CLR James: Negroes in the Civil War: Their Role in the Second American Revolution

An indispensable contribution to the understanding of the role of the Negro in American history is a study of the period between 1830 and 1865. In this article we treat the subject up to 1860.

The basic economic and social antagonisms of the period embraced the whole life of the country and were fairly clear then, far less today. The system of chattel slavery needed territorial expansion because of the soil exhaustion caused by the crude method of slave production. But as the North developed industrially and in population, the South found it ever more difficult to maintain its political domination. Finally the struggle centered, economically, around who would control the newly-opened territories, and, politically, around the regional domination of Congress.

The regime in the South was by 1830 a dreadful tyranny, in startling contrast to the vigorous political democracy of the North. The need to suppress the slaves, who rebelled continuously, necessitated a regime of naked violence. The need to suppress the hostility to slavery of the free laborers and independent farmers led to the gradual abrogation of all popular democracy in the Southern states.

Previous to 1830 there had been anti-slavery societies in the South itself, but by 1830 cotton was king and, instead of arguing for and against slavery, the Southern oligarchy gradually developed a theory of Negro slavery as a heaven-ordained dispensation. Of necessity they sought to impose it upon the whole country. Such a propaganda can be opposed only actively. Not to oppose it is to succumb to it.

The impending revolution is to be led by the Northern bourgeoisie. But that is the last thing that it wants to do. In 1776 the revolutionary struggle was between the rising American bourgeoisie and a foreign enemy. The bourgeoisie needs little prodding to undertake its task. By 1830 the conflict was between two sections of the ruling class based on different economies but tied together by powerful economic links. Therefore, one outstanding feature of the new conflict is the determination of the Northern bourgeois to make every concession and every sacrifice to prevent the precipitation of the break. They will not lead. They will have to be forced to lead. The first standard-bearers of the struggle are the petty bourgeois democracy, organized in the Abolition movement, stimulated and sustained by the independent mass action of the Negro people.

The Petty Bourgeoisie and the Negroes

The petty bourgeoisie, having the rights of universal suffrage, had entered upon a period of agitation which has been well summarized in the title of a modern volume, The Rise of the Common Man. Lacking the economic demands of an organized proletariat, this agitation found vent in ever-increasing waves of humanitarianism and enthusiasm for social progress. Women’s rights, temperance reform, public education, abolition of privilege, universal peace, the brotherhood of man — middle class intellectual America was in ferment. And to this pulsating movement the rebellious Negroes brought the struggle for the abolition of slavery. The agreement among historians is general that all these diverse trends were finally dominated by the Abolition movement.

The Negro struggle for Abolition follows a pattern not dissimilar to the movement for emancipation before 1776. There are, first of all, the same continuous revolts among the masses of the slaves themselves which marked the pre-1776 period. In the decade 1820–30 devoted white men begin the publication of periodicals which preach Abolition on principles grounds. The chief of these was Benjamin Lundy. No sooner does Lundy give the signal than the free Negroes take it up and become the driving force of the movement.

Garrison, directly inspired by Lundy, began early, in 1831. But before that, Negro Abolitionists, not only in speeches and meetings, but in books, periodicals and pamphlets, posed the question squarely before the crusading petty bourgeois democracy. Freedom’s Journal was published in New York City by two Negroes as early as 1827. David Walker’s Appeal, published in 1829, created a sensation. It was a direct call for revolution. Free Negroes organized conventions and mass meetings. And before the movement was taken over by such figures as Wendell Phillips and other distinguished men of the time, the free Negroes remained the great supporters of the Liberator. In 1831, out of four hundred and fifty subscribers, fully four hundred were Negroes. In 1834, of 2,300 subscribers, nearly two thousand were Negroes.

After the free Negroes came the masses. When Garrison published the Liberator in 1831, the new Abolition movement, as contrasted with the old anti-slavery societies, amount to little. Within less than a year its fame was nation-wide. What caused this was the rebellion of Nat Turner in 1831. It is useless to speculate whether Walker’s Appeal or the Liberator directly inspired Turner. What is decisive is the effect on the Abolition movement of this, the greatest Negro revolt in the history of the United States.

The Turner revolt not only lifted Garrison’s paper and stimulated the organization of his movement. The South responded with such terror that the Negroes, discouraged by the failures of the revolts between 1800 and 1831, began to take another road to freedom. Slowly but steadily grew that steady flight out of the South which lasted for thirty years and injected the struggle against slavery into the North itself. As early as 1827 the escaping Negroes had already achieved some rudimentary form of organization. It was during the eventful year of 1831 that the Underground Railroad took more definite shape. In time thousands of whites and Negroes risked life, liberty and often wealth to assist the rebel slaves.

The great body of escaping slaves, of course, had no political aims in mind. For years rebellious slaves had formed bands of maroons, living a free life in inaccessible spots. Thousands had joined the Indians. Now they sought freedom in civilization and they set forth on that heroic journey of many hundreds of miles, forced to travel mainly by night, through forest and across rivers, often with nothing to guide them but the North Star and the fact that moss grows only on the north side of trees.

The industrial bourgeoisie in America wanted none of this Abolition. It organized mobs who were not unwilling to break up meetings and to lynch agitators. Many ordinary citizens were hostile to Negroes because of competition in industry and the traditional racial prejudice. At one period in the early ‘forties, the Abolition movement slumped and Negro historians assert that it was the escaping slaves who kept the problem alive and revived the movement. But we do not need the deductions of modern historians. What the escaping slaves meant to the movement leaps to the eye of the Marxian investigator from every contemporary page.

By degrees the leadership of the movement passed into the hands of and was supported by some of the most gifted white poets, writers and publicists of their time. The free Negroes, in collaboration with the Abolitionist movement, sometimes by themselves, carried on a powerful agitation. But a very special role was played by the ablest and most energetic of the escaping slaves themselves. These men could write and speak from first-hand experience. They were a dramatic witness of the falseness and iniquity of the whole thesis upon which the Southern case was built. Greatest of them all and one of the greatest men of his time was Frederick Douglass, a figure today strangely neglected. In profundity and brilliance, Douglass, the orator, was not the equal of Wendell Phillips. As a political agitator, he did not attain the fire and scope of Garrison nor the latter’s dynamic power in organization. But he was their equal in courage, devotion and tenacity of purpose, and in sheer political skill and sagacity he was definitely their superior. He broke with them early, evolving his own policy of maintenance of the Union as opposed to their policy of disunion. He advocated the use of all means, including the political, to attain Abolition. It was only after many years that the Garrisonians followed his example. Greatest of the activists was another escaped slave, Harriet Tubman. Very close to these ex-slaves was John Brown. These three were the nearest to what we would call today the revolutionary propagandists and agitators.

They drove the South to infuriation. Toward the middle of the century the Abolitionists and the escaping slaves had created a situation that made compromise impossible.

The Anti-Fugitive Slave Law

In 1848 there occurred an extraordinary incident, a harbinger of the great international movement which was to play so great a part in the Civil War itself. When the news of the 1848 revolution in France reached Washington, the capital, from the White House to the crowds in the streets, broke out into illuminations and uproarious celebration. Three nights afterward, seventy-eight slaves, taking this enthusiasm for liberty literally, boarded a ship that was waiting for them and tried to escape down the Potomac. They were recaptured and were led back to jail, with a crowd of several thousands waiting in the streets to see them, and members of Congress in the House almost coming to blows in the excitement. The patience of the South and of the Northern bourgeoisie was becoming exhausted. Two years later, the ruling classes, South and North, tried one more compromise. One of the elements of this compromise was a strong Anti-Fugitive Slave Law. The Southerners were determine to stop this continual drain upon their property and the continuous excitation of the North by fugitive slaves.

It was the impossibility of enforcing the Anti-Fugitive Slave Law which wrecked the scheme. Not only did the slaves continue to leave. Many insurrectionary tremors shook the Southern structure in 1850 and again in 1854. The South now feared a genuine slave insurrection. They had either to secede or force their political demands upon the federal government.

The Northern bourgeoisie was willing to discipline the petty bourgeois democracy. But before long, in addition to their humanitarian drive, the petty bourgeois democrats began to understand that not only the liberty of the slaves but their own precious democratic liberties were at stake. To break the desire of the slaves to escape, and to stifle the nation-wide agitation, the South tried to impose restrictions upon public meetings in the North and upon the use of the mails. They demanded the right to use the civil authorities of the North to capture escaping slaves. Under their pressure, Congress even reached so far as to side-track the right of petition. The Declaration of Independence, when presented as a petition in favor of Abolition, was laid upon the table. Negroes who had lived peaceably in the North for years were now threatened, and thousands fled to Canada. Douglass and Harriet Tubman, people of nation-wide fame (Douglass was an international figure) were in danger. There was no settling this question at all. The petty bourgeois democrats defied the South. The escaping slaves continued to come. There were arrests and there were spectacular rescues by pro-Abolition crowds. Pro-slavery and anti-slavery crowds fought in the streets and with the Northern police. Scarcely a month passed but some escaping slave or ex-slave, avoiding arrest, created a local and sometimes a national agitation.

Slaves on ships revolted against slave-traders and took their ships into port, creating international incidents. Congress was powerless. Ten Northern states legalized their rebelliousness by passing Personal Liberty Laws which protected state officers from arresting fugitive slaves, gave arrested Negroes the right of habeas corpus and of trial by jury, and prohibited the use of the jails for runaway Negroes. Long before the basic forces of the nation moved into action for the inevitable show-down the petty bourgeois democrats and revolting slaves had plowed up the ground and made the nation irrevocably conscious of the great issues at stake.

The Free Farmers and the Proletariat

Yet neither Negroes nor petty bourgeois democracy were the main force of the second American revolution, and a more extended treatment of American history would make that abundantly clear if that were needed by any serious intelligence. The great battle was over the control of the public doman! Who was to get the land — free farmers or slave-owners? The Republican Party, as Commons has said, was not an anti-slavery party. It was a Homestead party. The bloody struggle over Kansas accelerated the strictly political development. Yet it was out of the Abolition movement that flowered the broader political organizations of the Liberty Party and the Free Soil Party, which in the middle of the decade finally coalesced into the Republican Party.

It was Marx who pointed out very early (The Civil War in the United States, p. 226. Letter to Engels, July 1, 1861) that what finally broke down the bourgeois timidity was the great development of the population of free farmers in the Northwest Territory in the decade 1850–60. These free farmers were not prepared to stand any nonsense from the South because they were not going to have the mouth of the Mississippi in the hands of any hostile power. By 1860 the great forces which were finally allied were the democratic petty bourgeoisie, the free farmers in the Northwest, and certain sections of the proletariat. These were the classes that, contrary to 1776, compelled the unwilling bourgeois to lead them. They were the basic forces in the period which led to the revolution. They had to come into action before the battle could be joined. They were the backbone of the struggle.

In all this agitation the proletariat did not play a very prominent rôle. In New England the working masses were staunch supporters of the movement and the writer has little doubt that when the proletariat comes into its own, further research will reveal, as it always does, that the workers played a greater role than is accredited to them. Yet the old question of unemployment, rivalry between the Negroes in the North and the Irish, the latest of the immigrant groups, disrupted one wing of the proletariat. Furthermore, organized labor, while endorsing the Abolitionist movement, was often in conflict with Garrison, who, like Wilberforce in England, was no lover of the labor movement. Organized labor insisted that there was wage slavery as well as Negro slavery, and at times was apt to treat both of them as being on the same level — a monumental and crippling error.

Nevertheless, on the whole, the evidence seems to point to the fact that in many areas the organized proletarian movement, though not in the vanguard, supported the movement for Abolition. Finally, we must guard against one illusion. The Abolition movement dominated the political consciousness of the time. Most Northerners were in sympathy. But few wanted war or a revolution. When people want a revolution, they make one. They usually want anything else except a revolution. It was only when the war began that the abolitionists reaped their full reward. Despite all this Abolition sentiment in the North, and particularly in the Northwest areas, the masses of the people on the whole were not anxious to fraternize with the free Negroes, and over large areas there was distinct hostility. But the free Negroes in the North never allowed this to demoralize them, and the masses of the revolting slaves kept on coming. Between 1830 and 186o, sixty to a hundred thousand slaves came to the North. When they could find no welcome or resting place in the North, some of them went on to Canada. But they never ceased to come. With the Civil War they will come in tens and then in hundreds of thousands.

Abolition and the International Proletariat

From its very beginning at the end of the eighteenth century, the Negro struggle for freedom and equality has been an international question. More than that, it seems to be able to exercise an effect, out of all proportion to reasonable expectation, upon people not directly connected with it. In this respect, the Abolition movement in America has curious affinities with the Abolition movement a generation earlier in Britain.

In Britain, before the emancipation in 1832, the industrial bourgeoisie was actively in favor of abolition. It was industrially more mature than the American bourgeoisie in 1850; the West Indian planters were weak, and the slaves were thousands of miles away. But there, too, the earlier Abolition movement assumed a magnitude and importance out of all proportion to the direct interests of the masses who supported it. Earlier, during the French Revolution, the mass revolts of the Negroes brought home to the French people the reality of the conditions which had existed for over a hundred and fifty years. A kind of collective “madness” on the Negro question seemed to seize the population all over France, and no aristocrats were so much hated as the “aristocrats of the skin.”

The Abolitionist movement in America found not only a ready audience at home but an overwhelming welcome abroad. Not only did Garrison, Wendell Phillips and others lecture in Britain. Frederick Douglass and other Negro Abolitionists traveled over Europe and enrolled many hundreds of thousands in Abolitionist societies. One inspired Negro won seventy thousand signed adherents to the cause in Germany alone. In the decade preceding the Civil War, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was read by millions in Britain and on the continent, and even as far afield as Italy. And masses of workers and radicals in France, Spain and Germany took an active interest in the question. Their sentiments will bear wonderful fruit during the Civil War itself.

It is not enough to say merely that these workers loved the great American Republic and looked forward to the possibility of emigrating there themselves one day. There are aspects to this question which would repay modern investigation and analysis by Marxists. Beard, who has some insight into social movements in America, is baffled by certain aspects of the Abolition movement. Thoroughly superficial are the self-satisfied pratings of English historians about the “idealism” of the English as an explanation of the equally baffling Abolition movement in Britain. It would seem that the irrationality of the prejudice against Negroes breeds in revolutionary periods a corresponding intensity of loathing for its practitioners among the great masses of the people.

“The Signal Has Now Been Given”

The slaves played their part to the end. After Lincoln’s election and the violent reaction of the South, the North, not for the first time, drew back from Civil War. Congress and the political leaders frantically sought compromise. Frederick Douglass in his autobiography gives an account of the shameful attempts on the part of the North to appease the South. Most of the Northern Legislatures repealed their Personal Liberty Laws. And Douglass concludes his bitter chapter by saying:

“Those who may wish to see to what depths of humility and self-abasement a noble people can be brought under the sentiment of fear, will find no chapter of history more instructive than that which treats of the events in official circles in Washington during the space between the months of November, 1859, and March, 1860.” (Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Pathway Press, 1941, pp. 362–366.)

For a long time even Lincoln’s stand was doubtful. On December 20, 1860, the very day on which South Carolina seceded, Lincoln made a statement which seemed to exclude compromise. However, in a series of speeches which he delivered on his eleven-day journey to Washington, he confused the nation and demoralized his supporters. Even after the inaugural, on March 4, the North as a whole did not know what to expect from him. Marx, as we have seen, had no doubt that the decisive influence was played by the North-west farmers, who supplied sixty-six votes or 36.6 per cent of the votes in the college which elected Lincoln.

But there was refusal to compromise from the South also. Says Douglass:

“Happily for the cause of human freedom, and for the final unity of the American nation, the South was mad and would listen to no concessions. It would neither accept the terms offered, nor offer others to be accepted.”

Why wouldn’t they? One reason we can now give with confidence. Wherever the masses moved, there Marx and Engels had their eyes glued like hawks and pens quick to record. On January 11, 1860, in the midst of the critical period described by Douglass, Marx wrote to Engels:

“In my opinion, the biggest things that are happening in the world today are, on the one hand, the movement of the slaves in America started by the death of John Brown, and, on the other, the movement of the serfs in Russia … I have just seen in the Tribune there has been a fresh rising of slaves in Missouri, naturally suppressed. But the signal has now been given.”

Fifteen days later, Engels replied:

“Your opinion of the significance of the slave movement in America and Russia is now confirmed. The Harper’s Ferry affair with its aftermath in Missouri bears its fruits … the planters have hurried their cotton on to the ports in order to guard against any probable consequence arising out of the Harper’s Ferry affair.”

A year later Engels writes to Marx:

“Things in North America are also becoming exciting. Matters must be going very badly for them with the slaves if the Southerners dare to play so risky a game.”

Eighty years after Marx, a modern student has given details which testify to that unfailing insight into the fundamental processes of historical development, so characteristic of our great predecessors. In Arkansas, in Mississippi, in Virginia, in Kentucky, in Illinois, in Texas, in Alabama, in Northwest Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina – rebellion and conspiracy swept the South between 1859 and 1860. Writes a contemporary after the John Brown raid:

“A most terrible panic, in the meantime, seizes not only the village, the vicinity and all parts of the state, but every slave state in the Union … rumors of insurrection, apprehensions of invasions, whether well founded or ill founded, alter not the proof of the inherent and incurable weakness and insecurity of society, organized upon a slave-holding basis” (Ibid., p. 352).

The struggle of the Negro masses derives its peculiar intensity from the simple fact that what they are struggling for is not abstract but is always perfectly visible around them. In their instinctive revolutionary efforts for freedom, the escaping slaves had helped powerfully to begin and now those who remained behind had helped powerfully to conclude, the self-destructive course of the slave power.

CLR James: Originally published in New International, Vol.IX No.11, December 1943, pp. 338–341.

Glory! Glory! Ypsilanti’s Black Freedom Fighters Assault Fort Wagner!

We continue covering the sesquicentennial of the Civil War Today marking the anniversary of a milestone this day in the history of the black liberation struggle in the United States; the battle of Fort Wagner, July 18th, 1863. Though black troops had seen action in the west earlier, notably when they fought at the battles if Island Mound in Missouri, Port Hudson, Louisiana and just the day before at the battle of Honey Springs in Indian Territory on July 17th, 1863, it wasn’t until this day 148 years that black troops were widely seen to have joined the war as combatants.

The 54th Massachusetts saw horrific combat on this day leading a doomed assault on a Confederate fort protecting Charleston, South Carolina, Fort Wagner. Dispelling the racist notion that blacks would not fight, they fought like people fighting for their lives and the lives of their families. They fought for their own future, the future of blacks in America and the future of freedom around the world. And they fought ferociously.

The Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts was a pioneering black regiment largely staffed by white abolitionists and composed of free blacks form the North as well as some escaped slaves from the south. It was the first black regiment raised in the north and one of the few to retain its state designation throughout the war. Some of those enlistees included noted black abolitionists and activists including the sons of Frederick Douglass. It was, if such a thing might be said, the ‘elite’ black unit of the Civil War.

Some 1,500 Union soldiers, black and white, were counted as casualties that day. Of the 54th, only 315 men remained after the battle. thirty were killed in action, fighting which saw the 54th reach the parapet of the fort and engage the enemy with their very hands. The dead included regimental leader and abolitionist Colonel Shaw as well as Captains Russel and Simpkins. These white officers were buried in a mass grave with the black enlisted men where they remained until a storm washed the burials out to sea. Twenty-four later died of wounds, fifteen were captured, and fifty-two were reported missing after the battle and never reported again.

Massachusetts was the citadel of the abolitionist movement and the raising of black troops enjoyed the active support of the state government, then held by the more radical, if not The radical, wing of the Republican Party and attracted people from all over the North; from my small town, Ypsilanti, Michigan as well. Around twelve men, impatient with the lack of progress in raising a regiment in Michigan, joined some of the first regiments in the country to be raised: the deservedly famous 54th and 55th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. In several contingents, and organized by a network of black Masonic lodges, the men left from Ypsilanti for Camp Meigs in Readville, Massachusetts in the Spring of 1863. After the 54th was full the 55th Massachusetts was formed and also served with distinction throughout the war, including at the battles of James Island and Honey Hill. Three units with Ypsilanti men; the 54th, 55th and the Michigan raised 102nd USCT, which included over seventy Ypsilantians, would all serve together in the same operations from South Carolina to Florida and there is ample evidence that the men related across the regimental boundaries, including at memorials for fallen comrades from Ypsilanti.

Mostly young, mostly without families and mostly working as laborers and living as borders these men all had pasts, all of them were from somewhere else. Some lied about their pasts, some concealed them. Some were undoubtedly escaped slaves, others were exiles from racist communities. Many knew each other, others were recent arrivals. Only months after they enlisted their regiment would be decimated at Fort Wagner, their service a badge of honor for the rest of their lives, if they lived. What went through the minds of these men as they headed by steamers down the coast to slavery’s shores, guns in their hands and freedom on their lips?

They included Elias Rouse, an escaped slave from Kentucky who joined Company K of the 54th and was wounded in the arm in the assault on Fort Wagner.He would later marry the widow, Mary, of another volunteer, John Gay of the 102nd United States Colored Troops, who died of disease and is buried in South Carolina. Elias is buried in Ypsilanti’s Highland Cemetery.

John Bird a farmhand originally from Ohio, who joined the 55th and died of disease on Morris Island, South Carolina in January.

Nelson Wilson, a young hotel worker claiming to be from Canada though he was from Kentucky, also possibly an escaped slave, joined the 55th and was promoted to Full Corporal and later moved to Saint Louis.

James Wood originally from Indiana would join the 55th and serve through the war moving to Detroit afterward where he became a cook.

Napoleon Hamilton, originally from Alabama, joined the 54th and was promoted for his role at Fort Wagner later to have his rank reduced for ‘carelessness’.

William Casey, originally from Virginia, joined the 55th at the age of 48, though he lied and said he was 40. He injured his back doing fatigue-duty and was assigned to regimental duties after that, discharged for disability at the very end of the war.

Charles August, a black smith originally from Delaware was captured during the assault and died in the notorious Andersonville prison in September of 1864.

John Leatherman, a merchant marine, joined the 54th and was either killed in the assault on Fort Wagner or was captured and later died at Andersonville (the records say both). The thought of an experience of a captured black soldier is terrifying. Very few of the men captured at Wagner survived.

Charles Scott, a day laborer, joined the 54th and died of wounds received in one of the very last battles of the war, Boykins Mills, South Carolina in April, 1865.

Others from Michigan who fought with these storied regiments include Armistead Williams, a 36 year old laborer from Detroit, who joined the 54th and was captured two days before the assault on Fort Wagner, dying in July, 1864 of typhoid fever.

William Brown, a 19 year old merchant marine from Detroit died at Folly Island, South Carolina in December, 1864. He joined Company E and was in the thick of the fight at Wagner.

William Griffin, a twenty year old blacksmith from Detroit, had joined the 55th and was killed in action at the battle of Honey Hill on November 30th, 1864.

Richard Richie, a farmer from Greenville, Michigan joined the 55th as well. Originally from Mississippi, he was killed at the battle of Honey Hill as well.

Alfred Harris, a 28 year old sailor from Detroit, joined the 54th and was declared missing, never to be seen again, following the assault on Wagner.

Henry Steward, a 23 year old farmer from Adrian, joined the 54th and was promoted to Sergeant. He died of wounds received during the assault on Wagner in September of 1863 in a hospital in Hilton Head, South Carolina.

John Stevens, a farmer from Pontiac was 23 when he joined the 54th. He died this day, 148 years ago fighting for the liberation of his enslaved race on the walls of Fort Wagner.

These are the names of only some of the veterans of the 54th and 55th. There were many who answered freedom’s call from Ypsilanti and headed south in a war of liberation with other black units, mainly with the Michigan raised 102nd USCT. So many of their stories are lost forever, whatever we might do to rescue their legacy is not worthy of their sacrifice, yet we must do it. Remember their names comrades, they are heroes.

Below is a letter from Frederick Douglass’s son Lewis to his sweetheart Amelia, whom he would later marry, in the days following the battle that gives a sense of the assault and the men who made it.

Long live the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts! Freedom will be taken by the sword!

MORRIS ISLAND. S. C. July 20

MY DEAR AMELIA: I have been in two fights, and am unhurt. I am about to go in another I believe to-night. Our men fought well on both occasions. The last was desperate we charged that terrible battery on Morris Island known as Fort Wagoner, and were repulsed with a loss of 3 killed and wounded. I escaped unhurt from amidst that perfect hail of shot and shell. It was terrible. I need not particularize the papers will give a better than I have time to give. My thoughts are with you often, you are as dear as ever, be good enough to remember it as I no doubt you will. As I said before we are on the eve of another fight and I am very busy and have just snatched a moment to write you. I must necessarily be brief. Should I fall in the next fight killed or wounded I hope to fall with my face to the foe.

If I survive I shall write you a long letter. DeForrest of your city is wounded George Washington is missing, Jacob Carter is missing, Chas Reason wounded Chas Whiting, Chas Creamer all wounded. The above are in hospital.

This regiment has established its reputation as a fighting regiment not a man flinched, though it was a trying time. Men fell all around me. A shell would explode and clear a space of twenty feet, our men would close up again, but it was no use we had to retreat, which was a very hazardous undertaking. How I got out of that fight alive I cannot tell, but I am here. My Dear girl I hope again to see you. I must bid you farewell should I be killed. Remember if I die I die in a good cause. I wish we had a hundred thousand colored troops we would put an end to this war. Good Bye to all Write soon Your own loving LEWIS

Along the Ohio: Freedom Bound

I went down to southeast Ohio over the weekend for the Nelsonville Music Festival on the swollen banks of the Hocking River and had some tooling around time. That part of Ohio is an ancestral homeland of mine and place of innumerable childhood memories. Its byways and backroads are a perfect canvas for day-tripping. It was in full spring; the foothills of the Appalachians have every plant and every tree flowering and bursting forth and a sweet smell hangs over the valleys. The after-rain mist clinging to the green hills. A sublime place until one sees the ramshackle trailers and mining’s detritus, poverty and ecocide, that are ubiquitous in the hills and hollers of the region. Its history, from the end of the last Ice Age through the Adena and the Hopewell until now, a constant pull on my attention.

The poorest part of Ohio, this is also an area rich in the history of resistance. From the tenacious wars of the Shawnee to slaves fleeing the shore of bondage that was the south bank of the Ohio; from the organizers of utopian communities responding to the degradations of industry’s arrival underway in the nineteenth century to the repeated strikes and risings of coal miners in the early twentieth. Every community is both the official story and the story that negates the official story. Sleepy Ohio has also been a place of proud, occasionally fierce, rebellion.

A few miles north of Pomeroy, which sits on the Ohio, is a place hidden, purposely, deep in the hills of Morgan Township, Gallia County. The Lambert Land Settlement was established by slaves from Virginia (which then included what is now West Virginia and abutted Ohio) freed on the death of the of their ‘owner’ in 1839. His will stipulated that the slaves in his charge be given the means to set up in freedom, the land purchased to be held in common by the families in perpetuity. Thirty settlers arrived in 1843. The place they chose became a center of abolitionist activity and a refuge on the way to freedom for those escaping slavery. Well worth the trip there, and clearly rarely visited, the cemetery and church that mark the remains of the hamlet is a special place. Tucked away in time and place.

Being just miles from the Ohio River the settlement quickly became a stopping place by those fleeing north from slavery. Its location so close to the slave states Kentucky and Virginia also meant the threat from slave-catchers was very real as well. In 1850 Elijah Anderson, a Baptist preacher, ‘underground railroad’ activist and member of the settlement, was lured to Kentucky under the guise of assisting runaways. There he was captured and jailed in Frankfort. Members of the settlement were told that they needed $200 to bail their comrade from the jail. Duly raised, they were then told that Elijah Anderson had died in prison. On return to Morgan the casket was opened before burial where it was revealed that Elijah had been shot and his skull crushed.

From the Ohio River to this settlement, runaways would then be assisted to other communities and safe houses stretching north to the abolitionist stronghold that was the old Western Reserve in northeast Ohio. While many escaping slaves, at the height estimated (perhaps highly) by one participant of the time to be two hundred a year, only briefly stayed around in a place so perilously close to the River, some did stay on. Some white neighbors, like the abolitionists Benjamin and Susan Ward who lived down the road from the settlement, were allies, many others were not. There are many myths associated with the ‘underground railroad’, but it is inescapably true that many hundreds of slaves were helped to freedom by a series of networks, mostly ad hoc, organized primarily by free blacks and other slaves, escaped or still in bondage. Free black communities close to slavery were naturally at the center of such a movement, the Lambert Lands settlement epitomizes much in that dynamic.

The area had gained newly freed slaves in 1862, fleeing with the Union retreat from western Virginia in 1862. When the opportunity to return south in a war of liberation finally arrived in 1863 a large number of the men in the settlement joined the colored regiments that were forming. In Ohio this largely meant the 5th and the 27th United States Colored Troops regiments.  Several members of the settlement dying from disease or killed in battle, including at the battle of The Crater in Petersburg, 1864 where they would have been commanded by a distant relative of this writer, or at the battle of New Market Heights where the 5th received hundreds of casualties and the largest group of Medals of Honor given to black troops in the Civil War. One of those who answered the call was William P. Ellison, whose grave is pictured above. Joining the famed Mississippi Squadron of the US Navy, one of the few integrated institutions in the country, Ellison served on the US General Lyon.

That Ellison joined the fight is no surprise; he had joined that struggle many years before. Named by the chronicler of the area’s anti-slavery movement, the white abolitionist Nelson Banks Sisson, as a leading ‘conductor’ on the U.G.R.R., Sisson relates the time when, at the home of James and Martha Howell (main ‘underground railroad’ activists in the settlement), Ellison successfully fought off slave-catchers with a chair. Born into slavery in Virginia, Ellison’s family were among the first members of the settlement.

Up to thirty other Colored Troops veterans are buried here, some of them clearly arriving after the Civil War, many of them lie in unmarked graves. Along with the 27th and 5th USCT, which were raised in Ohio, those buried here were also members of the 15th and 16th USCTs as well as the 44th and 88th Heavy. One man, William Norman, seems to have ‘passed’ as white and joined the 36th Indiana which fought in the Western Theater throughout the war eventually destroying Hoods army in Tennessee under General George Thomas.

The women were no less involved in the struggle, though with much less of a paper trail to follow. A look through the Census records shows a majority of the households led by women, unsurprising given the strains and obstacles the slave system and virulent racism placed on the black family. Women are often written into the shadows of history, but they were at the center of the settlements activity. Sisson describes another incident on the nearby Raccoon Creek where a female fugitive was hiding from pursuit. The woman was defended by four other women, described as being brave and ‘used to guns’, who sat at the door and announced to the men approaching as they leveled their weapons, ‘The first man that comes through that gate is a dead man’.  Apparently the slave catchers took them at their word and retreated from the home.

Morgan’s Raid in July, 1863 passed right by the Lambert Lands settlement, with Morgan’s troops taking over nearby Vinton. The area’s activity in assisting slaves to freedom was hardly news to Morgan and his raid was something of an extension of the border war that had been going on long before the outbreak of the Civil War. Morgan’s men captured blacks, sending them into slavery south during their trek north of the Ohio, striking terror into black communities of the region before the raid was broken up to the southeast of Morgan Township at Buffington Island on the Ohio.

There is much more to know on the community’s history. For example, I’d love to know the story of the above. Who was”Miles”? Other than tracing the benefactor of the monument, the aforementioned NB Sisson, I have been unable to get a hint. It certainly is an interesting monument and is one of the many stories to only partially reveal themselves. How many more are completely hidden? The Lambert Lands settlement was a communal one, made up almost entirely of farmers, and was held by the descendents of the original freed slaves for well over a century until, unable to pay the property taxes, the state took over the land and sold it off in the the early 1970s.

A working community the settlement had a school and a church, but it would be wrong to see it as a town. A farming settlement comprising fifteen or so families on two hundred and fifty acres with links to the other communities around it, both white and black, but with a strong identity of its own, many of the families that began the settlement would stay on and marry among each other for generations. Self sustaining rural black communities existed in Ohio well into the twentieth century and while the history of black folks in the north is largely seen as an urban one, born of southern migrations in the twentieth century, there remain significant traditions of black life, much of it rural and pre-dating the Civil War, outside of that experience. That tradition is kept alive to this day by some of the descendents of the Lambert Lands.

In 2002 the central monument was dedicated as well as markers produced for some of the graves, mainly those of Colored Troops veterans, by a group including descendents of the original families in nearby Gallipolis, an Ohio river town with a strong black and free slave tradition (including the longest running celebration of Emancipation in the entire country).

Hardly unique, the Morgan Township settlement was one of many that nestled in the Appalachian foothills of southeast Ohio, indeed southern Ohio is on the front line of freedom’s fight. Along with the “Gist settlements” that were established in Brown, Adams and Highland counties there was Payne’s Crossing in Hocking County, the Pee Pee colony in Pike County, the Stillguest settlement in Ross, Berlin Crossroads in Jackson county (home to the Woodson family, prominent black anti-slavery activists said to be descendents of Thomas Jefferson’s slaves, who lost two men, beaten to death by slave-catchers, in the 1850s), Huston Hollow in Scioto County, the Macedonia, Pokepatch and Black Fork settlements in Lawrence County are the names of some of them. While most were made up of farms some found work in the newly opened iron and coal mines of the region. All of them lived on the border of bondage and the promise of liberty, all of them played a role in the struggle for freedom.

After setting up in Gallia County the newly freed slaves shed the name ‘Lambert’ of their master; among the families of the community were the Minnis, the Andersons, the Jones, the Millers, the Ellisons, the Howells, The Randalls, the Evens, the Burkes, the Hammonds, the Stevens, the Johnsons and the James. Their names are deserving of remembrance. Below are some photos of their graves, these freedom fighters and farmers of Ohio’s foothills.

Karl Marx: The North American Civil War

Karl Marx in October, 1861 giving a background to the start of the American Civil War:

For months the leading weekly and daily papers of the London press have been reiterating the same litany on the American Civil War. While they insult the free states of the North, they anxiously defend themselves against the suspicion of sympathising with the slave states of the South. In fact, they continually write two articles: one article, in which they attack the North, and another article, in which they excuse their attacks on the North.

In essence the extenuating arguments read: The war between the North and South is a tariff war. The war is, further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery and in fact turns on Northern lust for sovereignty. Finally, even if justice is on the side of the North , does it not remain a vain endeavour to want to subjugate eight million Anglo-Saxons by force! Would not separation of the South release the North from all connection with Negro slavery and ensure for it, with its twenty million inhabitants and its vast territory, a higher, hitherto scarcely dreamt-of, development? Accordingly, must not the North welcome secession as a happy event, instead of wanting to overrule it by a bloody and futile civil war?

Point by point we will probe the plea of the English press.

The war between North and South — so runs the first excuse — is a mere tariff war, a war between a protectionist system and a free trade system, and Britain naturally stands on the side of free trade. Shall the slave-owner enjoy the fruits of slave labour in their entirety or shall he be cheated of a portion of these by the protectionists of the North? That is the question which is at issue in this war. It was reserved for The Times to make this brilliant discovery. The Economist, The Examiner, The Saturday Review and tutti quanti expounded the theme further. It is characteristic of this discovery that it was made, not in Charleston, but in London. Naturally, in America everyone knew that from 1846 to 1861 a free trade system prevailed, and that Representative Morrill carried his protectionist tariff through Congress only in 1861, after the rebellion had already broken out. Secession, therefore, did not take place because the Morrill tariff had gone through Congress, but, at most, the Morrill tariff went through Congress because secession had taken place. When South Carolina had its first attack of secession in 1831, the protectionist tariff of 1828 served it, to be sure, as a pretext, but only as a pretext, as is known from a statement of General Jackson. This time, however, the old pretext has in fact not been repeated. In the Secession Congress at Montgomery all reference to the tariff question was avoided, because the cultivation of sugar in Louisiana, one of the most influential Southern states, depends entirely on protection.

But, the London press pleads further, the war of the United States is nothing but a war for the forcible maintenance of the Union. The Yankees cannot make up their minds to strike fifteen stars from their standard. They want to cut a colossal figure on the world stage. Yes, it would be different if the war was waged for the abolition of slavery! The question of slavery, however, as The Saturday Review categorically declares among other things, has absolutely nothing to do with this war.

It is above all to be remembered that the war did not originate with the North, but with the South. The North finds itself on the defensive. For months it had quietly looked on while the secessionists appropriated the Union’s forts, arsenals, shipyards, customs houses, pay offices, ships and supplies of arms, insulted its flag and took prisoner bodies of its troops. Finally the secessionists resolved to force the Union government out of its passive attitude by a blatant act of war, and solely for this reason proceeded to the bombardment of Fort Sumter near Charleston. On April 11 (1861) their General Beauregard had learnt in a meeting with Major Anderson, the commander of Fort Sumter, that the fort was only supplied with provisions for three days more and accordingly must be peacefully surrendered after this period. In order to forestall this peaceful surrender, the secessionists opened the bombardment early on the following morning (April 12), which brought about the fall of the fort in a few hours. News of this had hardly been telegraphed to Montgomery, the seat of the Secession Congress, when War Minister Walker publicly declared in the name of the new Confederacy: No man can say where the war opened today will end. At the same time he prophesied that before the first of May the flag of the Southern Confederacy will wave from the dome of the old Capitol in Washington and within a short time perhaps also from the Faneuil Hall in Boston. Only now ensued the proclamation in which Lincoln called for 75,000 men to defend the Union. The bombardment of Fort Sumter cut off the only possible constitutional way out, namely the convocation of a general convention of the American people, as Lincoln had proposed in his inaugural address. For Lincoln there now remained only the choice of fleeing from Washington, evacuating Maryland and Delaware and surrendering Kentucky, Missouri and Virginia, or of answering war with war.

The question of the principle of the American Civil War is answered by the battle slogan with which the South broke the peace. Stephens, the Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy, declared in the Secession Congress that what essentially distinguished the Constitution newly hatched at Montgomery from the Constitution of Washington and Jefferson was that now for the first time slavery was recognised as an institution good in itself, and as the foundation of the whole state edifice, whereas the revolutionary fathers, men steeped in the prejudices of the eighteenth century, had treated slavery as an evil imported from England and to be eliminated in the course of time. Another matador of the South, Mr. Spratt, cried out: “For us it is a question of founding a great slave republic.” If, therefore, it was indeed only in defence of the Union that the North drew the sword, had not the South already declared that the continuance of slavery was no longer compatible with the continuance of the Union?

Just as the bombardment of Fort Sumter gave the signal for the opening of the war, the election victory of the Republican Party of the North, the election of Lincoln as President, gave the signal for secession. On November 6, 1860, Lincoln was elected. On November 8, 1860, a message telegraphed from South Carolina said: Secession is regarded here as an accomplished fact; on November 10 the legislature of Georgia occupied itself with secession plans, and on November 13 a special session of the legislature of Mississippi was convened to consider secession. But Lincoln’s election was itself only the result of a split in the Democratic camp. During the election struggle the Democrats of the North concentrated their votes on Douglas, the Democrats of the South concentrated their votes on Breckinridge, and to this splitting of the Democratic votes the Republican Party owed its victory. Whence came, on the one hand, the preponderance of the Republican Party in the North? Whence, on the other, the disunion within the Democratic Party, whose members, North and South, had operated in conjunction for more than half a century?

Under the presidency of Buchanan the sway that the South had gradually usurped over the Union through its alliance with the Northern Democrats attained its zenith. The last Continental Congress of 1787 and the first Constitutional Congress of 1789 -90 had legally excluded slavery from all Territories of the republic north-west of the Ohio. (Territories, as is known, is the name given to the colonies lying within the United States itself which have not yet attained the level of population constitutionally prescribed for the formation of autonomous states.) The so-called Missouri Compromise (1820), in consequence of which Missouri became one of the States of the Union as a slave state, excluded slavery from every remaining Territory north of 36 degrees latitude and west of the Missouri. By this compromise the area of slavery was advanced several degrees of longitude, whilst, on the other hand, a geographical boundary-line to its future spread seemed quite definitely drawn. This geographical barrier, in its turn, was thrown down in 1854 by the so-called Kansas-Nebraska Bill, the initiator of which was St[ephen] A. Douglas, then leader of the Northern Democrats. The Bill, which passed both Houses of Congress, repealed the Missouri Compromise, placed slavery and freedom on the same footing, commanded the Union government to treat them both with equal indifference and left it to the sovereignty of the people, that is, the majority of the settlers, to decide whether or not slavery was to be introduced in a Territory. Thus, for the first time in the history of the United States, every geographical and legal limit to the extension of slavery in the Territories was removed. Under this new legislation the hitherto free Territory of New Mexico, a Territory five times as large as the State of New York, was transformed into a slave Territory, and the area of slavery was extended from the border of the Mexican Republic to 38 degrees north latitude. In 1859 New Mexico received a slave code that vies with the statute-books of Texas and Alabama in barbarity. Nevertheless, as the census of 1860 proves, among some hundred thousand inhabitants New Mexico does not yet count half a hundred slaves. It had therefore sufficed for the South to send some adventurers with a few slaves over the border, and then with the help of the central government in Washington and of its officials and contractors in New Mexico to drum together a sham popular representation to impose slavery and with it the rule of the slaveholders on the Territory.

However, this convenient method did not prove applicable in other Territories. The South accordingly went a step further and appealed from Congress to the Supreme Court of the United States. This Court, which numbers nine judges, five of whom belong to the South, had long been the most willing tool of the slaveholders. It decided in 1857, in the notorious Dred Scott case, that every American citizen possesses the right to take with him into any territory any property recognized by the Constitution. The Constitution, it maintained, recognises slaves as property and obliges the Union government to protect this property. Consequently, on the basis of the Constitution, slaves could be forced to labour in the Territories by their owners, and so every individual slaveholder was entitled to introduce slavery into hitherto free Territories against the will of the majority of the settlers. The right to exclude slavery was taken from the Territorial legislatures and the duty to protect pioneers of the slave system was imposed on Congress and the Union government.

If the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had extended the geographical boundary-line of slavery in the Territories, if the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854 had erased every geographical boundary-line and set up a political barrier instead, the will of the majority of the settlers, now the Supreme Court of the United States, by its decision of 1857, tore down even this political barrier and transformed all the Territories of the republic, present and future, from nurseries of free states into nurseries of slavery.

At the same time, under Buchanan’s government the severer law on the surrendering of fugitive slaves enacted in 1850 was ruthlessly carried out in the states of the North. To play the part of slave-catchers for the Southern slaveholders appeared to be the constitutional calling of the North. On the other hand, in order to hinder as far as possible the colonisation of the Territories by free settlers, the slaveholders’ party frustrated all the so-called free-soil measures, i.e., measures which were to secure for the settlers a definite amount of uncultivated state land free of charge.

In the foreign, as in the domestic, policy of the United States, the interest of the slaveholders served as the guiding star. Buchanan had in fact bought the office of President through the issue of the Ostend Manifesto, in which the acquisition of Cuba, whether by purchase or by force of arms, was proclaimed as the great task of national policy. Under his government northern Mexico was already divided among American land speculators, who impatiently awaited the signal to fall on Chihuahua, Coahuila and Sonora. The unceasing piratical expeditions of the filibusters against the states of Central America were directed no less from the White House at Washington. In the closest connection with this foreign policy, whose manifest purpose was conquest of new territory for the spread of slavery and of the slaveholders’ rule, stood the reopening of the slave trade, secretly supported by the Union government. St[ephen] A. Douglas himself declared in the American Senate on August 20, 1859: During the last year more Negroes have been imported from Africa than ever before in any single year, even at the time when the slave trade was still legal. The number of slaves imported in the last year totalled fifteen thousand.

Armed spreading of slavery abroad was the avowed aim of national policy; the Union had in fact become the slave of the three hundred thousand slaveholders who held sway over the South. A series of compromises, which the South owed to its alliance with the Northern Democrats, had led to this result. On this alliance all the attempts, periodically repeated since 1817, to resist the ever increasing encroachments of the slaveholders had hitherto come to grief. At length there came a turning point.

For hardly had the Kansas-Nebraska Bill gone through, which wiped out the geographical boundary-line of slavery and made its introduction into new Territories subject to the will of the majority of the settlers, when armed emissaries of the slaveholders, border rabble from Missouri and Arkansas, with bowie-knife in one hand and revolver in the other, fell upon Kansas and sought by the most unheard-of atrocities to dislodge its settlers from the Territory colonised by them. These raids were supported by the central government in Washington. Hence a tremendous reaction. Throughout the North, but particularly in the North-west, a relief organisation was formed to support Kansas with men, arms and money. Out of this relief organisation arose the Republican Party, which therefore owes its origin to the struggle for Kansas. After the attempt to transform Kansas into a slave Territory by force of arms had failed, the South sought to achieve the same result by political intrigues. Buchanan’s government, in particular, exerted its utmost efforts to have Kansas included in the States of the Union as a slave state with a slave constitution imposed on it. Hence renewed struggle, this time mainly conducted in Congress at Washington. Even St[ephen] A. Douglas, the chief of the Northern Democrats, now (1857 – 58) entered the lists against the government and his allies of the South, because imposition of a slave constitution would have been contrary to the principle of sovereignty of the settlers passed in the Nebraska Bill of 1854. Douglas, Senator for Illinois, a North-western state, would naturally have lost all his influence if he had wanted to concede to the South the right to steal by force of arms or through acts of Congress Territories colonised by the North. As the struggle for Kansas, therefore, called the Republican Party into being, it at the same time occasioned the first split within the Democratic Party itself.

The Republican Party put forward its first platform for the presidential election in 1856. Although its candidate, John Fremont, was not victorious, the huge number of votes cast for him at any rate proved the rapid growth of the Party, particularly in the North-west. At their second National Convention for the presidential election (May 17, 1860), the Republicans again put forward their platform of 1856, only enriched by some additions. Its principal contents were the following: Not a foot of fresh territory is further conceded to slavery. The filibustering policy abroad must cease. The reopening of the slave trade is stigmatised. Finally, free-soil laws are to be enacted for the furtherance of free colonisation.

The vitally important point in this platform was that not a foot of fresh terrain was conceded to slavery; rather it was to remain once and for all confined with the boundaries of the states where it already legally existed. Slavery was thus to be formally interned; but continual expansion of territory and continual spread of slavery beyond its old limits is a law of life for the slave states of the Union.

The cultivation of the southern export articles, cotton, tobacco, sugar , etc., carried on by slaves, is only remunerative as long as it is conducted with large gangs of slaves, on a mass scale and on wide expanses of a naturally fertile soil, which requires only simple labour. Intensive cultivation, which depends less on fertility of the soil than on investment of capital, intelligence and energy of labour, is contrary to the nature of slavery. Hence the rapid transformation of states like Maryland and Virginia, which formerly employed slaves on the production of export articles, into states which raise slaves to export them into the deep South. Even in South Carolina, where the slaves form four-sevenths of the population, the cultivation of cotton has been almost completely stationary for years due to the exhaustion of the soil. Indeed, by force of circumstances South Carolina has already been transformed in part into a slave-raising state, since it already sells slaves to the sum of four million dollars yearly to the states of the extreme South and South-west. As soon as this point is reached, the acquisition of new Territories becomes necessary, so that one section of the slaveholders with their slaves may occupy new fertile lands and that a new market for slave-raising, therefore for the sale of slaves, may be created for the remaining section. It is, for example, indubitable that without the acquisition of Louisiana, Missouri and Arkansas by the United States, slavery in Virginia and Maryland would have been wiped out long ago. In the Secessionist Congress at Montgomery, Senator Toombs, one of the spokesmen of the South, strikingly formulated the economic law that commands the constant expansion of the territory of slavery. “In fifteen years,” said he, “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 is known, the representation of the individual states in the Congress House of Representatives depends on the size of their respective populations. As the populations of the free states grow far more quickly than those of the slave states, the number of Northern Representatives was bound to outstrip that of the Southern very rapidly. The real seat of the political power of the South is accordingly transferred more and more to the American Senate, where every state, whether its population is great or small, is represented by two Senators. In order to assert its influence in the Senate and, through the Senate, its hegemony over the United States, the South therefore required a continual formation of new slave states. This, however, was only possible through conquest of foreign lands, as in the case of Texas, or through the transformation of the Territories belonging to the United States first into slave Territories and later into slave states, as in the case of Missouri, Arkansas, etc. John Calhoun, whom the slaveholders admire as their statesman par excellence, stated as early as February 19, 1847, in the Senate, that the Senate alone placed a balance of power in the hands of the South, that extension of the slave territory was necessary to preserve this equilibrium between South and North in the Senate, and that the attempts of the South at the creation of new slave states by force were accordingly justified.

Finally, the number of actual slaveholders in the South of the Union does not amount to more than three hundred thousand, a narrow oligarchy that is confronted with many millions of so-called poor whites, whose numbers have been constantly growing through concentration of landed property and whose condition is only to be compared with that of the Roman plebeians in the period of Rome’s extreme decline. Only by acquisition and the prospect of acquisition of new Territories, as well as by filibustering expeditions, is it possible to square the interests of these poor whites with those of the slaveholders, to give their restless thirst for action a harmless direction and to tame them with the prospect of one day becoming slaveholders themselves.

A strict confinement of slavery within its old terrain, therefore, was bound according to economic law to lead to its gradual effacement, in the political sphere to annihilate the hegemony that the slave states exercised through the Senate, and finally to expose the slaveholding oligarchy within its own states to threatening perils from the poor whites. In accordance with the principle that any further extension of slave Territories was to be prohibited by law, the Republicans therefore attacked the rule of the slaveholders at its root. The Republican election victory was accordingly bound to lead to open struggle between North and South. And this election victory, as already mentioned, was itself conditioned by the split in the Democratic camp.

The Kansas struggle had already caused a split between the slaveholders’ party and the Democrats of the North allied to it. With the presidential election of 1860, the same strife now broke out again in a more general form. The Democrats of the North, with Douglas as their candidate, made the introduction of slavery into Territories dependent on the will of the majority of the settlers. The slaveholders’ party, with Breckinridge as their candidate, maintained that the Constitution of the United States, as the Supreme Court had also declared, brought slavery legally in its train; in and of itself slavery was already legal in all Territories and required no special naturalisation. Whilst, therefore, the Republicans prohibited any extension of slave Territories, the Southern party laid claim to all Territories of the republic as legally warranted domains. What they had attempted by way of example with regard to Kansas, to force slavery on a Territory through the central government against the will of the settlers themselves, they now set up as law for all the Territories of the Union. Such a concession lay beyond the power of the Democratic leaders and would only have occasioned the desertion of their army to the Republican camp. On the other hand, Douglas’s settlers’ sovereignty could not satisfy the slaveholders’ party. What it wanted to effect had to be effected within the next four years under the new President, could only be effected by the resources of the central government and brooked no further delay. It did not escape the slaveholders that a new power had arisen, the North-west, whose population, having almost doubled between 1850 and 1860, was already pretty well equal to the white population of the slave states — a power that was not inclined either by tradition, temperament or mode of life to let itself be dragged from compromise to compromise in the manner of the old North-eastern states. The Union was still of value to the South only so far as it handed over Federal power to it as a means of carrying out the slave policy. If not, then it was better to make the break now than to look on at the development of the Republican Party and the upsurge of the North-west for another four years and begin the struggle under more unfavourable conditions. The slaveholders’ party therefore played va banque. When the Democrats of the North declined to go on playing the part of the poor whites of the South, the South secured Lincoln’s victory by splitting the vote, and then took this victory as a pretext for drawing the sword from the scabbard.

The whole movement was and is based, as one sees, on the slave question. Not in the sense of whether the slaves within the existing slave states should be emancipated outright or not, but whether the twenty million free men of the North should submit any longer to an oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders; whether the vast Territories of the republic should be nurseries for free states or for slavery; finally, whether the national policy of the Union should take armed spreading of slavery in Mexico, Central and South America as its device.

In another article we will probe the assertion of the London press that the North must sanction secession as the most favourable and only possible solution of the conflict.

To Arms! To Arms!

One hundred and fifty years ago today the American Civil War began. The war would develop into a revolution, unfinished to this day. We are still called upon to achieve its promise and, in part, to overturn its consequences as well. Those consequences imply a new civil war; one that would destroy wage slavery. John Brown’s body is a mouldering in the grave, but his soul is marching still. To Arms! To Arms!

Secession: What Was It All About?

While a small and discredited minority of historians may still question slavery’s central war in the conflagration that was the Civil War, most historians, the vast majority and all of the serious ones, place the institution of slavery as the key reason for the war.  Most people have vaguer notions if they have notion at all, but still tend to see slavery as central to the story (though what about slavery is a different question) of the war.  That being said there are still redoubts of the Lost Cause and they are getting more attention than they deserve, including by this blog.  If they weren’t so pernicious I’d ignore them, if they didn’t find echo in the Teabaggers and anti-immigrant brownshirts one could just laugh them off.  But talk of ‘state’s rights’ has always been code for white rule in this country.  It wasn’t just slavery and Jim Crow, in the 1830s it was evoked to to ignore the Supreme Court and remove the Cherokee, in current times it is proclaimed in enacting anti-immigrant laws.  Etc. Etc.

The gala ball held recently to commemorate South Carolina’s slaveholders rebellion, the Sons of Confederate Veterans television ads peddling racially coded falsehoods wholesale, the kerfuffle over Virginia’s official declaration on the sesquicentennial, all these and many more even before we’ve reached Sumter’s anniversary opening the War in April, bodes poorly for the public discourse on the war.  It is hard to dignify some of the characterizations of the causes of the US Civil War brought up by this week and the way they were largely handled by the mass media.  The media’s shaky footing is a reflection of the continued myopia this country has on the War; on our history in general for that matter.  The only question on the US citizenship test with two correct answers is ‘what was the cause of the Civil War?’  Both ‘slavery’ and ‘state’s rights’ are counted right.  Wrong.

State’s rights?  Southern elites had no problem with Dred Scott extending slavery’s writ to every state whether they liked it or not.  State’s rights?  Sure, the right to own and trade in slaves and the right of new states to as well.  I’ll let James McPherson give the argument in the video below on the causes of the Civil War and how and why views on the causes changed over time. McPherson may have mellowed a little, but he remains invaluable.  All of his books are worth finding and, unlike many of the best works on the period, available at your local library.  Comrades who haven’t yet could do no better than to pick up McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom– perhaps the best single volume of history in the last 40 years- to read during the period of the anniversary.

While the meaning of the war has changed over time, history tells a damning story.  I did a quick word search of the secession declarations of the Confederate States (not all issued declarations), including the one celebrated by the gala in Charleston this week (where’s the 54th Massachusetts when you need them?), for slave, slaveholding and slavery.  While the Son of Confederate veterans may say different, the actual Confederates weren’t as shy.  It was slavery folks. Yes, I know.  It’s more complicated than that, but without slavery there is no Civil War.  Lincoln famously said in the Second Inaugural of 1864:

‘One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease.’

‘All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war.‘  And from far less lofty, but no less reliable sources here are the secession declarations:

South Carolina, December 24th 1860, where slavery is mentioned 18 times is the most clear, secession happens because the slave-holding party lost control of the Federal government for the first time.

”On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.  The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.’

Mississippi, January 9th 1861: 8 times in a very short declaration.

‘Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery– the greatest material interest of the world.’ (pretty clear, that)

Florida, January 10th 1861: slavery is mentioned 14 times and among other choice quotes states:

‘A President has recently been elected, an obscure and illiterate man without experience in public affairs or any general reputation mainly if not exclusively on account of a settled and often proclaimed hostility to our institutions and a fixed purpose to abolish them. It is denied that it is the purpose of the party soon to enter into the possession of the powers of the Federal Government to abolish slavery by any direct legislative act. This has never been charged by any one. But it has been announced by all the leading men and presses of the party that the ultimate accomplishment of this result is its settled purpose and great central principle.’

Alabama, January 10th doesn’t issue a declaration but the Ordinance of Secession states (I’ll let the reader guess what the ‘domestic institutions’ mentioned are) :

‘Whereas, the election of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin to the offices of president and vice-president of the United States of America, by a sectional party, avowedly hostile to the domestic institutions and to the peace and security of the people of the State of Alabama, preceded by many and dangerous infractions of the constitution of the United States by many of the States and people of the Northern section, is a political wrong of so insulting and manacing a character as to justify the people of the State of Alabama in the adoption of prompt and decided measures for their future peace and security’

Georgia, January 19th 1861:

Slavery is mentioned 33 times and opens with these lines: ‘The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slaveholding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery…’

…and from Texas on February 2nd 1861 where slavery is mentioned 14 times comes this nugget: ‘In all the non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith and comity which should exist between entirely distinct nations, the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color – a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States. ‘

Straight from the source y’all.  OK, over to McPherson.

The only question on the US citizenship test with two correct answers is “what was the cause of the Civil War?’.  Both ‘slavery’ and ‘state’s rights’ are counted right.  Wrong.

Lincoln Elected 150 Years Ago This Day

November 6th, 1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States.  The crisis had come to a head. South Carolina would soon secede, the War would begin.  How to feel about Lincoln?  Well, for what it’s worth I can say pretty confidently that he would have been the only President ever elected that I myself would have voted for.  And maybe then only in 1864.  Lincoln did change, it wasn’t that he took a circuitous route to get to the right place, he changed the place he wanted to go.  Yes, he would have been maddeningly hard to support sometimes, especially in the early years of the war as he courted the Border States.  By the end of the war you might have gladly died to protect him.

If you look at the actual politicians on hand at the time, there is not a one, with the partial exceptions of Seward and Sumner and it would have taken a revolution  (possible if Lincoln lost in 1864) for them to see power, to lead this struggle to its conclusion; emancipation.   He is also, by a large measure, the best writer ever to be President.  Read his letters, articles and speeches.  Many of them are brilliant in their own terms.  There’s a lot of myths about the man and none of them need to be perpetuated, but history will continue to be kind to him.  When it mattered most he stood for human freedom and fought to achieve it, paying with his life.

William Lloyd Garrison was one of those who found it maddeningly hard to support Lincoln in the early years of the war.  Here he is four years later.  The war had changed.  Emancipation was now the purpose and the means of the war to restore the Union.  Hundreds of thousands had fallen, millions had struck out for freedom.  But it was not over yet.  When Garrison spoke these words, in the Spring of 1864 the war had become something else, something horrific beyond all past experience.  In the first two weeks of May, when this speech was given, the Army of the Potomac suffered 33,000 casualties on a ten mile meat grinder south of the Rapidan at the start of Grant’s Overland Campaign.  In those two weeks the face of war itself changed as the soldiers themselves learned to dig trenches wherever they arrived, the tone of the fighting had changed as well.  Gettysburg and Chancellorsville are downright gallant and civilized compared to The Wilderness and Spotsylvania.  That Spring was epic.  In response both to the casualties and to the change in focus of the war there was increasing anti-war agitation in the North.  Copperheads were preaching sedition and Lincoln’s re-election in the Fall was far from certain.  The outcome of the struggle, from the perspective of the time, was hardly a forgone conclusion.  Lincoln would not retreat.  This is the context of Garrison’s speech below as we remember Lincoln on his election, this day 150 years ago.

‘Grant that there are many sad things to look in the face; grant that the whole of justice has not yet been done to the negro; grant that here and there greivances exist which are to be deplored and to be redressed; still, looking at the question broadly, comprehensively, and philosophically, I think the people will ask another question—whether they themselves have been one hair’s breadth in advance of Abraham Lincoln? (Applause.) Whether they are not conscious that he has been not fully up with him, but on the whole, a little beyond them? (Applause.) As the stream cannot rise higher than the fountain, so the President of the United States, amenable to public sentiment, could not, if he wished to do it, far transcend public sentiment in any direction. (Applause.) For my own part, when I remember the trials through which he has passed, and the perils that have surrounded him—perils and trials unknown to any man, in any age of the world, in official station—when I remember how fearfully pro-slavery was the public sentiment of the North, to say nothing of the South—when I remember what he has had to deal with—when I remember how nearly a majority, even at this hour, is the seditious element of the North, and then remember that Abraham Lincoln has struck the chains from the limbs of more than three millions of slaves (applause); that he has expressed his earnest desire for the total abolition of slavery; that he has implored the Border States to get rid of it; that he has recognized the manhood and citizenship of the colored population of our country; that he has armed upwards of a hundred thousand of them, and recognized them as soldiers under the flag; when I remember that this Administration has recognized the independence of Liberia and Hayti; when I remember that it has struck a death blow at the foreign slave trade by granting the right of search; when I remember that we have now nearly reached the culmination of our greatest struggle for the suppression of the rebellion and its cause, I do not feel disposed, for one, to take this occasion, or any occasion, to say anything very harshly against Abraham Lincoln. (Long and prolonged applause.)’

William Lloyd Garrison’s Defense of Lincoln appeared in The Liberator on May 20, 1864

‘As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.’ Abraham Lincoln August 1, 1858.

The Rustbelt’s Radical Civil War Sesquicentennial Survey Begins!

This November will see the midterm elections, it will also be the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s election and the Southern secession crisis. The sesquicentennial of the Civil War, far and away the most important period in the life of this country, is upon us.  Expect many memorials, living history exhibitions, celebrations, symposiums and events of all kinds to mark the anniversary (I have a long standing commitment to take my young nephew to the 2013 Gettysburg reenactment).  How we view that period in our history, which we’ll say begins with the crisis in Kansas of 1854 and ends with the Compromise of 1877 and the collapse and reversal of Reconstruction, has changed dramatically over the years.  Each fifty years a new generation looks at those days of conflict, of liberation and, finally, of defeat from their own perspective.  This is quite natural of course, but it also provides a telling glimpse into the view the nation has of itself, the official nation and the critical nation, the competing nations.

The last big anniversary was in the 1960s during the struggle against Jim Crow and the very real consequences of Reconstrcution’s failure.  That period saw a flowering of Civil War scholarship and welcome revisionism.  Expect much, unwelcome revisionism, to be made of Obama’s Presidency this time around; though the social conflict in this country may belie the Progress We, As A Nation, Have Made business.  I am a radical Civil War nerd as readers of this blog will have picked up with a knowing chuckle.  Since I was ten and asked for a subscription of Civil War Times magazine until now, my interest only grows as I learn more. In France comrades get to wax on, along with so much else, about the san culotte stalking the aristocrats in the streets of Paris and singing La Marseillaise, here we get to talk about armed former slaves marching into Charleston singing John Brown’s Body.  A comrade has to have something to hang their hat on when they swim, half digested, in the belly of the beast.

This is our Revolution; imperfect, glorious, incomplete, explosive, half-hearted, contradictory and confused and, most importantly for our purposes, even now unfinished business.  It is simply impossible to understand what this nation is and how it became without understanding its greatest conflict and I am convinced that all future conflicts, dare I say revolutions, will make reference to it and, in some ways, unfold beneath its shadow.  So expect an abnormal, and admittedly irregular, amount of inexpert Civil War posts over the next period – a sort of Civil War survey for radicals and reds.  I welcome and invite any guest contributions and will undoubtedly be posting some uncovered esoterica of interest limited to real heads.  This being a US Marxist blog, I figure that just comes with the territory.

We’ll say we started the project with the previous post, but begin officially today and mark early October.  The time of year in 1855 when John Brown, our failed, but every bit as potent Spartacus, first arrived in Kansas to join his sons in the struggle to win the state from slavery.  Brown whose legacy evoked Eugene Debs to ask/demand, “And who will be the John Brown of wage slavery?”  From a certain perspective that remains the question today. But we wont begin with Brown, we’ll start at the end of the war in the summer of 1865, before the promise of emancipation was replaced by a re-invigorated white supremacy, before Reconstruction and before its fall.  Much must have seemed possible, because it was.

Written in response to his former owner’s request that he rejoin him in Tennessee from which he fled during the war, this brilliant response dictated by a man only recently chattel, Jourdan Anderson then living in Ohio, says as much as any document of the true nature of the revolutionary upheaval that was the American Civil War.  It should be required reading in our public schools.  The destruction of the chattel system in the South was only one of the consequences of that period; its most glorious, but not its only.  For a moment, a brief moment, the ‘bottom rail on top now, massa.’

Dayton, Ohio, August 7, 1865

To my old master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee.

Sir,

I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than any body else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in a better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

I want to know particulary what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get $25 a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy. The folks here call her Mrs. Anderson, and the children Milly, Jane, and Grundy go to school and are learning well. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, “Them colored people were slaves down in Tennesssee.” The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost Marshall-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for 32 years, and Mandy 20 years. At 25 dollars a month for me, and 2 dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to $11,608. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to.

Please send the money by Adam’s Express, in care of V. Winters Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the Good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Surely, there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.

In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve and die, if it comes to that, than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits. Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when your were shooting at me.

From you old servant,

Jourdan Anderson