OCTOBER 11, 1861:
The
New York Tribune publishes a letter by Karl Marx attacking the Slaveocracy
and British support for the Confederacy. It reads in part:
“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…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?”
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