Lincoln in the World

by Kevin Peraino

  Prussian authorities finally crushed the liberal revolt. Marx and his family fled to London amid the counterrevolution. At one point, Marx had actually considered moving to the United States—to newly annexed Texas—but he discovered it was “hellishly expensive” and dropped the idea. Work as a radical communist, he was learning, did not pay the bills. “It is a pity,” Marx’s mother once remarked, “that Karl doesn’t make some capital instead of just writing about it.” The family eventually moved into a dingy, two-bedroom apartment on London’s Dean Street.

  Marx and his group in London, biographer David McLellan notes, displayed a ferocious zeal, behaving “like the early Christians awaiting the Second Coming.” A Prussian spy who infiltrated one of the meetings found Marx’s home full of broken furniture and covered in a thick layer of dust and tobacco ash. “If you sit down,” the spook reported, “you risk a pair of trousers.” According to the agent, Marx led “the existence of a real bohemian intellectual. Washing, grooming and changing his linen are things he does rarely, and he likes to get drunk.” The whole place reeked so badly of cigar and coal smoke that the Prussian spy found his eyes watering.25

  One of the group’s first tasks, the revolutionaries decided, would be to form a newspaper as part of their “secret propaganda society.” Yet Marx’s heart was not really in it. Both Marx and Engels were chastened by the failure of Europe’s liberal moment. “From now on,” Engels wrote Marx in 1851, “we are answerable for ourselves alone.” Marx, who had taken to wearing a fashionable scarf and a monocle in one eye, spent time teaching fellow German refugees political economy. Still, the philosopher could not stay away from the newspaper business for long. He remained convinced that the reactionary crackdown could not survive the swift pace of technological change. “King Steam,” a friend recalled Marx saying, “was being superseded by a still greater revolutionary—the electric spark.”

  In 1851, a letter arrived from Charles Dana offering Marx a job writing for the Tribune. The paper wanted two articles each week, and would pay five dollars per piece. Marx immediately agreed to join the paper’s staff.26 The Tribune offer could not have come at a better time. Marx’s home life was on the verge of falling apart. Money was so tight that Jenny sold their beds to pay the bills. Meanwhile, Marx had impregnated the family’s nanny, who had been a childhood friend of Jenny’s back in Prussia. The tension had become unbearable in the tiny Dean Street apartment. Nothing could soothe the pain of Marx’s betrayal, but at least the newspaper job allowed Marx to support his family. Jenny Marx later recalled that the family paid off old debts with the new income and managed to live a somewhat “less anxious life” free of their old “nagging daily worries.”27

  Marx complained about the job, but he was increasingly fascinated by North America. His philosophic forebear, Hegel, considered America “the land of the future.” Soon, Hegel wrote, “the center of world-historical importance will be revealed there.” After gold was discovered in the American West in 1848, Marx identified the United States as the new “fulcrum of world commerce.” He complained about “the moneybag republicans of North America,” but he also marveled at the accelerating wave of technological innovation emerging from the United States. At one industrial exhibition, Marx wrote Engels in 1851, the Americans displayed new weapons, reapers, and sewing machines—alongside “a colossal lump of California gold ore.” The natural resources of North America were spawning a brisk trade across the Pacific, the economist observed. The New World was filling the role that Italy had played in the Middle Ages and England had taken on in recent years. America was still something of a backwater when it came to the issue of human bondage. Other countries in Europe and Latin America had emancipated their slaves years before. Still, there was no denying the increasing material strength of Britain’s former colonies. Marx considered America the rising “center of gravity of world trade.”28

  Grinding Bones and Making Soup

  Marx recognized that his dispatches for the Tribune had the power to influence two hundred thousand Americans each week. Still, he had to hold his nose to work for a newspaper that he considered the house organ of the American bourgeoisie. “It’s truly nauseating,” Marx wrote, “that one should be condemned to count it a blessing when taken aboard by a blotting-paper vendor such as this. To crush up bones, grind them and make them into soup like paupers in the workhouse—that is what the political work to which one is condemned in such large measure in a concern like this boils down to.” Marx had no respect for Horace Greeley, despite the editor’s crusading editorial policies. He considered Greeley a second-rate thinker. Still, it was hard to beat the reach of the Tribune. Readers particularly looked to the paper for its international coverage, provided by a network of eighteen foreign correspondents.29

  From his perch in London, Marx covered the entire world. He wrote about British trade with China. He analyzed the Greek insurrection against Ottoman rule. He composed dispatches on revolutions in Spain and revolts in India. Lincoln, as a lawyer in Springfield during the 1850s, carefully pored over the Tribune, noting that it was “extensively read in Illinois.” He sometimes wrote Greeley to complain about individual stories with which he disagreed. We have no record of whether Lincoln actually read Marx’s dispatches. But they would have been difficult to miss. Marx contributed more than 350 articles to the newspaper over the course of the decade. Many were printed on the front page under his own byline. It is certainly easy to imagine Lincoln stretching out on his couch in the offices of Lincoln & Herndon, reading Marx aloud, to the annoyance of his partner. Herndon often noted the power of the Tribune in letters to associates, referring to Marx’s employer as a “great paper” with a “widespread and almost universal circulation.”30

  Despite the high profile, Marx complained that the “newspaper muck” irritated him. He often wrote through the night, then napped on his sofa once the sun rose. When he was done, Marx’s wife would copy the philosopher’s illegible scrawl into a readable format. Marx referred to the reports as his “letters.” The Tribune sometimes felt the need to apologize for its controversial contributor. The editors cautioned readers that they did not always agree with their opinionated London correspondent. And yet, Marx’s bosses continued, “those who do not read his letters neglect one of the most instructive sources of information on the great questions of current European politics.” Marx, for his part, complained that the Tribune editors ruthlessly chopped up his material. In later years, they often printed his contributions as unsigned editorials. The Tribune, Marx wrote Engels in 1854, “has again appropriated all my articles as leaders and published only trash under my name.” In many cases the frustrated Marx simply farmed out the work to Engels, who was working at his father’s textile mill in Manchester.31

  The urban underclass of Manchester would one day play its own highly unlikely role in the international affairs of the Civil War. Diplomacy, in many ways, was still the province of kings and their representatives. Yet over the course of the nineteenth century, common people outside the world’s chancelleries were becoming increasingly capable of exerting pressure on high officials. The burgeoning culture of political activism in Britain, coupled with the boom in newspaper publishing, meant that organized groups of workers could manage to have some voice—however soft—in global politics.

  Lincoln may have ultimately given this group too much credit for its ability to sway the sympathies of cold-eyed British statesmen. Still, as the Civil War intensified, the American president would eventually find himself appealing directly to British laborers, convinced that any bonds of affinity would help the Union’s cause. Textile workers in cities like Manchester would bear the most painful burdens of any potential cotton shortage. If they grew desperate enough, British officials might feel pressure to intervene to stop the war. Furthermore, Lincoln believed (correctly, this time) that a moral appeal could energize this constituency. Many of the same workers, after all, had mobilized to help abolish West Indian slavery earlier in the ninet
eenth century.32

  As for Engels, working at his father’s mill provided an opportunity to stay in close contact with labor leaders and observe the deprivations of English workers firsthand. The city, Engels observed, consisted of “a planless, knotted chaos of houses” situated along “a narrow, coal-black, foul-smelling stream, full of debris and refuse.” The creek ultimately emptied into “the most disgusting blackish-green slime pools.” Pigs rolled in the slop, and the stench of the local tanneries was oppressive. The disgusting conditions did not keep Marx from coming to visit regularly throughout the 1850s. Manchester, he found, was a convenient location to hide out from his creditors. Marx’s wife, Jenny, teased Engels that he had become “a great cotton lord.” Actually, Engels stole hundreds of dollars from his father’s company to send back to his collaborator in London. Marx was elated when he heard the postman knock. “There’s Frederick!” the philosopher would cry. “Two pounds extra! Saved!”33

  Marx had withdrawn from politics during much of the 1850s. He maintained some contacts with the Chartists, a movement of British workers that sought voting rights and labor reforms. But he was frustrated by the failure of the working class to rise up. Instead he focused primarily on journalism and his longer economic treatises. Marx devoured European newspapers as research for his Tribune articles. He was ever on the lookout for signs of impending revolution. The outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853 offered one potential spark. The whole situation was “bubbling and boiling,” he wrote. A foreign crisis, Marx understood, could induce Manchester’s workers to take to the streets and demand change. “The times,” he wrote optimistically in 1856, “seem to me to be hotting up.”34

  Marx’s financial situation improved slightly as the decade progressed. When two of Jenny’s aristocratic relatives died, the family inherited a couple of hundred pounds. They moved to more spacious accommodations near London’s Hampstead Heath. The new place, with its view of St. Paul’s Cathedral, “is truly a prince dwelling compared with the holes we used to live in,” as Jenny put it. Marx, whom his children called Moor because of his dark complexion, found time to relax a little, carrying the tots around on his back like a horse. But money ultimately remained tight. Marx felt that he deserved a higher salary from the Tribune. “With three pounds per article,” he wrote Engels, “I could at last get out of the muck.” At first his bosses in New York agreed to raise his rate. But in 1857 they cut his weekly contributions from two articles to one—defeating the purpose of a raise. Marx, writing in his unique mishmash of German and English, complained to Engels that he was “from all sides gebothert.” He groused about the “lousy Yankees.” Marx’s wife was forced to cart their remaining linen and furniture to the local pawnshop.35

  Marx, despite his poverty, never pulled his punches as a journalist. He reserved some of his most vehement criticism for Britain’s Lord Palmerston. The German radical considered the Most English Minister the tool of Britain’s bourgeoisie. Palmerston was a great phony, Marx believed. If he was too weak to confront a “strong enemy,” he predicted, Palmerston would find a straw man to knock down instead. In Palmerston’s vision, Marx wrote, “the movement of history is nothing but a pastime, expressly invented for the private satisfaction of the noble Viscount Palmerston of Palmerston.” Still, Marx observed, the aging statesman had become a hero to the middle class. His chief supporters consisted of Britain’s lords of industry, whom Marx derided as “vampyres, fattening on the life-blood of the young working generation.” The irresponsible Palmerston and the “industrial slaveholders” who supported him, Marx complained, sought foreign wars to distract from troubles at home.36

  Marx, despite his uncompromising rhetoric, was actually willing to support middle-class revolutions if he thought they would lead to an uprising of the working class. The growing tension in North America on the slavery question enthralled him. By the winter of 1860, Marx considered the rising conflict over slavery one of “the biggest things now happening in the world.” He recognized that a Civil War across the Atlantic could have profound consequences in Europe. English textile mills like the one Engels helped operate depended on a steady supply of raw cotton from the slaveholding states in America. A shortage could lead to massive unemployment, perhaps even revolution. “If things gradually get serious,” Marx wrote Engels in January 1860, “what will become of Manchester?”37

  Marx was a careful student of the material elements of national power. The more he analyzed the state of play, the more a Northern victory appeared inevitable. In a letter to Engels in July 1861, Marx cited census figures to make the case that the burgeoning population of the American Northwest (including the modern-day Midwest) alone now far exceeded the total population of the seceding states. Northwesterners, Marx insisted, would not simply hand over the Mississippi Delta to a foreign power. Still, the war would be no easy victory. Marx believed that the South—teeming with angry, poor “adventurers”—would win some early battles. In the long run, however, the North was sure to prevail—not least, Marx observed, because it could always “play the last card, that of a slave uprising.”38

  A Snake in the Bed

  Marx considered the antislavery agitation in America part of a worldwide trend toward abolition. He saw parallels in Russian czar Alexander II’s emancipation of the serfs in 1861. Antislavery had in fact been sweeping the globe for decades prior to the American Civil War. In 1814 Mexico had abolished slavery, and a decade later Central America did the same. Britain banned the slave trade in 1807, and prohibited slavery altogether in 1833. In the 1850s, Colombia, Argentina, Venezuela, and Peru all joined the movement. The United States was well behind the times.39

  Lincoln, of course, loathed slavery. For years he had been speaking out eloquently against the institution. Yet he also believed that the Constitution protected the property rights of slaveholders. As the secession crisis deepened, therefore, he made his goal the preservation of the Union—not abolition, which he initially believed would be both illegal and counterproductive. Furthermore, racism remained prevalent, even in the North. Lincoln recognized that he needed to take those views into account. “A universal feeling,” he once remarked, “whether well or ill founded, cannot be safely disregarded.” Freeing slaves might alienate otherwise loyal plantation owners in border states like Kentucky. With territory slipping out of the Union by the day, the president could not afford to forfeit any supporters. “I think to lose Kentucky,” he wrote Orville Browning, “is nearly the same as to lose the whole game. Kentucky gone, we can not hold Missouri, nor, as I think, Maryland. These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us. We would as well consent to separation at once, including the surrender of this capitol.”40

  Lincoln further clarified his position by reciting a parable. If “out in the street, or in the field, or on the prairie I find a rattlesnake,” he began, “I take a stake and kill him. Everybody would applaud the act and say I did right. But suppose the snake was in a bed where children were sleeping. Would I do right to strike him there? I might hurt the children; or I might not kill, but only arouse and exasperate the snake, and he might bite the children.” On another occasion, Lincoln compared the country to a sick man with a tumor on his neck. Remove the tumor, he warned, and the patient might die in the process.41

  In Lincoln’s first inaugural, the new president went out of his way to reassure slaveholders in the border states. He had no intention, he explained, “directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery where it exists.” Seward relayed the message to his diplomats in the field: Slavery was not to be mentioned at all as a rationale for the war. (A frequently overlooked line in the secretary of state’s April Fools’ memo urges the president to “change the question before the public from one upon slavery” to “a question upon Union or disunion.” Lincoln agreed with this part of Seward’s counsel—at least at first.) Europe’s ruling classes took Lincoln and Seward at their word—not least because it was convenient for them. Europeans disliked s
lavery, but they also depended upon cotton from the Confederate states. If the war transformed into an antislavery crusade, it would complicate matters immensely. Marx, in his Tribune dispatches, tried to expose the hypocrisy in the attitudes of European aristocrats. He argued persuasively that slavery actually lay at the foundation of the conflict.42

  Marx, in some ways, operated like a modern blogger. He did little original reporting. Instead, he pored over the proliferating English newspapers and magazines—and then critiqued them. Marx once revealingly complained that he could not do his job because he did not have enough money to buy newspapers. When he did have the money, there was never a lack of material. The number of American newspapers alone had more than doubled in the three decades before the Civil War.43

  Lincoln, too, was a shrewd observer—and manipulator—of the media. Even before he became president, he worked carefully to control his own image.44 He spent a great deal of time in newspaper offices. He often lurked in composing rooms, watching as his speeches were set in type to make sure no mistakes crept in. Once, back in Illinois, he bought a printing press in an attempt to woo German voters. Sometimes he tried to bribe newspaper publishers. As president, Lincoln quizzed visiting correspondents for intelligence from the battlefield.

  The flood of newspaper commentary sometimes overwhelmed Lincoln. He complained that he lost sleep over hostile editorials. At the White House on one occasion, an acquaintance observed that newspapers were not always “reliable.” Lincoln shot back that he agreed. “That is to say,” the president added, that “they ‘lie,’ and then they ‘re-lie’!” As the war unfolded, Lincoln soured particularly on the editor in chief of the Tribune. “Greeley is so rotten,” the president told his cabinet on one occasion, “that nothing can be done with him.”45