Walt Whitman, writing nearly 20 years earlier, in 1847, argued that extending slavery to the West would “bring the dignity of labor down to the level of slavery.” The battle lines, then, were “the grand body of white workingmen, the millions of mechanics, farmers, and operatives of our country, with their interests, on the one side—and the interests of a few thousand rich, ‘polished,’ and aristocratic owners of slaves at the south on the other side.”
36 Therefore, as Lincoln argued in 1858 in his famous “House Divided” speech, the Union would eventually have to become “
all one thing, or
all the other.”
37 There could be no middle ground as Western expansion threatened the future of free and slave labor. For Marx, the American Civil War was a “struggle between two social systems … the system of slavery and the system of free labor.” Ultimately, this struggle could only be resolved “by the victory of one system or the other.”
38 The war, as Lincoln suggested in his Second Inaugural Address, came regardless of protestations of peace and desire to avoid war. The conflict between the Northern free labor and Southern slave labor seemed inevitable.
Marx believed that slavery in the South stood in the way of the expansion of capitalism. In the American Civil War, Marx argued that the “first act,” or the “constitutional waging of the war” was the abolishment of slave labor in the United States.
39 The “second act, the revolutionary waging of war” was what could lead to socialism; it was not until the United States was fully capitalist in its organization of labor and mode of production that socialism was possible. Marx was in favor of aggressive expansion of capitalism throughout the country, North and South, insofar as it would lead to the development of socialism in the former colonies. Though Marx was wrong in his prediction of pending socialism—and to some extent in his assessment of Southern society as not being fully capitalist—his assessment of conflicting labor systems leading to national conflict aligned with Lincoln’s. For both men, a society where men owned the fruits of their own labor was a central tenet of how this conflict must mete out...
