Address of the International Working Men’s Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter reproduces the text of an address drafted by Karl Marx and sent by the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA) to Abraham Lincoln following his re-election in 1864. Its core argument is that the American Civil War was not merely a national conflict over secession and slavery, but a world-historical class struggle with direct implications for the European working class. The address frames Lincoln’s victory as a decisive blow against the “Slave Power,” transforming the war’s watchword from resistance to slavery’s expansion into its outright destruction.
Marx makes several key claims. First, the struggle over the Western territories was fundamentally a contest over whether those lands would be developed by free labour—the labour of the emigrant—or degraded by the slave driver’s tramp. Second, the slaveholders’ rebellion is presented as a counterrevolutionary offensive against the democratic and emancipatory legacy of the American Revolution and the eighteenth-century European revolutions. The Confederacy is accused of cynically proclaiming property in man “the cornerstone of the new edifice” and of openly rescinding the founding ideals of the Republic. Third, Marx asserts that European workers instinctively understood that the slaveholders’ revolt was a “tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labour”—a direct assault on the interests of the working class everywhere. The address cites the cotton crisis, which imposed hardships on European workers, and their opposition to pro-Confederate intervention by the upper classes, as evidence of working-class solidarity. Contributions of blood from Europe to the Union cause are also noted.
The address draws on the historical context of the American Revolution and the European revolutions of the eighteenth century, positioning the Civil War as a second, more radical emancipation. It also references the IWMA’s own founding in 1864, situating the address within the Association’s project of international working-class solidarity.
The polemical target is twofold. Externally, it is the slaveholding oligarchy and its European sympathisers among the “upper classes.” Internally, Marx criticises the Northern workingmen for previously tolerating slavery and for boasting of the white labourer’s prerogative to “sell himself and choose his own master” while denying that right to the enslaved Black worker. This internal barrier, the address argues, has now been swept away by the war itself. The address concludes by hailing Lincoln as a “single-minded son of the working class” and declaring the antislavery war an “earnest of the epoch to come” for working-class emancipation.