The Triumph of Industry over Tyranny: Why the North Won the American Civil War

The Triumph of Industry over Tyranny:

Why the North Won the American Civil War

    The North won the military part of the American Civil War in 1965 because their cause was economically, politically and socially progressive. I was an inevitable outcome. The system of industrial capitalism was the next phase in history, the next step in political-economic evolution. The American Civil War came at a time of industrial revolution in America. Thanks to the North, American industrial efficiency was unmatched when the Civil War broke out in 1861. The American South, although capitalist, maintained an Old World style system based on chattel slavery and a rigid social hierarchy. After the Civil War, chattel slavery was replaced with the free labor or free enterprise system. Proposed by Republicans, free labor or free enterprise turned chattel slavery into wage slavery. Under chattel slavery, whole living human bodies were bought and sold. Under free enterprise access to workers bodies was sold by the worker to the capitalist, by the hour. The Republican Party, founded by radical abolitionists like socialist newspaper tycoon Horace Greeley, increasingly became the party of big business as the Gilded Age marched along after 1877. Although radicals like German communist Karl Marx and his writing partner Frederick Engels hoped the American Antislavery War, as they called it, would cause the ascendency of the working class, they quickly became disillusioned. The political and social war between the North and the South didn’t end in 1965. It finally ended in the Compromise of 1877. The South won this phase. Although the racialized Old World system of the South successfully integrated into the new industrial capitalist order, the American Civil War was overall a progressive war that resulted in greater freedom and modernization of the economy.

In order to understand the progressive nature of the American Civil War one must understand Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’ argument for a unilinear model of political evolution. According to this model, ninety nine percent of human history was primitive communism. Feudalism followed. Capitalism followed after that. Marx and Engels hoped the phases after capitalism would be socialism and then communism. Trinidadian historian Eric Williams argued the birth of capitalism depended on slavery, but the American South’s version of slavery driven capitalism was less mobile and more agrarian than the North’s industrial capitalism. The South maintained a rigid, Old World style racial hierarchy. Industrialization in the North, on the other hand, revolutionized capitalism and expanded the commodification of goods. The industrial revolution shattered the world order. It gave rise to a new form of political economy. The South’s mode of production was capitalist, but it was not ready for the rapid changes industrialism brought.

Historian James McPherson argued that the American North represented an anomaly on the world scene. He writes, “The South more closely resembled a majority of the societies in the world than did the rapidly changing North during the antebellum generation. Despite the abolition of legal slavery or serfdom throughout much of the western hemisphere and western Europe, most of the world - like the South - had an unfree or quasi-free labor force. Most societies in the world remained predominantly rural, agricultural, and labor intensive…. The North - along with a few countries of northwestern Europe - hurtled forward eagerly toward a future of industrial capitalism that many southerners found distasteful if not frightening; the South remained proudly and even defiantly rooted in the past before 1861.” The South, like many of the countries in Europe, embraced an agrarian capitalist mode of production that retained elements of feudal Europe. They were resentful of the imposition of the new industrial economy into their traditional way of life. The bourgeoisie of the South was obsessed with traditional values and rapid change made them nervous. All history is class struggle. In the South, most of the working class, especially blacks, supported the Union in the Civil War. However, the Southern bourgeoisie would not let their Old World order be shattered without violence.

    In January of 1865, Marx and Engels, under the auspices of the First International Workingmen’s Association, wrote to president of the United States Abraham Lincoln. They expressed their hope for a progressive result from the American Antislavery War writing, “While the workingmen, the true political powers 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 laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, 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.” Marx and Engels argued a shift away from chattel slavery to wage slavery was a progressive step. They believed the victory of Northern forces would help both enslaved blacks and the white working class. The Republicans hoped to liberate black slaves from being bought and sold by others. Their idea of liberation, though, was for blacks to be free to choose to which master they sell their bodies and their time. Marx and Engels felt this was far from liberation.

The classical liberal idea of freedom is negative freedom. Negative freedom removes legal barriers to the exercise of free choice, but it does not offer the material and economic resources necessary to have positive freedom. Positive freedom is the material ability to actually do what one wants.

Russian communist revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin argued negative freedom is merely “formal,” whereas positive freedom is “actual.” When Lenin said, “Freedom yes, but for WHOM? To do WHAT?” he was arguing that freedom for the oppressor is an abridgement of freedom for the oppressed. The kind of freedom the South defended was the freedom to buy and sell other human beings. Obviously, this was not freedom for the blacks who were being bought and sold.

Historian David Donald might agree with Lenin that formal, negative freedom is not necessarily, ultimately good. However, he does not take into account positive, actual freedom. He writes, “If we could free ourselves of the notion that democracy (a ‘good’ thing) must inevitably have been connected with the winning (hence “good”) Lincoln government, we would discover abundant evidence that the Confederacy, not the Union, represented the democratic forces in American life.” The Confederacy was distrustful of authority, especially the authority of the federal government. At first, they financed their operations by borrowing rather than taxation, which they saw as coercive. Eventually they had no choice but to tax the people against their will. They were so opposed to a centralized governmental authority that it undermined their military success.

The weakness of Donald's argument is his definition of democracy. If one takes democracy to mean majority rule, democracy was anathema to the Confederates. Blacks, both free and enslaved, women and poor whites has no political power. The South suffered not from an overabundance of democracy. They suffered from the same contradictions Marx identified in capitalism. They insisted on individual, formal freedom while they were a social movement. Their success would have required cooperation of individuals and States in a common cause. This was too much for the individualistic Southerners.

The Confederate idea of freedom was the formal, not actual, freedom Lenin denounced. Confederates wanted slave owners to be free to buy and sell slaves and operate their businesses as they saw fit. Marx and Engels explain, “[T]he abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at. By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying. But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also.” Marx and Engels argue in order to have positive freedom the state must dispense with some negative freedoms. Even the negative, formal freedoms Southerners fought so hard over were not offered to blacks and white women. Poor white men did not have the actual freedom to ‘pursue happiness’ as the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America promised. Marx and Engels wanted to smash the social order and do away with the bourgeois notion of freedom that justified enslavement of human beings.

The only way that the Old World system that birthed capitalism, built on the transatlantic slave trade, would be broken was if it was violently crushed. This was abolitionist John Brown's sentiment when he said, “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land can never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed, it might be done.” John Brown came to the conclusion that violence was necessary to end the even greater violence of chattel slavery. He was right but his dream of emancipation for blacks would not be realized by the end of the fighting in 1865. The problem with the Unionist cause was that it was too democratic and too anti-federalist. Lincoln and the Unionists wanted peace and reconciliation with the South. They wanted to give the seditious states their rights.  This was a major failure and it set back the cause of antiracism for almost a century. If the Radical Republicans had somehow been able to take both the legislative and the executive branch, whether by election or by coup, suspended the Constitution by declaring a state of emergency and sent more troops to the South to implement and defend Reconstruction, millions of blacks and antiracist whites would have been spared the atrocities of Jim Crow segregation and Klan justice. If they fully funded a Freedmen's Bureau through taxation of ill gotten profits from slavery and seized plantations and actually given each black family forty acres and a mule they could have corrected the racial-economic imbalance that is almost as start today as it was then.

    As Civil War fighting drew to a close, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels predicted the South would be the ultimate victors of the American Civil War. In July of 1865 Engels wrote to Marx, “I... like Mr. [President of the United States Andrew] Johnson's policy less and less. Hatred of Negroes comes out more and more violently, while as against the old lords of the South he lets all power go out of his hands. If things go on like this, in six months all the old villains of secession will be sitting in Congress at Washington. Without coloured suffrage nothing whatever can be done there, and J [Johnson] leaves it to the vanquished, the ex-slaveholders, to decide upon this matter. It is too absurd.” The dream of emancipation died with the assassination of Republican President Abraham Lincoln, who Marx and Engels lauded as “the single-minded son of the working class.” Marx was excited by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, but Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, did not impress Marx or Engels. Ultimately, the interests of the Republican bourgeoisie of the North and the Democratic bourgeoisie of the South were too similar. The Old World order was restored when, in 1877, Republican presidential candidate Ulysses S. Grant, who lost the popular vote but won the electoral college in the election of 1876, agreed to end Reconstruction in return for the Presidency. Although several blacks were elected to Congress throughout the South during Reconstruction, their political power was soon eviscerated. The South synthesized their Old World racial order with the new industrial capitalism. The result was a system of disenfranchisement, lynching, hanging, burning and plundering of blacks throughout the South. Racist southerners made clear the formal status of blacks as free and equal citizens was not going to be respected in actual reality.

    The American Civil War ended slavery and ushered in a progressive era of industrial capitalism in that was unmatched elsewhere in the world. This was a progressive, positive development that resulted in a degree of negative, formal freedom for blacks. The industrial capitalist order exemplified by the North was the next step in political-economic evolution. It replaced chattel slavery with wage slavery. Blacks were given formal rights, but these formal rights were not granted in actual reality. Above all, however, the American Civil War was a necessary fight that turned America into the vanguard of capitalism for the world. The Radical Republicans and newly enfranchised blacks elected representatives to Congress, many of them black, that had genuinely emancipatory ideas on how to reorganize Southern society but their success was short lived. Instead of using Reconstruction to genuinely increase both formal and actual freedom for all, the bourgeoisie of the North and South struck a bargain to stop the egalitarian Radical Republican vision. Despite this set back, the American Civil War was progressive, ethically just and a net positive for the working class, both black and white. After the Civil War the Gilded Age made the contradictions in industrial capitalism apparent. The formation of industrial unions during the Gilded Age gave workers, both black and white, a greater degree of positive, actual freedom that they would not have had if the Civil War had not determined industrial capitalism the new world order. The system of disenfranchisement and segregation of blacks continued in the South until the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. However, the civil rights movement that spawned that legislation would not have been possible without the formal rights granted to blacks by the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the United States Constitution. These amendments were won by Northern victory in the Civil War and the Radical Republican Congress that followed.

Sources:

James M. McPherson, Battlecry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988)

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Marxist Internet Archive, “Marx’s Letter of Abraham Lincoln,” Accessed February 12 2019, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1864/lincoln-letter.htm

Slavoj Zizek, Marxist Internet Archive, “The Leninist Freedom,” Accessed February 12 2019, https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/zizek.htm

David Donald, In Why the North Won the Civil War, David Donald ed., (New York: Collier, 1962)

Richard N. Current, In Why the North Won the Civil War, David Donald ed., (New York: Collier, 1962)

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Accessed February 12 2019, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm

Richard Josiah Hinton, John Brown and His Men, (New York: Funk and Wagnals, 1894)

Frederick Engels, Marx and Engels on the United States, Nelly Rumyantseva ed., (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1979)

- Mitchell K. Jones 2019