March 9, 2022
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
Abraham Lincoln and
the Ghost of Karl Marx
Friends,
Back in early 1981
the brilliant Southern scholar and traditionalist, Professor Mel Bradford, was
the leading contender to receive President Ronald Reagan’s nomination as head
of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Bradford was the epitome of the accomplished
and erudite academician, yet his deep-rooted Southern and pro-Confederate
beliefs disqualified him in the eyes of many national “conservatives” such as
George Will and Bill Kristol. Bradford’s worst sin, they asserted, had been
that he had harshly (if with laser-like precision and accuracy) criticized the
modern icon within the “conservative movement”—Abraham Lincoln.
Bradford’s major
accusations were that Lincoln essentially “remade” the American constitutional
system, asserting “equality” as the country’s foundational value and enlarging
the ultimate power of the federal government at the expense of the states, and,
thus, beginning a process of governmental expansion and control that continues
largely unabated in our time.
It was largely criticism
of Lincoln that became the new bar, the “red line” which one could not violate
that doomed Bradford (and ushered in William Bennett at the NEH instead). Since
then criticism of Lincoln is not acceptable, not tolerated by mainstream
conservatives. Instead, the conservative establishment now heralds such
neo-Reconstructionist historians as Allen Guelzo or even Marxist Eric Foner (a
favorite of Karl Rove). Any dissent from the virtual canonization of Lincoln in
contemporary American society usually comes mostly from Southern traditionalists
and their allies, Paleo- (or Old Right) conservatives, who are usually then
dismissed or derided by the establishment Republican Party, various pundits on
Fox News and the present-day “conservative movement” as reactionary
know-nothings, unable to understand the natural evolution of the American
republic.
Yet, beyond
Lincoln’s role in unleashing the power of an omnipotent federal government, there
is another aspect of Lincoln’s background that should worry Americans—not only
Southerners—just as much. It is perhaps the best guarded confidence in American
history. It certainly isn’t something that the dominant “conservative movement”
wishes to acknowledge, much less see debated publicly. Yet, the factual record
is there for anyone with initiative and curiosity to see for himself: Abraham
Lincoln not only had a favorable opinion of Karl Marx and his writings, but was
at times sympathetic to socialist policies and ideas.
A few years back (July 27, 2019) a short article by Gillian
Brockell appeared in The Washington Post.
Titled, “You know who was into Karl Marx? No, not AOC. Abraham Lincoln,” the
author catalogues the connections between Lincoln and Marx, and the list is—or
at least should be—alarming for conservative Americans. (I acknowledge my debt
to Brockell’s investigative reporting for this article.)
In his first annual
message—his first State of the Union address—in December 1861 he ends the
address with a peroration on what the Chicago
Tribune at the time called a meditation on “capital versus labor.” “Capital
is only the fruit of labor,” Lincoln elaborated, “and could never have existed
if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves
much the higher consideration.”
Those words could
have come almost directly from Karl Marx, but they were spoken by Lincoln.
Fascinating, since the sixteenth president was an avid reader of the father of
Marxism and corresponded with him during the War Between the States. Abraham
Lincoln was not a declared socialist, certainly not in the modern sense. But Lincoln and Marx — born only nine years apart — were contemporaries. They had many mutual
friends, read each other’s
work, and, in 1865, exchanged letters.
During his only
term in Congress during the late 1840s, Lincoln became a close associate of New York Daily Tribune editor, Horace
Greeley. It was through Greeley’s paper that the ideas and program of the
nascent Republican Party were spread. And these were not just the usual
anti-slavery slogans we so often hear today when we read of the formation of
the party. Often those positions sounded a great deal like socialism, including
proposals for the redistribution of land in the American West by the federal
government to the poor and emancipated slaves.
At approximately
the same moment in time, across the Atlantic Karl Marx was penning his famous
text, “The Communist Manifesto” (1848). The failed revolutionary uprising in
Germany had compelled Marx to take refuge in England. Hundreds of thousands of
other German radicals immigrated to and took refuge in the United States,
settling in places like St. Louis, Missouri, where they would play a critical
role in later securing that essentially Southern state for the Union in
1861-1862. According to historian Robin Blackburn, in his volume, An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and
Abraham Lincoln, Marx even considered immigrating and going west to Texas.
According to
Blackburn Marx believed that the two most significant things happening in the
world in 1860 were “the movement of the slaves in America started by the death
of John Brown, and … the movement of the serfs in Russia.”
In 1852 Charles A.
Dana, an avowed socialist and managing editor of the Daily Tribune, hired Marx to be the paper’s English correspondent.
Dana had been active previously in the utopian socialist experiment Brook Farm,
and he carried his vision of a workingman’s utopia with him. Marx, in exile,
was a natural fit as a correspondent, and for the next decade the founder of
modern communism authored 500 articles for the New York flagship paper of the
Republican Party, many of them front-page editorials formally expressing the
journal’s position. And like other contemporary Republicans, Lincoln constantly
read the Tribune, and certainly,
then, he read and digested the writings of Karl Marx. Indeed, it was the
support of the German radical immigrants recently come to American shores and
the Tribune that propelled Lincoln to
the Republican presidential nomination in 1860.
In 1862 Dana left
the Tribune, Secretary of War Edwin
Stanton making him Special Commissioner for the operation of the War
Department. Essentially, he became “the eyes of the Administration,” as Lincoln
called him, with an inordinate influence over the conduct of the War…and over
Abraham Lincoln. His opinions were received by the president as gospel, and
frequently they mirrored the editorials of Tribune
journalist Karl Marx.
After Lincoln’s
re-election in November 1864, Marx wrote to him (January 1865) as
representative of the International Workingmen’s Association, a group bringing
together socialists, communists, anarchists and trade unions, to “congratulate
the American people upon your reelection.” Marx continues in his
communication: “…the workingmen of
Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era
of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for
the working class.”
The president’s
response to Marx came by way of his ambassador in London, Charles Francis
Adams. Adams declared that Lincoln considered the founder of Marxism to be a
“friend” and that he possessed the “sincere and anxious desire that he may be
able to prove himself not unworthy of the confidence which has been recently
extended to him by his fellow citizens and by so many of the friends of
humanity and progress throughout the world.” The Union, Lincoln added, derived
“new encouragement to persevere from the testimony of the workingmen of
Europe.”
But this was not
Lincoln’s only tip of the hat to revolutionary social radicalism. In 1864 he
met with the New York Workingmen’s Association where he insisted that “the
strongest bond of human sympathy, outside of the family relation, should be one
uniting all working people, of all nations, and tongues, and kindreds.”
Of course, Abraham
Lincoln never declared himself to be a socialist, and many of his utterances
were likely politically-motivated. Yet, he certainly viewed socialists—the
workingmen’s unions—as staunch allies in his war against the South. As author
John Nichols in his study, The “S” Word:
A Short history of American Tradition…Socialism (2015), comments about “the left leanings of founders of the Republican Party”: “…it is indisputable that the Republican
Party had at its founding a red streak.”
In spite of the
current historical legerdemain and outright falsification of history, Lincoln
continued to be an icon of the Left after his death. In the early twentieth
century Socialist Party USA leader, Eugene V. Debs, saluted Lincoln as a fellow
“revolutionary.” And in the later 1930s American communists flocked to
volunteer for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight, they claimed, “against
fascism and Francisco Franco” in Spain’s bloody civil war.
One hundred years
after Lincoln’s death, in February 1968, in an address praising communist W. E.
B. Du Bois, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. (reputedly a Republican, like
his father) spoke in praise of Lincoln’s Marxist connection: “…Abraham Lincoln
warmly welcomed the support of Karl Marx during the Civil War and corresponded with
him freely. … Our irrational obsessive anti-communism has led us into too many
quagmires….”
Every time, then,
that a Dinesh D’Souza, Brian Kilmeade or Victor Davis Hanson on Fox News, or a
representative of the Claremont Institute praises America’s sixteenth president
and claims him for the conservative movement, while condemning those old
“racist” Southerners, alarms should sound for genuine believers in the Framers’
Constitution.
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Boyd D.
Cathey, a native North Carolinian, holds an MA degree in history
from the University of Virginia (where he was a Thomas Jefferson Fellow) and a
doctorate in history from the University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain (where he
was a Richard M. Weaver Fellow). He is former assistant to conservative author
Dr. Russell Kirk and the author of numerous articles in English, Spanish,
French, Polish, and Russian. His volume of essays about the South, The Land We Love: The South and Its Heritage,
was published in November 2018.
Boyd, this is a fascinating account of Lincoln's association with Marx. The difficulty is to somehow reconcile all this with Mr. Lincoln's even longer association with the dynamos of 19th century capitalism--the railroads. JT
ReplyDeleteAlong with Mr. Lincoln's assertions about the innate unsuitability of negros to be present in the US during the Lincoln-Douglas debates-- the real victims of all of this being the White Trash in the labor market.
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