose platform was drawn up on the avowed antagonism to the encroachments of the Slaveocracy and the abuse of the Union by the slave interest, carried the day in the North? How, in the second instance, did it come to pass that the great bulk of the Northern Democratic party, flinging aside its old connexions with the leaders of Slaveocracy, setting at naught its traditions of half a century, sacrificing great commercial interests and greater political prejudices, rushed to the support of the present Republican Administration and offered it men and money with an unsparing hand?

Instead of answering these questions The Economist exclaims:

“Can we forget [...] that Abolitionists have habitually been as ferociously persecuted and maltreated in the North and West as in the South? Can it be denied that the testiness and half-heartedness, not to say insincerity, of the Government at Washington, have for years supplied the chief impediment which has thwarted our efforts for the effectual suppression of the slave trade on the coast of Africa; while a vast proportion of the clippers actually engaged in that trade have been built with Northern capital, owned by Northern merchants and manned by Northern seamen?”

This is, in fact, a masterly piece of logic. Anti-Slavery England cannot sympathize with the North breaking down the withering influence of slaveocracy, because she cannot forget that the North, while bound by that influence, supported the slave-trade, mobbed the Abolitionists, and had its Democratic institutions tainted by the slavedriver’s prejudices. She cannot sympathize with Mr. Lincoln’s Administration, because she had to find fault with Mr. Buchanan’s Administration. She must needs sullenly cavil at the present movement of the Northern resurrection, cheer up the Northern sympathizers with the slave-trade, branded in the Republican platform, and coquet with the Southern slaveocracy, setting up an empire of its own, because she cannot forget that the North of yesterday was not the North of to-day. The necessity of justifying its attitude by such pettifogging Old Bailey pleas proves more than anything else that the anti-Northern part of the English press is instigated by hidden motives, too mean and dastardly to be openly avowed.

As it is one of its pet maneuvers to taunt the present Republican Administration with the doings of its Pro-Slavery predecessors, so it tries hard to persuade the English people that The N. Y. Herald ought to be considered the only authentic expositor of Northern opinion. The London Times having given out the cue in this direction, the servum pecus of the other anti-Northern organs, great and small, persist in beating the same bush. So says The Economist:

“In the height of the strife, New-York papers and New-York politicians were not wanting who exhorted the combatants, now that they had large armies in the field, to employ them, not against each other, but against Great Britain — to compromise the internal quarrel, the slave question included, and invade the British territory without notice and with overwhelming force.”

The Economist knows perfectly well that The N. V. Herald’s efforts, which were eagerly supported by The London Times, at embroiling the United States into a war with England, only intended securing the success of Secession and thwarting the movement of Northern regeneration.

Still there is one concession made by the anti-Northern English press. The Saturday snob tells us:

“What was at issue in Lincoln’s election, and what has precipitated the convulsion, was merely the limitation of the institution of Slavery to States where that institution already exists.”

And The Economist remarks:

“It is true enough that it was the aim of the Republican party which elected Mr. Lincoln to prevent Slavery from spreading into the unsettled Territories.... It may he true that the success of the North, if complete and unconditional, would enable them to confine Slavery within the fifteen States which have already adopted it, and might thus lead to its eventual extinction — though this is rather probable than certain.”

In 1859, on the occasion of John Brown’s Harper’s Ferry expedition, the very same Economist published a series of elaborate articles with a view to prove that, by dint of an economical law, American Slavery was doomed to gradual extinction from the moment it should be deprived of its power of expansion. That “economical law” was perfectly understood by the Slaveocracy.

“In 15 years more,” said Toombs “without a great increase in Slave territory, either the slaves must be permitted to flee from the whites, or the whites must flee from the slaves.”

The limitation of Slavery to its constitutional area, as proclaimed by the Republicans, was the distinct ground upon which the menace of Secession was first uttered in the House of Representatives on December 19, 1859. Mr. Singleton (Mississippi) having asked Mr. Curtis (Iowa), “if the Republican party would never let the South have another foot of slave territory while it remained in the Union,” and Mr. Curtis having responded in the affirmative, Mr. Singleton said this would dissolve the Union. His advice to Mississippi was the sooner it got out of the Union the better — “gentlemen should recollect that [ ... ] Jefferson Davis led our forces in Mexico, and [...] still he lives, perhaps to lead the Southern army.” Quite apart from the economical law which makes the diffusion of Slavery a vital condition for its maintenance within its constitutional areas, the leaders of the South had never deceived themselves as to its necessity for keeping up their political sway over the United States. John Calhoun, in the defense of his propositions to the Senate, stated distinctly on Feb. 19, 1847, “that the Senate was the only balance of power left to the South in the Government,” and that the creation of new Slave States had become necessary “for the retention of the equipoise of power in the Senate.” Moreover, the Oligarchy of the 300,000 slave-owners could not even maintain their sway at home save by constantly throwing out to their white plebeians the bait of prospective conquests within and without the frontiers of the United States. If, then, according to the oracles of the English press, the North had arrived at the fixed resolution of circumscribing Slavery within its present limits, and of thus extinguishing it in a constitutional way, was this not sufficient to enlist the sympathies of Anti-Slavery England?

But the English Puritans seem indeed not to be contented save by an explicit Abolitionist war.

“This,” says The Economist “therefore, not being a war for the emancipation of the Negro race, [...] on what other ground can we be fairly called upon to sympathize so warmly with the Federal cause?” “There was a time,” says The Examiner, “when our sympathies were with the North, thinking that it was really in earnest in making a stand against the encroachments of the Slave States,” and in adopting “emancipation as a measure of justice to the black race.”

However, in the very same numbers in which these papers tell us that they cannot sympathize with the North because its war is no Abolitionist war, we are informed that “the desperate expedient of proclaiming Negro emancipation and summoning the slaves to a general insurrection,” is a thing “the mere conception of which [...] is repulsive and dreadful,” and that “a compromise” would be “far preferable to success purchased at such a cost and stained by such a crime.”

Thus the English eagerness for the Abolitionist war is all cant. The cloven foot peeps out in the following sentences:

“Lastly, [...]” says The Economist, “is the Morrill Tariff, a title to our gratitude and to our sympathy, or is the certainty that, in case of Northern triumph, that Tariff should be extended over the whole Republic, a reason why we ought to be clamorously anxious for their success?” “The North Americans,” says The Examiner, “are in earnest about nothing but a selfish protective Tariff. The Southern States were tired of being robbed of the fruits of their slave-labor by the protective tariff of the North.”

The Examiner and The Economist comment each other. The latter is honest enough to confess at last that with him and his followers sympathy is a mere question of tariff, while the former reduces the war between North and South to a tariff war, to a war between Protection and Free-Trade. The Examiner is perhaps not aware that even the South Carolina Nullifiers of 1832, as Gen. Jackson testifies, used Protection only as a pretext for secession; but even The Examiner ought to know that the present rebellion did not wait upon the passing of the Morrill tariff for breaking out. In point of fact, the Southerners could not have been tired of being robbed of the fruits of their slave labor by the Protective tariff of the North, considering that from 1846-1861 a Free-Trade tariff had obtained.

The Spectator characterizes in its last number the secret thought of some of the Anti-Northern organs in the following striking manner:

“What, then, do the Anti-Northern organs really profess to think desirable, under the justification of this plea of deferring to the inexorable logic of facts?” They argue that disunion is desirable, just because, as we have said, it is the only possible step to a conclusion of this “causeless and fratricidal strife;” and next, of course, only as an afterthought, and as an humble apology for Providence and “justification of the ways of God to man,” now that the inevitable necessity stands revealed — for further reasons discovered as beautiful adaptations to the moral exigencies of the country, when once the issue is discerned. It is discovered that it will be very much for the advantage of the States to be dissolved into rival groups. They will mutually check each other’s ambition; they will neutralize each other’s power, and if ever England should get into a dispute with one or more of them, more jealousy will bring the antagonistic groups to our aid. This will be, it is urged, a very wholesome state of things, for it will relieve us from anxiety and it will encourage political ‘competition,’ that great safeguard of honesty and purity, among the States themselves.

“Such is the case — very gravely urged — of the numerous class of Southern sympathizers now springing up among us. Translated into English — and we grieve that an English argument on such a subject should be of a nature that requires translating — it means that we deplore the present great scale of this “fratricidal” war, because it may concentrate in one fearful spasm a series of chronic petty wars and passions and jealousies among groups of rival States in times to come. The real truth is, and this very un-English feeling distinctly discerns this truth, though it cloaks it in decent phrases, that rival groups of American States could not live together in peace or harmony. The chronic condition would be one of malignant hostility rising out of the very causes which have produced the present contest. It is asserted that the different groups of States have different tariff interests. These different tariff interests would he the sources of constant petty wars if the States were once dissolved, and Slavery, the root of all the strife, would be the spring of innumerable animosities, discords and campaigns. No stable equilibrium could ever again be established among the rival States. And yet it is maintained that this long future of incessant strife is the providential solution of the great question now at issue — the only real reason why it is looked upon favorably being this, that whereas the present great-scale conflict may issue in a restored and stronger political unity, the alternative of infinitely multiplied small-scale quarrels will issue in a weak and divided continent, that England cannot fear.

“Now we do not deny that the Americans themselves sowed the seeds of this petty and contemptible state of feeling by the unfriendly and bullying attitude they have so often manifested to England, but we do say that the state of feeling on our part is petty and contemptible. We see that in a deferred issue there is no hope of a deep and enduring tranquillity for America, that it means a decline and fall of the American nation into quarrelsome clans and tribes, and yet we hold up our hands in horror at the present “fratricidal” strife because it holds out hopes of finality. We exhort them to look favorably on the indefinite future of small strifes, equally fratricidal and probably far more demoralizing, because the latter would draw out of our side the thorn of American rivalry.”

Progress of Feelings in England

London, Dec.7, 1861

The friends of the United States on this side of the Atlantic anxiously hope that conciliatory steps will be taken by the Federal Government. They do so not from a concurrence in the frantic crowing of the British press over a war incident, which, according to the English Crown lawyers themselves, resolves itself into a mere error of procedure, and may be summed up in the words that there has been a breach of international law, because Capt. Wilkes, instead of taking the Trent, her cargo, her passengers, and the Commissioners, did only take the Commissioners. Nor springs the anxiety of the well-wishers of the Great Republic from an apprehension lest, in the long run, it should not prove able to cope with England, although backed by the civil war; and, least of all, do they expect the United States to abdicate, even for a moment, and in a dark hour of trial, the proud position held by them in the council of nations. The motives that prompt them are of quite a different nature.

In the first instance, the business next in hand for the United States is to crush the rebellion and to restore the Union. The wish uppermost in the minds of the Slaveocracy and their Northern tools was always to plunge the United States into a war with England. The first step of England as soon as hostilities broke out would be to recognise the Southern Confederacy, and the second to terminate the blockade. Secondly, no general, if not forced, will accept battle at the time and under the conditions chosen by his enemy.

"A war with America," says The Economist, a paper deeply in Palmerston’s confidence, "must always be one of the most lamentable incidents in the history of England; but if it is to happen, the present is certainly the period at which it will do us the minimum of harm, and the only moment in our joint annals at which it would confer on us an incidental and partial compensation."

The very reasons accounting for the eagerness of England to seize upon any decent pretext for war at this ’only moment’ ought to withhold the United States from forwarding such a pretext at this ’only moment.’ You go not to war with the aim to do your enemy ’the minimum of harm,’ and, even to confer upon him by the war, ’an incidental and partial compensation.’ The opportunity of the moment would all be on one side, on the side of your foe. Is there any great strain of reasoning wanted to prove that an internal war raging in a State is the least opportune time for entering upon a foreign war? At every other moment the mercantile classes of Great Britain would have looked upon a war against the United States with the utmost horror. Now, on the contrary, a large and influential party of the mercantile community has for months been urging on the Government to violently break the blockade, and thus provide the main branch of British industry with its raw material. The fear of a curtailment of the English export trade to the United States has lost its sting by the curtailment of that trade having already actually occurred. "They" (the Northern States), says The Economist, "are wretched customers, instead of good ones." The vast credit usually given by English commerce to the United States, principally by the acceptance of bills drawn from China and India, has been already reduced to scarcely a fifth of what it was in 1857. Last, not least, Decembrist France, bankrupt, paralyzed at home, beset with difficulty abroad, pounces upon an Anglo-American war as a real godsend, and, in order to buy English support in Europe, will strain all her power to support "Perfidious Albion" on the other side of the Atlantic. Read only the French newspapers. The pitch of indignation to which they have wrought themselves in their tender care for the "honor of England," their fierce diatribes as to the necessity on the part of England to revenge the outrage on the Union Jack, their vile denunciations of everything American, would be truly appalling, if they were not ridiculous and disgusting at the same time. Lastly, if the United States give way in this instance, they will not derogate one iota of their dignity. England has reduced her complaint to a mere error of procedure, a technical blunder of which she had made herself systematically guilty in all her maritime wars, but against which the United States have never ceased to protest, and which President Madison, in his message inaugurating the war of 1812, expatiated upon as one of the most shocking breaches of international law. If the United States may be defended in paying England with her own coin, will they be accused for magnanimously disavowing, on the part of a single American captain, acting on his own responsibility, what they always denounced as a systematic usurpation on the part of the British Navy!

In point of fact, the gain of such a procedure would be all on the American side. England, on the one hand, would have acknowledged the right of the United States to capture and bring to adjudication before an American prize court every English ship employed in the service of the Confederation. On the other hand, she would, once for all, before the eyes of the whole world, have practically resigned a claim which she was not brought to desist from either in the peace of Ghent, in 1814, or the transactions carried on between Lord Ashburton and Secretary Webster in 1842.The question then comes to this: Do you prefer to turn the "untoward event" to your own account, or, blinded by the passions of the moment, turn it to the account of your foes at home and abroad?

Since this day week, when I sent you my last letter, British consols have again lowered, the decline, compared with last Friday, amounting to 2 per cent, the present prices being 89 3/4 to 7/8 for money and 90 to 1/8 for the new account on the 9th of January. This quotation corresponds to the quotation of the British consols during the first two years of the Anglo-Russian war. This decline is altogether due to the warlike interpretation put upon the American papers conveyed by the last mail, to the exacerbating tone of the London press, whose moderation of two days’ standing was but a feint, ordered by Palmerston, to the dispatch of troops for Canada, to the proclamation forbidding the export of arms and materials for gunpowder, and lastly, to the daily ostentatious statements concerning the formidable preparations for war in the docks and maritime arsenals.

Of one thing you may be sure, Palmerston wants a legal pretext for a war with the United States, but meets in the Cabinet councils with a most determinate opposition on the part of Messrs. Gladstone and Milner Gibson, and, to a less degree, of Sir Cornewall Lewis. "The noble viscount" is backed by Russell, an abject tool in his hands, and the whole Whig Coterie. If the Washington Cabinet should furnish the desired pretext, the present Cabinet will be sprung, to be supplanted by a Tory Administration. The preliminary steps for such a change of scenery have been already settled between Palmerston and Disraeli. Hence the furious war-cry of The Morning Herald and The Standard, those hungry wolves howling at the prospect of the long-missed crumbs from the public almoner.

Palmerston’s designs may be shown up by calling into memory a few facts. It was he who insisted upon the proclamation, acknowledging the Secessionists as belligerents, on the morning of the 14th of May, after he had been informed by telegraph from Liverpool that Mr. Adams would arrive at London on the night of the 13th May. He, after a severe struggle with his colleagues, dispatched 3,000 men to Canada, an army ridiculous, if intended to cover a frontier of 1,500 miles, but a clever sleight-of-hand if the rebellion was to be cheered, and the Union to be irritated. He, many weeks ago, urged Bonaparte to propose a joint armed intervention "in the internecine struggle," supported that project in the Cabinet council, and failed only in carrying it by the resistance of his colleagues. He and Bonaparte then resorted to the Mexican intervention as a pis aller. That operation served two purposes, by provoking just resentment on the part of the Americans, and by simultaneously furnishing a pretext for the dispatch of a squadron, ready, as The Morning Post has it, "to perform whatever duty the hostile conduct of the Government of Washington may require us to perform in the waters of the Northern Atlantic." At the time when that expedition was started, The Morning Post, together with The Times and the smaller fry of Palmerston’s press slaves, said that it was a very fine thing, and a philanthropic thing into the bargain, because it would expose the slave- holding Confederation to two fires — the Anti-Slavery North and the Anti-Slavery force of England and France. And what says the very same Morning Post, this curious compound of Jenkins and Rhodomonte, of plush and swash, in its to-day’s issue, on occasion of Jefferson Davis’s address? Hearken to the Palmerston oracle:

"We must look to this intervention as one that may be inoperative during a considerable period of time; and while the Northern Government is too distant to admit of its attitude entering materially into this question, the Southern Confederation, on the other hand, stretches for a great distance along the frontier of Mexico, so as to render its friendly disposition to the authors of the insurrection of no slight consequence. The Northern Government has invariably railed at our neutrality, but the Southern with statesmanship and moderation has recognized in it all that we could do for either party; and whether with a view to our transactions in Mexico, or to our relations with the Cabinet at Washington, the friendly forbearance of the Southern Confederacy is an important point in our favor."

I may remark that the Nord of December 3 — a Russian paper, and consequently a paper initiated into Palmerstons designs — insinuates that the Mexican expedition was from the first set on foot, not for its ostensible purpose, but for a war against the United States.

Gen. Scott’s letter had produced such a beneficent reaction in public opinion, and even on the London Stock Exchange, that the conspirators of Downing Street and the Tuileries found it necessary to let loose the Patrie, stating with all the airs of knowledge derived from official sources that the seizure of the Southern Commissioners from the Trent was directly authorized by the Washington Cabinet.

English Public Opinion

London, Jan. 11, 1862

The news of the pacific solution of the Trent conflict was, by the bulk of the English people, saluted with an exultation proving unmistakably the unpopularity of the apprehended war and the dread of its consequences. It ought never to be forgotten in the United States that at least the working classes of England, from the commencement to the termination of the difficulty, have never forsaken them. To them it was due that, despite the poisonous stimulants daily administered by a venal and reckless press, not one single public war meeting could be held in the United Kingdom during all the period that peace trembled in the balance. The only war meeting convened on the arrival of the La Plata, in the cotton salesroom of the Liverpool Stock Exchange, was a corner meeting where the cotton jobbers had it all to themselves. Even at Manchester, the temper of the working classes was so well understood that an insulated attempt at the convocation of a war meeting was almost as soon abandoned as thought of.

Wherever public meetings took place in England, Scotland, or Ireland, they protested against the rabid war — cries of the press, against the sinister designs of the Government, and declared for a pacific settlement of the pending question. In this regard, the two last meetings held, the one at Paddington, London, the other at N ewcastle — u pon — Tyne, are characteristic. The former meeting applauded Mr. Washington Wilkes’s argumentation that England was not warranted in finding fault with the seizure of the Southern Commissioners’; while the Newcastle meeting almost unanimously carried the resolution — firstly, that the Americans had only made themselves guilty of a lawful exercise of the right of search and seizure; secondly, that the captain of the Trent ought to be punished for his violation of English neutrality, as proclaimed by the Queen. In ordinary circumstances, the conduct of the British workingmen might have been anticipated from the natural sympathy the popular classes all over the world ought to feel for the only popular Government in the world.

Under the present circumstances, however, when a great portion of the British working classes directly and severely suffers under the consequences of the Southern blockade; when another part is indirectly smitten by the curtailment of the American commerce, owing, as they are told, to the selfish “protective policy” of the Republicans; when the only remaining democratic weekly, Reynolds’s paper, has sold itself to Messrs. Yancey and Mann, and week after week exhausts its horse-powers of foul language in appeals to the working classes to urge the Government, for their own interests, to war with the Union — under such circumstances, simple justice requires to pay a tribute to the sound attitude of the British working classes, the more so when contrasted with the hypocritical, bullying, cowardly, and stupid conduct of the official and well-to-do John Bull.

What a difference in this attitude of the people from what it had assumed at the time of the Russian complication! Then The Times, The Post, and the other Yellowplushes of the London press, whined for peace, to be rebuked by tremendous war meetings all over the country. Now they have howled for war, to be answered by peace meetings denouncing the liberticide schemes and the Pro-Slavery sympathy of the Government. The grimaces cut by the augurs of public opinion at the news of the pacific solution of the Trent case are really amusing.

In the first place, they must needs congratulate themselves upon the dignity, common sense, good will, and moderation, daily displayed by them for the whole interval of a month. They were moderate for the first two days after the arrival of the La Plata, when Palmerston felt uneasy whether any legal pretext for a quarrel was to be picked. But hardly had the crown lawyers bit upon a legal quibble, when they opened a charivari unheard of since the anti-Jacobin war. The dispatches of the English Government left Queenstown in the beginning of December. No official answer from Washington could possibly be looked for before the commencement of January. The new incidents arising in the interval told all in favor of the Americans. The tone of the Transatlantic Press, although the Nashville affair might have roused its passions, was calm. All facts ascertained concurred to show that Capt. Wilkes had acted on his own hook. The position of the Washington Government was delicate. If it resisted the English demands, it would complicate the civil war by a foreign war. If it gave way, it might damage its popularity at home, and appear to cede to pressure from abroad. And the Government thus placed, carried, at the same time, a war which must enlist the warmest sympathies of every man, not a confessed ruffian, on its side.

Common prudence, conventional decency, ought, therefore, to have dictated to the London press, at least for the time separating the English demand from the American reply, to anxiously abstain from every word calculated to heat passion, breed ill-will, complicate the difficulty. But no! That “inexpressibly mean and groveling” press, as William Cobbett, and he was a connoisseur, calls it, really boasted of having, when in fear of the compact power of the United States, humbly submitted to the accumulated slights and insults of Pro-Slavery Administrations for almost half a century, while now, with the savage exultation of cowards, they panted for taking their revenge on the Republican Administration, distracted by a civil war. The record of mankind chronicles no self-avowed infamy like this.

One of the yellow-plushes, Palmerston’s private Moniteur — The Morning Post — finds itself arraigned on a most ugly charge from the American papers. John Bull has never been informed — on information carefully withheld from him by the oligarchs that lord it over him — that Mr. Seward, without awaiting Russell’s dispatch, had disavowed any participation of the Washington Cabinet in the act of Capt. Wilkes. Mr. Seward’s dispatch arrived at London on December 19. On the 20th December, the rumor of this “secret” spread on the Stock Exchange. On the 21st, the yellow-plush of The Morning Post stepped forward to gravely herald that “the dispatch in question does not in any way whatever refer to the outrage on our mail packet.”

In The Daily News, The Morning Star, and other London journals, you will find yellow-plush pretty sharply handled, but you will not learn from them what people out of doors say. They say that The Morning Post and The Times, like the Patrie and the Pays, duped the public not only to politically mislead them, but to fleece them in the monetary line on the Stock Exchange, in the interest of their patrons.

The brazen Times, fully aware that during the whole crisis it had compromised nobody but itself, and given another proof of the hollowness of its pretensions of influencing the real people of England, plays to-day a trick which here, at London, only works upon the laughing muscles, but on the other side of the Atlantic, might be misinterpreted. The “popular classes” of London, the “mob”, as the yellow-plush call them, have given unmistakable signs-have even hinted in newspapers-that they should consider it an exceedingly seasonable joke to treat Mason (by the by, a distant relative of Palmerston, since the original Mason had married a daughter of Sir W. Temple), Slidell & Co. with the same demonstrations Haynau received on his visit at Barclay’s brewery.” The Times stands aghast at the mere idea of such a shocking incident, and how does it try to parry it? It admonishes the people of England not to overwhelm Mason, Slidell & Co. with any, sort of public ovation! The Times knows that its to-day’s article will form the laughing-stock of all the tap-rooms of London. But never mind! People on the other side of the Atlantic may, perhaps, fancy that the magnanimity of The Times has saved them from the affront of public ovations to Mason, Slidell & Co., while, in point of fact, The Times only intends saving those gentlemen from public insult!

So long as the Trent affair was undecided, The Times, The Post, The Herald, The Economist, The Saturday Review, in fact the whole of the fashionable, hireling press of London, had tried its utmost to persuade John Bull that the Washington Government, even if it willed, would prove unable to keep the peace, because the Yankee mob would not allow it, and because the Federal Government was a mob Government. Facts have now given them the lie direct. Do they now atone for their malignant slanders against the American people? Do they at least confess the errors which yellow-plush in presuming to judge of the acts of a free people, could not but commit? By no means. They now unanimously discover that the American Government, in not anticipating England’s demands, and not surrendering the Southern traitors as soon as they were caught, missed a great occasion, and deprived its present concession of all merit. Indeed, yellow plush! Mr. Seward disavowed the act of Wilkes before the arrival of the English demands, and at once declared himself willing to enter upon a conciliatory course a ; and what did you do on similar occasions? When, on the pretext of impressing English sailors on board American ships — a pretext not at all connected with maritime belligerent rights, but a downright, monstrous usurpation against all international law-the Leopard fired its broadside at the Chesapeake, killed six, wounded twenty-one of her sailors, and seized the pretended Englishmen on board the Chesapeake, what did the English Government do? That outrage was perpetrated on the 20th of June, 1807. The real satisfaction, the surrender of the sailors, &C., was only offered on November 8, 1812, five years later. The British Government, it is true, disavowed at once the act of Admiral Berkeley, as Mr. Seward did in regard to Capt. Wilkes; but, to punish the Admiral, it removed him from an inferior to a superior rank. England, in proclaiming her Orders in Council,” distinctly confessed that they were outrages on the rights of neutrals in general, and of the United States in particular; that they were forced upon her as measures of retaliation against Napoleon, and that she would feel but too glad to revoke them whenever Napoleon should revoke his encroachments on neutral rights. Napoleon did revoke them, as far as the United States were concerned, in the Spring of 1810. England persisted in her avowed outrage on the maritime rights of America. Her resistance lasted from 1806 to 23d of June, 1812 — after, on the 18th of June, 1812, the United States had declared war against England. England abstained, consequently, in this case for six years, not from atoning for a confessed outrage, but from discontinuing it. And this people talk of the magnificent occasion missed by the American Government! Whether in the wrong or in the right, it was a cowardly act on the part of the British Government to back a complaint grounded on pretended technical blunder, and a mere error of procedure, by an ultimatum, by a demand for the surrender of the prisoners. The American Government might have reasons to accede to that demand; it could have none to anticipate it.

By the present settlement of the Trent collision, the question underlying the whole dispute, and likely to again occur — the belligerent rights of a maritime power against neutrals — has not been settled. I shall, with your permission, try to survey the whole question in a subsequent letter. For the present, allow me to add that, in my opinion, Messrs. Mason and Slidell have done great service to the Federal Government. There was an influential war party in England, which, what for commercial, what for political reasons, showed eager for a fray with the United States. The Trent affair put that party to the test. It has failed. The war passion has been discounted on a minor issue, the steam has been let off, the vociferous fury of the oligarchy has raised the suspicions of English democracy, the large British interests connected with the United States have made a stand, the true character of the civil war has been brought home to the working classes, and last, not least, the dangerous period when Palmerston rules single-headed without being checked by Parliament, is rapidly drawing to an end. That was the only time in which an English war for the slaveocrats might have been hazarded. It is now out of question.

Karl Marx, The Crisis Over the Slavery Issue

London, December 10, 1861

The United States has evidently entered a critical stage with regard to the slavery question, the question
underlying the whole Civil War. General Fremont has been dismissed for declaring the slaves of rebels
free. A directive to General Sherman, the commander of the expedition to South Carolina, was a little
later published by the Washington Government, which goes further than Fremont, for it decrees that
fugitive slaves even of loyal slave-owners should be welcomed and employed as workers and paid a
wage, and under certain circumstances armed, and consoles the "loyal" owners with the prospect of
receiving compensation later. Colonel Cochrane has gone even further than Fremont, he demands the
arming of all slaves as a military measure. The Secretary of War Cameron publicly approves of
Cochrane’s "views". The Secretary of the Interior, on behalf of the government, then repudiates the
Secretary of War. The Secretary of War expresses his "views" even more emphatically at a public
meeting stating that he will vindicate these views in his report to Congress. General Halleck, Fremont’s
successor in Missouri, and General Dix in east Virginia have driven fugitive Negroes from their military
camps and forbidden them to appear in future in the vicinity of the positions held by their armies.

General Wool at the same time has received the black "contraband" with open arms at Fort Monroe. The
old leaders of the Democratic Party, Senator Dickinson and Croswell (a former member of the so- called
Democratic regency), have published an open letter in which they express their agreement with Cochrane
and Cameron, and Colonel Jennison in Kansas has surpassed all his military predecessors by an address
to his troops which contains the following passage:
No temporising with rebels and those sympathising with them. I have told General Fremont that I would
not have drawn my sword had I thought that slavery would outlast this struggle. The slaves of rebels will
always find protection in this camp and we will defend them to the last man and the last bullet. I want no
men who are not Abolitionists, I have no use for them and I hope that there are no such people among us,
for everyone knows that slavery is the basis, the centre and the vertex of this infernal war. Should the
government disapprove of my action it can take back my patent, but in that case I shall act on my own
hook even if in the beginning I can only count on six men.
The slavery question is being solved in practice in the border slave states even now, especially in Missouri and to a lesser extent in Kentucky, etc. A large-scale dispersal of slaves is taking place. For
instance 50,000 slaves have disappeared from Missouri, some of them have run away, others have been
transported by the slave-owners to the more distant southern states.
It is rather strange that a most important and significant event is not mentioned in any English
newspaper. On November 18, delegates from 45 North Carolina counties met on Hatteras Island,
appointed a provisional government, revoked the Ordinance of Secession and proclaimed that North
Carolina was returning to the Union. The counties of North Carolina represented at this convention have
been called together to elect their Representatives to Congress at Washington.

Karl Marx, News From America

London, Dec. 13, 1861

The news of the Harvey Birch’s fate and the presence of the cruiser Nashville in Southampton harbour
reached New York on November 29, but does not seem to have caused the sensational effect on which
certain circles here counted just as much as others, the anti-war groups, feared it. On this occasion the
force of one shock wave was broken by that of another. For New York was just in the throes of an
election campaign, since voting for a new mayor was to take place on December 3. Mr. Russell, the
envoy of The Times in Washington, who ruins his Celtic talent by affected Englishness, pretends
supercilious surprise at this pre-election commotion. Mr. Russell of course plays up to the illusions of the
London cockney, who imagines that the election of a New York mayor is just as much a display of
antiquated tomfoolery as is the election of a Lord Mayor in London. It is well known that the Lord
Mayor of London is not concerned at all with the greater part of London. He is nominally the regent of
the City, a mythological phenomenon which attempts to prove that it really exists by producing good
turtle soup at banquets and bad judgments in cases of infringement of police regulations. Only in the
fancy of Parisian writers of vaudevilles and of news items for the press does the Lord Mayor of London
still remain an important political personage. The Mayor of New York on the other hand is a real power.
At the beginning of the secession movement, the notorious Fernando Wood, the previous Mayor, was
about to declare New York an independent city republic, of course in agreement with Jefferson Davis.
His plan was thwarted by the energy of the Republican Party of the Empire City.

Charles Sumner from Massachusetts, a member of the Senate — where he was attacked by a
cane-wielding Senator from the South at the time of the Kansas affair — made a brilliant speech on the
origin and hidden motives of the slave-owners’ rebellion at a well-attended meeting in the Cooper
Institute of New York on November 27. After his address the meeting passed the following resolution:
The doctrine of the emancipation of the slaves of rebels advanced by General Fremont, as well as
pronouncements subsequently made by General Burnside, Senator Wilson, George Bancroft (the famous
historian), Colonel Cochrane and Simon Cameron, which point to the anticipated eradication of slavery
as the cause of the rebellion, express a moral, political and military necessity. This meeting considers that public opinion in the North is now definitely prepared to support any practical plan for the eradication of
slavery — this national misfortune — that might be proposed, and it regards such a result as the only
consistent conclusion of this fight between civilisation and barbarism.
The New-York Tribune makes the following remark about Sumner’s speech:

"The allusion of Mr. Sumner to the coming discussions of Congress on this subject" (slavery), "will
kindle a hope that that body will understand where Southern weakness and Northern strength really lie,
and will seize the instrumentality by which the rebellion is to be brought to a speedy and final
extirpation."

A personal letter from Mexico contains inter alia the following passage:
"The British ambassador plays the part of an enthusiastic friend of President Juárez’s Administration....

People well versed in Spanish intrigues assert that General Marquez has been instructed by Spain to rally
the scattered forces, both the Mexican and the Spanish elements, of the Church party. This party is then
supposed to use an opportunity, which is expected to present itself soon, to beg Her Catholic Majesty to
provide a king for the throne of Mexico. An uncle of the Queen is said to have been chosen for this
office. Since the man is old he would in the natural course of events soon quit the scene, and as any
clause designating a successor was to be avoided, Mexico would revert to Spain. Thus the same policy
would carry the day in Mexico as in Haiti."

Karl Marx, The Civil War in the United States

"Let him go, he is not worth thine ire!" Again and again English statesmanship cries-recently through the
mouth of Lord John Russell-to the North of the United States this advice of Leporello to Don Juan’s
deserted love. If the North lets the South go, it then frees itself from any admixture of slavery, from its
historical original sin, and creates the basis of a new and higher development.

In reality, if North and South formed two autonomous countries, like, for example, England and
Hanover, their separation would be no more difficult than was the separation of England and Hanover.
"The South," however, is neither a territory closely sealed off from the North geographically, nor a moral
unity. It is not a country at all, but a battle slogan.
The advice of an amicable separation presupposes that the Southern Confederacy, although it assumed
the offensive in the Civil War, at least wages it for defensive purposes. It is believed that the issue for the
slaveholders’ party is merely one of uniting the territories it has hitherto dominated into an autonomous
group of states and withdrawing them from the supreme authority of the Union. Nothing could be more
false: "The South needs its entire territory. It will and must have it." With this battle-cry the secessionists
fell upon Kentucky. By their "entire territory" they understand in the first place all the so-called border
states-Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri and Arkansas.
Besides, they lay claim to the entire territory south of the line that runs from the north-west corner of
Missouri to the Pacific Ocean. What the slaveholders, therefore, call the South, embraces more than
three-quarters of the territory hitherto comprised by the Union. A large part of the territory thus claimed
is still in the possession of the Union and would first have to be conquered from it. None of the so-called
border states, however, not even those in the possession of the Confederacy, were ever actual slave
states. Rather, they constitute the area of the United States in which the system of slavery and the system
of free labour exist side by side and contend for mastery, the actual field of battle between South and
North, between slavery and freedom. The war of the Southern Confederacy is, therefore, not a war of
defence, but a war of conquest, a war of conquest for the spread and perpetuation of slavery.

The chain of mountains that begins in Alabama and stretches northwards to the Hudson River-the spinal
column, as it were, of the United States-cuts the so-called South into three parts. The mountainous
country formed by the Allegheny Mountains with their two parallel ranges, the Cumberland Range to the
west and the Blue Mountains to the east, divides wedge-like the lowlands along the western coast of the Atlantic Ocean from the lowlands in the southern valleys of the Mississippi. The two lowlands separated
by the mountainous country, with their vast rice swamps and far-flung cotton plantations, are the actual
area of slavery. The long wedge of mountainous country driven into the heart of slavery, with its
correspondingly clear atmosphere, an invigorating climate and a soil rich in coal, salt, limestone, iron
ore, gold, in short, every raw material necessary for a many-sided industrial development, is already for
the most part free country. In accordance with its physical constitution, the soil here can only be
cultivated with success by free small farmers. Here the slave system vegetates only sporadically and has
never struck root. In the largest part of the so-called border states, the dwellers of these highlands
comprise the core of the free population, which sides with the Northern party if only for the sake of
self-preservation.

Let us consider the contested territory in detail.
Delaware, the most north-eastern of the border states, is factually and morally in the possession of the
Union. All the attempts of the secessionists at forming even one faction favourable to them have since
the beginning of the war suffered shipwreck on the unanimity of the population. The slave element of
this state has long been in process of dying out. From 1850 to 1860 alone the number of slaves
diminished by half, so that with a total population of 112,218 Delaware now numbers only 1,798 slaves.
Nevertheless, Delaware is demanded by the Southern Confederacy and would in fact be militarily
untenable for the North as soon as the South possessed itself of Maryland.

In Maryland itself the above-mentioned conflict between highlands and lowlands takes place. Out of a
total population of 687,034 there are here 87,188 slaves. That the overwhelming majority of the
population is on the side of the Union has again been strikingly proved by the recent general elections to
the Congress in Washington. The army of 30,000 Union troops, which holds Maryland at the moment, is
intended not only to serve the army on the Potomac as a reserve, but, in particular, also to hold in check
the rebellious slaveowners in the interior of the country. For here we observe a phenomenon similar to
what we see in other border states where the great mass of the people stands for the North and a
numerically insignificant slaveholders’ party for the South. What it lacks in numbers, the slaveholders’
party makes up in the means of power that many years’ possession of all state offices, hereditary
engagement in political intrigue and concentration of great wealth in few hands have secured for it.

Virginia now forms the great cantonment where the main army of secession and the main army of the
Union confront each other. In the north-west highlands of Virginia the number of slaves is 15,000, whilst
the twenty times as large free population consists mostly of free farmers. The eastern lowlands of
Virginia, on the other hand, count well-nigh half a million slaves. Raising Negroes and the sale of the
Negroes to the Southern states form the principal source of income of these lowlands. As soon as the
ringleaders of the lowlands had carried through the secession ordinance by intrigues in the state
legislature at Richmond and had in all haste opened the gates of Virginia to the Southern army,
north-west Virginia seceded from the secession, formed a new state, and under the banner of the Union
now defends its territory arms in hand against the Southern invaders.
Tennessee, with 1,109,847 inhabitants, 275,784 of whom are slaves, finds itself in the hands of the
Southern Confederacy, which has placed the whole state under martial law and under a system of
proscription which recalls the days of the Roman Triumvirates. When in the winter of 1861 the
slaveholders proposed a general convention of the people which was to vote for secession or
non-secession, the majority of the people rejected any convention, in order to remove any pretext for the secession movement. Later, when Tennessee was already militarily over-run and subjected to a system of
terror by the Southern Confederacy, more than a third of the voters at the elections still declared
themselves for the Union. Here, as in most of the border states, the mountainous country, east Tennessee,
forms the real centre of resistance to the slaveholders’ party. On June 17, 1861, a General Convention of
the people of east Tennessee assembled in Greenville, declared itself for the Union, deputed the former
governor of the state, Andrew Johnson, one of the most ardent Unionists, to the Senate in Washington
and published a "declaration of grievances," which lays bare all the means of deception, intrigue and
terror by which Tennessee was "voted out" of the Union. Since then the secessionists have held east
Tennessee in check by force of arms.

Similar relationships to those in West Virginia and east Tennessee are found in the north of Alabama, in
north-west Georgia and in the north of North Carolina.
Further west, in the border state of Missouri, with 1,173,317 inhabitants and 114,965 slaves-the latter
mostly concentrated in the north-west of the state-the people’s convention of August 1861 decided for the
Union. Jackson, the governor of the state and the tool of the slaveholders’ party, rebelled against the
legislature of Missouri, was outlawed and took the lead of the armed hordes that fell upon Missouri from
Texas, Arkansas and Tennessee, in order to bring it to its knees before the Confederacy and sever its
bond with the Union by the sword. Next to Virginia, Missouri is at the present moment the main theatre
of the Civil War.

New Mexico-not a state, but merely a Territory, into which twenty-five slaves were imported during
Buchanan’s presidency in order to send a slave constitution after them from Washington-had no craving
for the South, as even the latter concedes. But the South has a craving for New Mexico and accordingly
spewed an armed band of adventurers from Texas over the border. New Mexico has implored the
protection of the Union government against these liberators.
It will have been observed that we lay particular emphasis on the numerical proportion of slaves to free
men in the individual border states. This proportion is in fact decisive. It is the thermometer with which
the vital fire of the slave system must be measured. The soul of the whole secession movement is South
Carolina. It has 402,541 slaves and 301,271 free men. Mississippi, which has given the Southern
Confederacy its dictator, Jefferson Davis, comes second. It has 436,696 slaves and 354,699 free men.

Alabama comes third, with 435,132 slaves and 529,164 free men.
The last of the contested border states, which we have still to mention, is Kentucky. Its recent history is
particularly characteristic of the policy of the Southern Confederacy. Among its 1,135,713 inhabitants
Kentucky has 225,490 slaves. In three successive general elections by the people-in the winter of 1861,
when elections to a congress of the border states were held; in June 1861, when elections to the Congress
in Washington took place; finally, in August 1861, in elections to the legislature of the State of
Kentucky-an ever increasing majority decided for the Union. On the other hand, Magoffin, the Governor
of Kentucky, and all the high officials of the state are fanatical supporters of the slaveholders’ party, as is
Breckinridge, Kentucky’s representative in the Senate in Washington, Vice-President of the United States
under Buchanan, and candidate of the slaveholders’ party in the presidential election of 1860. Too weak
to win over Kentucky for secession, the influence of the slaveholders’ party was strong enough to make
this state amenable to a declaration of neutrality on the outbreak of war. The Confederacy recognised the
neutrality as long as it served its purposes, as long as the Confederacy itself was engaged in crushing the
resistance in east Tennessee. Hardly was this end attained when it knocked at the gates of Kentucky with the butt of a gun to the cry of: "The South needs its entire territory. It will and must have it!"
From the south-west and south-east its corps of free-booters simultaneously invaded the "neutral" state.

Kentucky awoke from its dream of neutrality, its legislature openly took sides with the Union,
surrounded the traitorous Governor with a committee of public safety, called the people to arms,
outlawed Breckinridge and ordered the secessionists to evacuate the invaded territory immediately. This
was the signal for war. An army of the Southern Confederacy is moving on Louisville, while volunteers
from Illinois, Indiana and Ohio flock hither to save Kentucky from the armed missionaries of slavery.

The attempts of the Confederacy to annex Missouri and Kentucky, for example, against the will of these
states, prove the hollowness of the pretext that it is fighting for the rights of the individual states against
the encroachments of the Union. On the individual states that it considers to belong to the "South" it
confers, to be sure, the right to separate from the Union, but by no means the right to remain in the
Union.

Even the actual slave states, however much external war, internal military dictatorship and slavery give
them everywhere for the moment a semblance of harmony, are nevertheless not without oppositional
elements. A striking example is Texas, with 180,388 slaves out of 601,039 inhabitants. The law of 1845,
by virtue of which Texas became a State of the Union as a slave state, entitled it to form not merely one,
but five states out of its territory. The South would thereby have gained ten new votes instead of two in
the American Senate, and an increase in the number of its votes in the Senate was a major object of its
policy at that time. From 1845 to 1860, however, the slaveholders found it impracticable to cut up Texas,
where the German population plays an important part, into even two states without giving the party of
free labour the upper hand over the party of slavery in the second state. This furnishes the best proof of
the strength of the opposition to the slaveholding oligarchy in Texas itself.

Georgia is the largest and most populous of the slave states. It has 462,230 slaves out of a total of
1,057,327 inhabitants, therefore nearly half the population. Nevertheless, the slaveholders’ party has not
so far succeeded in getting the Constitution imposed on the South at Montgomery sanctioned by a
general vote of the people in Georgia.
In the State Convention of Louisiana, meeting on March 21, 1861, at New Orleans, Roselius, the
political veteran of the state, declared:
"The Montgomery Constitution is not a constitution, but a conspiracy. It does not inaugurate a
government of the people, but a detestable and unrestricted oligarchy. The people were not permitted to
have any say in this matter. The Convention of Montgomery has dug the grave of political liberty, and
now we are summoned to attend its burial."
Indeed, the oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders utilised the Congress of Montgomery not
only to proclaim the separation of the South from the North. It exploited it at the same time to reshape
the internal constitutions of the slave states, to subjugate completely the section of the white population
that had still preserved some independence under the protection and the democratic Constitution of the
Union. Between 1856 to 1860 the political spokesmen, jurists, moralists and theologians of the
slaveholders’ party had already sought to prove, not so much that Negro slavery is justified, but rather
that colour is a matter of indifference and the working class is everywhere born to slavery.

One sees, therefore, that the war of the Southern Confederacy is in the true sense of the word a war of
conquest for the spread and perpetuation of slavery. The greater part of the border states and Territories are still in the possession of the Union, whose side they have taken first through the ballot-box and then
with arms. The Confederacy, however, counts them for the "South" and seeks to conquer them from the
Union. In the border states which the Confederacy has occupied for the time being, it is holding the
relatively free highlands in check by martial law. Within the actual slave states themselves it is
supplanting the hitherto existing democracy by the unrestricted oligarchy of three hundred thousand
slaveholders.

Were it to relinquish its plans of conquest, the Southern Confederacy would relinquish its capacity to live
and the purpose of secession. Secession, indeed, only took place because within the Union the
transformation of the border states and Territories into slave states seemed no longer attainable. On the
other hand, were it to cede the contested territory peacefully to the Southern Confederacy, the North
would surrender to the slave republic more than three-quarters of the entire territory of the United States.

The North would lose the whole of the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, except the narrow strip
from Penobscot Bay to Delaware Bay, and would even cut itself off from the Pacific Ocean. Missouri,
Kansas, New Mexico, Arkansas and Texas would draw California after them. Incapable of wresting the
mouth of the Mississippi from the hands of the strong, hostile slave republic in the South, the great
agricultural states in the basin between the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghenies, in the valleys of the
Mississippi, the Missouri and the Ohio, would be compelled by their economic interests to secede from
the North and enter the Southern Confederacy. These north-western states, in their turn, would draw after
them into the same whirlpool of secession all the Northern states lying further east, with perhaps the
exception of the states of New England.
What would in fact take place would be not a dissolution of the Union, but a reorganisation of it, a
reorganisation on the basis of slavery, under the recognised control of the slaveholding oligarchy. The
plan of such a reorganisation has been openly proclaimed by the principal speakers of the South at the
Congress of Montgomery and explains the paragraph of the new Constitution which leaves it open to
every state of the old Union to join the new Confederacy. The slave system would infect the whole
Union. In the Northern states, where Negro slavery is in practice unworkable, the white working class
would gradually be forced down to the level of helotry. This would fully accord with the loudly
proclaimed principle that only certain races are capable of freedom, and as the actual labour is the lot of
the Negro in the South, so in the North it is the lot of the German and the Irishman, or their direct
descendants.

The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social
systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labour. 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.
If the border states, the disputed areas in which the two systems have hitherto contended for domination,
are a thorn in the flesh of the South, there can, on the other hand, be no mistake that, in the course of the
war up to now, they have constituted the chief weakness of the North. One section of the slaveholders in
these districts simulated loyalty to the North at the bidding of the conspirators in the South; another
section found that in fact it was in accordance with their real interests and traditional ideas to go with the
Union. Both sections have equally crippled the North. Anxiety to keep the "loyal" slaveholders of the
border states in good humour, fear of throwing them into the arms of secession, in a word, tender regard
for the interests, prejudices and sensibilities of these ambiguous allies, has smitten the Union government
with incurable weakness since the beginning of the war, driven it to half measures, forced it to dissemble away the principle of the war and to spare the foe’s most vulnerable spot, the root of the evil-slavery
itself.

When, only recently, Lincoln pusillanimously revoked Frémont’s Missouri proclamation on the
emancipation of Negroes belonging to the rebels, this was done solely out of regard for the loud protest
of the "loyal" slaveholders of Kentucky. However, a turning point has already been reached. With
Kentucky, the last border state has been pushed into the series of battlefields between South and North.
With the real war for the border states in the border states themselves, the question of winning or losing
them is withdrawn from the sphere of diplomatic and parliamentary discussions. One section of
slaveholders will throw off the mask of loyalty; the other will content itself with the prospect of a
financial compensation such as Great Britain gave the West Indian planters. Events themselves drive to
the promulgation of the decisive slogan-emancipation of the slaves.
That even the most hardened Democrats and diplomats of the North feel themselves drawn to this point,
is shown by some announcements of very recent date. In an open letter, General Cass, Secretary of State
for War under Buchanan and hitherto one of the most ardent allies of the South, declares emancipation of
the slaves the conditio sine qua non of the Union’s salvation. In his last Review for October, Dr.
Brownson, the spokesman of the Catholic party of the North, on his own admission the most energetic
adversary of the emancipation movement from 1836 to 1860, publishes an article for Abolition.

"If we have opposed Abolition heretofore," he says among other things, "because we would preserve the
Union, we must a fortiori now oppose slavery whenever, in our judgment, its continuance becomes
incompatible with the maintenance of the Union, or of the nation as a free republican state."

Finally, the World, a New York organ of the diplomats of the Washington Cabinet, concludes one of its
latest blustering articles against the Abolitionists with the words:
"On the day when it shall be decided that either slavery or the Union must go down, on that day sentence
of death is passed on slavery. If the North cannot triumph without emancipation, it will triumph with
emancipation."

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