Re: Debating slavery: Marx's discussion

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The below is an excerpt from Marx's discussion of the Civil War which has the 
theme of
the slavocracy as the ruling class of the ENTIRE U.S  (not just the South) in 
the
decades before the Civil War

http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/marx.html

Karl Marx
The North American Civil War

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Written: October 1861
Source: Marx/Engels Collected Works, Volume 19
Publisher: Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964
First Published: Die Presse No. 293, October 25, 1861

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Just as the bombardment of Fort Sumter gave the signal for the opening of the 
war, the
election victory of the Republican Party of the North, the election of Lincoln 
as
President, gave the signal for secession. On November 6, 1860, Lincoln was 
elected. On
November 8, 1860, a message telegraphed from South Carolina said: Secession is
regarded here as an accomplished fact; on November 10 the legislature of Georgia
occupied itself with secession plans, and on November 13 a special session of 
the
legislature of Mississippi was convened to consider secession. But Lincoln's 
election
was itself only the result of a split in the Democratic camp. During the 
election
struggle the Democrats of the North concentrated their votes on Douglas, the 
Democrats
of the South concentrated their votes on Breckinridge, and to this splitting of 
the
Democratic votes the Republican Party owed its victory. Whence came, on the one 
hand,
the preponderance of the Republican Party in the North? Whence, on t!
he other, the disunion within the Democratic Party, whose members, North and 
South,
had operated in conjunction for more than half a century?

Under the presidency of Buchanan the sway that the South had gradually usurped 
over
the Union through its alliance with the Northern Democrats attained its zenith. 
The
last Continental Congress of 1787 and the first Constitutional Congress of 1789 
-90
had legally excluded slavery from all Territories of the republic north-west of 
the
Ohio. (Territories, as is known, is the name given to the colonies lying within 
the
United States itself which have not yet attained the level of population
constitutionally prescribed for the formation of autonomous states.) The 
so-called
Missouri Compromise (1820), in consequence of which Missouri became one of the 
States
of the Union as a slave state, excluded slavery from every remaining Territory 
north
of 36 degrees latitude and west of the Missouri. By this compromise the area of
slavery was advanced several degrees of longitude, whilst, on the other hand, a
geographical boundary-line to its future spread seemed quite definitely drawn. 
This !
geographical barrier, in its turn, was thrown down in 1854 by the so-called
Kansas-Nebraska Bill, the initiator of which was St[ephen] A. Douglas, then 
leader of
the Northern Democrats. The Bill, which passed both Houses of Congress, 
repealed the
Missouri Compromise, placed slavery and freedom on the same footing, commanded 
the
Union government to treat them both with equal indifference and left it to the
sovereignty of the people, that is, the majority of the settlers, to decide 
whether or
not slavery was to be introduced in a Territory. Thus, for the first time in the
history of the United States, every geographical and legal limit to the 
extension of
slavery in the Territories was removed. Under this new legislation the hitherto 
free
Territory of New Mexico, a Territory five times as large as the State of New 
York, was
transformed into a slave Territory, and the area of slavery was extended from 
the
border of the Mexican Republic to 38 degrees north latitude. In 1859 New Me!
xico received a slave code that vies with the statute-books of Tex
the census of 1860 proves, among some hundred thousand inhabitants New Mexico 
does not
yet count half a hundred slaves. It had therefore sufficed for the South to 
send some
adventurers with a few slaves over the border, and then with the help of the 
central
government in Washington and of its officials and contractors in New Mexico to 
drum
together a sham popular representation to impose slavery and with it the rule 
of the
slaveholders on the Territory.

However, this convenient method did not prove applicable in other Territories. 
The
South accordingly went a step further and appealed from Congress to the Supreme 
Court
of the United States. This Court, which numbers nine judges, five of whom 
belong to
the South, had long been the most willing tool of the slaveholders. It decided 
in
1857, in the notorious Dred Scott case, that every American citizen possesses 
the
right to take with him into any territory any property recognized by the 
Constitution.
The Constitution, it maintained, recognises slaves as property and obliges the 
Union
government to protect this property. Consequently, on the basis of the 
Constitution,
slaves could be forced to labour in the Territories by their owners, and so 
every
individual slaveholder was entitled to introduce slavery into hitherto free
Territories against the will of the majority of the settlers. The right to 
exclude
slavery was taken from the Territorial legislatures and the duty to protect !
pioneers of the slave system was imposed on Congress and the Union government.

If the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had extended the geographical boundary-line 
of
slavery in the Territories, if the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854 had erased every
geographical boundary-line and set up a political barrier instead, the will of 
the
majority of the settlers, now the Supreme Court of the United States, by its 
decision
of 1857, tore down even this political barrier and transformed all the 
Territories of
the republic, present and future, from nurseries of free states into nurseries 
of
slavery.

At the same time, under Buchanan's government the severer law on the 
surrendering of
fugitive slaves enacted in 1850 was ruthlessly carried out in the states of the 
North.
To play the part of slave-catchers for the Southern slaveholders appeared to be 
the
constitutional calling of the North. On the other hand, in order to hinder as 
far as
possible the colonisation of the Territories by free settlers, the 
slaveholders' party
frustrated all the so-called free-soil measures, i.e., measures which were to 
secure
for the settlers a definite amount of uncultivated state land free of charge.

In the foreign, as in the domestic, policy of the United States, the interest 
of the
slaveholders served as the guiding star. Buchanan had in fact bought the office 
of
President through the issue of the Ostend Manifesto, in which the acquisition 
of Cuba,
whether by purchase or by force of arms, was proclaimed as the great task of 
national
policy. Under his government northern Mexico was already divided among American 
land
speculators, who impatiently awaited the signal to fall on Chihuahua, Coahuila 
and
Sonora. The unceasing piratical expeditions of the filibusters against the 
states of
Central America were directed no less from the White House at Washington. In the
closest connection with this foreign policy, whose manifest purpose was 
conquest of
new territory for the spread of slavery and of the slaveholders' rule, stood the
reopening of the slave trade, secretly supported by the Union government. 
St[ephen] A.
Douglas himself declared in the American Senate on August 20, 18!
59: During the last year more Negroes have been imported from Africa than ever 
before
in any single year, even at the time when the slave trade was still legal. The 
number
of slaves imported in the last year totalled fifteen thousand.

Armed spreading of slavery abroad was the avowed aim of national policy; the 
Union had
in fact become the slave of the three hundred thousand slaveholders who held 
sway over
the South. A series of compromises, which the South owed to its alliance with 
the
Northern Democrats, had led to this result. On this alliance all the attempts,
periodically repeated since 1817, to resist the ever increasing encroachments 
of the
slaveholders had hitherto come to grief. At length there came a turning point.

end of excerpt