Sir, We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority.
If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant warcry of your re-election is, Death to Slavery.
From the commencement of the Titanic-American strife the working men of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labour of the emigrant, or prostituted by the tramp of the slave-driver?
When an oligarchy of 300,000 slave-holders dared to inscribe, • for the first time in the annals of the world, "slavery" on the banner of Armed Revolt; when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man [17]
was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the 18th century; when on those very spots counter-revolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding "the [...] ideas entertained [...] at the time of the formation of the old Constitution", and maintained "slavery to be a beneficent institution", indeed the only solution of the great problem of "the relation of labour to capital", and cynically proclaimed property in man "the cornerstone of the new edifice",(1) then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slave-holders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labour, and that for the men of labour, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis,[18] opposed enthusiastically the pro-slavery intervention, importunities of their betters — and, from most parts of Europe, contributed their quota of blood to the good cause.
While the working men, the true political power of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic; while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned labourer to sell himself and choose his own master; they were unable to attain the true freedom of labour or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation, but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.
The working men of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Anti-Slavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.
Signed on behalf of the International Working Men's Association
The Central Council Le Lubez, Corresponding Secretary for France, F. Rybczinsky (Pole), Emile Holtorp (Pole), /. B. Bocquet, H. Jung, Corresponding Secretary for Switzerland; Morisot, Georgy W. Wheeler, J. Dénouai, P. Bordage, Leroux, Talandier, Jourdain, Dupont, R. Gray, D. Lama, Setacci, F. Solustri, P. Aldovrandi, D. G. Bagnagatti, G. P. Fontana, Corresponding Secretary for Italy; G. Lake, J. Buckley, G. Howell, J. Osborne, J. D. Stainsby, J. Grossmith, G. Eccarius, Friedrich Lessner, L. Wolff, K. Kaub, Henry Bolleter, Ludwig Otto, N. P. Hansen (Dane), Karl Pfänder, Georg Lochner, Peter Petersen, Karl Marx, Corresponding Secretary for Germany, A. Dick, J. Wolff, J. Whitlock, J. Carter, W. Morgan, William Dell, John Weston, Peter Fox, Robert Shaw, John H. Longmaid, Robert Henry Side, William C. Worley, Blackmoor W., R. Hartwell, W. Pidgeon, B. Lucraft, J. Nieass?
G. Odger, President of Council,
William R. Cremer, Honorary General Secretaryb
Endnotes
[16] The resolutions proposed by Marx on the constitution of the Central Council (later called the General Council), the leading body of the International Working Men's Association, worked out in detail the general principles briefly formulated in points 4, 5 and 6 of the Provisional Rules (see this volume, pp. 15-16). The first of these resolutions forbade the then widespread practice in England of promoting to the leading bodies of various societies honorary, but actually non-working, members, because this enabled representatives of the propertied classes to influence workers' organisations without putting themselves under obligation to them. The press report did not name the author of this resolution, but it is obvious from the Minute Book of the General Council that all three were moved by Marx. Between January and April 1865 the Central Council adopted several more resolutions which specified the rights and duties of its members. They were proposed by various Council members, usually supported by Marx and sometimes initiated by him (see this volume, pp. 357 and 364-65). The resolutions II and III were published in English for the first time in The General Council of the First International. 1864-1866, Moscow, 1962. p. 17 These resolutions were used as a basis for the Address of the Central Council to Working Men's Societies (see this volume, pp. 372-73) made public in the summer of 1865. On November 22 the Central Council, on the proposal of its members Dick and Howell, decided to congratulate Abraham Lincoln on his re-election to the presidency. The writing of the letter of congratulation was entrusted to the Sub-Committee. The text, written by Marx, was approved by the Sub-Committee, unanimously confirmed by the Central Council on November 29, 1864, and sent to President Lincoln through Adams, the American envoy to London. On January 28, 1865 the Council received a reply in Lincoln's name which was read out at the Council meeting on January 31 and published in The Bee-Hive Newspaper on February 4, 1865 and The Times on February 6, 1865. As Marx wrote to Wilhelm Liebknecht in February 1865, of all Lincoln's replies to Men's Association was "not merely a formal acknowledgement of receipt". This address to Lincoln was first published in The Daily News, No. 5813, December 23, 1864 and then in The Miner and Workman's Advocate, No. 95, December 24, 1864, Reynolds's Newspaper, No. 750, December 25, 1864, The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 169, January 7, 1865 and in the German newspapers Der Social-Demokrat, No. 3, supplement, December 30, 1864, Berliner Reform, No. 4, January 5, 1865 and Hermann, No. 314, January 7, 1865. It was also included in the book, Life of Abraham Lincoln, New York, 1865. In this volume the address has been reproduced from the hand-written copy signed by all members of the Central Council and has been checked with the text in the newspapers.
[17] The reference is to the Declaration of Independence passed by the delegates of 13 North American colonies at the Congress in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776. The Declaration proclaimed the secession from England and the formation of an independent republic — the United States of America. It formulated such bourgeois-democratic principles as freedom of the individual, equality before the law, sovereignty of the people, exerting great influence on the European revolutionary movement and the French Revolution in particular. However, the democratic rights proclaimed were from the very start violated by the American bourgeoisie and planters who secured their power as a result of the American War of Independence (1775-83), the first American bourgeois revolution, excluded the common people from political life, and preserved slavery, p. 19
[18] See Note 5.