Capitalist Development and the American Civil War Pt. 4

The Civil War as the key moment in the subjugation of the black and white proletariat to the requirements of a rapacious bourgeoisie.

The Consequences of the War

In the South things weren’t going too well either. Even before the war two thirds of the whites didn’t own slaves, and the economic situation of most of these „poor whites,“ even when not on the threshold of poverty, was certainly far from prosperous. They didn’t therefore share the enthusiasm for the war about to spread through southern society, especially amongst the planters. In fact, in the more hilly and mountainous regions of the interior there was widespread disagreement, which in the case of West Virginia would lead to secession; but there were other analogous situations in East Tennessee, Arkansas and Missouri, all of them states which would eventually provide significant numbers of volunteers also to the Unionist army as well. These were the yeoman farmers, small proprietors working their own land who weren’t interested in the planters’ demands, but whose own political weight was negligible. Their discontent would steadily increase during the war, due both to food shortages and to forced conscription: the rule that allowed the rich not to fight also existed in the South, owner or overseers of more than twenty slaves having the right to an exemption. These small peasants formed the backbone of Lee’s army, but, although initially enthusiastic, their willingness to fight would dwindle as their thoughts turned to their families labouring in the fields without their help, as the horrors of war appeared on their own doorsteps. In fact the areas where the yeomanry were most widespread (eastern central Tennessee, North Virginia, the hilly regions of north Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi) would be those most devastated by the federal armies.

In 1863 there were therefore revolts against conscription and food riots in the South too. Another decisive factor in the concluding phase of the war was the crippling level of desertion undermining the confederate army. Out of the 100,000 deserters which abandoned it during the 4 years of war most belonged to the yeomanry; and the figure would be higher still if those failing to report for military service were taken into account. By January 1st 1865, over half the confederate soldiers were absent without leave.

It is calculated that the human cost in terms of loss of life was over 365,000 for the North and over 320,000 for the South. In a country of about 30,000,000 inhabitants 700,000 dead was a considerable amount; to this must be added around another half a million wounded and disabled. And yet these figures, enormous though they are, fail to give an accurate impression of the real devastation wrought, and the suffering experienced by the people on both sides.

Obviously it was in the South that the harshest revolutionizing would occur. Apart from the incalculable damage the region had suffered in a direct sense, its entire world had fallen apart. The ruination and radical defeat of the class of southern planters was even more drastic than that suffered by nobles and clergy at the time of the French Revolution. In the wake of Lincoln’s assassination the victors would impose a Carthaginian peace: the emancipation of the slaves was immediate, total and without indemnity and the class of planters, large and small, found themselves deprived not only of their entire workforce but with more or less their entire capital expropriated as well. The portion of capital invested in land had undergone immense destruction and major confiscations during the war. Contemporaneously, with a stroke of the pen, the public debt and the confederate currency were erased.

But the real victory for the capitalist North was to have a free hand in the economic field. The southerners had always been the main obstacle in the way of the stringent economic protectionism required to make the great mass of consumers pay the costs of the industrial revolution. The protective tariff would thus be raised to unprecedented levels. The 1864 Tarif Act raised excise duties on the total of taxable merchandise from 19.67% in 1860 to 47.56% in 1865. The victory of financial interests was also assured when in 1864 a new law established a powerful central banking system.

The South was politically, militarily and economically on its knees. The destruction it had suffered was appalling. Apart from all the cities and towns razed to the ground, the thousands of miles of uprooted railway track, the hundreds of bridges, railway stations and private and public buildings blown up or burnt down, there were the neglected roads, irrigation works and forests and immense stretches of abandoned farmland, which had been reduced by 18%. Zootechnical property was reduced in the South with equines down by 31%, cattle by 35%, sheep by 20% and pigs by 42%. And the serious lack of forage meant re-establishing pre-war levels was prevented. The South had been reduced to colonial status, and the conditions resulting from the war would maintain it in a position of under-development for many decades to come. Naturally this also applied to the southern manufacturing industry, which was maybe the Confederacy’s weakest point at the start of the war.

But it would be a mistake to think that the initially disadvantageous conditions or the tightening of the blockade caused the confederates to relapse into resigned fatalism. In fact the most challenging task which confronted the confederate government was precisely that of creating a productive apparatus from scratch which would meet the requirements of the war, and, given the starting position, there was only one way forward: forced industrialisation. Since the capitalist road, founded on free initiative, was not possible, because most capital was tied up in the countryside, mainly in slaves, and couldn’t be imported either, the only road left was based on public ownership of the means of production and on forced saving, one which some historians have defined as “socialist”.

This was achieved by means of three instruments: submission of all existing manufactures to the most stringent public control (the government ordaining what was produced, allocating raw materials, railway transportation, labour power, and even freezing profits, to the extent that at a certain point the owners of the most important steelworks offered to formally hand over their enterprises to the State); nationalisation of as many establishments as possible; and finally, the outright creation of a powerful state industrial sector which, towards the end of the conflict, constituted a structure which incorporated virtually the whole of the confederate industrial apparatus.
 

The North’s War

If the South would end up devastated by the war, in the North it meant unprecedented prosperity. The railroad companies did very well out of it, due both to job orders from the military and the closing of the Mississippi which would divert the flow of trade along an East-West axis; the meat packing industry did very well out of it: Chicago, the city of the railroad and the big slaughterhouses experienced a prodigious growth during this period. But it was boom time for all of the sectors linked to the war, such as agriculture (which compensated for the loss of manpower with increased mechanisation and a further push to the West) and the clothing industry, which although it benefitted the honest also allowed sidereal earnings to the dishonest, like those who manufactured items using shoddy, that is, with reprocessed wool waste which was often simply just recompressed. Union soldiers would soon learn this to their cost, when their uniforms, which appeared composed of normal material, would literally melt in the rain. Swindling the state is, of course, a very common phenomenon, especially during the general chaos of the war when it is very easy to get round the regulations, especially if a few officials are bribed here and there. So, whilst the war was used on the one hand to infuse proletarians with patriotic ideals, on the other it was just another opportunity for the bourgeoisie to do business, whether legal or illegal, with friends or enemies, the main thing being to turn a profit.

The country came out of the war significantly changed and greater changes were ahead. The emergent industrial bourgeoisie was fiercely nationalist and republican; Congress adopted economic policies that were strongly expansionist: a national paper money was born, a central banking system, and an enormous public debt. Funds were raised by putting new tariffs and taxes on practically everything produced and consumed. Workers killed in the war were rapidly replaced thanks to incentives to immigrate. The Homestead Act gave free land to the pioneers, everywhere technical and agricultural colleges were founded. Huge swathes of land were gifted to the railroad companies to build railways, allowing the penetration of capital towards the West. The latter measure as good as condemned the prairie Indians to death, but whilst it may be possible to stop armies no power on earth can stop capital in its expansionist phase. If on the eve of the war the government was almost impotent, now that industrial and financial capitalism was making itself heard it entered a period of unprecedented activism, reflecting the true birth of the North American state.
 

Marx and Engels’ stance

Our teachers would follow the progress of the war attentively, writing in particular detail about the first two years, when Marx made it the subject of his press correspondence. After which they would continue to discuss it in their letters.

Apart from the judgements on general and military matters already cited, the first thing one notes, particularly in the letters, is their passionate engagement with the war, in which, apertis verbis, they took the side of the North. Rather than the South being the victim of the North it is aggressively expansionist: Marx shows that it isn’t enough for slavery merely to survive, because its endemic features compel it to continually expand (“war of conquest”) stagnation equating with the death of its economic system. These two social systems simply aren’t able to co-exist; South and North aren’t, nor can they be, two autonomous countries: “The South isn’t a nation, it’s a battle cry”.

Both Marx and Engels complain of the North’s lamentable lack of revolutionary energy; they don’t give a damn, wrote Engels on 30 July, 1862, the government is hesitant about everything: conscription, fiscal measures, attacking slavery, and when some measure is passed, Lincoln hedges it about with so many clauses as to render it ineffective. And the generals, they are all incompetent. If the North doesn’t start a revolutionary war it won’t be able to win.

Marx is more optimistic: he recognises the political and military weaknesses of the North, which the South doesn’t have, but he knows that time is on the side of the North and that the situation will change. Even after the second battle of Bull Run, Marx, writing on 10 September, 1862, would advise Engels not to be too influenced by the military aspect of things. Certainly there should be a transition from the „constitutional“ to the „revolutionary“ phase, which for Marx and Engels consisted in the use of all available force against the representatives of the backward economic system. But an explicitly and completely revolutionary phase would be something that would never happen in North America; the bourgeoisie there would be born reactionary, as indeed was the case in Europe in the same century. Already their fear of the proletariat is intense, and the capitalists are torn between the desire to radically transform society and their fear of a working-class offensive, in this case including the black proletariat. Putting effective political and military instruments into the hands of the subordinate classes of North and of South is far too risky and would never be attempted, unless counterbalanced, that is, with such precautionary measures as to render them ineffective.

If the North had directed effort towards agitating amongst the blacks in the South and arming them where possible, both behind the lines and by enrolling blacks who had fled to the North, the war would have been over in a few months, and with negligible loss of human life. But who then would have prevented those hosts of armed men from reorganising the world as they thought fit? The bourgeoisie’s great fear, which would materialize a few years later during the Paris Commune, permeates the last two centuries as a constant and undeniable factor; a fear, moreover, which is entirely justified. For the bourgeois state, for all bourgeois states, any battle between interest groups, social classes or sovereign states can only take place after control over the subordinate and working classes is assured, or after these have been securely yoked up to one of contending war machines, which is tantamount to the same thing as they are no longer capable of fighting in their own interest. The black proletariat wasn’t allowed to fight in the front line for its liberation; instead it was allowed to send tens of thousands of its sons to die under the orders of white officers, with nothing given in exchange except vague hopes of a wealth that would never materialize, and an emancipation which would transform their condition in name only, without actually improving their living conditions; indeed, in the decades to come, they would actually get worse.

A „revolutionary“ war would, therefore, have been decisive in the early phases of the Civil War, but by 1863 the disparity of forces in the field is such that it is clear to all that the fall of the Confederacy is only a matter of time.

In the Autumn of 1862, thanks to a widespread feeling of opposition to the war, the republicans were trounced by the democrats in the legislative elections and their majority whittled down to a mere 20 seats. Engels was extremely disappointed: „Desirable though it may be, on the one hand, that the bourgeois republic should be utterly discredited in America too, so that in future it may never again be preached on its own merits, but only as a means towards, and a form of transition to, social revolution, it is, nevertheless, annoying that a rotten oligarchy, with a population only half as large, should evince such strength as the great fat, helpless democracy“ (15 November 1862). Marx, however, recalling that the South was in a very difficult situation and that the democratic victory was the sort of reaction that occurred in every revolutionary movement, continued to remain optimistic. In fact it was probably mainly thanks to government intervention that the republicans retained their position. The democrats were in the majority in the Indiana and Illinois assemblies and it was only the intervention of the Union army – which proceeded to arrest some of the democratic party candidates – which made it possible for the republicans to remain in power in the border states like Missouri, Kentucky and Maryland. Lincoln also ordered the arrest of his likely adversary in the next presidential elections, the well-known Ohio Democrat, Clement L. Vallandingham, and later had him exiled to the Confederate territories. The bourgeoisie isn’t shocked by dictatorial measures, whether open or disguised, as long as they are enforced to protect its interests.

Marx and Engels denounce the European states for plotting to exploit the civil war for their own ends by means of an imperialist-financial undertaking in Mexico; the latter whilst the British working class was fighting generously for the cause of the North. In fact at the beginning of 1862 the English cotton barons, using the Trent incident as justification, petitioned for a campaign of British intervention on the side of the South with the aim of breaking the naval blockade. The English workers, although damaged by the cotton blockade, which had caused widespread unemployment in the textile industry, generously demonstrated in favour of the North, thus acting to deter the British bourgeoisie’s temptation to intervene.

The International would also make its voice heard, first sending a letter of congratulation to Lincoln on his re-election in 1864 (which was acknowledged with an official reply), then inviting Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, to complete the work of his predecessor – assassinated, as it was believed then, by a southerner – by initiating the new era of the emancipation of labour.
 

The “Reconstruction” and its failure

The Civil War was the consequence of the fact that the ruling classes of American society were clearly divided into two sections.

In the great bourgeois revolutions the divisions within the ruling classes had allowed the radical tendencies of the lower strata to emerge, much more so in the case of the French Revolution than in the English. In the American Civil War there was no radical uprising of this kind. At least in its main outlines this is easy to understand: the American cities weren’t teeming with desperate artisans and potential sans-culottes. Class-consciousness and the organised power of proletarians were virtually non-existent and the existence of land to the West reduced its potential explosiveness. The necessary conditions for a peasant revolt were therefore also lacking. In the South, instead of peasants at the bottom of the pyramid there were black slaves; and these were in no condition to rebel, except in a sporadic and disorganised way. Despite slave insurrections having occurred, they didn’t have political consequences. No clear revolutionary impulse emerged from this direction, chiefly because their liberation hadn’t been of their own making. We have seen how fearfully, and with what cautiousness the two belligerents had consented to put weapons into the hands of a not too excessive number of blacks. Another obstacle in the way of a struggle directly led and organised by blacks was the profound ignorance in which they were kept. Thus were the ex-slaves pushed, empty handed, alone and defenceless, into the world outside the plantations.

After Lincoln’s death, Andrew Johnson, the vice-president who took his place, continued the work of reconciliation, composed of pardons and the reconstitution of the southern ruling class by reinstating most of the old dignitaries. Johnson nominated the governors of the ex rebel states and authorised them to convoke constituent assemblies, allowing to vote those who had taken the oath proposed by Lincoln: Loyalty to the United States and acceptance of the Proclamation of emancipation. Higher ranking confederate officials and the major property owners would have to be individually pardoned by the president. On the completion of this procedure, the states would again become part of the union.

Johnson was an ex-democratic senator from Tennessee, the only senator from the South to remain loyal to the Union. He had been against the southern landed aristocracy and it was therefore expected he would treat them with extreme severity; but he was also a virulent and declared racist, which would become evident when certain decisions had to be made. Lincoln had chosen him not only for electoral reasons but also to counterbalance the republican radicals; obviously the assassination hadn’t figured in his calculations. Johnson permitted the governors to surround themselves with prominent ex-secessionists, who he would readily pardon, and he allowed them to issue laws and regulations restricting the freedom of the recently emancipated blacks.

The so-called Black Codes, replacing the Slave Codes to which they bore an astonishing likeness, aimed to tie the slaves to the plantations by means of barely disguised forms of servitude. These codes limited the right of blacks to own land, to acquire arms and to move around freely; they imposed prohibitive taxes on anyone who wanted to engage in autonomous activity, especially if non-agricultural; and they allowed the bosses to take on the sons of ex slaves who proved to be „unsuitable“ parents as „apprentices.“ Blacks weren’t allowed to stand witness against whites in court; if they abandoned work they could be thrown into prison for breaking their contract; anyone found not to be working could be arrested and fined 50 dollars. Those who couldn’t pay the fine could be hired to anyone in the county who would pay the fine. Blacks could also be fined for making insulting gestures, for not observing the curfew and for possession of firearms. A personal control over blacks was established which was indistinguishable from slavery. Despite the thirteenth amendment, which rendered slavery unconstitutional, the South attempted to legally recreate it in all but name. By the end of 1865 the ex-confederates were back in power and had re-established their rule.
 

The Missing Agricultural Reform

It was the capitalists in the North who launched the single progressive initiative. In the group known as the Republican Radicals abolitionist ideals merged with industrial interests to give life to a brief flame, albeit quickly extinguished in the rising tide of corruption.

Although the radicals were a thorn in Lincoln’s side during the war, he nevertheless managed to bring the war to a victorious military conclusion on the basis of the sole programme of safeguarding the existence of the Union, i.e., without conducting any serious offensive against property rights in the South. But for a brief period between 1865-68, the three years following the cessation of hostilities, the Republican radicals would hold power in the North and conduct an offensive against the plantation system and the remnants of slavery.

The leaders of the group considered the war as a struggle between the progressive capitalism of the North and a reactionary agrarian society based on slavery. But if the conflict between the North and the South really can be characterised in such a way, then the most important battles were fought after the war had ended. But capitalism was already in its cowardly and corrupt phase by now, incapable of seeing its revolution through to its conclusion. Thus it was in Italy and Germany, and thus will be the case in most bourgeois revolutions in the Third World: the bourgeoisie is subjected to pressure from external powers at the same time as it has guard itself in primis from its own working class. Thus it is forced to halt in mid-stream, camouflage itself (as in China), or sometimes even go into reverse gear.

Drawn from amongst the proponents of abolitionism and from the radicals of the Free Soil group, a small nucleus of republican politicians would interpret the war as an opportunity to „uproot the vestiges of a dying world of barons and serfs, nobles and slaves“ in order to reconstitute the South according to the vision of the „progressive and democratic“ North, founded on „Freedom of speech, on freedom of labour, on schools and ballot boxes.“ The leader of the Republican Radicals, Thaddeus Stevens, who expressed himself more cautiously in public, wrote in a letter that what the country needed was a leader (i.e. not Lincoln) „with sufficient moral courage to make of this a radical revolution, and to remodel our institutions (…) This would involve both the destruction and emancipation of society in the South, and the repopulation of half the continent.“

But what really gave the impetus to this movement, taking it out of the realm of idle chatter, was that its objectives coincided with the interests of sectors of vital importance in Northern society, namely, the nascent iron and steel industry in Pennsylvania and a railroad company. Stevens, in his capacity as parliamentarian, would act as intermediary for both these groups and from each of them he received money. The radical Republicans also gained the support of many workers in the North, even if the latter were cool towards abolitionism, since they feared competition from the blacks. They considered the New England abolitionists as the hypocritical representatives of the factory owners, whilst they enthusiastically supported the radical’s protectionism and their deflationist programme. Finance and commerce, however, were unsympathetic towards the radicals. And after the war the radicals would turn to the „Northern plutocracy”.

The radicals’ offensive didn’t, however, represent a capitalist united front against the plantation system, and this explains its intrinsic weakness. At the time of its greatest strength it was a coalition of industrialists and a few railroad companies, supported by part of the working class.

In a speech on 18 December 1865, Stevens presented to public opinion and to Congress his analysis of the situation and his programme of action. The South had to be treated as a conquered country and not as a series of states that, after having left the Union, could be welcomed back with open arms. „The foundation of their institutions-political, municipal, and social-must be broken up and relaid, or all our blood and treasure have been spent in vain. This can only be done by treating and holding them as a conquered people.“ The southern states wouldn’t be allowed to return to the Union, Stevens stated, „until the Constitution shall have been so amended as to make it what its framers intended; and so as to secure perpetual ascendency to the party of the Union,“ that is, the Republican party. If the southern states were not „reconstructed“ – this euphemism of the time would continue to be used in all subsequent histories – it could easily submerge the North, said Stevens, and thereby the South would have won the peace after losing the war.

It was on the basis of these considerations that Stevens outlined his programme to reconstruct the society in the South from top to bottom, i.e., smashing the power of the plantation owners by confiscating all land of over 200 acres, „even if this might force the nobility (of the South) into exile.“ In this way the federal government would obtain enough land to give every black family around 40 acres; giving rise to the slogan “40 acres and a mule”, which was used to discredit the hopes, held to be utopian, of the recently liberated slaves.

The demand for a vast redistribution of land was born of the knowledge that it was the only way to break the power of the planters. Indeed the latter had already started to do all they could to recuperate by other means the substance of their lost power, something that was possible owing to the economic misery of the blacks.

There is persuasive evidence that the division of the old plantations into smaller landholdings for the blacks was in fact a feasible proposition. The North’s military authorities undertook two experiments of this type to resolve the pressing problem of the thousands of blacks without means. They transferred the confiscated and abandoned land across to more than 40,000 blacks, who it was thought would be able to successfully work the land as small peasant farmers, until president Johnson returned the property to their previous white proprietors. The experience of slavery was certainly not the best in terms of preparing the blacks to manage enterprises as small rural capitalists. There is little the blacks could have done for themselves, or to favour of northern interests, without a minimum degree of economic security and political rights, including the right to vote.
 

“Reconstruction” According to the Radicals

The radicals lashed out at Johnson’s leniency towards the South, and the return to home rule. There was a struggle in Congress that almost led to the impeachment of the president, who lost his ascendancy, whilst meanwhile Congress annulled everything and recommenced with its own version of Reconstruction. The first step was an inquiry into actual conditions in the South. The inquiry documented the existence of widespread poverty amongst the blacks as well as brutal oppression, intimidation and legal discrimination on the part of the whites. The committee conducted a detailed examination of the racial riots that had recently taken place in Memphis and New Orleans, resulting in many casualties. It concluded that in fact the New Orleans rebellion had been a police massacre in which dozens of blacks had been murdered in cold blood.

Congress abolished home rule in the southern States and divided the ex Confederation into 5 military districts. Even southern citizens who had already obtained a pardon would have to take a more rigorous oath before recovering their right to vote, and ex-confederate officials had the right withdrawn. The state conventions had to draw up new constitutions.

Reduced to its essentials, the radical programme of reconstruction of the South consisted of using the North’s military force to destroy the plantation aristocracy and replace it with a system of landed property that was modern and capitalist, and which ensured landed property and the right to vote to the blacks. Soon enough, thanks to economic dynamics themselves, masses of workers originally involved in extensive agriculture would end up in the industrial cities, providing the low price labour power ever required by the industrial bourgeoisie; the agricultural sector, meanwhile, would undergo an evolution dictated by the laws of the market. In a capitalist sense it was a revolutionary programme.

But in fact things weren’t going too badly for the northern industries in any case. Even taking into account the movement towards the West, the forces of labour arriving from Europe, who were much more qualified and educated than the blacks and easier to integrate, were, even if not sufficient in themselves, enough to cause divisions amongst the bourgeoisie. Thus even northerners who professed sympathy for the Negro Cause showed signs of weakening. In reply to Stevens speech of 6 September 1865, Horace Greely, director of the New York Tribune, wrote: „We object to the idea of fighting against southern property because the well-off classes in the South, since they are more human and enlightened than the ignorant strata of poor whites, are less hostile to the Negroes.“

The fears of the N.Y. Tribune give us a hint of what would happen when the well-off classes of North and South had buried their differences and, in another famous compromise, had let the blacks go off and find out for themselves what to do with their freedom.

It is therefore not surprising that the radicals were defeated. Or rather, they weren’t defeated as such, but anything radical in their programme was defeated as soon as it came into conflict with the interests of the Northern proprietors. The radicals, against the wishes of the more moderate republicans, were unable to get confiscation of land inserted in the 1867 reconstruction laws. In the House of Representatives, Stevens’ “40 acres” gained a mere 37 votes. The more influential classes in the North were not about to tolerate a direct attack on property, even on rebel property, not even in the name of capitalist democracy and economic development. The Nation warned: „Dividing up land belonging to the rich amongst the landless would mean for our political and social system a trauma from which it would be unlikely to recover without loss of liberty.“ The failure of the agrarian reform was a decisive defeat that eliminated the most important part of the radical programme. Without the agrarian reform the rest of the programme added up to a collection of measures that were either palliative or irritating, according to one’s point of view.

This failure, which left the alliance between the white proprietors in the South and those in the rest of the country on its feet, is a reflection of the limited revolutionary impulse that existed in American society at that time.

Since the land wasn’t confiscated and redistributed, the plantation system gained a second lease of life thanks to the replacing of slave labour with new forms of labour. To begin with, wage labour was tried, but as a system it failed, at least in part because the blacks had the tendency to sign up for work during slack periods and make themselves scarce when the cotton harvest came around. The plantation owners therefore resorted to the share-cropping system, which allowed them far more control over the labour force. In areas where a peasant class had never previously existed, the change was a significant one.

An American characteristic of the situation derived from the figure of the country storekeeper, often a rich planter. By providing the tenant farmers and sharecroppers with various goods on credit, at vastly inflated prices, he was able to control their labour power. The tenant farmers and sharecroppers couldn’t buy things anywhere else, since, being short of ready cash, they had to acquire goods on credit. The landed proprietor’s share of the harvest was always so large that the sharecropper remained in perpetual debt, and the same went for the tenant farmers. In this way economic ties replaced for many blacks those of the slavery that had been suppressed. It is difficult to say to how much the situation of the blacks was improved by this change, even supposing it was an improvement. To compete the picture there were the firms that used convict labour; always blacks as chance would have it, and who had been incarcerated, mainly for insignificant transgressions, after a due process of law that was, of course, administered by whites.

Lenin defined the American south as „a closed, stagnant environment, without fresh air, a kind of prison for the ‚liberated‘ Negroes.“ Even in 1915 he stated that „the economic survivals of the slave system differ not one wit from the economic survivals of feudalism, and in the ex-slave regions of the South these survivals are still very evident even today.“

The main effect of the change seems to have been turning the economy of the South, insofar as it wasn’t already, into one based on a sole product, with the bankers putting pressure on the planters, and the planters on the sharecroppers, to cultivate products that could be rapidly converted into cash.
 

“Redemption”

Political revival went hand in hand with economic revival, the one reinforcing the other. We won’t go into the contorted and contradictory political manoeuvrings which the successors of the groups that had held power in the South before the civil war resorted to in order to acquire political influence. Suffice it to mention that the scallawags, as southerners who switched over to serving the Union government after the war came to be known – or white collaborationists as we would call them today – included numerous planters, merchants and even captains of industry.

A major dose of violence served to remind the blacks „of their place“ and to re-establish white supremacy („home rule“). It is to this period that we can trace the birth of the Ku Klux Klan, which in fact was just one amongst a number of terrorist organisations to launch cowardly attacks on blacks, almost invariably unarmed and isolated, with the aim of steering them away from the ballot boxes. Even many of the carpetbaggers (officials who came from the North who were generally considered to be corrupt) were “persuaded” that going home was in their best interests.

In the meantime, railroad and industrial interests were acquiring growing influence in the South. In short, the moderates and the well-to-do would recover their power, their authority and their influence in the South, just like in the North. Even public opinion, certainly not determined by the blacks, was starting to tire of the constant climate of tension. The democrats in the South reconquered one state after another (in what, in debatable taste, they would call “Redemption”), until in 1876 only three, Louisiana, Florida and South Carolina, remained in the hands of the radicals. The terms of an alliance between these two groups in course of preparation; terms which would rise above the old line that had divided them during the war.

The 1876 elections would be the most violent and bitterly fought in the whole of American history. The democratic candidate, Samuel J. Tilden of New York, clearly established himself with a broad popular vote (even if tainted by the violence against blacks in the southern states). The Republicans however questioned the results in four States, twenty electoral votes; if all these votes had gone to the republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes, he would have been elected. Resistance came mainly from army veterans, who had no intention of accepting the latter result. It was even feared there might even be a new outbreak of war. Pessimists predicted it would be the last free election (and maybe they were right!). After a few months, a compromise was reached. The South would accept Hayes’ victory, on condition that, once in power, he would withdraw all federal troops from the South, nominate a southerner to his cabinet and allocate substantial funds for a programme of domestic improvement in the South. Hayes took office and the troops were duly withdrawn. Reconstruction was over, and it would mark the end of any serious effort to protect the constitutional rights of blacks. It would next come up for discussion again in the 1960s.

Thus did the party of property, wealth and privilege in the North finally abandon any claim to be supporting the rights of the oppressed class of black proletarians. Once the ex slave-owning “junkers” in the South had discovered the urban bourgeois in themselves, and the northern industrialists had found themselves dealing with radical protest from their own proletariat, the classic conservative coalition would become possible, and Thermidor would arrive to liquidate the “Second American Revolution”.

The industrial and financial bourgeoisie in the North had no need of the blacks, and it was happy to leave them in the tender care of the ex-slaveowners. After its attempt to change society into one in which all would adhere to the pure liberal-democratic bourgeois model (even if it was never entirely united in pursuit of this goal), it had been content to achieve the principal aim of the civil war, that of maintaining the federation, and this was the essential condition for a number of important reasons. In the first place, the bourgeoisie was guaranteed a burgeoning domestic market of a very respectable size which would guarantee it an outlet for goods that, for now, weren’t competitive on the world market; also, it could be assured of a pacified hinterland where it was possible to get rich speculating on the immense possibilities opened up by the conquest of the West, which was then still in progress; finally, it could turn its attention, confident that its country was economically developed and militarily in a favourable position, to whatever imperialist adventure presented itself. In fact in 1865, with war barely concluded, Grant, not yet in the running for the presidential job, was already champing at the bit to invade Mexico, to cross the Canadian frontier, and to occupy San Domingo; and it was he, in that same year, who ordered Sherman to conduct an out and out campaign of genocide against the native Americans.
 

By Way of Conclusion

Only the proletarian revolution will be self-aware, and even then only as a collective awareness existing within the proletarian party for such consciousness certainly cannot be attributed to the thoughts and desires of the individual participants. Whether sudden or dispersed over a long period, all of the social upheavals, which we call revolutions, that have changed man’s economic relations in an enduring way, have occurred by virtue of a series of actions, determinations and conditions that have propelled huge numbers of people to act in a certain way, towards a certain end, such as to determine the revolutionary outcome; and sometimes the original causes were situated so long ago, or so far away, that even the instigators of the revolutionary action themselves were unaware of the real reasons they had acted as they did, or of the revolution’s real objectives. Often those who actually were aware of the real reasons didn’t take part in the action, as in the case of the big bourgeoisie in their revolution; although the latter would be good at providing plenty of bogus reasons to those who were forced to take action and risk their own lives.

The American Civil War had need of ideals as well, on both sides. In the North they fought for the liberation of the black slaves, a noble cause if ever there was one; and certainly there were those who sincerely wanted to help the blacks. And yet the condition of the black Americans, barring a few exceptions, would end up even worse than it had been under slavery.

The abolition of servitude in all its forms and the total freeing up of the productive forces is one of the main aims of the bourgeois revolution. And yet the North American bourgeoisie stopped at a certain stage in the undertaking, in fact, as we have seen, it actually took a few steps backward. Why? It was because this wily, late arrival of a bourgeoisie had never deployed all-out revolution as ones of its weapons, having always preferred instead to content itself with a few basic achievements that were to its advantage, i.e., unity, greater centralisation of the state, a free hand in commercial and industrial policy and also in foreign policy. A choice which, by potentially creating a state of permanent conflict, might have been costly under any other circumstances, but in a country like the United States was, as is said today, „a winning formula.“ Yes, maybe they could have introduced an agrarian reform, but was that really advantageous? As part of the bourgeois revolution, the consequences of agrarian reform are a development of the productive forces, the creation of new social strata to counter-pose to the defeated classes who might attempt to regain power, the creation of a strong domestic market for industrial production, and an increase in the population to add to the future army of wage-earners (knowing that the land distributed would soon enough be lost, due to debt, etc). All of these advantages were however more or less guaranteed both through the development of the West, where a class of small and medium farmers was in rapid development over increasingly vast areas, and by the huge waves of emigration, which after the cessation of hostilities increased even further.

Even as far as the war was concerned the American bourgeoisie preferred to follow the bloodier path, leaving behind them 700,000 young men massacred, in the four years of war, and unprecedented destruction. Nothing was done to stir up the blacks in the South. In fact, if the blacks had been mobilised, secession would never have been proclaimed. It would have released 4 million desperate individuals whose revolt might have gone any number of ways. Certainly an anti-capitalist outcome would have been impossible, but the bourgeoisie is never keen on taking risks; it is always dominated by fear.

And it wasn’t wrong. In July, only a few weeks after Hayes’ inauguration had marked the end of Reconstruction, the country was confronted with what would become known as ‘The Great Strike of 1887’. With the problem of the blacks effectively suppressed for the next 80 years, the social question, the wage labour question, now appeared on the scene as a consequence of the great economic crisis, which had began in 1873 and whose consequences would be felt for the rest of the decade. This event, which could equally be called, „The Great Scare of 1877,“ was managed with the ample use of the army and militia, which didn’t hesitate to massacre the strikers, take the place of workers on the railways, protect blacklegs, and prevent meetings and rallies by force. This struggle, which in certain cases assumed insurrectional proportions, may be considered as the beginning of the modern history of the workers’ movement in the United States.

It was only after defeating the blacks, the weakest section of the American proletariat, that American capitalism would launch its all-out attack against the urban working class mainly concentrated in the East and Mid-West. For the bourgeoisie, this was a much more dangerous and seasoned adversary, even though it still lacked strong and effective organisations. The containment of the blacks in the South, at the mercy of their ex-owners, excluded them, for the most part, from the industrial working class; their place was taken by the hordes of emigrants, who were often illiterate peasants who spoke a babel of languages. The blacks remained trapped in the states where previously they had been slaves, and from whence it was extremely difficult to escape.

When all is said and done, this chapter in the history of the bourgeoisie, who are today masters of the world, adds up to little more than a miserable balance sheet of advantages and disadvantages, of political and economic debits and credits. The bourgeoisie that immolated itself on the battlefields behind Cromwell’s banner, or as armed republicans in the French Revolution, no longer exists. The final outcome of the American Civil War shows us that throughout the world the petty mean-mindedness of the ruling class was irreversible even then; a ruling class that still contaminates human society today, distorting it in line with its own narrow interests.