Karl Marx in the New-York Tribune 1861

Karl Marx in the New-York Tribune 1861

The American Question in England

Source: the New-York Daily Tribune, October 11, 1861;

Transcribed: by Tony Brown.

London, Sept. 18, 1861

Mrs. Beecher Stowe’s letter to Lord Shaftesbury, whatever its intrinsic merit may be, has done a great deal of good, by forcing the anti-Northern organs of the London press to speak out and lay before the general public the ostensible reasons for their hostile tone against the North, and their ill-concealed sympathies with the South, which looks rather strange on the part of people affecting an utter horror of Slavery. 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.

"In the first place says The Economist, "the assumption that the quarrel between the North and South is a quarrel between Negro freedom on the one side and Negro Slavery on the other, is as impudent as it is untrue. "The North," says The Saturday Review, "does not proclaim abolition, and never pretended to fight for Anti-Slavery. The North has not hoisted for its oriflamme the sacred symbol of justice to the Negro; its cri de guerre is not unconditional abolition." "If," says The Examiner, "we have been deceived about the real significance of the sublime movement, who but the Federalists themselves have to answer for the deception?"

Now, in the first instance, the premiss must be conceded. The war has not been undertaken with a view to put down Slavery, and the United States authorities themselves have taken the greatest pains to protest against any such idea. But then, it ought to be remembered that it was not the North, but the South, which undertook this war; the former acting only on the defense. If it be true that the North, after long hesitations, and an exhibition of forbearance unknown in the annals of European history, drew at last the sword, not for crushing Slavery, but for saving the Union, the South, on its part, inaugurated the war by loudly proclaiming "the peculiar institution" as the only and main end of the rebellion. It confessed to fight for the liberty of enslaving other people, a liberty which, despite the Northern protests, it asserted to be put in danger by the victory of the Republican party and the election of Mr. Lincoln to the Presidential chair. The Confederate Congress boasted that its new-fangled constitution, as distinguished from the Constitution of the Washingtons, Jeffersons, and Adams’s, had recognized for the first time Slavery as a thing good in itself, a bulwark of civilization, and a divine institution. If the North professed to fight but for the Union, the South gloried in rebellion for the supremacy of Slavery. If Anti-Slavery and idealistic England felt not attracted by the profession of the North, how came it to pass that it was not violently repulsed by the cynical confessions of the South?

The Saturday Review helps itself out of this ugly dilemma by disbelieving the declarations of the seceders themselves. It sees deeper than this, and discovers "that Slavery had very little to do with Secession;" the declarations of Jeff. Davis and company to the contrary being mere "conventionalisms" with "about as much meaning as the conventionalisms about violated altars and desecrated hearths, which always occur in such proclamations."

The staple of argument on the part of the anti-Northern papers is very scanty, and throughout all of them we find almost the same sentences recurring, like the formulas of a mathematical series, at certain intervals, with very little art of variation or combination.

"Why," exclaims The Economist, "it is only yesterday, when the Secession movement first gained serious head, on the first announcement of Mr. Lincoln’s election, that the Northerners offered to the South, if they would remain in the Union, every conceivable security for the performance and inviolability of the obnoxious institution — that they disavowed in the most solemn manner all intention of interfering with it — that their leaders proposed compromise after compromise in Congress, all based upon the concession that Slavery should not be meddled with." "How happens it," says The Examiner, "that the North was ready to compromise matters by the largest concessions to the South as to Slavery’, How was it that a certain geographical line was proposed in Congress within which Slavery was to be recognized as an essential institution? The Southern States were not content with this."

What The Economist and The Examiner had to ask was not only why the Crittenden and other compromise measures were proposed in Congress, but why they were not passed? They affect to consider those compromise proposals...