A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (45 page)

In France, where the whole revolutionary process had begun, the middle class republicans found that, having defeated the workers, there was no one to protect them against the advance of the monarchists. However, the monarchists were divided between the heirs of the Bourbons and the heirs of Louis Philippe and were incapable of deciding who to impose as king. Into this gap stepped a nephew of Napoleon, Louis Bonaparte. He won the presidency late in 1848 with 5.5 million votes—against only 400,000 for the middle class republican leader Ledru Rollin and 40,000 for the left wing revolutionary Raspail. In 1851, fearing he would lose a further election, he staged a coup. The following year he proclaimed himself emperor.

Karl Marx drew the conclusion at the end of the year:

Backdoor bourgeoisie

The revolutions did not leave Europe completely unchanged, however. In Germany and Austria they brought about the final end of feudal payments and serfdom—although on terms which transformed the landowning
Junkers
into agrarian capitalists and did little for the peasants. The monarchs of most German states conceded constitutions which left them with the power to appoint governments, but provided for parliamentary representation for the moneyed classes and even, in a diluted form, for the workers and peasants. The ground was cleared for capitalist advance, even if it was capitalist advance under monarchies which prevented the bourgeoisie itself from exercising direct control over the state.

Germany began to undergo its own industrial revolution. Industry grew at a rate of around 4.8 percent a year; the railways by 14 percent. Investment in the 30 years after 1850 was four times the level of the 30 years before. Coal production rose fourfold in Prussia in 25 years, raw iron output multiplied 14-fold, steel output rose 54-fold. The number of steam powered machines rose by about 1,800 percent. Alfred Krupp had employed a mere 60 workers in 1836; by 1873 he employed 16,000. Although Germany’s industrialisation took off 60 years after Britain’s, it was soon catching up.
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The Ruhr’s collieries were larger and more intensive than those of south Wales; the German chemical industry developed synthetic dyes long before Britain’s.

These years also saw the accelerated growth of large-scale industries in France and, at a slower pace, in parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The bourgeoisie, looking back in the late 1860s, could reflect that they might have lost the political struggle in 1848, but they had won the economic battle. In France they put their faith in Louis Bonaparte. In Germany they rejoiced as Bismarck, exercising near dictatorial powers within the Prussian monarchy fought wars against Denmark, Austria and France to build a new, unified German Empire as the most powerful state in western Europe.

The Italian and Hungarian bourgeoisies also recovered from the defeat of the national movements in 1848-49. At first the Austrian crown continued to rule over Milan, Venice and Budapest, as well as Prague, Cracow and Zagreb. But the national movements were far from destroyed. There was continuing enthusiasm for national unity among sections of the Italian middle class and, although few of the peasantry and urban poor shared such feelings (a bare 4 percent of the population spoke the Tuscan dialect that was to become the Italian language), there was enormous bitterness against the king of Naples and the Austrian rulers of Lombardy. In the late 1850s Cavour—the minister of the king of Piedmont—sought to take advantage of these feelings. He made deals with the radical nationalist Mazzini and the republican revolutionary Garibaldi, on the one hand, and the governments of Britain and France on the other. Garibaldi landed with 1,000 revolutionary ‘redshirts’ in Sicily to raise the island in revolt against the king of Naples
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and marched north. The king of Piedmont sent an army south and they crushed the royal army of Naples between them, while French forces ensured the withdrawal of the Austrians from Lombardy. Then Cavour and the king of Piedmont completed their manoeuvre by disarming Garibaldi’s troops, forcing him into exile and gaining the reluctant backing of the southern Italian aristocracy, who recognised ‘things have to change if they are to remain the same’.
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The kings of Piedmont became the kings of the whole of Italy—although the united country long remained fractured between an increasingly modern capitalist north and an impoverished south where landowners continued to treat the peasants in a near-feudal manner and mafia banditry flourished.

Hungary, likewise, gained nationhood by manoeuvres at the top aimed at incorporating the forces of rebellion below. In the 1860s the Austrian monarchy reorganised itself following its conflicts with France and then with Prussia. It established two parallel administrative structures. The first was run by a German speaking government apparatus, partly responsible to a parliament in Vienna, and ruled over Austria, the Czech lands, the Polish region around Cracow and the Slav speaking province of Slovenia. The second was run by a Hungarian speaking government apparatus in Budapest and ruled over Hungary, Slovakia, the partially Romanian speaking region of Transylvania, and the Serbo-Croat speaking provinces of Croatia and (following conflicts with Turkey) Bosnia. The arrangement allowed it to stabilise its rule for half a century.

Two old national movements in Europe remained completely unsatisfied, however. In Ireland the late 1840s had seen a renaissance of the nationalism born at the time of the French Revolution and crushed in 1798. The Great Famine of those years revealed the horrific human cost of the damage done to the Irish economy by its subservience to the British ruling class. A million people died, another million were forced to emigrate, and the population was halved. Even the dominant constitutional politician, Daniel O’Connell, who had worked all his life for Irish Catholic rights within the ‘United Kingdom’, was forced to raise the question of independence—while a new generation of middle class radicals saw the need to go further, to fight for a republic. Their attempt at a rising in 1848 was smashed. But from now on the ‘Irish question’ was to be central in British political life.

The failure to solve the Irish issue at one end of Europe was matched by the continuing struggle of Polish nationalism at the other. The Polish nobility had never been reconciled to the partition of the kingdom of Poland between Russia, Prussia and Austria in the 1790s, and they led revolts against Russian rule in the 1830s and again in the 1860s. The Polish nobles were feudal landowners, dominating not merely the Polish but also the Byelorussian, Ukrainian and Jewish lower classes. Yet their fight against the Russian tsar led them into conflict with the whole counter-revolutionary structure imposed on Europe after 1814 and again after 1848, and to find common purpose with revolutionaries and democrats across Europe. For the British Chartists, the French republicans and the German communists, the Polish struggle was their struggle—and exiled Poles from noble families were to be found fighting in Italy, southern Germany, Hungary and Paris.

On 12 April 1861 South Carolina volunteer soldiers opened fire on United States federal forces in Fort Sumter, which faces the port of Charleston. They were expressing, in the most dramatic fashion, the slave-owning Southern states’ refusal to accept the presidency of Abraham Lincoln and the recently formed Republican Party.

Until that moment, few people had expected the disagreement would lead to fighting. Lincoln had only taken over the presidency a month before, and had repeatedly said his sole concern was to preserve the newly opened territories in the north west for ‘free labour’. His personal dislike of slavery did not mean he favoured banning it in the Southern states. ‘I have no purpose’, he insisted in a debate in 1858, ‘to interfere with the institutions of slavery in the states where it exists’.
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He repeated the point during his 1861 election campaign.
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While the Southern states were organising to break away from the US, much of Congress’s effort went into finding a compromise which would leave slavery in the South untouched. The abolitionist opponents of slavery were a small minority both in Congress and among the population of the North at large. It was quite usual for their meetings to be broken up by hostile crowds even in Boston, regarded as their stronghold.

Three days before the bombardment of Fort Sumter the leading abolitionists were convinced civil war was impossible and the government would give in to the demands of the slave states. The black abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote, ‘All talk of putting down treason and rebellions by force are as impotent and worthless as the words of a drunken woman in a ditch. Slavery has touched our government’.
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Yet the shooting at Fort Sumter began the bloodiest war in US history—costlier, in terms of American dead, than the War of Independence, the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War and the Vietnam War combined.

The unbridgeable gulf

More was at stake than a simple misunderstanding. There was a clash between fundamentally different ways of organising society.
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The US had emerged from its revolution against British rule with two different forms of economic organisation, each catering for the growing world market. In the North, the ‘free labour’ of small farmers, artisans and waged workers in small workshops prevailed. The South was dominated by the owners of the slave-owning plantations, even through the majority of its white population were small farmers, artisans or workers without slaves of their own.

The contrast between the ‘slave’ and the ‘free’ regions did not seem to be an insuperable issue to the early political leaders. The regions were separated geographically, and even Southerners like Jefferson, the half-ashamed slave-owner who drew up the Declaration of Independence and became president in 1800, assumed that slavery was on its way out. After all, Adam Smith had proved that ‘free’ labour would always be more efficient and profitable than slave labour.

However, that was before the advent of large-scale cotton farming to cater for the insatiable appetite of the Lancashire mills. In 1790 the South produced only 1,000 tons of cotton a year. By 1860 the figure had grown to a million tons. Gangs of slaves working under the discipline of gang masters with whips were an efficient means of cultivating and picking the crop on a large-scale. There were four million slaves by 1860.

But it was not only slaves the plantation owners wanted. They wanted more land to feed the foreign demand for cotton. They got some when the US government bought Florida from Spain and Louisiana from France. They seized land granted to certain Indian nations (who were dumped 1,000 miles further west in conditions of immense hardship), and they grabbed vast amounts through war with Mexico. But even this was not enough. Now they looked to the unsettled area between the Mississippi and the Pacific—an area far greater than all the existing states combined.

The Northern states were also undergoing an enormous transformation by the middle of the 19th century. Their population had expanded over and over again as successive waves of immigrants arrived from the impoverished lands of Europe, hoping to succeed as small farmers or well paid workers. In turn, the growing population created a growing market for manufacturers and merchants. The output of New England textiles grew from four million yards in 1817 to 308 million in 1837. By 1860 the country had the second highest industrial output in the world, behind Britain but rapidly catching up. The free population of the North looked to the territory of the west as the way to fulfil their dreams of owning land, while the Northern capitalists looked to it as a potentially huge area for profit-making.

The ‘transport revolution’ was making an enormous impact. Canals linked New York to the Great Lakes and the Midwest; the Midwest, in turn, was connected to the Gulf of Mexico by steamboats plying the Ohio, Mississippi and Missouri. There were 30,000 miles of railways by 1860, more than in the whole of the rest of the world. Everywhere communities which formerly practised subsistence farming were increasingly linked to the market. The old isolation of state from state and North from South was becoming a thing of the past.

The question of who was to dominate the land west of the Mississippi could not be avoided indefinitely, and other questions were connected with it. Important sections of Northern industrial capitalism wanted tariffs to protect their products and their markets from British capitalists. But the cotton economy of the South was intimately tied to the British cotton industry and resented any threat to free trade. Whose interests was the federal government to pursue in its foreign policy?

The plantation owners got their way for the best part of half a century. Missouri in 1820 and Texas in the 1840s entered the Union as slave states. In the 1850s federal soldiers enforced a new law against runaway slaves, seizing people in Northern cities such as Boston and returning them to their masters in the South. Then in 1854 the Democratic Party president and Congress decided slavery would prevail in Kansas and other western territories if the majority of white settlers voted for it—in other words, if supporters of slavery from the South could use their wealth to establish a base in these territories before free settlers from the north east arrived.

This caused fury not just within the abolitionist movement of humanitarian whites and free blacks which had built substantial, if minority, support in New England, where slavery had never existed on any scale. It infuriated all those Northerners—however infected they might be with racist ideas—who stood for ‘free soil’, for dividing the land of the West into small farms for new settlers. Both groups feared that the plantation owners, who controlled the presidency, Congress and the Supreme Court, would grab the whole of the West. This would destroy the hopes of would-be farmers, leave industrial capital dominant in only a handful of north eastern states, and give the plantation owners control of the government for the foreseeable future.

Kansas became the setting for a bitter mini civil war between ‘free labour’ settlers and advocates of slavery from across the border in Missouri. Across the country opinion polarised. In the North it led to the creation of a new political party, the Republicans, whose candidate in the 1860 presidential election was Abraham Lincoln.

The party’s support cut across class lines. Sections of big business, farmers, artisans and workers were bound together by the determination to preserve the western territories for free labour. This did not mean common opposition to racism. There was a solid core of abolitionists—including open admirers of John Brown, who was executed in December 1859 for leading a mixed group of black and white men in the seizure of a federal armoury building at Harper’s Ferry in Virginia with the aim of freeing local slaves. But there were also large numbers of people who continued to accept racist stereotypes. Some of the ‘free labour states’ denied blacks the vote, and others went so far as to deny blacks the right to live there. In 1860 New York, which voted for Lincoln by a clear majority, also voted by two to one in a referendum against giving blacks the vote on the same basis as whites.

The success of the Republican Party in the North stemmed from its ability to make free labour rather than racism or even slavery the central issue. Lincoln personified this approach. It was on this basis that he won 54 percent of the vote in the Northern states and 40 percent of the vote throughout the country. He was able to take office because of a split between the Northern and Southern wings of the Democratic Party over the question of Kansas.

However moderate Lincoln’s stance, the plantation owners saw his election as a threat to which they had to respond. As far as they were concerned their whole society was at stake. If it did not expand it was doomed—and Lincoln’s presidency doomed expansion. Some also feared that unless they raised a storm their hold on the South as a whole might be undermined, since two thirds of the whites owned no slaves and might be attracted to the ideas gaining support in the North.

The seven southernmost cotton-producing states—where slaves accounted for almost half the population—announced their secession from the United States and began to arm. In April they took the initiative and attacked Fort Sumter. They believed, correctly, that the outbreak of hostilities would lead other slave-owning states to join them (which four of the seven did). But they also thought, incorrectly, that Lincoln’s government—with only 16,000 troops at its disposal—would cave in to their demands.

The long impasse

Civil wars have a habit of starting with small-scale clashes between irregular forces and escalating into huge set piece confrontations. This was no exception.

Immediately after the attack on Fort Sumter, ‘the North was galvanised by a frenzy of patriotism by the event…Every Northern hamlet held a war meeting’.
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States rushed to offer militia regiments to the federal government and men to volunteer for the new army. The abolitionists suddenly found their meetings packed with enthusiastic crowds. ‘The whole of the North is a unit,’ one Boston abolitionist reported. ‘Young and old, men and women, boys and girls have caught the sacred enthusiasm…The times are ripening for the march of a liberating army into the Confederate states’.
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There was something of the feeling found in revolutions, with a sudden interest in new ideas. Newspapers printing a statement by the anti-slavery campaigner Wendell Phillips sold 200,000 copies.
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Speakers like Frederick Douglass got an enthusiastic reception wherever they went.
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Huge audiences, many of whom would previously have regarded the involvement of women in politics as an outrage, listened spellbound to speeches by a 19 year old abolitionist, Anna Dickinson.
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Yet for 18 months the conduct of the war by the North was in contradiction to this near-revolutionary mood. Lincoln believed, rightly or wrongly, that the only way to hold the North together behind the war was to bend over backwards to conciliate moderate opinion. He conciliated the Northern Democrats, people who had no objection to slavery but wanted a united country, and the leaders of three border states—Maryland, Delaware and Kentucky—which had a relatively low level of slave ownership and had chosen to stay in the Union. He appointed moderates to key positions in the government. He gave command of the Northern army, after it had suffered a serious defeat in the summer (the Battle of Bull Run), to a Democrat and supporter of Southern slavery, McClellan. He rescinded an order by the commander on the western front, Fremont, for the emancipation of all slaves in Missouri. He even indicated that slaves who ran away to the Unionist armies (known as ‘contrabands’) should be returned to their Confederate masters providing they had not been involved in military labour.

It soon became clear that a moderate policy was not going to win the war. McClellan followed an ultra-cautious policy, centred on building up a large army in the Washington area and then trying to break through to the nearby Confederate capital of Richmond. It fitted the politics of those who merely wanted to force the secessionist states back into the Union without changing their social system. But as a military policy it was completely unsuccessful. Eighteen months into the war the battle lines were essentially the same as at the beginning, except for Northern victories along the Mississippi, and the South was still in control of a territory the size of France. There was growing demoralisation in the North, with a feeling that victory was impossible even among some of its most fervent supporters.
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But the sense that the war was going nowhere also created a new audience for the abolitionists. They pointed out that the South had four million slaves to do its manual work and so could mobilise much of the free male population for the war. By contrast, the North was having increasing difficulties in filling the ranks of its army. They argued Lincoln should undercut the economy of the South by a declaration of freedom for the slaves, and strengthen the North’s forces by enrolling black soldiers.

The abolitionist Wendell Phillips railed against Lincoln’s policy in a famous speech:

The reluctant revolutionaries

The speech caused a furore and led to bitter attacks on Phillips. But it crystallised a growing feeling that only revolutionary methods would work. Despite McClellan’s conservatism, radical army commanders were already beginning to resort to some of these methods—welcoming escaped slaves to their camps and taking away the property, including the slaves, of ‘rebels’ in areas occupied by the Northern armies. Then, at a decisive moment, Lincoln himself made a series of radical moves—raising the first black regiment, declaring freedom for slaves in all states still in revolt, and dismissing McClellan.