Circa1865

In their most revealing book “Red Republicans and Lincoln’s Marxists,” (iUniverse, 2007), authors Al Benson and Walter Kennedy cite historian and diplomat William E. Dodd’s observation that “the election of Abraham Lincoln and, as it turned out, the fate of the Union was thus determined not by native Americans but by voters who knew least of American history and institutions.” Not only did Lincoln gain the presidency with only 39% of the popular vote, but among that 39% were many new arrivals who understood and spoke little English.

Republicans and Marxists

Distinct Marxist organizations had all but disappeared from the American scene by the end of the Civil War. The Communist Club, founded in New York City by refugee [German] Forty-Eighters in 1857, had dwindled to some twenty members, few of them workers. The most influential Marxists of the 1850’s, having concluded that at the moment America’s bourgeoisie were more revolutionary than her inert proletariat, allied themselves closely with the Republican party.

Military service during the war completed the process of drawing many such Marxists away from labor activity, for some met their deaths . . . and others simply exchanged the Marxism of their younger days for a Radical Republican outlook. Still others turned their attention at the war’s end to organizing aid to the expected revolution in Germany.

The founding of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864, however, not only opened the way for a revival of Marxist influence but also linked Marxist thought (and Marx’s personal activity) directly with the trade-union movement. The “final object” of the workers’ movement, Marx emphasized to his New York disciple Friedrich Bolte, is “the conquest of political power.”

(Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872. David Montgomery, University of Illinois Press, 1981, pp 167-          168)