Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx in Dialogue by Allan Kulikoff (review)

Ten years ago, an internet search for "Marx and Lincoln" yielded dozens of conspiracy websites that argued that Marx and Lincoln were working together to Stalinize the United States. Such websites highlighted Lincoln quotes that sounded "communistic" and were, ironically, purloined from the literature of the 1930s Popular Front left that had, like other left-wing groups before them, tried to appropriate Lincoln's memory. The most damning evidence of a Lincoln–Marx cabal, according to these conspiracy theories, was their correspondence.

The same internet search today turns up radically different results. The conspiracy websites still exist—a top hit is David Duke explaining a Marx–Lincoln conspiracy—but they are drowned out by reviews of new scholarly work on Marx and Lincoln. Allan Kulikoff's new edition of Lincoln and Marx's writings is one such volume. As Peter Hoffer states in his preface to the book, Kulikoff situates the selected letters, speeches, and newspaper pieces in a broader historical trend toward internationalizing our understanding of slavery and labor, the Civil War, and the antislavery origins of the war. The result is a highly teachable text that prompts readers to think about the U.S. Civil War as an international event and serves as a primer on free labor and Marxist thought.

With one important exception, the titular "dialogue" was created by Kulikoff. He effectively juxtaposes writings by Lincoln and Marx around themes like slavery and society, secession, and emancipation to create a convincing conversation between the two writers. Kulikoff had a lot to work with as Marx was deeply interested in American affairs while Lincoln was deeply interested in European affairs. Well before the American Civil War commenced, Marx identified as a supporter of the Republicans and the United States—indeed many of his friends and comrades from the Revolutions of 1848 like Joseph Weydemeyer and August Willich were Republicans, and during the war they became officers in the United States Army. With so many American correspondents it should not come as a surprise that, unlike many European intellectuals (and a small number of modern-day historians), Marx understood from the outset that disagreements over the place of slavery in the United States formed the root of the sectional crisis and resulting civil war. Marx threw his support behind the Republicans specifically for their antislavery stance: During the Civil War, he helped to organize the International Workingmen's Association (IWMA) to build support for the United States among British and European workingmen.

Lincoln's re-election in 1864 prompted the sole exchange between Marx and Lincoln, when Marx, on behalf of the IWMA, sent a congratulatory letter to Lincoln. The recipient, through Charles Adams, returned a note of thanks to the author and the IWMA. Despite the brevity and formality of this exchange, it forms a microcosm of the conversations that Kulikoff constructed. Marx and Lincoln agree that slavery ought to be destroyed, but Lincoln (or Adams) sidestepped some of Marx's more radical statements by recommitting himself to free labor, stating that nations must "promote the welfare and happiness of mankind by benevolent intercourse and example," not through revolution (106).

Kulikoff's introductory essay and his selections are superb; they concisely illuminate the similarities and the differences between free-labor ideology and Marx's theories. Although we know the end result of free-labor thought, like the failure of Reconstruction, Kulikoff's book recovers how people understood free-labor thought and its radical implications during the Civil War. Although it did not lead to a worldwide proletarian revolution, the Republicans, acting on free-labor ideas, undertook a massive land redistribution scheme and abolished one of the most valuable classes of property in the world.

Kulikoff ends his work with a popular counterfactual: What if Lincoln had not been assassinated and had overseen Reconstruction? As Kulikoff imagines, Marx might explain why Reconstruction was failing (or had failed), while Lincoln would tell him that "only an easy reconstruction, which...