The Article:<\/strong> Reading Karl Marx with Abraham Lincoln<\/a> by John Nichols in International Socialist Review.<\/p>\n

The Text:<\/strong><\/p>\n

These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert, to fleece the people.<\/em>
\n\u2014Abraham Lincoln, from his first speech as an Illinois state legislator, 1837<\/p>\n

Everyone now is more or less a Socialist.<\/em>
\n\u2014Charles Dana, managing editor of the New York Tribune, and Lincoln\u2019s assistant secretary of war, 1848<\/p>\n

The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.<\/em>
\n\u2014Karl Marx and the First International Workingmen\u2019s Association to Lincoln, 1864<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On December 3, 1861, a former one-term congressman, who had spent most of the past dozen years studying dissident economic theories, mounting challenges to the existing political order and proposing ever more radical responses to the American crisis, delivered his first State of the Union address as the sixteenth president of the United States.<\/p>\n

Since assuming office eight months earlier, this new president had struggled, without success, first to restore the severed bonds of the Union and then to avert a wrenching civil war. Now, eleven southern slave states were in open and violent rebellion against the government he led.<\/p>\n

His inaugural address of the previous spring had closed with a poignant reflection on the prospect of eventual peace, imagining a day when the Union might again be touched \u201cby the better angels of our nature.\u201d But, now, in the last month of what Walt Whitman would recall as America\u2019s \u201csad, distracted year\u201d\u2014\u201cYear that suddenly sang by the mouths of the round-lipp\u2019d cannons\u201d\u2014the better angels seemed to have deserted the continent. Every effort to restore the republic had been thwarted. There was no room for accommodation with the Confederate States of America. Fort Sumter had been fired upon and the flag of southern rebellion now flew above Charleston Harbor. Virginia, the cradle of presidents, the state of Washington, Jefferson and Madison, had joined the revolt and assembled a capital of the Confederacy less than 100 miles from Washington. Hundreds of Union and Confederate soldiers had died, with thousands more wounded at the First Battle of Bull Run. Armies had been reorganized and generals replaced with the recognition that this was no skirmish. This was a protracted war that would eventually force all Americans to \u201c[throw] off the costumes of peace with [an] indifferent hand.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In the presence of the remaining congressmen and senators who filled only a portion of the seats in the Capitol chamber on that December day, the new president knew that he needed to address the circumstance of a nation that was no longer in any sense united. He did so as an agitated, angered American who spoke no more of angels and instead bemoaned \u201cthe disloyal citizens of the United States who have offered the ruin of our country.\u201d He warned, ominously, of how \u201cA nation which endures factious domestic division is exposed to disrespect abroad, and\u2026is sure sooner or later to invoke foreign intervention.\u201d He fretted about a strained federal budget, expressing hope \u201cthat the expenditures made necessary by the rebellion are not beyond the resources of the loyal people.\u201d He noted that three vacancies would need to be filled on a suddenly abandoned Supreme Court and observed that \u201cone of the unavoidable consequences of the present insurrection is the entire suppression in many places of all the ordinary means of administering civil justice by the officers and in the forms of existing law.\u201d<\/p>\n

This was a wartime State of the Union address delivered not so much by a president as a commander in chief. Its purpose was to rally what remained of the House and Senate\u2014after the exodus of the southern Solons who had joined a mutiny against the elected government\u2014and to portray the struggle as not merely one for the preservation of a system of governance but for democracy itself. \u201cIt continues to develop that the insurrection is largely, if not exclusively, a war upon the first principle of popular government\u2014the rights of the people,\u201d declared the solemn speaker. \u201cConclusive evidence of this is found in the most grave and maturely considered public documents, as well as in the general tone of the insurgents. In those documents we find the abridgment of the existing right of suffrage and the denial to the people of all right to participate in the selection of public officers except the legislative boldly advocated, with labored arguments to prove that large control of the people in government is the source of all political evil. Monarchy itself is sometimes hinted at as a possible refuge from the power of the people.\u201d<\/p>\n

These were the words that might have ended the address, had the president not begged the pardon of his listeners to add: \u201cIn my present position, I could scarcely be justified were I to omit raising a warning voice against this approach of returning despotism.\u201d<\/p>\n

There was something more that Lincoln wanted to say to America. He needed to speak of another division, another struggle. The man who so carefully chose his words did not relinquish the podium before devoting \u201cbrief attention\u201d to his fears regarding \u201cthe effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government.\u201d<\/p>\n

Amid all the turbulence of a burgeoning Civil War, Abraham Lincoln wanted it to be known that he was unsettled by the rising assumption \u201cthat labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded so far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life.\u201d<\/p>\n

That false construct could not be allowed to take hold in a free country, argued the president. It must be understood, he concluded: \u201cLabor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.\u201d<\/p>\n

To be sure, Lincoln related this observation to the wrenching questions posed by the Civil War. \u201cA few men own capital, and that few avoid labor themselves, and with their capital hire or buy another few to labor for them. A large majority belong to neither class\u2014neither work for others nor have others working for them. In most of the Southern States a majority of the whole people of all colors are neither slaves nor masters, while in the Northern a large majority are neither hirers nor hired.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Lincoln was speaking now of a broader concern: his fear that the few who were possessed of capital might, in a time of turbulence, seek to bend the rule of law\u2014diminishing the historic respect for the rights of man outlined by Lincoln\u2019s hero Tom Paine in order to favor their interests above those of the great many Americans who toiled for wages, or the fees paid farmers. \u201cNo men living are more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up from poverty; none less inclined to take or touch aught which they have not honestly earned,\u201d the president warned. \u201cLet them beware of surrendering a political power which they already possess, and which if surrendered will surely be used to close the door of advancement against such as they, and to fix new disabilities and burdens upon them till all of liberty shall be lost.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lincoln\u2019s insistence that labor guard against the surrender of political power to capital\u2014a point he began to outline before his presidency and would repeat throughout his tenure\u2014is rarely afforded the attention paid to his rhetoric regarding the state of \u201ca house divided against itself,\u201d \u201cthe proposition that all men are created equal\u201d or the faint hope that: \u201cGovernment of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet, how can we neglect the words that this most instructive of presidents chose to insert in so critical a commentary as his first State of the Union address?<\/p>\n

How can we fail to recognize the echoes of a language which scholars of economic, social and political rhetoric might associate less with the sixteenth president than with one of his contemporaries: a Prussian-born son of the Enlightenment, who was causing a stir on both sides of the Atlantic at precisely the moment when Lincoln was casting about for a language to describe the economic forces that were carrying America from its agrarian roots to its industrial future?<\/p>\n

Didn\u2019t Karl Marx take an interest in the relation of labor and capital? Was it not the coauthor of Das Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei who observed that: \u201cthe essential condition of capital is wage-labor\u201d? And that: \u201cCapitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth\u2014the soil and the laborer\u201d?<\/p>\n

Well, there can surely be no connection, no tangible link between Abraham Lincoln, the log cabin\u2013born, rail-splitting, archetypal nineteenth-century American and founding Republican, and Karl Marx, the bearded, brooding, archetypal \u201cEuropean\u201d and proud socialist plotter.<\/p>\n

Unless, of course, we bother to examine the tattered copies of the American outlet for Marx\u2019s revolutionary preachments during the period when Lincoln was preparing to leave the political wilderness and make his march to the presidency. That journal, the New York Tribune, was the most consistently influential of nineteenth-century American newspapers. Indeed, this was the newspaper that engineered the unexpected and in many ways counterintuitive delivery of the Republican nomination for president, in that most critical year of 1860, to an Illinoisan who just two years earlier had lost the competition for a home-state U.S. Senate seat. The Tribune is remembered, correctly, as the great Republican paper of the day. It argued against slavery in the south. But it argued as well, with words parallel to Lincoln\u2019s in that first address to the Congress, that \u201cour idea is that Labor needs not to combat but to command Capital.\u201d<\/p>\n

Seven years before he and Lincoln served together in the Congress (during each man\u2019s sole term in the U.S. House) Horace Greeley\u2014or \u201cFriend Greeley,\u201d as Lincoln referred to the editor in their correspondence\u2014began the Tribune with a stated purpose: \u201cto serve the republic with an honest and fearless criticism.\u201d He succeeded, more wholly than any American editor before or after his transit of the mid-nineteenth century, in creating a newspaper that was not merely a newspaper. Greeley\u2019s nationally circulated Tribune was, as Clarence Darrow aptly remembered it, \u201cthe political and social Bible\u201d of every reforming, radical and Republican household. The Tribune was surely that for Lincoln, whose engagement with the paper would last the better part of a quarter century and eventually extend to wrangling with Greeley about the proper moment at which to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln\u2019s involvement was not just with Greeley but with his sub-editors and writers, so much so that the first Republican president appointed one of Greeley\u2019s most radical lieutenants\u2014the Fourier- and Proudhon-inspired socialist and longtime editor of Marx\u2019s European correspondence, Charles Dana\u2014as his assistant secretary of war.<\/p>\n

Greeley\u2019s newspaper was the tribune of the agitation that spawned the Republican Party and its successful presidential campaign of 1860. Lincoln would say of the editor: \u201cevery one of his words seems to weigh about a ton.\u201d<\/p>\n

This was as Greeley, an epic figure of American journalism, a political and social reformer who reveled in his ability not merely to report upon but to bend the arc of history, intended it.<\/p>\n

After learning the printer\u2019s trade at the Northern Star in tiny Poultney, Vermont, Greeley arrived in New York in 1831, during the period when Fanny Wright and her allies were forging explicitly socialist political parties and movements in the city. Greeley came both to make his fortune\u2014and that he did\u2014and to steer the political progress of a young nation. William Seward, the radical Republican whose presidential ambitions were thwarted when Greeley switched his allegiance to Lincoln, celebrated the young newspaper editor as a Whitmanesque figure: \u201crather unmindful of social usages, yet singularly clear, original, and decided, in his political views and theories.\u201d<\/p>\n

Greeley was what the British refer to as a \u201ccampaigning editor.\u201d He started newspapers as platforms to promote ideas\u2014for example, the Jeffersonian was established to advance Seward\u2019s successful Whig Party challenge to conservative Democratic governor William Marcy, a hack of the highest order who preached the patronage gospel of \u201cto the victor belong the spoils.\u201d Two years later Greeley would edit a national newspaper, the Log Cabin, as the campaign journal of another Whig, William Henry Harrison, who would win and briefly hold the presidency.<\/p>\n

With the Tribune, however, Greeley would no longer crusade for candidates\u2014although he certainly had his favorites\u2014but for a set of ideals that would come to define the Whig Party, to which he and Lincoln remained in many senses true loyalists. When the Whigs failed to effectively confront issues of slavery, urbanization and economic transition, however, the Tribune became the prime proponent of a new and more radical political constellation that took as its name the word used to describe proponents of the \u201cconstructive treason\u201d that began with a rejection of \u201cthe divine right of kings\u201d and with it of the favored position of the propertied classes: \u201cRepublican.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt has been urged as an objection to the Tribune that it proposed to \u2018give hospitality to every new thought.\u2019 To that profession we shall be constant, at whatever sacrifice,\u201d Greeley wrote when the paper\u2019s radicalism began to shake some political foundations in the mid-1840s. \u201cFull of error and suffering as the world yet is, we cannot afford to reject unexamined any idea which proposes to improve the moral, intellectual, or social condition of mankind.\u201d<\/p>\n

Greeley practiced an advocacy journalism that was not cautious about taking sides in the great debates of his day. His first editorial duty, he explained, was to keep \u201can ear open to the plaints of the wronged and suffering, though they can never repay advocacy, and those who mainly support newspapers will be annoyed and often exposed by it; a heart as sensitive to oppression and degradation in the next street as if they were practiced in Brazil or Japan; a pen as ready to expose and reprove the crimes whereby wealth is amassed and luxury enjoyed in our own country as if they had only been committed by Turks or Pagans in Asia some centuries ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

That final reference to reproving \u201cthe crimes whereby wealth is amassed and luxury enjoyed\u201d might not meet with the applause of the trickle-down economists and laissez-faire fabulists who today guide the policies of what has become of Greeley\u2019s Republican Party. But Greeley would never have recognized today\u2019s so-called Republicans as heirs to the party he and his comrades forged.<\/p>\n

Greeley welcomed the disapproval of those who championed free markets over the interests of the working class, a class he recognized as including both the oppressed slaves of the south and the degraded industrial laborers of the north. In a memorial column that the Tribune published after his death in 1872\u2014at the close of the editor\u2019s quixotic \u201cLiberal Republican\u201d presidential campaign\u2014it was recalled of Greeley:<\/p>\n

If there was any special class of whom this plain man was the champion, for whom he used all his skill, and his zeal, and influence, it was the class of the poor and the oppressed and the forsaken, of those who were abused and outraged by their fellow men.\u2026 [The] sober verdict of history will be that no single man did so much for the overthrow of human bondage in this land as the editor of the New York Tribune. If he did not lay his ax so unsparingly to the root of the tree as some other of the reformers, he destroyed it quite as effectually by steadily hacking away its limbs and tendrils, and ruining so its inner life. That he wished and longed for its destruction, who ever dared to doubt? That he was the enemy of every form of social wrong and iniquity, who ever doubted? You cannot imagine this man palliating or tolerating any custom or traffic which degrades or imbrutes or depraves men. Not to one, but to many, moral reforms his time and heart were given. To education, thorough and universal; to sobriety, in eating not less than in drinking; to cleanliness, with him very near to godliness; to humanity, for beasts not less than for men; to free homes for emigrants; to cordial welcome of exiles from other lands, seeking refuge on these shores; to the liberation of all oppressed and struggling peoples. When was his word of cheer and sympathy wanting? With the weak against the strong, with the abandoned ones, his heart went, and he would give to these more than justice. This made him the friend of Hungarians and Poles and Irishmen, and the defender even of the Pagans against Christians. When the weak and the needy called, he did not stop to ask whether these shared his political or his religious creed, or what his race or his party would gain in befriending them. He obeyed the Divine call, and not seldom was made half a martyr in obedience to his instinct of compassion. His fame for wisdom suffered in the promptness of his sympathetic zeal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Greeley\u2019s sympathetic zeal was that of a distinct breed of nineteenth-century social reformer, who was not satisfied merely with the repair of the breach created when the founders of the American experiment failed to keep faith with their initial recognition of the self-evident truth \u201cthat all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.\u201d He was profoundly concerned, as was Lincoln, with the question of how to maintain a measure of economic equality in a time of unprecedented and overwhelming accumulation of wealth\u2014not merely by southern planters but by northern bankers and businessmen. These concerns led him to embrace the teachings of Charles Fourier, the French utopian socialist who complained: \u201cOnce upon a time people talked about the infallibility of the pope; today it is that of the merchant which they wish to establish.\u201d In Fourier\u2019s view, the promise of equality was an idle one unless it was coupled with economic protections for the great mass of working men and women. The French socialist held:<\/p>\n

Equality of rights is another chimera, praiseworthy when considered in the abstract and ridiculous from the standpoint of the means employed to introduce it in civilization. The first right of men is the right to work and the right to a minimum [income]. This is precisely what has gone unrecognized in all the constitutions. Their primary concern is with favored individuals who are not in need of work. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Fourier\u2019s writing was popularized in the United States by Albert Brisbane, an American who traveled to France in the 1820s, studied with the philosopher and then returned to the United States to spread the socialist gospel. He found a comrade in Greeley, who referred to Fourier\u2019s views in the Log Cabin and championed them in the Tribune. Greeley made Brisbane a columnist for the paper and, when the new journal was attacked for spreading such radical views, the editor wrote: \u201cDo not stand there quarreling with those who have devised or adopted a scheme which you consider absurd or impracticable, but take hold and devise something better. For, be assured, friend! that this generation will not, must not pass without the discovery and adoption of some method whereby the Right to Labor and to receive and enjoy the honest reward of such labor, shall be secured to the poorest and least fortunate of our people.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the mid-1840s, explains historian Roy Marvin Robbins, \u201cGreeley preached a new order of society with Brisbane\u2019s socialistic ideas as its basis.\u201d Even as the utopian ideals of Fourierism proved difficult to realize in practical form\u2014despite the best efforts of social reformers such as Brisbane and his compatriot Bronson Alcott\u2014Greeley evolved his own advocacy and that of theTribuneto champion land reforms that combined elements of Fourier\u2019s socialism and the pioneering ideal. Greeley\u2019s famous line \u201cGo west, young man\u201d was the practical expression of a broader vision of distributing open and unsettled land to the poor\u2014even if, at the same time, it shamefully disregarded the Native Americans of the western lands, who both the editor and Lincoln failed to ever fully or even adequately respect or protect.<\/p>\n

Attacked by a rival newspaperman in James Watson Webb\u2019s Courier and Express\u2014which journalist and historian Francis Brown describes as \u201ca Wall Street paper\u201d that \u201ccatered to mercantile interests, to finance, and to shipping, and editorially\u2026voiced the conservative views of the merchant class\u201d\u2014on grounds that he was a \u201cFourierist, an Agrarian, and an Infidel,\u201d Greeley replied:<\/p>\n

We admit and insist on the legal right of the owner of wild lands to keep them uninhabited forever, but we do not consider it morally right that he should do so when land becomes scarce and subsistence for the landless scanty and precarious\u2026yes\u2026something will be done, in spite of any stupid clamor that can be raised about \u201cInfidelity\u201d and \u201cAgrarianism,\u201d to secure future generations against the faithful evils of Monopoly of Land by the few. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The boldness of Greeley\u2019s stances won him a good deal of personal popularity among the radical Whigs of New York and the champions of the nascent \u201cFree Soil\u201d movement, which Greeley urged to \u201csecure to each and all\u2026a really Free Soil!\u2014especially free from the hated speculators.\u201d In an 1848 special election, he was sent to Congress as a representative from New York. Greeley served for only a few months, but he used his time in the House to propose and promote an early version of the Homestead Act. Challenged by a western conservative to explain why an urban member was so interested in freeing up rural land for settlement, Greeley countered that he \u201crepresented more landless men than any other member\u201d of the Congress. A good line, but unlikely to please a chamber that did not share the editor\u2019s radicalism. One of his few allies was the young first-term Whig congressman from Illinois, who Greeley recalled as a comrade with whom he \u201cagreed on the slavery issue as one which must be answered permanently in the course of a few years.\u201d The two men spoke on a daily basis during their joint tenure in the nation\u2019s capital and formed a bond that would last until Lincoln\u2019s assassination seventeen years later.<\/p>\n

It was not mere personal acquaintance that linked Greeley and Lincoln, however. By 1848, Greeley\u2019s Tribune was already a journalistic and political phenomenon. \u201cAcknowledged the most influential Whig editor in 1844, [Greeley] had by 1850 become the most influential anti-slavery editor\u2014the spokesman not of Whigs merely but of a great class of Northerners who were thoroughly antagonistic to slavery,\u201d recalls Frank W. Scott in his study of nineteenth-century American newspapers. As the slavery issue came to a head, the Tribune\u2019s influence grew so that it became not just a popular newspaper in New York City but a widely circulated national journal of opinion, distinguished by what Scott characterizes as \u201csome of the most vigorous and trenchant editorial writing America has ever known.\u201d In the early 1850s, the circulation of the Tribune\u2019s weekly national edition nearly tripled to more than 110,000 copies as it became what another historian, James Ford Rhodes, described as \u201cpre-eminently the journal of the rural districts, [where] one copy did service for many readers. To the people in the Adirondack wilderness it was a political bible, and the well-known scarcity of Democrats there was attributed to it. Yet it was as freely read by the intelligent people living on the Western Reserve of Ohio\u201d\u2014not to mention in Abraham Lincoln\u2019s Illinois.<\/p>\n

By the late 1850s, the weekly Tribune\u2019s Illinois circulation was close to 20,000, making the New York\u2013based journal one of the midwestern state\u2019s most widely circulated newspapers. There is no debate that Lincoln was among the most avid of the Tribune\u2019s Illinois readers. His correspondence with Greeley confirms this passionate relationship with the paper, as does his more extensive correspondence with his third and last law partner, William Herndon, in which Lincoln would sometimes complain that Greeley\u2019s newspaper was not being supportive enough of his political ambitions. It was in one of these fretful notes that Lincoln first expressed the view that \u201cevery one of [Greeley\u2019s] words seems to weigh about a ton.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lincoln did not merely consume Greeley\u2019s words, however. He devoured the whole of his weekly Tribune, as he did every other newspaper he could get his hands on. \u201cWhat Lincoln really liked to read were newspapers, reading them, a friend said, \u2018more than books,\u2019\u201d writes Lincoln biographer John C. Waugh. \u201cAnother friend said he \u2018never saw a man better pleased\u2019 than when Lincoln was appointed postmaster, because he could read [newspapers from around the country] before delivering them to their subscribers.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his period of deepest inquiry, the five years after his 1848 departure from Congress as a disappointed Whig and before his return to the political hustings as a champion of what would become the Republican Party, Lincoln devoted himself to examining, debating and ruminating on the reports in the national newspapers that were delivered to his Springfield law office\u2014especially Greeley\u2019s Tribune. Keenly aware of the rising tide of liberal, radical and socialist reform movements in Europe, a tide that would peak\u2014at least for a time\u2014in the \u201crevolutionary wave\u201d of 1848 and its aftermath, the young congressman joined other American Whigs in following the development of that year\u2019s \u201cSpringtime of the Peoples,\u201d which saw uprisings against monarchy and entrenched economic, social and political power in Germany, France, Hungary, Denmark and other European nations. For Lincoln, however, this was not a new interest.<\/p>\n

Long before 1848, German radicals had begun to arrive in Illinois, where they quickly entered into the legal and political circles in which Lincoln traveled. One of them, Gustav Korner, was a student revolutionary at the University of Munich who had been imprisoned by German authorities in the early 1830s for organizing illegal demonstrations. After his release, Korner returned to his hometown of Frankfurt am Main where, according to historian Raymond Lohne, \u201che was one of about fifty conspirators involved in an attack upon the two main city guardhouses and the arsenal at the police facility and jail. This admixture of students and soldiers had planned to seize cannon, muskets, and ammunition; free political prisoners accused of breaking press-censorship laws, and begin ringing the great Sturmglocke (storm bell) of the Dom, the signal for the people to come in from the countryside. At that point, the democratic revolution would be announced\u2026. Unfortunately, they were walking into a trap\u2026. Betrayed by both a spy in their midst, and the reluctance of the common people to rise, nine students were killed, twenty-four were seriously wounded, and by August 3, 1833, Gustav K\u00f6rner found himself riding into downtown Belleville, Illinois.\u201d<\/p>\n

Within a decade, Korner would pass the Illinois bar, win election to the legislature and be appointed to the state Supreme Court. Korner and Lincoln formed an alliance that would become so close that the student revolutionary from Frankfurt would eventually be one of seven personal delegates-at-large named by Lincoln to serve at the critical Republican State Convention in May 1860, which propelled the Springfield lawyer into that year\u2019s presidential race. Through Korner, Lincoln met and befriended many of the German radicals who, after the failure of the 1848 revolution, fled to Illinois and neighboring Wisconsin. Along with Korner on Lincoln\u2019s list of personal delegates-at-large to the 1860 convention was Friedrich Karl Franz Hecker, a lawyer from Mannheim who had served as a liberal legislator in the lower chamber of the Baden State Assembly before leading an April 1848 uprising in the region\u2014an uprising cheered on by the newspaper Marx briefly edited during that turbulent period, Neue Rheinische Zeitung\u2014Organ der Demokratie.<\/p>\n

Thwarted by military forces loyal to the old order, Hecker fled first to Switzerland and then to Illinois, where he would join Lincoln in forging the new Republican Party and become a key speaker on his American ally\u2019s behalf in the 1858 Senate race that is remembered for the Lincoln-Douglas debates. With a commission from Lincoln, Hecker served as a brigade commander in the Union Army during the Civil War, as did a number of other \u201948ers.<\/p>\n

The failure of the 1848 revolts, and the brutal crackdowns that followed, led many leading European radicals to take refuge in the United States, and Lincoln\u2019s circle of supporters would eventually include some of Karl Marx\u2019s closest associates and intellectual sparring partners, including Joseph Weydemeyer and August Willich. Weydemeyer, who maintained a regular correspondence with Marx and Engels, soon formed a national network of Kommunisten Klubs to promote what the New York Times decried as \u201cRed Republicanism.\u201d Weydemeyer then allied with the new Republican Party and the presidential campaign of Abraham Lincoln, who would at the start of the Civil War appoint the former Prussian military officer as a technical aide on the staff of General John C. Fremont\u2014the 1856 Republican presidential nominee who became the commander of the army\u2019s Department of the West. Later, Lincoln issued Weydemeyer a commission as a colonel of the Forty-First Infantry Missouri Volunteers, charging the German Marxist with the defense of St. Louis. Willich, known as \u201cthe Reddest of the Reds,\u201d was a leader of the left faction of the German Communist League, which decried Marx\u2019s relative caution when it came to revolutionary agitation. As a key commander of the radical Free Corps in the Baden-Palatinate uprising of 1849, Willich chose as his aide-de-camp a young Friedrich Engels. Forced to flee to the United States after the defeat of the uprising, Willich decamped to Cincinnati, where he became editor of the socialist Republikaner newspaper and backed the candidacies of Fremont in 1856 and Lincoln in 1860. At the outset of the Civil War, Willich recruited a regiment of German immigrants and became its first lieutenant, quickly rising to the rank of brigadier general and making a name for himself by having military bands play revolutionary songs such as the \u201cArbiter [Workers\u2019] Marseillaise\u201d\u2014\u201cA reveille for the new revolution! The new revolution!\u201d<\/p>\n

Lincoln did not merely invite the \u201948ers to join his campaigns, he became highly engaged with their causes. As Lohne notes, \u201cLincoln was paying attention to these revolutionaries.\u201d In his hometown of Springfield, the former congressman rallied support for revolutionary movements in Europe, particularly the Hungarian revolt of Lajos Kossuth. Lincoln\u2019s name led the list of signatories on calls for public meetings to discuss the Hungarian revolt that appeared in the Illinois State Register and the Illinois Journal in January 1852. A week later, Lincoln helped to pen a resolution declaring that \u201cwe, the American people, cannot remain silent\u201d about \u201cthe right of any people, sufficiently numerous for national independence, to throw off, to revolutionize, their existing form of government, and to establish such other in its stead as they may choose.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lincoln\u2019s resolution argued:<\/p>\n

That the sympathies of this country, and the benefits of its position, should be exerted in favor of the people of every nation struggling to be free; and whilst we meet to do honor to Kossuth and Hungary, we should not fail to pour out the tribute of our praise and approbation to the patriotic efforts of the Irish, the Germans and the French, who have unsuccessfully fought to establish in their several governments the supremacy of the people. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The proclamation even took a shot at the British Empire, resolving:<\/p>\n

That there is nothing in the past history of the British government, or in its present expressed policy, to encourage the belief that she will aid, in any manner, in the delivery of continental Europe from the yoke of despotism; and that her treatment of Ireland, of O\u2019Brien, Mitchell, and other worthy patriots, forces the conclusion that she will join her efforts to the despots of Europe in suppressing every effort of the people to establish free governments, based upon the principles of true religious and civil liberty.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What set Lincoln and his compatriots off? There\u2019s no mystery. The Illinois agitators had merely to open their weekly editions of Greeley\u2019s Tribune, which was declaring at the time that \u201cof the many popular leaders who were upheaved by the great convulsions of 1848\u2026the world has already definitely assigned the first rank to Louis Kossuth, advocate, deputy, finance minister, and finally governor of Hungary.\u201d The great historian of the Tribune\u2019s ideological and political battles, Adam Tuchinsky, notes: \u201cLouis Kossuth and the Central European national liberation movements remained familiar subjects in the pages of the paper\u201d\u2014so much so that conservative critics of the gazette objected to its \u201cKossuthism, Socialism, Abolitionism and forty other isms.\u201d<\/p>\n

Greeley believed that 1848\u2019s European revolts and their aftermath revealed \u201cboundless vistas\u201d along with the outlines of the \u201cuprising which must come.\u201d Predictably, his paper covered the revolutionary ferment of Europe with an intensity that made it virtually a local story for radicals in places like Springfield, Illinois. They pored over their copies of theTribunefor the latest from the front in what the paper\u2019s editor portrayed as a global struggle for \u201cthe larger liberty\u201d of \u201cthe Rights and Interests of Labor, the Reorganization of Industry, the Elevation of the Working-Men, the Reconstruction of the Social Fabric.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Tribune did not urge a \u201cto-the-barricades\u201d moment for the United States. Greeley and most of his editors still believed in the prospect of reform, although their frustration with the spread of the evil they referred to as \u201cthe slave power\u201d would at times cause the paper\u2019s proprietor to ponder whether \u201crevolution is the only resource left.\u201d Ultimately, however, what most excited Greeley and his readers about the stirrings of 1848 were the new and radical ideas that had emerged, and the mingling of those ideas with action that might lead to their implementation.<\/p>\n

The Tribune\u2019s European correspondent in the early stages of the period of uprisings, Henry Bornstein, admitted in his columns that he was \u201cgiddy\u201d at the developments in France, Germany and other countries. \u201cEvery day comes fresh news, each thing more astonishing than the next,\u201d wrote Bornstein, who spiced his correspondence with exclamations such as: \u201cHurrah! How gaily it burns!\u201d The Tribune was not just publishing news, Greeley announced, it wanted analysis, \u201cto increase the aggregate of information afforded by our columns.\u201d Bornstein agreed, arguing: \u201cCorrespondents now have to talk about other topics besides political events because these topics are outdated. Now they have to provide the \u2018big picture\u2019 about what is going on in Europe. Explain the reason for events to supplement the dry telegraph reports.\u201d<\/p>\n

Correspondent Bornstein, notes Tuchinsky, was \u201cthe paper\u2019s link to Karl Marx and a more class-conscious radicalism that would emerge in Europe during the 1848 revolutions and in their aftermath.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Bornstein\u2019s \u201cbig picture\u201d reporting style\u2014which he would eventually bring to the United States as an astute observer of the Civil War\u2014was only the start of the Tribune\u2019s emergence as the primary source of detailed reporting on international events and ideas that would reshape the way American radicals and reformers thought about their own struggles, against slavery in particular and economic and social injustice in general. No longer satisfied with the pastoral reforms of Fourier and the romantic French communalists, the Tribune now considered more radical responses.<\/p>\n

\u201cUltimately, 1848 would unearth an immense variety of French and European radical discourse; as a result, the Tribune diversified its coverage of socialist ideas,\u201d explains Tuchinsky. \u201cBut more than that, socialism itself became not simply a mode of reform but also, significantly, of explanation, a way to interpret events. Fourierism was a sectarian movement, and it failed, but along with the revolution it cleared the way for a new language and a new political mentality through which American progressive intellectuals perceived and critiqued their social and political world.\u201d<\/p>\n

To understand and interpret that new language, Greeley dispatched a recent hire, Charles Dana, to Paris. An idealistic polymath, Dana had for several years in the mid-1840s been a central player in the Brook Farm Association for Industry and Education in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. A utopian experiment in communal living that sought to implement Fourier\u2019s ideals, Brook Farm counted among its residents, investors, supporters and allies Greeley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Alcotts and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote of the prospect that residents might be \u201cFourierized or Christianized or humanized,\u201d with the observation that \u201cin a day of small, sour, and fierce schemes, one is admonished and cheered by a project of such friendly aims, and of such bold and generous proportion; there is an intellectual courage and strength in it, which is superior and commanding: it certifies the presence of so much truth in the theory, and in so far is destined to be fact.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dana sought to spread the \u201cbuild-heaven-on-earth\u201d gospel in the Harbinger, a journal edited by Brook Farm founder (and future Tribune literary editor) George Ripley, where the younger man\u2019s writing skills came to Greeley\u2019s attention. Impressed with the twenty-nine-year-old wordsmith\u2019s intellect and style\u2014and also, perhaps, by the fact that the Harbinger hailed the \u201cindomitable Tribune\u201d as the nation\u2019s great newspaper\u2014Greeley began grooming Dana to be the Tribune\u2019s managing editor. But the prot\u00e9g\u00e9 had grander goals. \u201cDana longed to travel to Europe. More than that, like most members of the Tribune\u2019s socialist circle, Dana viewed the European revolutions as a historical turning point and he was anxious to witness them firsthand,\u201d observes Tuchinsky. In particular, he was looking for new notions that might propel the socialist discourse beyond the romantic \u201cassociationist\u201d thinking of Fourier\u2019s followers. Along with Greeley, Dana had just a few years earlier hailed Fourier\u2019s ideas as the \u201clast hope of Divine Providence\u201d on earth; now, however, he was anticipating the moment when reformers and radicals would \u201cyield to necessity\u201d and recognize that the \u201charmonious\u201d agrarian ideal must give way to the barn-burner battle cry of \u201cFree soil, free labor, free speech, free men.\u201d<\/p>\n

Leaving New York in June 1848, Dana arrived in France just in time to race into the thick of the Parisian turmoil. He penned an immediate report that declared he was witnessing \u201ca glorious chance to do something immortal.\u201d While the calculus of how the immortal leap might be made remained indefinite, the ideological impulse was, to Dana\u2019s view, certain. \u201cSocialism is thus not conquered nor obscured in France by [the turmoil] but strengthened. It is no longer Fourierism, nor Communism, nor this nor that particular system which occupies the public mind of France, but it is the general idea of Social Rights and Social Reorganization. Everyone now is more or less a Socialist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dana\u2019s small-\u201cc\u201d catholic approach to the ideological divisions on the ground in Europe allowed him to sample freely from the different streams, to consult broadly and to keep American readers abreast of what seemed to the young writer to be a continent-wide struggle to throw off \u201cthe royalty of money\u2026the aristocracy of capital.\u201d Still clinging to at least some of his Fourierist ideals, Dana inclined toward the libertarian socialist preachments of the French philosopher and parliamentarian Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who argued for the establishment of workingmen\u2019s associations around a \u201crevolutionary program\u201d of \u201cNo more governments, no more conquests, no more international police, no more commercial privileges, no more colonial exclusions, no more control of one people by another, one State by another, no more strategic lines, no more fortresses\u2026.\u201d In particular, Dana was inspired to turn the Tribune, which had traditionally been friendly toward trade unionism, into an even more explicit advocate for organized labor, arguing editorially that: \u201cwe see no other mode in which Labor can protect itself against the overwhelming power of Capital than by this very method of Combination.\u201d Lincoln, the voracious Tribune reader, would frequently express such sympathies, not merely in debates and State of the Union addresses but in direct communications to labor groups. To the New York Workingmen\u2019s Association, the sitting president would in 1864 observe: \u201cThe strongest bond of human sympathy, outside of the family relation, should be one uniting all working people, of all nations, and tongues, and kindreds.\u201d<\/p>\n

But even as he was busy popularizing Proudhonist cures for the ailments of capital\u2014especially the project of creating a popular bank (\u201cbanque du peuple\u201d) with the purpose of freeing up credit for workers and farmers\u2014Dana was searching for new correspondents for Greeley\u2019s paper. In particular, he wanted to identify radical thinkers who could interpret for American readers not just the transitory developments in Germany, France, Holland or Hungary but also the social, economic and political currents that might resolve the great challenge that theTribuneoutlined in an editorial of the era: \u201c[While] no theorist has yet truly solved the great problem of the harmonious and beneficent combination of Labor, Skill and Capital, it is none the less palpable that the problem must be solved, and that Society fearfully suffers while awaiting the solution.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this search for \u201calternative strains of socialist thought,\u201d Dana made his way to the city of Cologne, where a friend of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath, was working with a radical paper that intrigued the American visitor. The editor of the paper had recently coauthored a much-circulated German-language pamphlet, Das Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, which argued: \u201cThe essential condition for the existence and rule of the bourgeois class is the accumulation of wealth in private hands, the formation and increase of capital; the essential condition of capital is wage-labor. Wage-labor rests entirely on the competition among the workers.\u201d To upset that condition, the writers had declared in February of 1848 for a \u201cCommunistic revolution\u201d with the words: \u201cThe proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of the world, unite!\u201d<\/p>\n

The pamphlet would be translated two years later into English as The Communist Manifesto. The editor in question was, of course, Karl Marx, with whom Dana spent a midsummer day in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung\u2014Organ der Demokratie office. Neither Dana nor Marx recorded the details of the meeting, although we are afforded a sense of the man the American writer encountered from a mutual acquaintance, Carl Schurz, the German editor and revolutionary who would flee to Wisconsin, help to form the Republican Party and return to Europe in 1861 as Abraham Lincoln\u2019s ambassador to Spain. Visiting Marx during the same long, hot summer of 1848, Schurz observed \u201cthe recognized head of the advanced socialistic school. The somewhat thickset man, with his broad forehead, his very black hair and beard and his dark sparkling eyes. I have never seen a man whose bearing was so provoking and intolerable. To no opinion which differed from his, he accorded the honor of even a condescending consideration. Everyone who contradicted him he treated with abject contempt; every argument that he did not like he answered either with biting scorn at the unfathomable ignorance that had prompted it, or with opprobrious aspersions upon the motives of him who had advanced it. I remember most distinctly the cutting disdain with which he pronounced the word \u2018bourgeois.\u2019\u201d Somehow, Dana and Marx connected. Indeed, they hit it off so famously that Dana would, according to Marx\u2019s biographer Francis Wheen, provide the philosopher with \u201cthe closest thing he ever had to a steady job.\u201d<\/p>\n

That job was as one of the most frequently published correspondents for the New York Tribune, with which Dana served a dozen years as managing editor. After Dana returned to New York to take up his new duties, he contacted Marx in London, where he had been forced to flee after German authorities shuttered the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, with an invitation to begin writing for the Tribune. And write Marx did. As Wheen notes, \u201cThe Tribune was by far the largest publisher of Marx\u2019s (and to a lesser extent, Engels\u2019s) work\u2026. The Tribune articles take up nearly seven volumes of the fifty-volume collected works of Marx and Engels\u2014more than Capital, more than any work published by Marx, alive or posthumously, in book form.\u201d The \u201csingular collaboration\u201d between Greeley\u2019s paper and Marx continued from the early 1850s until the time of Dana\u2019s departure to join Lincoln\u2019s White House staff. \u201cDuring this period,\u201d according to historian William Harlan Hale\u2019s masterly examination of the relationship, \u201cEurope\u2019s extremest radical, proscribed by the Prussian police and watched over by its agents abroad as a potential assassin of kings, sent in well over 500 separate contributions to the great New York family newspaper dedicated to the support of Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, temperance, dietary reform, Going West, and, ultimately, Abraham Lincoln.\u201d The official count of articles published by the Tribune under Marx\u2019s byline was 350, while Engels wrote 125 and the duo produced 12 together. But, as the philosopher himself noted, many more articles ended up running as the official line of the Tribune. \u201cOf late, the Tribune has again been appropriating all my articles as leaders [unsigned editorials],\u201d Marx complained in 1854.<\/p>\n

Even if Marx did not always get the credit he thought he deserved (and what ink-stained wretch does?), Dana was unstinting in his praise. \u201cIt may perhaps give you pleasure to know that [the articles] are read with satisfaction by a considerable number of persons and are widely reproduced,\u201d the editor wrote Marx, describing the correspondent as \u201cnot only one of the most highly valued, but one of the best-paid contributors attached to the newspaper.\u201d<\/p>\n

Greeley and Dana were so excited about Marx\u2019s contributions, in fact, that they showcased the German\u2019s first article in the paper\u2019s newly expanded Saturday edition on October 25, 1851. An editorial announced that among the \u201carticles from\u2026foreign contributors that are especially worthy of attention [was a rumination] upon Germany by one of the clearest and most vigorous writers that country has produced\u2014no matter what may be the judgment of the critical upon his public opinions in the sphere of political and social philosophy.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201cworthy\u201d article, \u201cRevolution and Counter-Revolution,\u201d appeared over the byline \u201cKarl Marx\u201d (even though it was actually a collaboration written largely by Engels). The language was, well, Marxist:<\/p>\n

The first act of the revolutionary drama on the continent of Europe has closed. The \u201cpowers that were\u201d before the hurricane of 1848 are again the \u201cpowers that be,\u201d and the more or less popular rulers of a day, provisional governors, triumvirs, dictators with their tail of representatives, civil commissioners, military commissioners, prefects, judges, generals, officers, and soldiers, are thrown upon foreign shores, and \u201ctransported beyond the seas\u201d to England or America, there to form new governments in partibus infidelium, European committees, central committees, national committees, and to announce their advent with proclamations quite as solemn as those of any less imaginary potentates. A more signal defeat than that undergone by the continental revolutionary party\u2014or rather parties\u2014upon all points of the line of battle, cannot be imagined. But what of that? Has not the struggle of the British middle classes for their social and political supremacy embraced forty-eight, that of the French middle classes forty years of unexampled struggles? And was their triumph ever nearer than at the very moment when restored monarchy thought itself more firmly settled than ever? The times of that superstition which attributed revolutions to the ill-will of a few agitators have long passed away. Everyone knows nowadays that wherever there is a revolutionary convulsion, there must be some social want in the background, which is prevented, by outworn institutions, from satisfying itself. The want may not yet be felt as strongly, as generally, as might ensure immediate success; but every attempt at forcible repression will only bring it forth stronger and stronger, until it bursts its fetters. If, then, we have been beaten, we have nothing else to do but to begin again from the beginning. And, fortunately, the probably very short interval of rest which is allowed us between the close of the first and the beginning of the second act of the movement, gives us time for a very necessary piece of work: the study of the causes that necessitated both the late outbreak and its defeat; causes that are not to be sought for in the accidental efforts, talents, faults, errors, or treacheries of some of the leaders, but in the general social state and conditions of existence of each of the convulsed nations. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It happened that Marx\u2019s article appeared at a time of \u201cbeginning again from the beginning\u201d for a great many American radicals. The Whig Party, with which Greeley, Lincoln and compatriots of like mind had aligned themselves, was collapsing under the weight of its internal divisions between those who believed in aggressively confronting the spread of the \u201cslave power\u201d and more cautious reformers. Lincoln, who with Greeley had left the Congress in 1849, was practicing law in Springfield and on \u201cthe circuit\u201d of county courthouses in Illinois. But he had not left politics behind. William Herndon observed years later that his law partner was in the early years of the 1850s \u201clike a sleeping lion\u2026waiting for the people to call.\u201d Biographer John Waugh writes of a future president who \u201cwith this tightly disciplined, deeply honed mind he read what he really considered important\u2014newspapers. Now, on the circuit, out of politics, he was reading newspapers more than anything else, reading them aloud, carefully following the rise and drift of political sentiment over the divisive issue of slavery\u2014reading them more closely, [fellow lawyer] Henry Whitney thought, than anybody he knew.\u201d<\/p>\n

Slavery was an omnipresent issue, but surely not the only issue for Lincoln, whose circle of close compatriots now included a number of the radical \u201948ers who had turned Wisconsin, Illinois and Missouri into new hubs of agitation. Lincoln watched international developments with frustration following the setbacks of the late 1840s and early 1850s, bemoaning in a letter to Herndon his sense that \u201cthe world is dead to hope, deaf to its own death struggle made known by a universal cry. What is to be done? Is anything to be done? Who can do anything and how can it be done? Did you ever think on these things?\u201d<\/p>\n

While studies of Lincoln place appropriate focus on his domestic engagements, there has been far too little attention paid to his global interests, especially during the period \u201cin the wilderness\u201d between the end of his congressional term and his return to the political stage. Yet, there can be no doubt that the future president was conscious of and highly engaged with developments in foreign lands\u2014thanks no doubt to his close reading of the Tribune and its most prominent European correspondent\u2014or that the future president made connections between what he read of distant divisions and what he thought about developments at home. Eulogizing his political hero Henry Clay in 1852, Lincoln would make frequent reference to Clay\u2019s international interests and involvements, declaring: \u201cMr. Clay\u2019s efforts in behalf of the South Americans, and afterwards, in behalf of the Greeks, in the times of their respective struggles for civil liberty are among the finest on record, upon the noblest of all themes; and bear ample corroboration of what I have said was his ruling passion\u2014a love of liberty and right, unselfishly, and for their own sakes.\u201d Lincoln invoked the struggles of the European revolutionaries and denounced \u201coppression of any of its forms\u2026crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings.\u201d He dismissed the rhetoric of his arch-rival, Illinois senator Stephen Douglas, finding it \u201cas bombastic and hollow as Napoleon\u2019s bulletins sent back from his campaign in Russia.\u201d And when Douglas compromised on the issue of allowing the spread of slavery to new territories, he declared: \u201cEquality in society alike beats inequality, whether the latter be of the British aristocratic sort or of the domestic slavery sort.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lincoln was arguably at his most radical when he penned those words in 1854. The man whose law partner described him as \u201calways calculating, and always planning\u201d would grow more circumspect as he proceeded from the political backwater of Springfield to the podium at New York\u2019s Cooper Union and the prospect of the presidency. In the immediate aftermath of Douglas\u2019s betrayal, however, Lincoln\u2019s language bore the distinct accent of Greeley\u2019s Tribune and its most radical writers.<\/p>\n

When Lincoln emerged in 1854 from his self-imposed political exile, it was with the intention of doing electoral battle not just with slavery but with those who stood in the way of the free soil and free labor movements the Tribune had popularized. \u201cFree labor has the inspiration of hope; pure slavery has no hope,\u201d declared the future president in one of his frequent linkages of ideological mantras. As he returned to politics, initially as a campaigner for old Whigs and new Republicans, and then as a contender in his own right for the Senate, Lincoln echoed the ideals and language of the era\u2019s fresh and determined radicalism. This is not to say that he embraced all the views of the Tribune\u2019s European correspondent; he was never so bold as to argue, in the way that Marx would in Capital\u2014a book that borrowed liberally from his writings for the Tribune\u2014that \u201cin the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralyzed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.\u201d<\/p>\n

But, now \u201cprimed\u201d by what his biographer Waugh describes as \u201call of his newspaper reading\u2026all of his study and thinking and analyzing for all those five cheerless politically deprived years,\u201d Lincoln recognized that the most radical promise of America\u2019s founding\u2014that \u201call men are created equal\u201d\u2014was being destroyed in a manner that would thwart progress not merely for Black slaves, but for white workers and farmers who sought their own freedoms. In his remarkable letter of August 15, 1855, to former Kentucky congressman George Robertson, a compatriot of Henry Clay and champion of the old-school Whig hope that slavery would gradually be abandoned, the forty-six-year-old Illinoisan would bemoan the dying of the Founders\u2019 faith. Recalling an address delivered decades earlier by Robertson, Lincoln wrote:<\/p>\n

You are not a friend of slavery in the abstract. In that speech you spoke of \u201cthe peaceful extinction of slavery\u201d and used other expressions indicating your belief that the thing was, at some time, to have an end[.] Since then we have had thirty-six years of experience; and this experience has demonstrated, I think, that there is no peaceful extinction of slavery in prospect for us. The signal failure of Henry Clay, and other good and great men, in 1849, to effect any thing in favor of gradual emancipation in Kentucky, together with a thousand other signs, extinguishes that hope utterly. On the question of liberty, as a principle, we are not what we have been. When we were the political slaves of King George, and wanted to be free, we called the maxim that \u201call men are created equal\u201d a self-evident truth; but now when we have grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves, we have become so greedy to be masters that we call the same maxim \u201ca self-evident lie.\u201d The fourth of July has not quite dwindled away; it is still a great day\u2014for burning fire-crackers!!!<\/p>\n

That spirit which desired the peaceful extinction of slavery, has itself become extinct, with the occasion, and the men of the Revolution. Under the impulse of that occasion, nearly half the states adopted systems of emancipation at once; and it is a significant fact, that not a single state has done the like since. So far as peaceful, voluntary emancipation is concerned, the condition of the negro slave in America, scarcely less terrible to the contemplation of a free mind, is now as fixed, and hopeless of change for the better, as that of the lost souls of the finally impenitent. The Autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown, and proclaim his subjects free republicans sooner than will our American masters voluntarily give up their slaves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The letter to Robertson was composed during a period in which Lincoln was arguing to his law partner, William Herndon, that \u201cthe day of compromise has passed. These two great ideas (slavery and freedom) have been kept apart only by artful means. They are like two wild beasts in sight of each other, but chained and apart. Some day these deadly antagonists will one of the other break their bonds, and then the question will be settled.\u201d What did Lincoln mean when he spoke of freedom as a great idea that stood in conflict with slavery? Was he merely addressing the condition of those physically enslaved by the southern plantation owners\u2014and the political and legal structures that supported them? Or was he speaking of a broader freedom? The answer is found in the records of Lincoln\u2019s public addresses from the time.<\/p>\n

While much is made of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas first contended in a series of dialogues prior to the election of 1854, which saw Lincoln return to the campaign trail with an energy and earnestness not seen since he made his House race eight years earlier. In the months after Douglas reopened the slavery question with his advocacy of the hated Kansas-Nebraska Act, the sitting senator and Lincoln, the former congressman who suddenly wanted very much to be a senator, clashed rhetorically in cities up and down Illinois. The speeches that Lincoln delivered that fall\u2014several lasting more than three hours\u2014wrestled mightily with the meaning of words such as \u201cequality,\u201d \u201cliberty\u201d and \u201cfreedom.\u201d At Peoria, he tossed his jacket aside on an uncommonly hot October day and delivered an address that Lincoln historian Lewis Lehrman would describe as \u201ca rhetorical and literary masterpiece\u201d that \u201cdramatically altered the political career of the speaker and, as a result, the history of America.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

A young journalist who covered the session in Peoria recalled both the words and the remarkable passion with which they were uttered. \u201cProgressing with his theme, his words began to come faster and his face to light up with the rays of genius and his body to move in unison with his thoughts,\u201d wrote Horace White, the city editor of the Chicago Daily Journal. \u201cHis gestures were made with his body and head rather than with his arms. His speaking went to the heart because it came from the heart. I have heard celebrated orators who could start thunders of applause without changing any man\u2019s opinion. Mr. Lincoln\u2019s eloquence was of the higher type, which produced conviction in others because of the conviction of the speaker himself. His listeners felt that he believed every word he said, and that, like Martin Luther, he would go to the stake rather than abate one jot or title of it. In such transfigured moments as these he was the type of the ancient Hebrew prophet as I learned that character at Sunday-school in my childhood.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Lincoln on that day may have been of \u201cthe type of the ancient Hebrew prophet,\u201d the \u201cbiblical\u201d text to which he turned was not the Old Testament, nor the New. He was relying instead on Euclid\u2019s Elements, the philosophical study the former congressman had read and reread during his wilderness years, honing the logical constructs that would less than a decade later prepare him to deliver his best remembered address on a blood-soaked battlefield where the Army of the Potomac and the army of Northern Virginia had over the course of three days sacrificed a combined 7,500 soldiers. As he would in those \u201cfew appropriate remarks\u201d at Gettysburg about a country \u201cdedicated to the proposition that \u2018all men are created equal,\u2019\u201d Lincoln at Peoria summoned ancient algorithms\u2014and more contemporary rhetorical flourishes\u2014to identify the greatest common divisor of a young republic. It was in Jefferson\u2019s promise of a great equality that the debater of 1854 and the president of 1863 would find his moral grounding.<\/p>\n

Little by little, but steadily as man\u2019s march to the grave, we have been giving up the OLD for the NEW faith. Near eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for SOME men to enslave OTHERS is a \u201csacred right of self-government.\u201d These principles cannot stand together. They are as opposite as God and Mammon; and whoever holds to the one, must despise the other. When Pettit, in connection with his support of the Nebraska bill, called the Declaration of Independence \u201ca self-evident lie\u201d he only did what consistency and candor require all other Nebraska men to do. Of the forty-odd Nebraska Senators who sat present and heard him, no one rebuked him. Nor am I apprized that any Nebraska newspaper, or any Nebraska orator, in the whole nation, has ever yet rebuked him. If this had been said among Marion\u2019s men, Southerners though they were, what would have become of the man who said it? If this had been said to the men who captured Andre, the man who said it, would probably have been hung sooner than Andre was. If it had been said in old Independence Hall, seventy-eight years ago, the very doorkeeper would have throttled the man, and thrust him into the street.<\/p>\n

Let no one be deceived. The spirit of seventy-six and the spirit of Nebraska, are utter antagonisms; and the former is being rapidly displaced by the latter.<\/p>\n

Fellow countrymen\u2014Americans south, as well as north, shall we make no effort to arrest this? Already the liberal party throughout the world, express the apprehension \u201cthat the one retrograde institution in America, is undermining the principles of progress, and fatally violating the noblest political system the world ever saw.\u201d This is not the taunt of enemies, but the warning of friends. Is it quite safe to disregard it\u2014to despise it? Is there no danger to liberty itself, in discarding the earliest practice, and first precept of our ancient faith? In our greedy chase to make profit of the negro, let us beware, lest we \u201ccancel and tear to pieces\u201d even the white man\u2019s charter of freedom.<\/p>\n

Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution. Let us turn slavery from its claims of \u201cmoral right,\u201d back upon its existing legal rights, and its arguments of \u201cnecessity.\u201d Let us return it to the position our fathers gave it; and there let it rest in peace. Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. Let north and south\u2014let all Americans\u2014let all lovers of liberty everywhere\u2014join in the great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving. We shall have so saved it, that the succeeding millions of free happy people, the world over, shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generations.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

While Lincoln may have recognized a need to \u201crepurify,\u201d he was not himself ideologically or morally pure. The man who as president would stand justifiably accused of mangling civil liberties, disregarding the aspirations and basic humanity of Native Americans and willingly sacrificing principle on the alter of political expediency had learned too well from his fellow Whig Henry Clay, \u201cthe great compromiser.\u201d Lincoln was an imperfect foe of slavery, as even his most generous biographers now acknowledge. Yet, it is reasonable to suggest that the Lincoln of 1854 was in the process of becoming the president who would\u2014pressured by Greeley\u2014finally sign an Emancipation Proclamation. What he was coming to understand, intellectually and emotionally, was that slavery was an oppression of a kind with other oppressions. And he was not on the side of the oppressors. He was on the side of freedom\u2014not merely as a moral or social construct, but as an economic one.<\/p>\n

This was a concept that was hardwired into the Republican Party from the moment of its founding\u2014by followers of Fourier\u2019s utopian socialist vision, by German \u201948ers and especially by the muscular veteran campaigner for radical land reform Alvan Bovay. It was an idea that Lincoln emphasized as he campaigned in 1856 for \u201cFree Soil, Free Labor, Free Men and Fremont.\u201d Slavery was an issue that year, and Frederick Douglass was surely right when he argued that voting Republican was the best way to strike \u201cthe severest, deadliest blow upon Slavery that can be given at this particular time.\u201d But slavery was not the only issue, as a southern Illinois newspaper, the Belleville Weekly Advocate, noted after Lincoln stumped across the region on behalf of the ticket of General John C. Fremont and former New Jersey senator William Dayton (who had defeated Lincoln for the new party\u2019s vice-presidential nomination in a 253 to 110 vote at the first Republican National Convention that summer in Philadelphia). \u201cHe vindicated the cause of free vlabor, \u2018that national capital,\u2019 in the language of Col. FREMONT, \u2018which constitutes the real wealth of this great country, and creates that intelligent power in the masses alone to be relied on as the bulwark of free institutions.\u2019 He showed the tendency and aim of the Sham Democracy to degrade labor to subvert the true ends of Government and build up Aristocracy, Despotism and Slavery.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two years later, on October 15, 1858, in the last of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the Republican candidate would frame the issues in the boldest possible terms, linking physical and economic slavery\u2014\u201cIt is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself \u201d\u2014as he addressed a crowd of 5,000 that had gathered in front of the Alton, Illinois, city hall. \u201cThat is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles\u2014right and wrong\u2014 throughout the world,\u201d Lincoln thundered. \u201cThey are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, \u2018You work and toil and earn bread, and I\u2019ll eat it.\u2019 No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.\u201d<\/p>\n

As he prepared for the 1860 presidential race, Lincoln would align with those who \u201chold that labor is the superior\u2014greatly the superior\u2014of capital.\u201d That line, from one of Lincoln\u2019s most striking speeches of the period, his September 30, 1859, address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, was reprised with minor variations throughout the difficult campaign for the Republican nomination. It was a nomination that saw Lincoln prevail with strong support from Greeley, who argued that the Illinoisan\u2019s determination to mingle free soil and free labor messages with his condemnations of \u201cthe Slave Power\u201d established the right mix for a winning campaign in a country that the editor believed \u201cwill only swallow a little Anti-Slavery in a great deal of sweetening.\u201d Whether it was Greeley\u2019s calculus, the fact of a divided opposition, Lincoln\u2019s oratory or Carl Schurz\u2019s successful rallying of German-American \u201948ers and their immigrant communities to fight the \u201cslaveholding capitalists\u201d on behalf of a \u201csociety, where by popular education and continual change of condition, the dividing lines between the ranks and classes are almost obliterated\u201d\u2014or, as is always the case in politics, by a proper mingling of all the messages\u2014the Republicans won the opportunity to preside over the conflict.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Republicans therefore attacked the rule of the slaveholders at their root,\u201d argued Marx in one of his many articles celebrating the rise of the new radical party in the United States\u2014just as he decried \u201cthe connivance of the Northern Democrats\u201d (or, as he referred to them, \u201cSlavocrats\u201d) with \u201cthe Southern Slavocracy.\u201d The columnist, often displaying enthusiasms as idealistic as the Republican campaigners of Vermont or Wisconsin, argued that the party\u2019s rapid rise offered \u201cmany palpable proofs that the North had accumulated sufficient energies to rectify the aberrations which United States history, under the slaveholders\u2019 pressure, had undergone for half a century, and to make it return to the true principles of its development.\u201d Lincoln\u2019s victory was in Marx\u2019s view a signal that the workers of the north would not \u201csubmit any longer to an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders.\u201d That would not sit well with the south, and Greeley\u2019s European correspondent explained to readers of the Tribune what they well knew to be the next stage in the history of the United States: \u201cThe Republican election victory was accordingly bound to lead to open struggle between North and South.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Civil War defined Lincoln\u2019s tenure in the White House. The nation\u2019s first Republican president was more than a mere warrior, however. He sought, sincerely if not always successfully, to strike the difficult balance between the duties of a commander in chief and a domestic policy maker, a balance he recognized in that first State of the Union address. Just as there were triumphs on the battlefield, there were triumphs in the economic debates that Lincoln had outlined. Chief among these was the enactment of the Homestead Act of 1862, a soft version of the land reforms proposed by Paine-influenced agrarian socialists and social democrats of varying stripes\u2014led by George Henry Evans, who suggested the movement be dubbed \u201cRepublican\u201d as early as the mid-1840s, and Evans\u2019s aide, Bovay, who would apply the name a decade later when he called the party into being at Ripon, Wisconsin. The act, which promised \u201cland for the landless,\u201d allowed any adult citizen (or anyone who had applied for citizenship) to claim a 160-acre parcel of land in the public domain. Greeley hailed it as \u201cone of the most vital reforms ever attempted\u201d and predicted it would usher in a postwar era of economic equity characterized by \u201cPeace, Prosperity and Progress.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even as they agreed on homesteading, Greeley and Lincoln wrangled over the timing and scope of an emancipation proclamation. The editor joined Frederick Douglass in demanding that the president take steps to make the Civil War not merely a struggle to preserve the Union, but \u201can Abolition war.\u201d Even as Greeley and Lincoln exchanged sometimes pointed letters, the Tribune\u2019s longtime managing editor Charles Dana was now working for Lincoln. Officially assigned to the War Department\u2014where he would eventually serve as assistant secretary\u2014Dana\u2019s real role was as an aide and adviser to the president on questions of what the former newspaperman described as the \u201cjudicious, humane, and wise uses of executive authority.\u201d That Lincoln spent much of his presidency reading dispatches from and welcoming the counsel of Marx\u2019s longtime editor\u2014like the fact that he awarded military commissions to the numerous comrades of the author of The Communist Manifesto who had come to the United States as political refugees following the failed European revolutions of 1848\u2014is a shard of history rarely seen in the hagiographic accounts that produce a sanitized version of the sixteenth president\u2019s story. In the years following Lincoln\u2019s death, his law partner and political comrade, William Herndon, complained that Lincoln\u2019s official biographers were already attempting \u201cto make the story with the classes as against the masses,\u201d an approach that he suggested \u201cwill result in delineating the real Lincoln about as well as does a wax figure in the museum.\u201d<\/p>\n

The real Lincoln was more of a Jeffersonian, and especially a Paineite, than an orthodox Marxist. The president rejected the idea of \u201ca law to prevent a man from getting rich\u201d as an impractical plan that would \u201cdo more harm than good.\u201d He expected that, while labor was \u201csuperior\u201d to capital, there \u201cprobably always will be a relation between labor and capital.\u201d But if he was something less than a Marxist, Lincoln was also something less than a laissez-faire capitalist\u2014indeed, quite a bit less. Even as he accepted a relationship between capital and labor, he expounded on the \u201cerror\u201d of \u201cassuming that the whole labor of the world exists within that relation.\u201d<\/p>\n

To the extent that sides were to be taken, Lincoln was on the side of labor. He urged working men to \u201ccombine\u201d and organize labor unions\u2014\u201cuniting all working people, of all nations, and tongues, and kindreds.\u201d He wanted \u201cfree labor\u201d to be able to make demands on capital, without apology or compromise. He proposed this, not as a young man in a \u201cradical phase,\u201d but as the president of the United States. And he said as much when leaders of the New York Workingmen\u2019s Democratic-Republican Association arrived at the White House in March 1864, to inform the president that they had elected him as an honorary member of their organization. Lincoln \u201cgratefully accepted\u201d the membership, read the attending paperwork and then responded appreciatively to his visitors: \u201cYou comprehend, as your address shows, that the existing rebellion means more, and tends to more, than the perpetuation of African Slavery\u2014that it is, in fact, a war upon the rights of all working people. Partly to show that this view has not escaped my attention, and partly that I cannot better express myself, I read a passage from the Message to Congress in December 1861.\u201d<\/p>\n

Having recalled his declarations about the superiority of labor, Lincoln spent a good deal more time with the Workingmen, despite a busy schedule that placed on his shoulders all the weight of decisions regarding the war and an impending re-election campaign. The campaign would see Lincoln\u2019s supporters distribute handbills in working-class wards of New York and other cities, arguing that the war was a fight not just to free slaves in the south but to free workers in the north from \u201cSlave Wages.\u201d The most ardent abolitionists, such as Frederick Douglass, had always reasoned that: \u201cLiberty to the slave is peace, honor, and prosperity to the country.\u201d But now this message was becoming central to the appeal of Lincoln\u2019s campaign to voters in the swing states that would decide whether the president could see the war through to \u201can Abolition peace\u201d characterized by \u201cliberty for all, chains for none.\u201d Emancipation, argued Lincoln\u2019s supporters, would allow African Americans in the south to \u201cdemand wages that would allow them to live in a decent manner, and therefore would help the poor white man to put up the price of labor instead of putting it down as [slavery does] now.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLet the workingman think of this and go to the polls and vote for Abraham Lincoln, who is the true democratic candidate, and not the representative of the English Aristocracy, or their form of government, to be rid of which so many have left their native shores, and which form the leaders of the Rebellion are in favor of, in evidence of which we have the fact that in many of the Southern States no people can hold office but a property holder\u2026\u201d went one leaflet\u2019s class-based appeal, which was critical to building the majority that would allow Lincoln to carry New York and retain the presidency with a decisive national landslide.<\/p>\n

From afar, Marx (who corresponded with Dana and other American compatriots during and after the war) cheered on the campaign, writing to Engels in September 1864 with considerable enthusiasm: \u201cShould Lincoln succeed this time\u2014as is highly probable\u2014it will be on a far more radical platform and in completely changed circumstances.\u201d<\/p>\n

Marx and Engels had been busy in the fall of 1864 with the work of organizing the International Workingmen\u2019s Association\u2014the \u201cFirst International\u201d of the communist movement and its allies on the left. At the meeting on November 19 of the International\u2019s general council in London, Marx presented a letter of congratulation to Lincoln, which the council endorsed. It read:<\/p>\n

Sir: We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.<\/p>\n

From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?<\/p>\n

When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, \u201cslavery\u201d on the banner of Armed Revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on those very spots counter-revolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding \u201cthe ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old constitution,\u201d and maintained slavery to be \u201ca beneficent institution,\u201d indeed, the old solution of the great problem of \u201cthe relation of capital to labor,\u201d and cynically proclaimed property in man \u201cthe cornerstone of the new edifice\u201d\u2014then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders\u2019 rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the pro-slavery intervention of their betters\u2014and, from most parts of Europe, contributed their quota of blood to the good cause.<\/p>\n

While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.<\/p>\n

The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The letter was duly delivered to Charles Francis Adams, Sr., the grandson of John and son of John Quincy, who had since the beginning of the war served in the delicate capacity of Lincoln\u2019s ambassador to the Court of St. James. Adams was well acquainted with Marx. A Greeley man, who would campaign for the vice presidency in 1872 on a \u201cLiberal Republican\u201d ticket led by the editor, he had been the subject of glowing accounts by Marx in theTribunesince his arrival in London in 1861. His own son and private secretary, Henry, after attending \u201ca democratic and socialistic meeting\u201d organized by Marx and Engels, had reported approvingly to Washington that the speakers emphasized \u201cthat their interests and those of the American Union were one, that the success of free institutions in America was a political question of deep consequence in England and that they would not tolerate any interference unfavorable to the north.\u201d Marx, Engels and their comrades suggested the great-grandson of one American president and the grandson of another were among the best friends that Lincoln and the Union cause had in London.<\/p>\n

The senior Adams dispatched the letter from Marx and the leaders of the First International in a packet of diplomatic correspondence that was delivered to the State Department in Washington. Secretary of State William Seward promptly replied that \u201cthese interesting papers have been submitted to the president.\u201d Seward then communicated Lincoln\u2019s response, which Adams in turn delivered to Marx and his comrades:<\/p>\n

\u201cI am directed to inform you that the address of the Central Council of your Association, which was duly transmitted through this Legation to the President of the United [States], has been received by him,\u201d began Adams. He went on: <\/p>\n

So far as the sentiments expressed by it are personal, they are accepted by him with a sincere and anxious desire that he may be able to prove himself not unworthy of the confidence which has been recently extended to him by his fellow citizens and by so many of the friends of humanity and progress throughout the world.<\/p>\n

The Government of the United States has a clear consciousness that its policy neither is nor could be reactionary, but at the same time it adheres to the course which it adopted at the beginning, of abstaining everywhere from propagandism and unlawful intervention. It strives to do equal and exact justice to all states and to all men and it relies upon the beneficial results of that effort for support at home and for respect and good will throughout the world.<\/p>\n

Nations do not exist for themselves alone, but to promote the welfare and happiness of mankind by benevolent intercourse and example. It is in this relation that the United States regard their cause in the present conflict with slavery, maintaining insurgence as the cause of human nature, and they derive new encouragements to persevere from the testimony of the workingmen of Europe that the national attitude is favored with their enlightened approval and earnest sympathies.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Marx was thrilled by \u201cthe fact that Lincoln answered us so courteously,\u201d as he was with the rejection of \u201creactionary\u201d policies and the expression of solidarity with \u201cthe friends of humanity and progress throughout the world.\u201d No fool, the philosopher recognized, as he wrote during the war, that \u201cLincoln\u2019s principal political actions contain much that is aesthetically repulsive, logically inadequate, farcical in form and politically, contradictory.\u201d He did not imagine the president as a revolutionary, let alone a likely recruit to the International. Yet he was inclined to believe, based on his many years of following and commenting upon the economic and political struggles of the United States, that the American erred to the left, and he was certain that \u201cLincoln\u2019s place in the history of the United States and of mankind will, nevertheless, be next to that of Washington!\u201d As such, the organizer in him delighted in the broad reporting of the exchange between the International and the Lincoln White House, which was featured news in the Times of London, along with other British and American papers. \u201cThe difference between Lincoln\u2019s answer to us and to the bourgeoisie [anti-slavery groups that had also written the president] has created such a sensation here that the West End \u2018clubs\u2019 are shaking their heads at it,\u201d Marx informed Engels. \u201cYou can understand how gratifying that has been for our people.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the decades following Lincoln\u2019s assassination, the story of his exchange with the First International was well known and often recounted. Eugene Victor Debs would stop his 1908 presidential campaign train\u2014\u201cThe Red Special\u201d\u2014in Springfield to deliver a celebratory address at Lincoln\u2019s grave. Years later, in the midst of another presidential campaign, Debs would argue that \u201cThe Republican Party was once red. Lincoln was a revolutionary.\u201d It is indisputable that the Republican Party had at its founding a red streak. And it is arguable that the party\u2019s first president was a radical; his great struggle, rooted in the ideals of the founding, was for \u201ca new birth of freedom\u201d that would be aptly characterized by the historian Charles Beard as the \u201cSecond American Revolution, and in a strict sense, the First.\u201d The fight, Lincoln argued at Gettysburg, was waged to give meaning to the founding promise that \u201call men are created equal.\u201d This did not, as some of the more excitable revisionists of the 1930s imagined, make Lincoln a communist. The man who clung so tightly in his Gettysburg Address to the Enlightenment visions that birthed the nation kept the faith in \u201cthat continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found\u201d\u2014as the plaque on display for more than a century near the great Lincoln statue on the University of Wisconsin campus describes it. Lincoln was not a Marxist, but the first Republican president belonged to a time when men such as he were familiar with the writings of Marx and the deeds of the revolutionary circle that spread from Europe to the United States in the aftermath of the 1848 rebellions. He sifted and winnowed the radical ideas of his day. He found truth in notions about the superiority of labor to capital, just as he found important\u2014at times essential\u2014allies among the radicals who shared the view that a dying southern aristocracy was mounting not merely a last desperate defense of slavery but \u201cin fact, a war upon the rights of all working people.\u201d<\/p>\n

A century after Lincoln\u2019s death, and barely five weeks before his own assassination, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., would recall the connection. King\u2019s comment came at a celebration of the life of W. E. B. Du Bois, which had been organized by the journal Freedomways at Carnegie Hall. Addressing the issue of Du Bois\u2019s radicalism, King used the address to urge a break with the \u201cred scare\u201d thinking that demonized everything and everyone associated with communism:<\/p>\n

We cannot talk of Dr. Du Bois without recognizing that he was a radical all of his life. Some people would like to ignore the fact that he was a Communist in his later years. It is worth noting that Abraham Lincoln warmly welcomed the support of Karl Marx during the Civil War and corresponded with him freely. In contemporary life the English-speaking world has no difficulty with the fact that Sean O\u2019Casey was a literary giant of the twentieth century and a Communist, or that Pablo Neruda is generally considered the greatest [living] poet, though he also served in the Chilean Senate as a Communist. It is time to cease muting the fact that Dr. Du Bois was a genius and chose to be a Communist. Our irrational obsessive anti-communism has led us into too many quagmires to be retained as if it were a mode of scientific thinking. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

While King offered a corrective to the casual dismissal of socialists, communists and other radicals, and of those\u2014including American presidents\u2014who might have been informed by them, it was Du Bois, a half century earlier, who offered the perspective on Lincoln that remains the most useful for those seeking a sense of what distinguished the most nuanced of American presidents.<\/p>\n

As a product of his times and of the great debates that defined them, as a student of ancient ideas and fresh ones, as an American born in the last weeks of Thomas Jefferson\u2019s presidency, when it was still perhaps possible to detect the fading glimmers of the Age of Enlightenment, Abraham Lincoln understood that the best answers to societal challenges were found in \u201cregions hitherto unexplored.\u201d This is why he read so widely. This is why he followed the freedom struggles that played out in distant lands so closely\u2014and so passionately. This is why he befriended radicals, many of them refugees from the great revolutions of 1848; and this is why he sampled so broadly from their proposals and platforms\u2014even if the man Du Bois recognized as \u201cbig enough to be inconsistent\u201d refused to embrace the whole of any one. \u201cHe did not always see the right at first,\u201d Du Bois said of Lincoln. But, the scholar noted, America\u2019s sixteenth president retained a remarkable \u201ccapacity for growth.\u201d It was that latter capacity that led Du Bois to suggest that Americans would do well to \u201ctake pattern of Lincoln\u201d and emulate his openness to ideas generated in those regions hitherto unexplored\u2014a newspaper office in Cologne, a Springfield meeting organized in solidarity with a Hungarian revolutionary, a Wisconsin schoolhouse filled with Fourierists and \u201cVote Yourself a Farm\u201d land reformers, a workingmen\u2019s club in New York, a gathering in London of the First International. Presidents who choose to dismiss individuals, ideas and ideologies with which they do not fully agree take too many options off the table; in so doing they ill serve the republic. There are points on every nation\u2019s arc of history where radical ideas are more than merely interesting, intriguing or perhaps unsettling; they are the \u201cnew enlightenments\u201d that enable and encourage the pursuit of \u201cthe welfare and happiness of mankind.\u201d Jefferson, at his best, recognized this. Paine as well. And, surely, Lincoln, when he observed in the darkest hours of his presidency: \u201cThe dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall our selves, and then we shall save our country.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Article: Reading Karl Marx with Abraham Lincoln by John Nichols in International Socialist Review. The Text: These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert, to fleece the people. \u2014Abraham Lincoln, from his first speech as an Illinois state legislator, 1837 Everyone now is more or less a Socialist. \u2014Charles Dana, managing editor of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[259],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n