Capitalist Development and the American Civil War Pt. 1

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

Report presented to the May 2002 Party Reunion

The United States in the Mid-19th Century

At the time of Lincoln’s election to the presidency of the country, the United States of America was an expanding society the like of which had never been seen before. The population of 23,261,000 in 1850 had risen to 31,513,000 in 1860, an increase almost entirely due to the influx of European immigrants. Indeed the wave of Irish immigration caused by the famine in the 40s had been followed by another wave due to the political reaction after the revolutions of 1848-49, composed for the most part of Germans. These were often politicised, skilled workers, many of whom were communist, and amongst them were many of Marx’s friends, including Weydemeyer and Willich, who would achieve high ranks in the Northern army during the course of the Civil War.

Those who didn’t stay in the industrial cities of the North moved off towards the Frontier where there was work for all. Although the Gold Rush certainly played an important part in the transfer of so many people to the West, the main dream of the pioneers was a patch of fertile land where they could live with their families. By 1860, the Union was still predominantly an agricultural country; in the previous ten years the area of cultivated land had grown by 50%, and the gross product had almost doubled. Five out of six Americans made a living from agriculture and only one dollar in nine was invested in non-agricultural activities.

And yet the most surprising phenomenon of those times was actually the rate of industrial development, which started up on the basis of the enormous market created for products linked to agriculture, and which was rendered possible by the uninterrupted flow of manual workers from Europe. In the same ten years the growth of industry is such that it is measurable in values of around the 100% mark, or even more. Along with the industrial development came an enormous development in the infrastructure, in particular in railways, merchant shipping, and the telegraph. Great cities like Chicago arose from nothing whilst the average literacy of the population was around 90% (as compared to around 20% in newly united Italy).

Trade had undergone a rapid and tumultuous expansion too, concentrating on the export of agricultural goods, mainly cotton, tobacco and cereals. Imports consisted principally of textiles, clothing, tea, coffee, and manufactured iron goods.

Workers had to endure harsh conditions, working eleven or twelve, or in extreme cases, 14 or 15 hours a day for low wages. Yet still, as compared with Europe, working and living conditions were better. If on the one hand the continual influx of starving immigrants tended to lower salaries, there still remained the choice, for the proletarian of New York or Pittsburgh, of acquiring a spade and a gun and heading off for the Frontier – a choice clearly denied to his brother proletarians in Manchester, Dusseldorf, Turin or St Petersburg.

One consequence of this fluidity of labour was a lesser permanence of the workers in the workplace, and therefore a certain dislocation between the minority of specialised and the mass of generic unskilled workers. This characteristic would mark out the American workers’ movement and influence even some aspects of its trade-unionism, soon to become a phenomenon on a national scale.

North and South

This picture of American society, which refers to the year 1860, is not enough to portray the Union’s economic, social and political situation, the origins of which are to be sought in the revolution of the century before. In the 80 years or so before 1860, two clearly differentiated poles had been developing within the Union according to two very different logics, the North and the South; to which may be added a third pole, the Mid-West, eventually better known as the North-West, less populated but extremely dynamic, and which would later be found to hold the balance of power in the conflict.

The North was composed of the states of New England, arisen from the puritan emigration in the 17^th century, and strongly homogeneous in terms of culture, religion and custom. At the beginning these states had been communities of fishermen and sailors, and of merchants; and, incidentally, it was from New England that virtually all the American slave ships came. Intermediate from a cultural point of view were Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York, even if economically they were undoubtedly part of the North.

The South is considered to start a little below the 40° parallel, the so-called Mason-Dixon line, which separates Pennsylvania from Maryland. In 1860 it comprised the major part of the United States, including the states of the Atlantic strip and the Gulf of Mexico, from Maryland to Texas, and the states further inland (Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky). With an extremely varied climate and terrain, a very dispersed population and few cities, the colonies, later states, in the South soon discovered their vocation in agriculture and were drawn towards the cultivation of those species particularly required by the world market, such as tobacco, rice and indigo; cotton would be introduced later. The wide open spaces favoured the installation of large landed properties and the sparsity of the population favoured the phenomenon of acquiring forced labour from abroad. Initially that included whites as well, on contracts of temporary slavery; later slavery would centre on the importation of Africans, captured and deported.

These differences, which already existed prior to the anti-colonial revolution, would become accentuated in the following years as bit by bit the two parts of the Union developed their potentialities, and brought into being two parties representing these divergent interests. The North became the stronghold of the “federalist” party, which was pro-centralisation, and supporter of strong federal government and the creation of a powerful Union bank – functional objectives of Northern mercantile interests (especially at the start). The South was represented by the “Democratic” party, supporter of decentralisation – of maximum autonomy for the individual states, and fearful that the central government could end up in the hands of a financial oligarchy; to these characteristics were added the defence of agriculture against other economic activities, and of the small business against the large. These were objectives, in fact, which were shared not only by the agricultural population of the South but also by a large part of the popular masses in the North which was composed of a significant number of small farmers and artisans.

This formula allowed the Democratic Party to secure the presidency with Jefferson (1800) and hang onto it, with a few, insignificant exceptions, until the fateful year of 1860.

Such continuity of government and political line, not without occasional jolts and resistance from the North, allowed for an uninterrupted development of the United States both in a territorial and economic sense. In 1860 the territory of the Union was already approaching what it is today, being bordered by the two oceans and by Canada and Mexico. The principal stages in this growth were:

1. the acquisition of Louisiana from France in 1803
2. the 1812-14 war with Great Britain, which prevented an expansion towards Canada
3. The acquisition of Florida from Spain in 1819
4. The war with Mexico (1845-48), followed by the acquisition of enormous territories in the South-West.

From a political and economic point of view various events would occur in this period which would have repercussions on the crisis which led to the Civil War. In the South the cultivation of cotton suddenly became very lucrative with the invention in 1797 of a machine for separating the seeds from the cotton fibre. In the space of a few years cotton would become the main crop in numerous Southern states, bringing wealth and an important export crop to the country.

The consequence of the war with Great Britain was a boost to the industrialisation of the North. Without the supply of goods from industries in Great Britain it became a pressing necessity to set up indigenous industries, and the preferred area for industrial expansion was – due to the concentration of capital, the continual influx of manpower and the already entrenched commercial sector – precisely the North, which to start with had been extremely opposed to the war. Among other things the government had to reconstitute in 1816 a Union bank, and also institute mild protective tariffs in order to protect the nascent industry from overseas competition. This matter of protectionism – required by the industrial North in the interests of its immense internal market, and opposed by the South, exporter of agricultural products – would come to overshadow every relationship between the two halves of the country.

1818 would mark the controversial appearance of another key issue in North-South relations, slavery. The territory of Missouri was ready to be admitted as a full state of the Union, but it was proposed by a deputy from the North that admission should be conditional on a gradual abolition of slavery in that state. What prompted this demand and why did it give rise to a serious crisis? To understand this it is necessary to go a bit deeper into the question of slavery and examine the changes it had undergone in previous years.

The “Peculiar Institution”

Slavery had existed in the United States since the colonial period. The chronic lack of farm labourers had made necessary the importation of forced labour, in other words, slaves. And the Southern farmers were not worried about the colour of their skin, it was just the enslavement of whites was not really a viable proposition, even if a form of temporary slavery had been applied earlier on when it had been the custom to keep European workers as slaves, for periods of seven years and more, in virtue of a contract that these had signed to cover their passage to America. A kind of temporary serfdom. But after the prescribed period they were free, if indeed they hadn’t freed themselves before: all one had to do was head off West, and to be courageous and adaptable. There was plenty of land for everybody. The Indians, what few there were, had shown how little adapted they were to working in the fields, as well as being susceptible to illness.

The first slave ship was a Dutch warship. In August 1619 it stopped off the coast of Virginia, and put ashore in order to put twenty slaves up for sale. This event, new for the Northern hemisphere of the New World, had been customary for some time in the European colonies of Central and South America. Other ships would soon follow.

The slaves arrived just as the plantations of Virginia were entering a crisis period. The enormous extent of the territory they covered required a huge number of hands, and the only alternative was to abandon it. In a short time slavery extended to all the English colonies in America, including New England in the North. Thus, once again showing that, at least in certain areas, relations of production aren’t determined by theoretical schemes but rather by the iron laws of production. In a short time there had been a transition from modern relations of labour, typical of the bourgeoisie which in Europe was just then starting to shake off its feudal chains, to feudal relations, and from these to slavery.

However in the North slavery never really took root: the type of work, commercial and craft-based to begin with, later industrial, wasn’t adapted to slavery, which functioned best in the great plantations; in addition, there was already labour in the North, consisting of small peasants and craftsmen, and none of them intended to have to compete with slave labour. Slavery therefore quickly disappeared in the North, but not for humanitarian reasons, the contrary. That the puritans of the North were far from being saints, despite the opinion they had of themselves, is shown by the fact that in the space of a few years they had set up in the slave business themselves, and such was their enthusiasm for the trade that eventually they would carve out a virtual monopoly for themselves, and derive enormous profits.

For the Southerners, the arrival of the slaves – especially when these began to constitute a substantial part of the population – was viewed with a certain amount of concern, because of the changes it brought to the country, and because of the potential threat to the economy and problems of coexistence with the whites. Therefore the colonies of the South, even before independence, enacted measures which prohibited the introduction of new slaves via the African trade; measures which the British government regularly annulled since it had no intention of renouncing the profits it derived from the trade. Thus the states had to wait until after the war of independence to prohibit the slave trade. There was even a proposal in 1787 to abolish the importation of slaves throughout the whole of the Union, a proposal which was thrown out, due, in fact, to opposition from the North; and for the same reasons as the government of his Britannic majesty. In the end there was a law passed in 1808 which abolished the trade, and another one, in 1820, which branded it as piracy.

Naturally, this didn’t mean the end of slavery, nor did it even halt the growth in the number of slaves, which actually experienced a veritable boom during this period. For a start, a good number of the slaves came from states within the Union: specifically those with economies intermediate between the north and the South (the so-called border states, such as Virginia, Maryland and Delaware etc) which had a limited requirement for them, but specialised in the production of slaves (an activity which had never been prohibited) as if they were just so many heads of cattle. Secondly, the only real consequence of the trade was an increase in the price of slaves because smuggling them had been going on pretty much continuously all along.

The price of slaves continued to rise, and on the eve of the war the average price was $1,000, peaking at $2,000. Indeed, the capital expended on slaves would come to constitute the main part of a company’s fixed assets, worth more than the market value of the land itself. The fact that the Northern business classes had never stopped dealing in slaves is illustrated by a newspaper story which tells us that even after the commencement of hostilities, on 21 April 1861, a slave ship was captured in Boston headed for New York with 960 slaves on board. These facts need to be borne in mind if we are to understand how lacking in unity the two sides were, both in the condemnation of slavery in the North, and the defence of slavery in the South.

Throughout the 19^th Century the position of the African slaves and their role in Southern society was not very different from that of the European working class, which was then enduring the oppression of a bourgeoisie greedy for profit; and Marx didn’t hesitate to place the conditions of the one and the other on the same plane: “For slave-trade read labour-market, for Kentucky and Virginia, Ireland and the agricultural districts of England, Scotland and Wales, for Africa, Germany” (Capital, vol.1). In certain respects the condition of the slaves was better than the workers: the fact that the slave only had a value for as long as he was alive meant that that someone had to maintain him or suffer an economic loss. The enterprise which went bust would sell its slaves, who would merely have a change of boss, whereas for “free” workers, in periods of economic crisis, if their work ended they would be abandoned to starvation and poverty. Even the pace of work was a lot more relaxed, and not for one moment would the Northern industrialists have considered using slave labour in their factories: in the final analysis, workers cost less than slaves, with the advantage that there was no need to make a substantial initial investment, and it was possible to “let them go” whenever convenient. Also they were considerably more efficient and diligent.

The situation would change substantially towards the end of the 18^th century when the invention of the machine, already mentioned, for separating the cotton seed from the fibre would change the face of the South for ever. The machine, known as the cotton gin, allowed a man’s productivity, in terms of the amount of cotton hulled, to be substantially increased from half a kilo to 50 kilos a day. It was from this time that the South, totally abandoning the old crops en masse, became a country of cotton plantations. “There is not the least doubt that the rapid strides of cotton spinning, not only pushed on with tropical luxuriance the growth of cotton in the United States, and with it the African slave trade, but also made the breeding of slaves the chief business of the border slave-states. When in 1790, the first census of slaves was taken in the United States, their number was 697,000; in 1861 it had nearly reached four millions” (Capital, vol.1).

Cotton, produced for export to England, became therefore an immense source of income on both sides of the Atlantic, for the shipping magnates of Liverpool and New York as well as the Southern farmers and Manchester industrialists. And the other consequence was the immiseration of all involved in its production and processing, slaves here, workers there, united in their bosses’ unbridled pursuit of profit. “Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact the veiled slavery of the wage-workers in Europe needed for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world”.

The condition of the slaves in the South, in particular those who worked as manual labourers on the great cotton plantations, would in the space of a few years get progressively worse, combining together the disadvantages of slavery and wage labour. Marx gives an accurate description of this phenomenon. In the chapter on “the working day,” in the section on “the greed for surplus value,” he shows in a compellingly forceful description how the condition of the slaves had become a living Hell. Surplus value wasn’t invented by capitalism, he says, referring to previous economic forms:

“it is, however, clear that in any given economic formation of society, where not the exchange value but the use-value of the product predominates, surplus-value will be limited by a given set of wants which may be greater or less, and that here no boundless thirst for surplus-value arises from the nature of the production itself. Hence in antiquity over-work becomes horrible only when the object is to obtain exchange-value in its specific independent money-form; in the production of gold and silver. Compulsory working to death is here the recognised form of over-work (…) Still these are exceptions in antiquity. But as soon as people, whose production still moves within the lower forms of slave labour, corvée labour, & c., are drawn into the whirlpool of the international market dominated by the capitalist mode of production, the sale of their products for export becoming their principal interest, the civilised horrors of over-work are grafted on the barbaric horrors of slavery, serfdom, &c. Hence the Negro labour in the Southern states of the American Union preserved something of a patriarchal character, so long as production was chiefly directed to immediate local consumption. But in proportion, as the export of cotton became of vital interest to these states, the over-working of the Negro and sometimes the using up of his life in 7 years of labour became a factor in a calculated and calculating system. It was no longer a question of obtaining from him a certain quantity of useful products. It was now a question of production of surplus value itself”.

The Missouri Compromise

Thus, even if many vocal and influential philanthropic and abolitionist societies did exist, the reason impelling the North to call for the banning of slavery was nothing to do with morality. The fact of the matter is that ending slavery in Missouri meant ending colonisation by southerners and opening it up to northerners. And that wasn’t all. Thanks to the parliamentary deputies which the new State had elected, the equilibrium in Washington could be altered in favour of the North in a definitive way. But politically most significant of all was the fact that for the first time the South no longer saw eye to eye with the frontiersmen; the pioneers who were populating the mid-west. It was they, rather than the New England industrialists, who were demanding the abolition of slavery most loudly, at least in the new territories. But despite this, the planters couldn’t afford to break off from such an important social group. Although at the time there weren’t that many of them, their numbers would grow rapidly, and there would be a proportionate increase in their economic and political weight up to the point of them deciding the election in Lincoln’s favour; and the destiny of the country at the time of Civil War.

After a tense period, the so-called Missouri Compromise was reached in 1820. It was established that slavery would be permitted in that State (where it had hardly taken root anyway, to the extent that in 1861Missouri wouldn’t side with the Confederates), but in future no slave state would be admitted from the new territories north of Missouri’s southern border (latitude 36º30’). This meant keeping back enormous spaces for the north, for future settlement and colonisation; for the free peasant and free wage-earner. The political weight of a slave-holding Missouri would be compensated by a new State, Maine, in the north-east.

The Midwest

After the War of Independence, and above all after the famous “Louisiana Purchase,” the first migrations of pioneers had poured into the Mississippi-Missouri basin and transformed vast areas of prairie and forest into productive agricultural enterprises. Since the differences between North and South were perpetuated even in the interior, the Mason-Dixon line appeared as a valid demarcation also to the west of the Allegheny mountains. But whilst the States of the new south (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, etc.) weren’t very different from the Atlantic States, the states of the North-west, today referred to as the Midwest because they form an intermediate zone between the East and the Rocky Mountains and beyond (the Far West), assumed entirely new characteristics.

Being in the main individualist farmers, of a hardy and stubborn nature, the pioneers undoubtedly had more in common with the southern planters; not least because many of them had come originally from the South. Environmental conditions were not, however, such as to permit the cultivation of cotton, tobacco and sugar cane. Conditions more resembled the north-east, and the most suitable activities would prove to be the cultivation of maize, wheat and cattle rearing. All of these were activities which required very few workers and which for the most part could be carried out by the farmer’s own family. Cattle rearing too required very little investment in labour (the famous cowboys). Thus, in these new States (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, etc.) conditions for a large labour force were not created, and slavery didn’t take root. The essentially agricultural nature of the economy caused the frontiersmen to feel a deeper affinity with the South in any case, and the democratic party long enjoyed strong support from the region.

The superabundant frontiersmen would achieve their first success with the election of Andrew Jackson to the presidency in 1828. With him the control of the democratic party would pass out of the hands of the southern planters and into those of the men of the west. Whilst this signified a move towards democratisation of the country, the principal consequence of which was universal suffrage; and if indeed the Central bank was liquidated, favouring the southern autonomists; nevertheless, in 1832, at the beginning of Jackson’s second term, it also brought a rise in customs duties. Whilst this was one of the North’s perennial requirements, needed in order to protect the young industries from low price foreign imports, it was nevertheless fiercely opposed by the South because damaging to the exportation of cotton and other agricultural products. But in the Midwest and South-west not everyone agreed, including the sheep farmers.

Sensing that it had been betrayed, the South reacted, and South Carolina, which had always been the most rebellious State of all, declared the relevant ordinances as invalid within its state frontiers. The government sent in troops; South Carolina mobilised its militia; and then, as on other occasions, a compromise was reached.

But the burning question had been forcefully posed: from whence came the autonomy of individual state, and from whence came the unquestioned authority of the central government? Obviously the vision of an autonomist and federalist society suited the agricultural interests of the south, whilst a centralised society was ideal for the nascent industrial bourgeoisie of the North. Ten years later History would give its answer to this question. Meanwhile Midwest and South had been reconciled because the former was annoyed by the North’s attempts to pass laws preventing the acquisition of land by the “pioneers,” intended as a measure to staunch the flow of labour from the cities of the East. And yet still to come were those mass migratory waves of a few years later referred to in Capital: “The enormous and ceaseless stream of men, year after year driven upon America, leaves behind a stationery sediment in the East of the United States, the wave of immigration from Europe throwing men on the labour-market there more rapidly than the wave of emigration westwards can wash them away”. The growing stream of Germans and Irish in the decade which followed would create just such conditions, providing sufficient labour for the factories, and thereby rendering less serious this point of friction between frontiersmen and the industrialists of the North-east.

Meanwhile, the Whigs of New York and Boston had to mark time whilst the democrats celebrated their victory in the war against Mexico; a war which had provided the Union, and agricultural expansionism, with an enormous territory stretching from Texas to California.

None of the fundamental problems had been resolved however: the South continued to survive in its own way, perpetuating a system of production which was incompatible with the historical advance of the American continent. By now crisis lay around every corner, and even this latest victory posed an inevitable question which appeared in the form of a bill presented by a Northern congressman: why not exclude slavery from the territories which had been seized from Mexico? Such a measure, passed off as “humanitarian,” would keep the Southerners away from the recently conquered territories. The South, naturally, rose up in protest, even threatening to secede. The Wilmot Proviso, as it was called, would be withdrawn, but in this case, too, a new conflict, adding to all the other sources of internal friction existing amongst the different sides, had emerged into full light of day. The men of the Midwest had fought to conquer the South-west, but that was because it was open to “free” labour, not slave labour; in other words, not to the southern farmers. This would make the frontiersmen turn against slavery, not for humanitarian reasons, but, as in the case of the Yankees, out of carefully calculated self-interest.

Thus, in the twenty years or so preceding the civil war, economic and social conditions in the United States were heading in a direction which would change the balance of forces between these three souls which existed within society; up to the point where a republican president was elected; up to the secession of the South.

We won’t go into the prodigious growth of industrialisation in the North in any great detail, but suffice to remark that it was towards the end of this period that the capital invested in industrial activities overtook that invested in the whole of American agriculture, both North and South. The South would inevitably lose ground, even in agriculture, to the North and West. The North was becoming richer and richer, the West was expanding in size and becoming more productive, with ever greater quantities of goods crossing the prairie for the Northern ports, or for Chicago – the new metropolis of the Midwest – on the railways, which were rarely of any interest to the South.

The North had two main problems it needed to resolve, that of manpower which, as we have seen, it counted on solving with the hordes of immigrants who were arriving in ever greater numbers, and that of custom tariffs, which it sought to resolve by passing appropriate laws, even if by means of extremely protracted parliamentary struggles. The problem of customs tariffs would only be definitively resolved after the war. Indeed, even if industrial development after 1850 was extremely rapid, for some products, nevertheless, such as iron and textiles, acute difficulties arose towards the middle of the decade preceding the war. Towards the end of 1854, stockpiles of iron were starting to build up in all the world’s markets. Most of the American factories had to close down. In the textiles sector, Lancashire had brought its costs down below New England’s, and between 1846 and 1856 its exports of printed and dyed cotton had jumped from 13 million to 114 million yards, and that of rough calico from 10 to 90 million yards. In 1857 there was a fairly serious financial crash. The tariffs approved for that year, bowing to Southern pressure, didn’t rise, in fact, in real terms, for these two manufactured articles, they went down. These facts aroused angry indignation amongst the industrial circles of the North.

Meanwhile the Midwest established closer and closer links with the industrial North and became increasingly bound up in its development. On the other hand, the disagreement between the frontiersmen and the South was rapidly taking more definite shape. The latter could survive only by exporting its agricultural system, based on large holdings and slave labour, to the West, whilst the West, if it didn’t have a problem with slavery to the east of the Mississippi, was totally resistant to slavery spreading towards the west coast where they considered the land should be available for small farmers. And not just available, but free, or at a very low price, for whoever was ready to turn the soil and make it productive, after, to be sure, having removed any boulders, cut down trees, and uprooted any stumps – and any Indians – they might find there.

The southerners were quick to oppose the movement, known as free-soilism, which consisted, in any case, mainly of people from the North-East. The North, meanwhile, in the fifties, had no reason to oppose it. There was therefore a notable slackening of that strong bond which had united the farmers of the South and West over the previous ten years: the consequence of this separation, which also had repercussions on the Democratic Party, and which effectively turned the South into a foreign body within the Union, would soon be felt.

The 1850s – The Decisive Years

In the ten years between 1850 and 1860 matters would come to a head and there would be a radicalisation of all the issues which had set the two spirits within the Union against each other. The economic and political conditions, responsible for the friction between North and South, could only but develop according to their own inexorable logic. By now, the South had come to understand that it couldn’t relent on any of its key positions under pain of undermining the cornerstones of its economic system, and thereby incurring total subjection to the North. The North was unable to put a break on its drive to expand because propelled by the relentless and inexorable forces of a young and exuberant capitalist system; which allowed no restraints, barriers or conditions to stand in its way, and whose intention was to maintain and develop the enormous domestic market (an initial requirement for any nascent capitalism) which the United States was rapidly becoming. Over and beyond any nationalist, democratic or humanitarian rhetoric, these were the real forces which lay behind the decisions; decisions which were forced on them, which led to war, both in the North and the South. By now, every disagreement between the two sides became a crisis, every struggle resulted in drastic measures, and every time, in the South, someone would conjure up the spectre of separation from the Union. In fact by this time it was already a case of there being two economic systems with divergent interests; interests which could not be addressed without one of the two sides suffering serious damage. Thus the ever more intransigent retreat of the two sides into their respective positions; thus the encroaching sense of hitting a dead end.

The decade would begin with a new dispute over the introduction of slavery into the new state – this time rather important – of California. A slavery, of course, which the Californians didn’t even want. The South rebelled, convoking a convention in Nashville to identify those provisions which would be required to safeguard the interests of the southern States. Already the word “secession” was passing from mouth to mouth. However a compromise was reached yet again: California wouldn’t be a slave state, and some concessions would be made to the South, including a more effective law for recuperating slaves which had escaped to the North. It would prove to be a very counter-productive step. The “Fugitive Slave Law” would only serve to irritate the northerners, including at the popular level, and the organised assistance to escaped slaves known as the Underground Railway would continue to grow; it was around this time too that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published, rounding off the moulding of Northernist public opinion against the South, and against slavery.

A particular feature of the 1850s was the development of the Midwest as an entity, of the Frontier, which continued to expand ever westward. New territories wanted to be admitted to the Union. Soon, along with a new problem, there arose a new crisis: that of the Nebraska territory. According to the Missouri Compromise, this territory couldn’t be a slave state, but the South, having only a few years before had to bite the bullet whilst it saw California succumbing to Northern influence, maintained that the terms of the Compromise had now expired. The leader of the Democratic party at the time was Steven Douglas, a midwesterner from Illinois. In those years he would find himself taking on the role of mediator between the two forces within the party: the frontiersmen, who wanted a systematic State ordering of the territories, free land, and no slavery, and the Southern planters, who were for free-exchange and slave-holding and were anti-centralist. Douglas, with his presidential ambitions, didn’t want to alienate himself from either of the two sides, and yet the law which he passed would have the opposite effect. The 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act created two States, Kansas to the South and Nebraska to the North. The Missouri compromise was abolished, and all questions pertaining to slavery would be decided by the resident populations. The law was interpreted as betrayal in the Midwest, and as capitulation in the South. Instead of seeing a growth in his electoral following, Douglas would see it drop sharply even in his home territory, and his chance of getting into the White House would be definitively compromised.

In an article entitled “The North American Civil War,” written on 20 October 1861, Marx showed how he viewed the important question of slavery:

“The cultivation of the Southern export crops, i.e. cotton, tobacco, sugar, etc., by slaves is only profitable so long as it is conducted on a mass scale by large gangs of slaves and in wide areas of naturally fertile soil requiring only simple labour. Intensive cultivation, which depends less on the fertility of the soil and more on capital investment and on intelligent and energetic labour, runs contrary to the nature of slavery. Hence the rapid transformation of states such as Maryland and Virginia, which in earlier times employed slavery in the production of export commodities, into states which raise slaves in order to export them to states lying further south. Even in South Carolina, where slaves form four sevenths of the population, the cultivation of cotton has remained almost stationary for years due to the exhaustion of the soil. Indeed South Carolina has become partly transformed into a slave-raising state by pressure of circumstances in so far as it already sells slaves to the states of the deep South and South-west to a value of four million dollars annually. As soon as this point is reached the acquisition of new territory becomes necessary, so that one section of the slave-holders can introduce slave labour into new fertile estates and thus create a new market for slave-raising and the sale of slaves by the section left behind. There is not the least doubt, for example, that without the acquisition of Louisiana, Missouri and Arkansas by the United States, slavery would long have disappeared in Virginia and Maryland. In the secession Congress at Montgomery one of the Southern spokesmen, Senator Toombs, strikingly formulated the economic law that necessitates the constant expansion of the slave territory.

“In fifteen years more,” he said,

“without a great increase in slave territory, either the slaves must be permitted to flee from the whites, or the whites must flee from the slaves (…)

As a result of economic laws, then, to confine slavery to the limits of its old terrain would inevitably have led to its gradual extinction; politically it would have destroyed the hegemony exercised by the slavestates by way of the Senate; and finally it would have exposed the slave-holding oligarchy to ominous dangers within their own states from the ‘poor whites’. With the principle that every further extension of slave territories was to be prohibited by law the Republicans therefore mounted a radical attack on the rule of the slave-holders. Consequently, the Republican victory could not help but lead to open struggle between North and South. However, as has already been mentioned, this election victory was itself conditioned by the split in the Democratic camp (…)

The slave-holders’ party, with Breckinridge as its candidate, asserted that the Constitution of the United States, as the Supreme Court had declared, made legal provision for slavery; slavery was in actual fact already legal in all territories and did not require special naturalization. Thus, while the Republicans prohibited any growth of slave territories, the Southern party laid claim to all territories as legally warranted domains. What they had tried, for instance, with Kansas – imposing slavery on a territory against the will of the settlers themselves, by way of the central government – they now held up as a law for all Union territories (…) On the other hand Douglas’s ‘settlers’ sovereignty’ could not satisfy the slave-holders’ party (…)

The Union was only of value for the South in so far as it let it use federal power as a means ofimplementing its slave policy. If it did not, it was better to break now than to watch the development of the Republican party and the rapid growth of the North-west for another four years, and to begin the struggle under less favourable conditions. The slave-holders party, therefore, now staked its all! When the Northern Democrats refused to play the role of the Southern ‘poor whites’ any longer, the South brought about Lincoln’s victory by splitting the votes and used this victory as an excuse for drawing the sword.

As is clear, the whole movement was and is based on the slave question. Not in the sense of whether the slaves within the existing slave states should be directly emancipated or not, but whether the twenty million free Americans of the North should subordinate themselves any longer to an oligarchy of 300,000 salve-holders; whether the vast territories of the Republic should become the nurseries of free states or of slavery; finally, whether the foreign policy of the Union should take the armed propaganda of slavery as its device throughout Mexico, Central and South America”.

Elsewhere Marx would reassert that the war for the South was “a war of conquest, aimed at extending and perpetuating slavery.”

Having been instructed in “the letter of the law,” the country mobilised to prevent Kansas from falling into the hands of the South (with Nebraska remaining firmly opposed to slavery). The Missouri southerners were the first “to invade” Kansas, staking an illegal claim to vote and creating an illegal Assembly which passed pro-slavery legislation: meanwhile, in New England, associations were formed to favour emigration to Kansas. It was clear that the North, due to the more powerful migratory thrust which characterised it, would eventually win out; and hence the activism of the southerners. The fact that it wasn’t really about slavery but was rather another episode in the battle between North and South is shown by the fact that there were only two slaves living in the entire state even in 1860.

The free-soilers, in just as illegal a way, would go on to elect a second assembly; there was no chance for the dust to settle, especially since the government, and president Pierce, clearly supported the southerners. It was therefore inevitable that the situation would lead to armed conflict, with all the violence and bloodshed which that entailed. And it was in this setting that the name of “captain” John Brown began to circulate, surrounded by an aura of terror. In the end, as was predictable, the free-soilers would get the better of the situation, but a rift had opened up between Midwest and South which would never be mended, on the contrary, thanks to subsequent events, they would draw even further apart. In 1858 the Kansas case would lead Douglas to line up against the Southerner president Buchanan, thus sanctioning the split in the Democratic party.

Indeed, in the 1856 elections the democratic candidate had only won thanks to divisions in the enemy ranks. Buchanan (the democrats having preferred another candidate to Douglas this time as well), took advantage of the weakness of the Whigs and the inexperience of the new party, the Republican party. This new party, composed of ex-Whigs and remnants of various other movements, defended a programme which, behind its ideological smokescreen, consisted of prohibition of slavery in the new states, the construction of a trans-continental railway, and included the political-economic demands of both the new financial and industrial oligarchy in the North, and the frontiersmen. It was a party which for the first time in the history of the country would manage to bring together the whole of the North (both East and West) against the South.

On the other hand the Democratic party was national only in a nominal sense, and since it was obliged to intransigently defend the interests of the South it gradually alienated other parts of the country. We’ve already seen the split with the frontiersmen; now it was a matter of deciding what the Democratic party’s stance would be towards the Atlantic states – and particularly towards Pennsylvania, a centre of iron and steel production which was increasingly feeling the pressure of English competition. Who ought it try and please, the Southern free-exchangists, or the capitalists and workers in the steel industry, all of whom were faithful Democratic party supporters? The South opted for the former. The same negative stance was taken towards the “free homesteads” by deploying both the majority in the Senate and the presidential veto. Proposals to improve the navigability of the lakes of the North-west were also greeted with a resounding ‘No’. Turned down as well were proposals for the trans-continental railway, the request by Kansas, now pacified and a non-slavery territory, to join the Union, and the project to open agricultural colleges in the West. Virtually all these refusals hit the Midwest, and they could hardly fail to turn it into a sworn enemy of the South. Before long the consequences would be seen in the presidential elections of 1860; whose electoral programmes, whether for or against, would be centred on these unresolved issues, with slavery acting as the cement binding all the various elements opposed to the South.