2 Marx’s rocky relations with the mainstream newspapers were our loss. The paper paid him only for articles published. In late 1862, he stopped writing for the paper, upset at the fact that many of his articles never made it to print. He signed a total of 52 articles, one written by Engels and two jointly written. In 1861, he started writing for Die Presse. Marx was understandably upset to receive his walking papers as he relied on the income from the Tribune to pay his bills. Due to the increased Civil War coverage, the Tribune pruned its European contributors to Karl Marx alone, until firing him in March 1862. Meanwhile, he was conducting his research for Capital. As the European correspondent for the paper, Marx wrote on diverse topics from Tory election corruption to the increase of mental illness in Great Britain. Marx began writing for the Tribune in 1852, publishing 350 articles, with Engels supplying another 125, and their jointly writing twelve, until the paper terminated Marx’s employment in 1862. Marx wrote for two newspapers, the New York Daily Tribune and the Viennese Die Presse, with Engels also contributing under Marx’s name. As a result, our next revolution in this country will be a working-class revolution.ĭuring the American Civil War, Marx and Engels resided in England, having fled their German homeland following the failed 1848 democratic revolutions in Europe. The revolution armed former slaves, destroyed the horrendous institution of slavery without compensation to the slave-owners, and opened the way for a struggle between the working class and the capitalist class. They did not characterize the Civil War as a socialist revolutionary war, but they believed that it advanced the cause of all workers, both white and Black, by destroying chattel slavery. Marx and Engels argued that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the North’s arming of Black soldiers transformed the Civil War from a purely constitutional war to preserve the country with slavery intact, into a revolutionary war.
Both men saw the war as an extension of the American Revolution of 1776. Overall, Marx had a better grasp on the whole war. Karl Marx had a more sweeping look at the conflict, from the economic development of the nation to the actions of the political and military leaders. Engels specialized on the military strategy of the Lincoln administration and that of the Confederate Jefferson Davis rebel government. In a January 1861 letter to Engels, written after the election of Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln, but before his inauguration, Marx wrote, “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.” 1ĭuring the war, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels contributed dozens of insightful articles for the New York Tribune and, later, for the Viennese Die Presse on political and military issues. Marx and Engels saw the events leading to the Civil War as momentous. They would have resoundingly answered “no.” The Civil War, they believed, was not just another horrible atrocity, but rather a revolution that ended slavery and destroyed the slave-owners’ power as a class. Was the Civil War just a tragic mistake? A war like any other imperialist war the United States ruling class has its soldiers fighting in today? While some answer these questions with a yes, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels would have been taken aback. Rather, there are tales of chivalrous Confederate generals heroically leading charges, drunken Union generals butchering their men in horrible frontal assaults, brothers fighting brothers in a pointless war that ravaged the land and wounded a people. More books are written on this war than on any period of US history, yet for all the words poured across the pages, the real cause of the war-slavery-is usually missed or obscured. THE CIVIL War is the defining event in the history of the United States, yet also the most misunderstood.