4. The Second American Revolution¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter 4: The Second American Revolution¶
This chapter argues that the American Civil War was not merely a sectional conflict but a revolutionary class struggle—a second American revolution—in which Northern industrial capital crushed the Southern slave-owning aristocracy. The expansion of US capitalism demanded raw cotton, integrating slave labour directly into capital accumulation. Despite the legal abolition of the African slave trade in 1808, imports surged, and enslaved people were treated as chattel, subjected to brutal physical examinations at auction. Southern ideologues, such as Senator Hammond, defended the institution by hypocritically attacking Northern wage-slavery. The Northern bourgeoisie, for its part, remained lukewarm on abolition, fearing that challenging property rights in the South would set a dangerous precedent for workers in the North.
The Missouri Compromise of 1820, which admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as free, merely expressed a temporary balance of forces, heightening antagonisms on both sides. Militant abolitionists like John Brown resorted to revolutionary methods, and his execution after the failed Harper’s Ferry raid of 1859 galvanised Northern public opinion. The war itself was at bottom a class struggle. Lincoln initially sought compromise to preserve the Union, but mass agitation from below forced the North into action. Once war was unavoidable, Lincoln took dictatorial measures—suspending habeas corpus, arresting thousands without charge, suppressing newspapers, and taxing the rich—all strictly unconstitutional but necessary to defeat the slaveholders’ rebellion. The chapter draws a pointed parallel: if a democratically elected socialist government faced a counterrevolutionary rebellion, it would be entitled to act as Lincoln did. The hypocrisy of condemning Lenin and Trotsky while praising Lincoln is exposed.
The Union’s early military failures reflected a ruling class still seeking compromise. Generals like McClellan were incompetent or treacherous, and the Northern bourgeoisie favoured capitulation, as war was bad for business. Lincoln realised the masses would not die merely to prevent secession. He issued the Emancipation Proclamation as a revolutionary executive order, recruited black soldiers, and defended labour and the right to strike. Victory was won not by Grant’s military genius but by the North’s industrial might and Lincoln’s revolutionary policy, which expropriated two billion dollars of slave property without compensation. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, and the Homestead Act granted free public land to settlers. Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865.
The British ruling class backed the Confederacy, building warships for it and nearly declaring war in 1861, but British workers opposed intervention despite the cotton famine causing mass unemployment. The First International, via Marx, wrote to Lincoln in support, and its members fought in the Union army. The chapter compares revolutionary violence: the French Revolution killed 7.7% of the population, the American Civil War 1.63%, and the Russian Civil War an estimated 0.7%. Critics of Bolshevism ignore these figures. The author argues that a socialist revolution in America could be peaceful if the working class is organised and led decisively. Capitalism has failed African Americans: black unemployment is double that of whites, black women are four times more likely to die in childbirth, and racial disparities persist. The Black Panthers and Malcolm X were targeted for linking racism to capitalism. Marxists argue that only socialism can realise the principles of the American Revolution.