US Civil War and the British working class

Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 222 August/September 2011

‘The first grand war of contemporaneous history is the American war … In this contest the highest form of popular self-government till now realised is giving battle to the meanest and most shameless form of man’s enslaving recorded in the annals of history.’

Karl Marx¹

The US Civil War began 150 years ago, when the Southern army fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbour, South Carolina, on 12 April 1861. Seven slave states (later joined by four more) had seceded from the United States, following the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln in the autumn of 1860, and formed the Confederate States of America. While the war was obviously important to the development of the United States, it is less well-known that it also presented the British working class with important challenges.

Origins of the United States Civil War²

In the middle of the 19th century, the United States included the eastern seaboard, the south-east, and what is today known as the ‘Midwest’ – the northern and central states in the centre of the continent, then called the ‘West’. The remaining half of the continent, almost unsettled by whites, stretching from British North America (now Canada) down to Mexico, and from the centre of the continent across to the Pacific, was known as the ‘Territories’.

The economy of the Southern states was dominated by cotton production, tended and harvested by slave labour. The North was already a vibrant manufacturing economy rivaling that of France and Germany in size, while the Midwest was predominantly agricultural, and increasingly producing for the Northern market. The cotton economy was labour intensive and the crop needed attention throughout its life – mechanisation was only successfully applied to cotton harvesting after the Second World War.

The only way to increase cotton profits was to lengthen the slaves’ working day and intensity of labour, or to extend the acreage under cotton. When cotton depleted the soil of nutrients, plantations tended to migrate further south and west, spreading from the south-eastern coastal states of South Carolina and Georgia, west into Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana. So the future of the Territories further west was in question: would they become slave states or free? It was not simply an economic issue: the slave states and their supporters dominated the Senate, giving them an effective veto on legislation. Admission of more free states would undermine what was known as the ‘Slave Power’.

The issue of slavery in the Territories went through a series of fights and compromises: the Missouri Compromise of 1820, over the admission of Missouri as a slave state; the admission of Texas, which had been wrested away from Mexico, as a slave state in 1845; the Wilmot Proviso of 1846, which forbade slavery in territory gained from Mexico. In the presidential campaign of 1848, Lewis Cass, the Democrat candidate, advocated that residents of the Territories decide the slavery issue. The Clay-Webster Compromise of 1850 admitted California as a free state but strengthened the fugitive slave law. The 1854 Ostend Manifesto sought to annex Cuba to the US as a slave state. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, broke the 1820 Compromise by opening the Kansas and Nebraska Territories to slavery, if the residents so wished. The Act sparked guerrilla warfare between pro- and anti-slavery activists in ‘Bloody Kansas’, split the Democrat Party and led to the founding of the anti-slavery Republican Party. The Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court in 1857 overturned the legality of the 1820 Compromise. In 1859, John Brown launched his famous raid on the arsenal at Harpers Ferry, deepening the polarisation over slavery, and in the autumn of that year Abraham Lincoln was elected President. Lincoln’s election was followed by the secession of the southern slave states.

Reaction in Britain

The North initially declared that the war was simply to restore the Union, while staying silent on slavery to placate the ‘border states’ – the slave states remaining in the Union. The South claimed it was a war for independence and the freedom to exercise ‘states’ rights’ – the power of the states versus that of the Federal government. The North’s refusal to declare the abolition of slavery as a goal was used as a pretext by the British ruling class to criticise the North while sympathising with the South. The British aristocracy felt affinity for the ‘genteel’ Southern aristocrats, while the bourgeoisie wanted to dominate the Southern market and escape Northern tariffs. Both were repelled by American democracy – indeed, the conservative wing of the ruling class was scathing in their criticism. James Spence, a Liverpool merchant, writing in The Times, drew a comparison with the French Revolution, which he claimed: ‘began with songs of liberty, ended in erecting despotism, and in piling up, as an altar to brotherly love, a hecatomb of human bones’ and the despotism of the majority. Another writer asserted that the American experiment with democracy resulted in ‘national decadence, and of the increasing inferiority of the race’.³

Marx attacked the hypocrisy of the British ruling class:

‘Their first and main grievance is that the present American war is “not one for the abolition of Slavery,” and that, therefore, the high-minded Britisher, used to undertake wars of his own, and interest himself in other people’s wars only on the basis of “broad humanitarian principles,” cannot be expected to feel any sympathy with his Northern cousins.’⁴

The war was not a war of defence by the Confederacy: the slave states had begun the war and were waging it to extend the slave system to the Territories and throughout the border states. Nor was it a war of national liberation and self-determination: the border states of Kentucky and Missouri had both voted to stay in the Union.

‘The attempts of the Confederacy to annex Missouri and Kentucky, for example, against the will of these states, prove the hollowness of the pretext that it is fighting for the rights of the individual states against the encroachments of the Union. On the individual states that it considers to belong to the “South” it confers, to be sure, the right to separate from the Union, but by no means the right to remain in the Union.’⁵

The war was nothing but a struggle between two social systems, free labour and slavery, which could only end in the victory of one system over the other. Although the North was trying to avoid confronting the slaveholders within its borders, even at this early stage of the war, Marx argued that

‘Events themselves drive to the promulgation of the decisive slogan – emancipation of the slaves.’⁶

Although Britain did not formally recognize the Confederacy, the British ruling class showed its sympathies by issuing a Proclamation of Neutrality on 14 May 1861, treating the Confederacy as an equal with the Union as if it were an independent nation – not a region in rebellion against the lawful government. How far the ruling class would go in support of the South was soon put to the test.

The Trent Affair

On 8 November 1861, the Union warship San Jacinto stopped the British mail steamer Trent in the Bahama channel and removed two Confederate envoys, Mason and Slidell, who were travelling to London and Paris to assist Southern efforts in trying to win diplomatic recognition in Europe. When news reached London, the British press was highly indignant at this impudent assault on British honour. The British government sent a message to the US government demanding an apology and release of the Confederate commissioners. At the same time, it prepared for war, moving troops to British North America (Canada) and debating the merits of burning New York and Boston.

The sympathies of the working class were strongly with the United States: while the United States had universal male suffrage for non-slaves, in Britain at that time the working class had, in effect, no vote. Nor did the US have a monarchy, an aristocracy or an established church. While the British ruling class prepared for war, the working class was largely opposed and held meetings demanding peace. Marx reported on meetings in Brighton and London, called by workers,⁷ which demanded an arbitrated settlement of the Trent affair and insisted that there had been no intentional insult to Britain, only a misinterpretation of the law. The United States delivered an apology to Britain, together with the Southern emissaries, and the crisis subsided.

The cotton famine and the British working class

Even as the crisis over the Trent was winding down, a more direct and more enduring challenge was developing for British workers. In 1860, before the war, cotton was 58% of all US exports. The Confederacy instituted an embargo, attempting to stop the export of cotton in an attempt to pressure European countries, particularly Britain, into recognising the Confederacy and intervening to restore the supply. The cotton was stored in warehouses and used to back Confederate war bonds, floated in Europe. It was next to impossible to evade the embargo, because the Union blockaded southern ports to prevent trade of war materiel. Cotton exports stopped almost completely.

In Britain, textile production was a leading sector of the economy: ‘Whoever says Industrial Revolution says cotton.’⁸

‘What the potato was to Irish agriculture, cotton is to the dominant branch of Great Britain’s industry. On its processing depends the subsistence of a mass of the population … more than four million people in England and Scotland live directly or indirectly on the cotton industry.’⁹

US cotton was 70-80% of all British cotton imports.¹⁰ With cotton imports reduced to a trickle at the end of 1861, hundreds of thousands of workers in Lancashire and elsewhere were thrown out of work or put on short time due to the ‘cotton famine’. (See Table 1)

In a report of ‘a great workers’ meeting’, held at the Newhall, Edgware Road, London, Marx described the situation in February 1862:

‘The misery that the stoppage of the factories and the shortening of the labour time, motivated by the blockade of the slave states, has produced among the workers in the northern manufacturing districts is incredible and in daily process of growth. … English interference in America has accordingly become a bread-and-butter question for the working class. …

‘The working class is accordingly fully conscious that the government is only waiting for the intervention cry from below, the pressure from without, to put an end to the American blockade and English misery. Under these circumstances, the persistence with which the working class keeps silent, or breaks its silence only to raise its voice against intervention and for the United States, is admirable. This is a new, brilliant proof of the indestructible excellence of the English popular masses’.¹²

The crisis hit both Marx and his close friend Engels personally. In March 1862, the New York Tribune stopped accepting articles from Marx since the news of the war left no space for foreign contributions. Engels was a partner in the cotton spinning firm of Ermen & Engels which operated the Victoria Mill in Salford. We find the normally cheerful Engels grumbling about the state of the market: ‘The crisis is affecting us badly, we have no orders, and, starting from next week, shall be working merely half-time’, ‘We have a whole heap of goods and can’t sell a thing …’.¹³

Meetings

The war continued and the cotton famine got worse. The manufacturers clamoured for an end to the blockade. Southern agents in Britain attempted to stir up popular resentment and to generate support for British intervention. The North was suffering defeat after defeat and there was no guarantee that the international solidarity shown during the Trent affair would continue to hold. Quite apart from the obvious interest of cotton operatives, there was lively popular interest in the war. Tens of thousands of British workers had emigrated to the North of the United States and wrote home. Their letters were read aloud and discussed. Crowds gathered outside newspaper and telegraph offices to discuss the latest news. Supporters of both sides distributed leaflets, wrote letters to newspapers, participated in petition drives and took part in meetings – public and private; workers would tramp miles simply to be able to read the latest news about the civil war. The working class engaged in a vibrant political life on a scale not witnessed in Britain in recent times.

Apart from the port city of Liverpool, which depended on the cotton trade and largely supported the Confederacy, it was almost impossible for Southern advocates to hold a public meeting without strong opposition. In a remarkable act of international solidarity, the starving cotton workers resisted the attempts of their bosses to get their support for British intervention on the side of the Confederacy and for the breaking of the blockade. Union supporters would propose pro-Northern amendments to motions at pro-Confederate meetings, lift their own speakers onto the platform, jeer the supporters of secession and loudly sing ‘John Brown’s Body’.

Many hundreds of meetings were held in support of the North. A pro-Union meeting in Lambeth in December 1862 was attended by 3,000 people. The announcement of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation gave a great stimulus to the pro-Union supporters, since the cause of the Union was now tied directly to the abolition of slavery. On the eve of the enactment of the Proclamation, 31 December, 1862, huge meetings in support, overwhelmingly of workers, were held in several cities. Two large meetings took place in London and another, with an audience of 6,000, in Manchester.¹⁴

The Manchester meeting passed anti-slavery motions and sent President Lincoln an address expressing the support of the Manchester workers, applauded all the measures so far taken to end slavery and urged him to progress further down the same path.

Marx was particularly pleased by these meetings:

‘The Times and co are hellish annoyed by the workers’ meetings in Manchester, Sheffield, and London. It’s excellent that the scales should thus be removed from the Yankees’ eyes. Not that Opdyke [Mayor of New York and political economist] hadn’t already declared at a meeting in New York:

“We know that the English working classes are with us, and that the governing classes of England are against us.”’¹⁵

A January 1863 meeting at Exeter Hall in London was so large that a second hall was not enough and the meeting overflowed into the street, blocking all traffic in the Strand.¹⁶

Nevertheless, the ‘sheeplike attitude’¹⁷ of the Lancashire workers in the face of the distress they experienced concerned Marx, and he was excited when the workers began to riot: ‘The goings-on in Staleybridge [sic] and Ashton are very cheering’.¹⁸

The George Griswold

In the autumn of 1862, the New York Times had sent a reporter to Lancashire to investigate the effects of the cotton famine. A series of articles about workers’ hardship appeared in the paper. In an editorial, the New York Times noted that the ‘dumb masses’ were the main supporters of the Union in Britain and proposed sending relief to alleviate suffering. A movement developed which collected funds and amassed food for the starving cotton workers. The George Griswold set sail from New York on 3 January 1863 and arrived in Liverpool six weeks later, to be followed by other relief ships. The American generosity contrasted with the reluctance of the British government to provide support for the unemployed workers. The crew and officers of the ship received a warm welcome at a civic reception in Liverpool, but the largest meeting to greet the George Griswold was held in the Manchester Free Trade Hall. It was so packed that 2,000 people could not get in and an overflow meeting was held. The gathering was treated as a sequel to the great December meeting in Manchester and, fittingly, Lincoln’s reply was read, first to the assembly, and then to those outside by lamplight:

‘I know, and deeply deplore, the sufferings which the working men at Manchester, and in all Europe, are called to endure in this crisis. … Through the action of our disloyal citizens, the working men of Europe have been subjected to a severe trial, for the purpose of forcing their sanction to that attempt [to replace democracy with the Slave Power]. Under these circumstances I cannot but regard your decisive utterances upon the question as an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country.’¹⁹

A resolution and an ‘Address to the crew of the George Griswold’ were cheered by the audience and endorsed by the speakers, the last of whom was Ernest Jones, the great Chartist leader who said:

‘The people had said there was something higher than work, more precious than cotton, more glorious, indeed, than a satisfied stomach – it was right, and liberty, and doing justice, and bidding defiance to all wrong (cheers).’²⁰

Jones was making the important point that under appropriate conditions, it was possible to win the political support of the working class for democracy, internationalism and anti-racism, even when this ran counter to its immediate material interests. Further meetings were held throughout Lancashire to greet the relief ships.

The ‘monster meeting’

The most important pro-Union meeting was held in St James’s Hall, London on 26 March 1863. The newer generation of trade unionists, who led the London Trades Council, wanted to give voice to workers’ support for the North.²¹ John Bright, a manufacturer and politician who was a Free Trader and co-founder of the Anti-Corn Law League, despite his record of hostility to trades unions, chaired the meeting and was the principal speaker. To Marx’s apparent surprise, he attacked the British ruling class from a republican standpoint, as Marx reported to Engels:

‘I attended a trade unions meeting chaired by Bright. He had very much the air of an Independent and, whenever he said ‘in the United States no kings, no bishops’, there was a burst of applause. The working men themselves spoke very well indeed, without a trace of bourgeois rhetoric or the faintest attempt to conceal their opposition to the capitalists’.²²

The meeting also impressed Henry Adams, son of the US Ambassador, who attended and reported back that ‘the class of skilled workmen in London’, the most influential section of the popular movement, ‘make common cause with the Americans who are struggling for the restoration of the Union, and … all their power and influence shall be used on behalf of the North.’²³

The size of the meeting, its composition and Bright’s powerful rhetoric had an arresting affect, overshadowing Parliament’s discussion of foreign policy the following day. Marx was convinced that the ‘monster meeting in St James’s Hall (under Bright’s chairmanship), prevented Palmerston declaring war on the United States, which he was on the point of doing’.²⁴

The end of the Civil War

The military struggle in America, and the political struggle in Britain both grew in scale and success until eventually the North triumphed and slavery was abolished. The conscious political support of the mass of the British working class, in the face of appalling suffering, enabled the civil war to proceed without British intervention:

‘It ought never to be forgotten in the United States that at least the working classes of England, from the commencement to the termination of the difficulty have never forsaken them’.²⁵

In Britain, following successful international workers’ meetings in support of the 1863 Polish insurrection and Garibaldi’s visit to Britain, the same trade unionists who organised the ‘monster meeting’ convened another in September 1864 which founded the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA). Marx attended and soon became its leading representative.

The movement in support of the Union had emphasised the political difference between the United States, where the working class had the vote, and Britain where it did not. This laid the basis for the Reform League, which Marx, through the IWMA, helped bring into existence. The League played the key role in pressuring Parliament to pass the Reform Act in 1867, extending the suffrage to the middle class and better-off workers.

Lessons for today

We have reviewed the history of this movement. What are the lessons for today?

The first important point is that a real political movement takes place everywhere in everyday life: political discussions and conversations were going on in the streets, in public houses, everywhere that working class people met – it was not confined to trade unions (many of which forbade political discussion) nor delegated to political parties (there was none for the working class), but, for a period, became part of everyday life. These kinds of activities are exactly the way a modern revolutionary movement will emerge amongst the working class today.

The second point is that this movement was anti-racist and internationalist: it was explicitly opposed to slavery, against treating black people as inferior to white, and took the principled side in the struggle in the US – this despite sections of the British working class being on the verge of starvation. This shows that, given the right conditions, it is perfectly possible to build mass anti-racist, internationalist movements among the working class.

There is nothing subtle about these lessons – they are obvious as soon as we know the history. What is striking is how this vitally important episode in the political history of the British working class has been neglected – or more accurately, covered up. It is US historians who have recovered this history for us²⁶ – while the one extensive British contribution has totally distorted, indeed reversed the true state of affairs.²⁷

However, it is this latter revisionist history that is publicly repeated today, for example by the Manchester Labour Council on its website²⁸ without mentioning that it is contradicted and discredited by US historians.

This brings us to the third, not so obvious lesson. Today the labour aristocracy, the privileged section of the working class is established and has powerful tools such as the Labour Party and the reformist trades unions to divert the working class from revolutionary struggle. In 1860, although the labour aristocracy existed and was inclined to compromise with the ruling class, there was neither a Labour Party nor mass trade unions it could use to control the working class. On this particular issue – support for the Union and emancipation, the voteless labour aristocracy and sections of the middle class were diametrically opposed to ruling class policy. Support for the Union meant support for free labour and universal suffrage; support for the South meant supporting slave labour and the aristocracy. At this particular time, the labour aristocracy was neither able to, nor wanted to, draw the working class into supporting the ruling class. Without the dead weight of the labour aristocracy holding it back, the mass of the working-class was able to gravitate spontaneously toward the democratic and internationalist banner, instead of being coaxed toward supporting the racist, chauvinist policy of the British ruling class.

Steve Palmer

US correspondent

1?Karl Marx, ‘The London Times on the Orléans Princes in America’, New York Tribune, 7 November 1861. Marx also wrote about the Civil War in the Vienna newspaper Die Presse. Marx’s writings and letters on the US Civil War are available, with slight differences in selection, in Marx and Engels, The Civil War in the United States, (New York, 1961), also in Marx and Engels, On the United States, (Moscow, 1979), Saul K Padover (Ed), Karl Marx on America & the Civil War, (New York, 1972) and Collected Works, Volume 19. A few of Marx’s early articles on the Civil War are in Karl Marx, Dispatches for the New York Tribune, (London, 2007). There are minor differences in some of the translations.

2?Marx gives a very clear explanation of the war in ‘The North American Civil War’, Die Presse, 25 October 1861 and in ‘The Civil War in the United States’, Die Presse, 7 November 1861.

3?Quoted RJM Blackett, Divided Hearts – Britain and the American Civil War, Baton Rouge, 2001, p14.

4?‘The American Question in England’, New York Tribune, 11 October 1861.

5?Ibid.

6?‘The Civil War in the United States’, Die Presse, 7 November 1861.

7?‘A Pro-America Meeting’ Die Presse, 1 January 1862; ‘A London Workers’ Meeting’, Die Presse, 2 February 1862.

8?EJ Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, London, 1968 p56.

9?Marx, ‘The Crisis in England’, Die Presse, 6 November 1861.

10?Thomas Ellison, The Cotton Trade of Great Britain, London, 1886, p86.

11?Ellison, p95.

12?Marx, ‘A London Workers’ Meeting’, Die Presse, 2 February 1862.

13?Engels to Marx, 28 February 1862; 5 March 1862.

14?Philip S Foner, British Labor and the American Civil War, New York, 1981, p43.

15?Marx to Engels, 2 January 1863.

16?Blackett, p196.

17?Marx to Engels, 17 November 1862

18?Marx to Engels, 24 March 1863. The Ashton Reporter had earlier noted the town’s ‘notoriety for the display of a murderous spirit, on the part of its working population’ who ‘wreak their vengeance upon obnoxious employers by efforts at blowing up their houses with gunpowder’, 2 February 1861.

19?Abraham Lincoln, ‘To the Working Men of Manchester’, 19 January 1863, Writings, Volume VI, p248.

20?From a report by the US Ambassador, Henry Adams, quoted in Foner, p52.

21 Marx specifically mentions William Cremer and George Odger who both spoke at the meeting and were instrumental in founding the International Working Men’s Association, Marx to Engels, 4 November 1864.

22?Marx to Engels, 9 April 1863.

23?Charles Glicksberg, ‘Henry Adams Reports on a Trades-Union Meeting’, The New England Quarterly, December 1942, pp727-8.

24?Marx to Weydemeyer, 29 November 1864.

25?‘English Public Opinion’, New York Tribune, 1 February 1862.

26?See the books by Foner and Beckett cited above. Also Howard Jones, Union in Peril, Chapel Hill NC, 1992.

27?Mary Ellison, Support for Secession: Lancashire and the American Civil War, Chicago, 1972. Ellison’s attempt to destroy ‘the myth of Lancashire’s support for the Union’ is systematically demolished by Foner and also directly refuted by the material gathered by Beckett.

28?www.spinningtheweb.org.uk, section on the Cotton Famine.