2. K. Marx. The American Question in England
London, Sept. 18, 1861
Mrs. Beecher Stowe's letter to Lord Shaftesbury,[8] 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." (1) "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(2) is not unconditional abolition."(3)
"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?" (4) 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 t ç 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[9] and the election of Mr. Lincoln to the Presidential chair. The Confederate Congress boasted that its new-fangled constitution,[10]
as distinguished from the Constitution of the Washingtons, Jeffersons, and Adams's,[11] had recognized for the first time Slavery as a thing good in itself, a bulwark of civilization, and a divine institution.[3] 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[12] 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 distincdy 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,(5) 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,(6) apprehended the Union to be in danger of splitting on that deadly antagonism.(7)
The encroachments of the slaveholding power reached their maximum point, when, by the Kansas-Nebraska bill,[15] 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 pledg-ing the Union to conquer or purchase in Cuba a new field of dominion for the slaveholder[16]; when, later on, by the Dred Scott decision,[17] 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,[18] the formation of the Republican party, and the large vote cast for Mr. Fremont during the Presidential election of 1856,[19]
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 graced 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[20] 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,(8) 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(9) 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[21] 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 pecus3 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. Y. Herald's efforts, which were eagerly supported by The London Times, at embroiling the United States into a war with England,[15] 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 be 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,[22] 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.(10) 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."(11) 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."(12) 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 cir-cumscribing 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,[24] as Gen. Jackson testifies, used Protection only as a pretext for secession;b
Endnotes
[8] On September 9, 1861 The Times (No. 24033) published a letter by the US Abolitionist writer Harriet Beecher Stowe to Lord Shaftesbury, the English philanthropist politician, urging Britons to give moral support to the North.
[9] The US Republican Party was formed in the north-eastern States in 1854 by a broad coalition of industrial and commercial bourgeoisie, farmers, workers and handicraftsmen in opposition to the Democratic Party. Its establishment reflected the antagonistic contradictions between the capitalism developing in the North and the system of slave labour prevalent in the South. The Republican Party, controlled by the Northern bourgeoisie, advocated the restriction of slavery to the Southern States, the free settlement of the Western Territories, and protectionist tariffs to stimulate the development of national industry. In 1860 Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate, was elected US President. He polled 1,866,352 votes as against 1,375,157 votes obtained by S. A. Douglas, the Democratic candidate (see Note 13).
[10] This refers to the Constitution of the Confederate States of America, adopted in Montgomery, Alabama, on March 11, 1861 at a congress of the seven secessionist states (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas). The full text of the Constitution appeared in the New-York Daily Tribune, No. 6206, March 16, 1861.
[11] 1 The Constitution, as formed for the United States, by the Federal Conventio7i, held at Philadelphia, in the year 1787... consolidated the rule of the bourgeoisie and planters in the form of a federal bourgeois republic.
[3] Construction of the Suez Canal was begun in 1859 and completed in 1869. The Fortress of Gae'ta, the last stronghold of Francis II, King of the Two Sicilies (the Kingdom of Naples), was seized by the Piedmont troops on February 12, 1861, as a result of which the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies became part of the united Kingdom of Italy.
[12] '- The Crittenden compromise, a project for the peaceful settlement of the North-South conflict, was submitted by Kentucky Senator Crittenden to the US Congress on Dei ember IS, I860.. It envisaged six amendments to the US Constitution calling, in particular, for a ban on slavery in states north of the 36°3()' boundary line fixed by the Missouri Compromise (see Note 14) and the legalisation of slavery south of that line. The project denied the Congress the right to abolish or alter the slave system in the Southern States. A special Senate committee rejected the Crittenden compromise on December 22, 1860.
[16] 6 This refers to a memorandum drawn up in October 1854 at the Belgian resort of Ostend by the US Minister to London Buchanan jointly with US diplomatic representatives in France and Spain. It recommended the US government to purchase or seize the island of Cuba, then in Spanish possession, with a view to extending slavery to it. It was not until March 1855 that the memorandum became public knowledge, causing indignation in the United States and abroad.
[17] 7 The Black slave Dred Scott had lived for four years in the non-slave States of Illinois and Wisconsin. In 1848 he brought a lawsuit, claiming freedom. In 1857 it was turned down by the US Supreme Court. The ruling implied that a slave remained the property of his master even in the free States — an example of the slaveholders' efforts to have slavery legalised throughout the country.
[18] 8 Marx means the armed struggle in Kansas (1854-56) between the supporters and opponents of slavery sparked off by the Kansas-Nebraska Bill (see Note 15). Despite the successes of the anti-slavery forces, Kansas fell under the sway of the pro-slavery faction, supported by the Federal government. However, the majority of the population continued the struggle and secured the admission of Kansas to the Union as a free state in 1861.
[19] At the 1856 Presidential election, Buchanan, the Democratic candidate, polled 1,838,169 votes, as against the 1,341,264 votes for Fremont, put up by the Republican Party, which was contesting a Presidential election for the first time (see Note 9).
[20] An ironical reference to the London press. The Illuminati were members of a secret Masonic society in Bavaria ( 1776-84).
[21] A street in London, in which the Central Criminal Court is situated,
[22] In October 1859 an 18-strong group of insurgents (including five Blacks), led by John Brown, seized a government arsenal in Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in an attempt to provoke a slave uprising in the Southern states. The group was encircled and almost totally wiped out by regular troops. Brown was severely wounded. He was tried and hanged in Charleston.
[24] In November 1832 the South Carolina Convention nullified the 1828 and 1832 Federal tariff acts, which imposed high import duties. The Ordinance of Nullification adopted by the Convention on November 24 proclaimed the resolve of the State's citizens to uphold their independence vis-à-vis the Federal government and threatened South Carolina's secession from the Union. President Andrew Jackson, with Congressional approval, sent troops to South Carolina, but, under pressure from the slaveholding planters, endorsed a compromise lower taiiff on March 2, 1833. South Carolina soon repealed the Ordinance of Nullification.
[15] 5 The Kansas-Nebraska Bill (An Act to Organise the Territories of Nebraska and Kansas), passed by the US Congress in May 1854 after a fierce debate, granted the white population of Kansas and Nebraska, which were being admitted to the Union, the right to permit or prohibit slavery within their boundaries. The Bill abolished the frontier line laid down by the Missouri Compromise between the free and slaveholding states (see Note 14) and allowed every state to introduce slavery, regardless of geographical position. The adoption of the Bill gave rise to an armed struggle in Kansas between the supporters and opponents of slavery (see Note 18).