The Black people in the United States share a common historical development different from the other oppressed nationalities and most especially from the white people in this country (the Europeans who, over several centuries, have been “melted” into the dominant national group). In Red Papers 1, we summarized the oppression of Black people in the U.S. over the past 350 years:
Black people are an imported colonial people, brought to this country in chains, and dispersed throughout it. Robbed of their land and resources and divested of their cultural heritage, Black people today are forced into oppressed communities exploited by absentee white business interests and controlled by an occupying army of mercenary police. Because of their particular geographic situation–dispersed in concentrations among the larger population–it appears extremely unlikely that Black people can win national liberation before the system of U.S. monopoly capitalism is destroyed.
While this statement generally provides a correct description of the situation of Black people today, it leaves out a crucial stage in the development of the Black people and the Black liberation struggle: the formation, after the Civil War and Reconstruction, of the semi-feudal, semi-colonized Black nation in the plantation Black Belt of the south.
Let’s examine the historical development of the Black nation and the Black liberation struggle a little more closely:
The international slave trade, based on the earliest plunder of Africa by European powers, was begun by Portugal (which, today, is one of the last direct colonial powers in Africa). Portugal had a virtual monopoly on the slave trade until the end of the 16th century. Then she was joined by the rest of the major European colonial powers: England, Spain, Holland and Denmark, as well as the American colonies.
The slave trade at that time followed a triangular path: from Europe to Africa with trading goods to buy slaves from the heads of tribes (who were already using slaves, mainly as domestic servants and local producers, or who were bribed into taking and selling slaves); then to the West Indies, Brazil, or the North American colonies, with the cargo of slaves; and finally back to Europe with the slave-grown products of the colonies.
The second leg, or “middle passage,” was an indescribable horror for the slaves, who were packed into the ships in the most wretched conditions. Many times the slaves rebelled. Sometimes they were successful, capturing or killing the captain and his henchmen and turning the ship around for home. But more often they paid the bitter price for daring to resist: the leaders, or sometimes slaves at random, were tortured or simply thrown overboard, or both. There are no exact figures for the numbers of Africans who died in Africa or during the “middle-passage.” But the best estimates are that, for every slave that reached the “new world,” one died at the hands of the slave-traders–some 20 million!
As the slave trade developed in the New England Puritan colonies, a second triangle trade route developed: from New England to Africa with commodities (mainly rum) to buy slaves; then to the West Indies with the slaves; and finally back to New England with West Indian molasses to make more slave-buying rum. Once in the colonies, the slaves continued to revolt. In the two hundred years 1663-1864, there were more than 200 recorded slaved rebellions, and there were certainly many more that were not recorded. The slave-owners made every effort] to suppress not only the rebellions but any news about’ them, for fear that it would inspire other slaves to rebel, that a single spark would start a prairie fire I and the whole slave system would go up in smoke.
But the slave system, driven on by the engine of primitive capitalist accumulation in Europe, was relentless. Marx summed up the importance of the slave-trade, among other factors, for the early development of capitalism in Europe:
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of Black skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. (Capital, Vol. I, Chapter 31, “Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist.”)
Within the U.S., although the slave trade was a highly profitable business and was widely practiced in New England and New York (even after it was formally outlawed in 1808), the slave system itself developed only in the southern regions, because only there was the climate suitable for the cultivation of crops that could be produced by the primitive slave methods: mainly tobacco, cotton, and, in the far-southern states like Louisiana, sugar.
At first tobacco was the main product of the southern slave economy; it found a big market in Europe. Only after the invention of the cotton gin, in 1793, did cotton begin the rise that soon made it “King Cotton” on the throne of southern barbarism. Before that time, cotton production was not really profitable, because of the problem of separating out the seed by hand, which took many man-hours per bale. In 1790, only about 3000 bales of cotton, 1000 pounds each, were produced in this country. Within 25 years, with the invention of the cotton gin, the figure had increased almost 70-fold, to over 200,000 bales. And by 1859, the year before southern secession, cotton exports hit the all-time high of 3.5 million bales, over 60% of all exports from the U.S. that year.
Most of the cotton was exported to England and fed the rapidly growing textile industry, the backbone of English capitalism. But the slave system not only laid the cornerstone for capitalism in England, it also provided, indirectly, the biggest part of the foundation of capitalism in the U.S. itself. Indirectly, because the biggest share of southern slave-grown cotton was shipped to England, and not to New England–one of the factors contributing to the antagonism between the northern industrialists and the southern planters and to the Civil War itself.
A good share of the profits of the English textile industry was, in turn, invested in manufacturing in the northern United States, after Independence as well as before. In an article on the Civil War, in 1862, Karl Marx pointed out that “English investments of capital in the United States are greater than the whole of capital invested in the English cotton industry.” (Article for Die Presse, Jan. 4, 1862, in The Civil War in the U.S., Writings by Marx and Engels, p. 129.) From the very beginning, Black labor has been poured into the foundation of this country’s economy.
And almost from the beginning, slave production in this country was commodity production for the European market, and secondarily, for the northern market in the U.S. itself. This was a different, and far more brutal form of slavery than was practiced in Africa, where the slaves produced mainly for their masters’ direct consumption and pleasure. In the southern colonies (states) despite their lavish degeneracy, the plantation owners ploughed most of the profits from the slave system into expanding that system–which meant into more land, since the crude methods of slave farming constantly ruined the land and forced the continual expansion of the slave territory.
Of course, even in antique slavery–in its later stages in the Greek and Roman empires, for example–slave production was also mainly commodity production–production for exchange, not for direct consumption by the slave-owner. Commerce became highly developed within these empires. But slavery in the U.S. differed from antique slavery in one very important respect: it was commodity production under the conditions of capitalist development and capitalist domination within the world market. Marx summed up the relationship between the growth of England as the most powerful capitalist country, and slavery in America:
Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage-workers in Europe needed for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world. (Capital, Vol. I, Chapter 31).
In the U.S. this form of commercial slave-exploitation meant tremendous suffering for the slaves. The condition of the slaves was far different than the picture the slave-owners (and very often their modern-day descendants, the monopoly capitalist wage-slavers) have tried to paint of the “darkies”: contented children who wanted nothing more than to work and sing for their “massah,” and, in turn, were treated with all the loving care reserved for the “massah’s” own children.
In fact, the slave-owners on several occasions were forced to reveal a bit of the real picture of slave life. A grand jury in Charleston, South Carolina, admitted in 1816 that the slaves were subjected to “barbarous treatment,” and were in fact treated “worse than beasts of burden.” (See Negro Slave Revolts in the United States, 1526-1860, written in 1939 by Herbert Aptheker.)
The average amount a slave-owner spent on food, clothing, bedding, sacks forgathering cotton and other items for the slaves in the 1820’s amounted to about $15 per year per slave. A slave was considered, according to James Madison, to be “gainful to his (or her) owner” at the age of nine or ten. From that time on, the slave could count on working from “can’t see” in the morning until “can’t see” at night, six, and sometimes seven days a week. As for the slaves’ living quarters, a Mississippi planter boasted of the housing he provided, and urged other slave-owners to be so generous as to also “house” six slaves in a hut 16 by 18 feet.
And since slave production was for the world market, the treatment of the slaves was even more barbarous when periodic depressions regularly struck the capitalist countries and collapsed or severely restricted the world market for cotton. At these times, especially, no amount of cruelty was spared in driving the slaves to produce still more, in the slave-owners’ desperate attempts not to be dragged down in the economic crisis.
Cruelty, of course, was an integral part of the slave system, because the slaves, who were worked harder than beasts of burden, were human beings and not beasts of burden. They never gave up their fight to win freedom. Herbert Aptheker quotes a private letter written in 1854 by the British Consul in Charleston, South Carolina, as just one bit of evidence of the actual condition of the slaves:
’The frightful atrocities of slave holding must be seen to be described ... My next door neighbor, a lawyer of the first distinction, and a member of the Southern Aristocracy, told me himself that he flogged all his own negroes, men and women, when they misbehaved ... It is literally no more to kill a slave than to shoot a dog.’
The slaves repeatedly refuted the slave-owners claims that their “niggers” were content and wanted no better life, because, after all, they were inferior to white people and less than human, besides. The slaves not only continued to rebel, but demonstrated a very high degree of political consciousness and very sophisticated organization in these rebellions.
Despite spies (slaves who were bribed with favors and the promise of employment in the house rather than in the master’s field) constant surveillance, and the most vicious means of terror, the slave-owners were not able to prevent widespread and large-scale revolts, especially after Toussaint L’Ouverture led the slaves of the sugar and coffee plantations of Haiti in an uprising in 1791, which, 12 years later, finally ended in independence for Haiti and emancipation for its more than 500,000 Black slaves. This gave great inspiration to the slaves in the U.S., and the number and scale of slave revolts in the southern states continued to grow after 1800. Often the Black slaves joined forces with Indians, and even on occasion with poor whites, who also suffered under the planters’ rule.
In the ten years, 1821-31, a period characterized by severe economic depression, the oppression and the resistance of the slaves became more intense. In 1822, Denmark Vesey, one of few slaves who managed to purchase his freedom but whose children were still slaves, organized one of the most elaborate and sophisticated plans for a slave uprising, calling for an attack on Charleston from five points simultaneously, backed up by a sixth force, patrolling the streets.
Shortly before it was to come off, the uprising was betrayed by a house slave. Vesey moved up the time of the revolt by a month, but it was too late, and the rebellion was brutally suppressed. Vesey and other leaders gave their lives in this rebellion. But even though it failed, it shook South Carolina and the whole south into panic. Altogether, probably 10,000 slaves took part in this rebellion, although exact estimates were impossible because the leaders who were captured and hanged went to their deaths with great dignity and refused to reveal any details of their plan. So widespread was the support among the slaves for this rebellion, that the hanging of the leaders threatened to touch off further rebellions, and federal troops had to be called in to prevent this.
Nine years later, in 1831, Nat Turner, convinced that “the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first,” led five other slaves in an uprising which, before it was finally suppressed, drew together hundreds of slaves in the area of Southampton County, Virginia. They killed every white person in the surrounding area of 20 miles–with one exception, the family of poor whites in the area who owned no slaves and were hardly better off than the slaves themselves. In retaliation, the slave-owners slaughtered more than a hundred slaves. Turner was hanged. But that did not put a stop to the slave rebellions that broke out in every part of the south in that same year, and continued, year-after-year, until the end of the Civil War and the end of the slave system.
Besides the Black men like Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner who led powerful slave revolts, Black women played an active and often a leading role in the struggle against slavery. The two most outstanding examples ate Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman.
Sojourner Truth, herself a former slave, devoted her life to working for an end to slavery. She travelled throughout the country, giving inspiration and leadership to the Abolitionist movement. She played a crucial role in winning support from women’s groups for the fight against slavery, and in linking up the struggle for women’s rights with the struggle to abolish slavery. At one women’s rights meeting, she answered a typical sermon, by a male preacher, about the superiority of men, by declaring, “I could work and eat as much as a man (when I could get it) and bear the lash as well–and ain’t I a woman? I have borne five children and seen most all sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard–and ain’t I a woman?”
Harriet Tubman was also born a slave. At the age of 29 she escaped, but until the slave system was finally overthrown, she continually risked her life to return to the south, armed with a revolver, to lead slaves–300 in all–in escaping on the “underground railroad” that secretly conducted them through the north to freedom in Canada. She became a legend throughout the south: the slaves referred to her as “Moses,” while the slaveowners put a price of $40,000 on her head. During the Civil War, she led armed attacks on the Confederate troops and collected vital military intelligence for the Union army. Her whole life stands as a monument to the unceasing, heroic struggle of the Black people to resist and overthrow the barbarous system of slavery.
Vicious oppression, and determined, relentless resistance: this is the real history of the slave system of commercial exploitation in the United States.
The fact of capitalist domination of “commercial exploitation,” of the slave products has led some people to conclude that slavery in this country was simply an extreme form of capitalist exploitation, that the slave-owners were, in fact, big capitalist farmers, and the slaves simply a super-exploited proletariat. Despite the important factors we have cited, which set off American slavery from antique slavery, we are convinced that this view is wrong.
Today, for example, oil fields in the Middle East are worked by the slaves of local compradors (junior partners) of the biggest oil monopolies. This does not mean the slaves are no longer slaves but simply super-exploited wage-workers. It does mean they have been drawn into the network of world capitalist–imperialist–economic relations, which has a profound effect on the concrete oppression they suffer and the form of their resistance.
In the Middle East slave region of Dhofar today, the slaves, led by forces applying Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought as their guiding ideology, are waging a war of national liberation against the imperialists and the reactionary slave-holders. This is possible in Dhofar today, despite the fact that there is almost no modern industry and no modern proletariat in that region, because, on a world scale, the proletariat is highly developed, has become the most powerful class and has already established its political rule over one-fourth of the world. Under these circumstances, the ideology of the proletariat, Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought, can guide the struggle for liberation, even where society has not yet advanced to the stage of capitalism.
But the fact that capitalism and its grave-digger, the modern proletariat, influence the development of the social system in all countries and regions of the world, including Dhofar, does not mean that the social system in every country or region, such as Dhofar, is capitalist or imperialist. Nor was the social system in the southern U.S. during the slave period a capitalist system.
Slavery in the U.S. differed not only from industrial capitalism–and retarded its development throughout the country–but from capitalism in agriculture. Slave tools had to be extremely heavy and therefore unwieldy and inefficient, so that the slave could not break them. This is a fundamental characteristic–the fact that the laborers had no initiative whatsoever, and in fact consistently resisted and sabotaged production–that American slavery had in common with antique slavery.
In his summation of Marxist philosophy, Dialectical and Historical Materialism, Joseph Stalin points out that this lack of initiative on the part of the laborers retards the development of the forces of production and is therefore one of the main factors leading to the eventual overthrow of the slave system. Tracing the development of ancient society from slavery to feudalism, Stalin cites the development of more advanced tools (the iron plough, the loom, etc.) and the beginnings of manufacture along with handicrafts. These developments lead to a situation where:
The new productive forces demand that the labourer shall display some kind of initiative in production and an inclination for work, an interest in work. The feudal lord therefore discards the slave, as a labourer who has no interest in work and is entirely without initiative, and prefers to deal with the serf who has his own husbandry, implements of production, and a certain interest in work essential for the cultivation of the land and for the payment in kind of part of his harvest to the feudal lord. (Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism, International Publishers edition, U.S.A., 1972, p. 36.)
The situation in the U.S. was more complicated, and not exactly the same. It was the industrial capitalist, rather than the feudal lord, who finally “discarded” the slave system as an obstacle to the development of the economy under his domination. Still, after the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Black people were reduced to semi-serf conditions in the Black Belt, under the domination of the bourgeoisie in the north and plantation owners in the south who had been brought under the wing of the northern capitalists (more on this shortly).
But despite these differences, it is clear that the pre-Civil War system of exploitation in the south shared the basic contradictions of antique slavery. Slavery rested on the most primitive methods of farming. Virtually none of the profits of the slave-holder went into improvements for the land. This is the major reason the slave states were constantly forced to expand, to find new land suitable to primitive slave production.
In his Negro People in American History, William Z. Foster (former head of the Communist Party at a time when it was a genuine revolutionary force) cites the fact that at the time of the Civil War, a 100-acre farm in Ohio could be started with an investment of only $6000, while in the slave state of Kentucky, across the river, an investment of $20,000 was required to start the same size farm. And the price of slaves rose steadily after the official outlawing of the international slave trade. For these reasons, the slave system left no money (capital) to invest in the exploitation of the very rich industrial raw materials of the south– and in the exploitation of a wage-earning class that could have built the industry in the south and made up a big part of the market (buyers) for the products of this industry.
Here is how Marx describes the primitive character of the slave economy:
The cultivation of the Southern export articles, cotton, tobacco, sugar, etc. carried on by slaves is only remunerative as long as it is conducted with large gangs of slaves, on a mass scale and on wide expanses of a naturally fertile soil that requires only simple labor. Intensive cultivation (one of the chief features of capitalism in agriculture–RU), which depends less on fertility of soil than on investment of capital, intelligence and energy of labor, is contrary to the nature of slavery. Hence the rapid transformation of states like Maryland and Virginia, which formerly employed slaves on the production of export articles, into states which raised slaves in order to export these slaves into the deep South. Even in South Carolina, where the slaves form four-sevenths of the population, the cultivation of cotton has for years been almost completely stationary in consequence of the exhaustion of the soil. Indeed, by force of circumstances South Carolina is already transformed in part into a slave-raising state... .” (article written by Marx for Die Presse, October 20, 1861; from The Civil War in the United States, letters and articles by Marx and Engels, p. 67).
Marx later describes the tremendous potential for industrial development in the mountain regions “driven into the heart of slavery,” which were never exploited by the slave system:
. . . with its correspondingly clear atmosphere, an invigorating climate and soil rich in coal, salt, limestone, iron ore, gold, in short, every raw material necessary for many-sided industrial development, (this mountanous region) is already for the most part a free country. In accordance with its physical constitution, the soil here can only be cultivated with success by free small farmers. Here the slave system vegetates only sporadically and never struck roots. In the largest part of the so-called border states, the dwellers of these highlands comprise the core of the free population, which in the interests of self-preservation already sides with the Northern party. (Marx, ibid., p. 73.)
Finally, Marx makes very clear that the Civil War was a ”struggle between two social systems, between the system of slavery and the system of free labor (capitalism). The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent.” (ibid., p. 81) For these reasons, we cannot agree with the view that slavery in the U.S. was only a form of extreme capitalist exploitation, and the slaves were only super-exploited proletarians. This erroneous view can and has led to serious political errors (which we will go into later).
Once again, despite important differences from antique slavery, the North American slave system was in fact a more primitive social system than bourgeois society, and in fact held back the development of bourgeois society throughout the country. The Civil War was not a battle between two wings of the bourgeoisie for dominance; it was, as Marx says clearly, a fight to the finish between two social systems that could no longer coexist within the same state.
Driven by the constant need to bring new land, and more slaves, under the lash of the slave system, the slavocracy raced headlong, and full of arrogance, into the inevitable showdown with the bourgeoisie in the north. The slave-owners trampled underfoot the Indians and Mexican people; they even trampled on “compromises” with the opposing system of “free labor.” The most outspoken and outrageous spokesmen for the slavocracy boasted of turning the entire country into a “slave republic.” John C. Calhoun declared that slavery was a “Universal Condition.” He was echoed by slaveholders generally, who proclaimed that “the adoption of the chattel slavery principle in the Northern factory system would forever end the war between employer and labor”–a rather ridiculous as well as criminal statement, in the fact of the hundreds of slave rebellions that erupted in the south and threw the whole slave system into continual panic.
Revolution or counter-revolution–the extension of the bourgeois-democratic revolution or the extension of the slave system–this was the central issue of the Civil War. The northern industrialists, of course, went into the struggle with all the sluggishness of an exploiting class torn by internal contradictions and facing intensifying contradictions with the smaller farmers and the wage-slaves. The “Copperheads,” the northern commercial and banking interests who were tied in with slave production and slave-based trade, formed a powerful fifth column within the Union government. They occupied high posts not only in the cabinet, but within the Union Army, and for the first years of the war they were successful in sabotaging the Union effort.
And Lincoln himself, representing a section of the rising industrial capitalists of the north, entered the war only with the purpose of “containing” slavery. True, he was convinced that by choking off the slave system from further expansion, he would bring about its eventual collapse; but he was slow in realizing that the slavocracy, knowing full well that Lincoln’s plans would indeed “dry up” slavery, was not about to be “contained.” “The South,” wrote Karl Marx in November, 1861, “is neither a territory strictly detached from the North geographically, nor a moral unity. It is not a country at all, but a battle slogan.” (Marx, ibid., p. 72.) And Marx pointed out that the Confederacy was not, could not be, content with merely the territory of “Secessia,” but, in order to survive as a slave system, must bring the entire U.S. under its barbarous rule.
Meanwhile, the developing group of financiers in the north was taking advantage of the Civil War to fatten itself. In 1860, the federal government paid out only $3.2 million in interest on the federal debt. At the end of the Civil War, this figure–on interest alone–had jumped to $77.4 million. Five years later, in 1870, it had almost doubled again, to $129 million, because of the tremendous costs of the war and the opportunities to expand roads, railways, waterways, etc. after the war–all of which required extensive long-term borrowing from the northern bankers.
The Civil War gave a tremendous boost to the concentration of capital both money and means of production, into fewer and fewer hands. J.P. Morgan, whose family empire is today one of the pillars of the U.S. ruling class, was typical of the role of the big northern capitalists who began, during the Civil War, the process of conquest and concentration that was to lead to their position of monopoly of industry, banking and political power.
As just one example, twice during the Civil War Morgan bought up condemned rifles from the Union government and then sold them back (in the same condition) to the Union army at greatly inflated prices. This symbolized the outlook of the most powerful sections of the northern bourgeoisie on the conduct of the war. But, this same class had overriding interests in subduing the Confederacy: the financing of internal improvements, particularly the railroads; the raising of the tariffs on manufactured goods; and, generally, the opening of the south to investment and trade for northern capital–all these demanded the defeat of the slavocracy.
All this pushed the northern bourgeoisie in the direction of abolishing slavery altogether. Still, this decisive step was not taken until it was clear that the Civil War was indeed a fight to the finish–of one system or the other–and that the northern bourgeoisie could not win it without freeing the slaves to fight in ’ the Union armies.
The most thoroughly revolutionary force was the slaves themselves, along with the relatively small number of Black freemen. Just before the Civil War, Karl Marx had already pointed to the tremendous revolutionary upsurge of the slaves and the potential power of their struggle for emancipation:
In my opinion, the biggest things that are happening in the world today are on the one hand the movement of the slaves in America started by the death of John Brown, and on the other the movement of the serfs in Russia. (Letter to Frederick Engels, Jan. 11, 1860).
As usual, Marx’s analysis is important on several levels. First, he points out that the attack on the army garrison at Harpers Ferry, Va., in October, 1859, by John Brown and his group of whites and Blacks was not at all the act of madmen, as bourgeois scholars have generally tried to portray it. Although it failed in its immediate aim of touching off a general slave uprising throughout the south, it sent an electric shock through the slave system and inspired the slaves to even more widespread and determined resistance.
Second, the comparison which Marx implies between the serfs of Russia and the slaves of the U.S. becomes even more direct and significant with the development of capitalism in both countries, as Lenin pointed out at the time of the first world war (more on this later). Finally, and most importantly, Marx’s correct analysis shatters the bourgeois slander that the slaves were a passive folk who quietly, if not happily, accepted their lot, and had to be set free by the efforts and sacrifices of the leaders of the northern bourgeois government.
The slave rebellions, especially the well-organized and mass revolts like those led by Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, gave rise and impetus to the anti-slavery Convention Movement of northern Black freemen, which, in turn, gave inspiration and direction to the northern white Abolitionists. And once the Civil War began, and the slaves recognized the combination of historical circumstances that could merge with their continual resistance to bring about their emancipation, the slaves used every method to strike blows at the Confederacy.
In the early stages of the war, Black slaves would rise up and strike down their masters, only to have the Union army suppress the slave insurrections and return runaway slaves. Still the slaves’ resistance grew: they sabotaged production–carrying out what W.E.B. DuBois aptly called a “Black general strike” throughout the south–they tied down Confederate troops in putting down rebellions behind their lines, and they continued to flee from the plantations in ever-larger numbers.
Finally, when they were allowed to join the Union Army, they fought, nearly 200,000 strong, usually at the front lines, in the most dangerous and decisive battles, taking the heaviest burden of the casualties and turning the tide of individual battles and of the war as a whole. Out of 186,000 Black troops, 37,000–or one out of five!–gave their lives during the two years they were permitted to fight in the Union Army. This was 35% higher than the death rate among the white soldiers. And the wages of the Black soldiers were only half those of the whites ($7 a month as compared to $13). But despite this degrading insult, the Black soldiers continued to fight heroically, in the forefront of the battle.
The working class at the time of the Civil War was very young, unstable and undeveloped. Although northern manufacturing was in the ascendancy, much of northern industry was barely beyond the handicraft stage before the Civil War. Most of the workers were craftsmen-mechanics, carpenters, blacksmiths, painters, bakers, etc. In 1830, only 30 years before the Civil War, production done by individual workers at their home (“home production”) outranked factory production by 4 to 3. Many of these skilled workers-or artisans-made and saved enough money to buy land in the West as the Indians were continually-driven off their land.
These factors, and especially the lack of a sizeable “surplus labor” population in the north that could act as a drag on the wages of northern workers, were crucial in placing the northern manufacturers at a competitive disadvantage with European, and particularly English, capitalists. The textile mills in Manchester, England, could pay a higher price for the cotton of the southern states than the textile owners in North America, despite the added shipping costs to the English owners. Their cost in variable capital (money laid out for wages) was considerably lower, because of the tremendous supply of “surplus labor” population that was constantly being driven off the rural farms of England.
This contradiction with their British competitors was an added reason the northern manufacturers were anxious to smash the southern Confederacy and bring these states, and their cotton production, under the complete domination of the north.
In the ten years before the Civil War, northern industry, and with it the northern wage-earning class, grew tremendously–especially in metal products, lumber, iron and railroads, as well as textiles. The value of manufacturing throughout the country–90% of which was in the north–had already leaped from $200 million in 1920 to over $1 billion in 1950. Between 1850-1860, the number of factories increased from 120,000 to 140,000, but the value of capital invested doubled (from one-half billion to one billion), as did the value of all manufactured products (from one billion to two billion). This indicates that concentration of capital and monopolization were already beginning to develop.
This growth in industry accelerated the north’s advancement over the south. In 1830, the southern states accounted for only 13% of total manufacture; in 1860, only 9%. In fact, by the time of the Civil War, in many areas of the south large trading centers were only beginning to develop, and with them merchant capitalism, the earliest form of capitalism. Under these circumstances, the proletariat of the south was also too small and undeveloped to be a significant force politically.
Even more than in the north, workers in the cities of the south were almost entirely limited to craftsmen before the Civil War. Despite the fact that 94% of the Black people in the south were slaves, the remaining Black freemen made up a sizeable proportion of the craftsmen and artisans, indicating that the total number was very small. Especially before 1830, Black freedmen had a less miserable life in the south than in the north. W.E.B. DuBois points out that, during the period 1800-1830, Black people in northern cities (DuBois uses Philadelphia as a typical example) were largely driven out of the positions they had held as skilled tradesmen. The same thing did not happen in the south until the next three decades, 1830-1860.
The picture in the south is further complicated, however, by the fact that, in addition to the free Black craftsmen (and small traders and artisans), there were a number of Black slaves who worked as craftsmen. As the crisis within the slave system grew sharper, and its very existence was more and more threatened, the slaveholders came to see the presence of even a small population of Black freemen in the south as a danger. Their response was to drive the condition of the freemen down to that of the slaves. In Slavery in the Cities, Richard Wade points out that during the 30 years leading up to the Civil War:
As the Black population dropped, white newcomers moved in and took over craft after craft. Occasionally to the accompaniment of violence and usually with official sanction, slave and free colored workers were shunted into the most menial and routine chores.” (Cited in Radical America, “Black Labor,” Vol. 5, No. 2, Mar.-April, 1971.)
For all these reasons, plus the fact that Marxism had only just been introduced into the political life of the country and of the infant workers’ movement, and because the bourgeoisie was still on the rise and gaining in strength, the U.S. proletariat was too weak, materially and ideologically, at the time of the Civil War, to lead the bourgeois-democratic revolution directly into the socialist revolution, as the Russian proletariat was able to do in 1917.
More than 50 years earlier in the United States, although capital was beginning to be concentrated into monopolies, and along with this workers were beginning to be concentrated into highly socialized labor, the working class had not developed to the point that it could become, in the same way as the Russian workers in 1917, “an immense force in the political life of the country.” (Stalin, Foundations of Leninism, p. 59.)
This is not to say that the workers, especially in the more industrially developed north, did not play an important role in winning the Civil War. Some people point to the actions of backward sections of the northern working class to “prove” that not only did the workers not make a big contribution to the defeat of the slave system, but in fact they opposed the struggle to abolish slavery. The most notorious incident cited in support of this argument is the 1863 anti-draft riot in New York City, where as many as a thousand people were killed, most of them Blacks, by a white mob made up largely of working people.
New York, however, had long been the center of “Copperheadism,” of the illegal slave trade, which continued long after it was outlawed in 1808, and sustained banking and commercial interests tied in with the slave plantations. The 1863 New York riot was instigated by these same “Copperheads” who pointed to the widespread corruption in the Union camp (as exemplified by J.P. Morgan). The “Copperheads” played on the fact that many wealthy northerners bought their way out of the draft (the standard price was $300), and they played on the fear of backward white workers that competition from freed slaves would flood the labor market, depriving white workers of jobs and driving down wages. “A Rich Man’s War, A Poor Man’s Fight!” was the slogan around which the New York riot was instigated.
But this riot was not typical of the attitude and the actions of northern workers toward the struggle against slavery. Marx pointed out that the overwhelming majority of white working people in the north reacted to the corruption of the Union government and its sluggishness in fighting the Confederacy by demanding an all-out war to abolish the slave system:
New England and the Northwest, which have provided the main body of the army, are determined to enforce a revolutionary waging of war on the government and to inscribe the battle-slogan ’Abolition of Slavery’ on the star-spangled banner. Lincoln yields only hesitatingly and uneasily to this pressure from without, but knows that he is incapable of offering resistance to it for long. Hence his fervent appeal to the border states to renounce the institution of slavery voluntarily and under the conditions of a favorable contract. (Article in Die Presse Aug. 9, 1862, in The Civil War in the United States, p. 260.)
More than 40% of the Union troops were workers (a much higher percentage than their proportion of the population). Many of these workers were drafted, but many were volunteers as well, including whole unions that joined the Union cause as a body. And among the workers, the Marxists, especially leaders like Joseph Weydemeyer, played a crucial role in combatting “Copperhead” influences and other backward tendencies, and in uniting and mobilizing the ranks of northern labor in the struggle to smash the slave system once and for all.
Marx and Engels also played a crucial role in organizing the workers of Europe, and especially England, to strike important blows against the Confederacy. Under Prime Minister Palmerston, the British government continually tried to whip up public support for an intervention in the Civil War, on the side of the Confederacy. It was repeatedly blocked in this by the English working class, despite appeals to the short-term selfish interests of the British workers. The Civil War almost completely cut off the supply of cotton to the English mills. A quarter or more of the English workers owed their employment, directly or indirectly, to the textile industry. In the face of the tremendous hardships caused by the cut-off of cotton from the southern U.S. the British workers held firm, organized opposition to Palmerston’s intervention plans, and were the main political force in defeating them.
There were other factors causing the British government to hesitate at intervention-especially the fact that England largely depended on farmers in the northern United States for its wheat. Another reason was that English capital was heavily invested in the north, a source of profit that would be lost if England openly sided with the south and the north won anyway. Still, in the early years of the Civil War, when the balance was still in favor of the Confederacy and the possibility of Confederate victory very great with British intervention, it was the overwhelming opposition of the British workers that prevented such an intervention.
With the final military defeat of the Confederacy and the emancipation of the slaves in all parts of the country (including the border states, which were not mentioned in Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation), the question clearly became: to continue the bourgeois-democratic revolution, and specifically to include the Black people in it, or to reconstitute the country on the basis of the present status quo. Lincoln was assassinated before he could be tested on this question, but his program for Reconstruction leaned heavily in the direction of maintaining the status quo.
Andrew Johnson, the Tennessee-born “poor white” who had risen to political prominence without taking a clear-cut stand on this central issue, succeeded Lincoln and almost immediately became the agent of the southern planters and their “Copperhead” allies. But the dominant wing of the northern bourgeoisie–prodded along by the abolitionists like Sumner and Stevens in Congress and, more importantly, by the continuing struggle of the Black people–recognized that its own victory over the planters could not be consolidated without stripping them of political power.
For this reason, over the objection–and the veto–of Johnson, Reconstruction governments were set up in the southern states, protected, though far too feebly, by the Federal Army. For the first time Black people were allowed to vote, and to participate in framing of new constitutions and in governing the “new” southern states. It is a gross exaggeration to say that there was “Negro rule” in the south.
Although at the time of secession Blacks made up nearly 45% of the total population of the southern states, and Black voters actually outnumbered the whites in five southern states, Blacks were universally outnumbered by whites in the southern Reconstruction legislatures. No Black person was ever elected Governor of a southern state. (P.B.S. Pinchback, elected Lieutenant-Governor of Louisiana, actually served as Governor for a few days in December, 1872, following the impeachment of the elected Governor, Henry Clay Warmoth. Pinchback was described by DuBois as “to all intents and purposes... an educated well-to-do congenial white man, with but a few drops of Negro blood, which he did not stoop to deny, as so many of his fellow whites did”).
And during the entire period of Reconstruction, Black people–as well as their white allies–were continually subjected to barbarous terror, instigated by the planters. Reconstruction stopped short of stripping the planters of the basis of their power: their land. A fierce struggle developed within the ruling northern capitalist class, in response to the struggle of the Black people who on many occasions seized the land of their former masters and defended it with guns, only to be overpowered and driven out by the Federal Army.
Stevens, and then Sumner, took the lead within the Union government in fighting the losing battle to support the Black people and poor whites of the south in their struggle for land and full democratic rights. The radical bourgeois-democratic forces were finally smashed (Sumner ended his career with the unfortunate act of capitulation).
Reconstruction did not “fail” as bourgeois historians claim. It was openly betrayed by the northern bourgeoisie which, especially after the panic and depression of 1873, “stabilized” the south by turning back the democratic movement led by the Black–and white–farmers and urban middle classes that arose after the Civil War. The Federal Army was withdrawn in 1877, (to be used immediately against the railroad strike of northern white workers). The Black people were left to the mercy of the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorists, organized by the planters under the rule and with the approval of the northern bourgeoisie.
The northern industrialists, who were making further strides in developing monopolies, had achieved what they needed in the south: the opportunity for expansion and investment (beginning with the railroads) and for new markets. Further investment was-threatened by the struggle, often violent, between the democratic forces and the planters. So with the south, and the planters, safely under the domination of northern capital, an arrangement was worked out with the planters–both the old slave-owners and the new northern capitalist “carpetbaggers”–who acquired large landholdings–making them political administrators of the south.
The southern region was turned into an underdeveloped preserve for northern capital. Industrial development in the south was controlled by the bourgeoisie in the north, and semi-feudal agriculture, with Black peonage as its base, was enforced. This was profitable not only to the planters, but to the developing commercial interests in the south, and, most especially, to the northern bankers and manufacturers who made loans to the planters, bought into the plantations themselves, and used the enforced poverty of the farmers, especially the Black peasants, to maintain starvation-level wages in industry.
Despite their short-lived existence, and continual sabotage by the planters–only half-heartedly (and increasingly less) opposed by the Federal Government–the Reconstruction governments made remarkable achievements in education, internal improvements (roads, railways, etc.) and in expanding the rights of the people. Black and white farmers and laborers voted in administrations that, despite a certain amount of corruption, were probably the most honest and closest to reflecting the interests of their constituents in the history of the country. Not only did Black and poor white working men win rights under the Reconstruction governments, but also women, who won the rights of property and divorce, if not the vote.
The deliberate reversal of Reconstruction, and of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in the south, meant the complete consolidation of power by the northern bourgeoisie and the re-subjugation of the Black people to the plantation system–but now on the basis of semi-feudal exploitation, mainly as sharecroppers, and under the domination of northern capital. For the northern bourgeoisie, the purpose of the Civil War and Reconstruction was to establish itself as the single ruling class, master of the entire country. As it expanded and, with the growth of monopolies, approached the stage of imperialism, the democratic aspirations of the Black people were sacrificed to this end.
The Black people were forged into a semi-colonized nation, held in semi-feudal bondage, in the plantation area of the south. And, on the basis of the oppression of this Black nation, the south as a whole was subjected to regional domination by the northern bourgeoisie, even though all classes of white people, including even the poorest farmers and workers, escaped the vicious “Black codes” that held the Black people in peonage.