The Civil War in the United States ed. by Karl Marx, Frederick Engels (review)

The theoretical framework developed by Marx and Engels for understanding the past has had a significant influence on history writing, even among many who do not count themselves political fellow travelers. Paradoxically, this influence endures despite the absence in the pair’s extensive writings of a single, stand-alone exposition on historical materialism. Readers are left to patch together a holistic understanding from three distinct strands of their work: fragments from Marx and Engels’s reckoning with the mixed inheritance of the Enlightenment and the subsequent achievements of German philosophy; the historical element in Marx’s studies of political economy; and their collaborative attempts to apply their approach to events unfolding during their own lifetimes — most significantly, the failed 1848 revolutions in Europe, the American Civil War of 1861–65, and the 1871 Paris Commune.

Both for its illumination of this theoretical legacy and for the unique insights it provides on American events, this new collection of Marx and Engels’s most significant writings on the US Civil War should be welcomed. International Publishers — then and now associated with the Communist Party — brought the first English-language collection of this material to print in 1937, and Saul K. Padover edited a well-organized translation for McGraw-Hill’s Karl Marx Library series in 1972. This reissue from International is augmented by the inclusion of excerpts from Marx’s passing references to the economic significance of slavery in early capitalism, newly translated material from political collaborators in the mid-nineteenth century US German émigré community, and a short appendix including W. E. B. Du Bois’s brief essay “Karl Marx and the Negro,” originally published in The Crisis in 1933. The translation of Joseph Weydemeyer’s analysis of the immediate postwar landscape in “The Negro Vote” (1865) makes for especially compelling reading: in it, the former ’48er and Union military veteran argues for land redistribution and the black franchise, but laments that northern labor “looks with indifference” on the restoration of ex-Confederates under President Andrew Johnson. “[W]here else in the South will [northern labor] find . . . allies,” he asks presciently, “if not among [former slaves]”? (173–74).

The explanatory power of Marx and Engels’s collaborative writing on American events, which even critics concede was based on a thorough immersion in available sources, is by now well established. Their wide-ranging reflections shape the scholarship of a handful of explicitly Marxist historians but likewise exert considerable influence on the work of prominent mainstream scholars. Read alongside other commentary, their developing assessment (originating mainly as articles in the New York Daily Tribune or the Vienna newspaper Die Presse) displays an analytic sophistication missing from most contemporary observers on both sides of the Atlantic and a depth that American historians struggled to match for more than a century after the war’s end.

Marx’s distinctive approach to American events was shaped by the context in which he took on the role of London correspondent for the Tribune — at the time the most important English-language newspaper published in the United States. Although laborers in Britain’s hard-hit mill towns remained loyal to the antislavery cause through some very trying times, Confederate sympathy was rife among their employers, saturating the bourgeois press and parliamentary debate. Elites attempted to justify withholding support for the North on the grounds that sectional tensions had little to do with slavery — an assertion given credibility by Lincoln’s open disavowal of emancipation as a war aim.

In the face of these efforts to deny the antislavery essence of the Union war, Marx developed a nuanced perspective that could acknowledge on one hand the timidity and prevarication of the Republican-led North and on the other the dynamic toward a war for emancipation, a trend that he regarded as inexorable. Engels — assigning more weight to military calculations — would waver occasionally in the early period of the conflict, but on the whole their joint...