Karl Marx: Letter to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America; 1865
Address of the International Working Men's Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America Presented to U.S. Ambassador Charles Adams January 28, 1865
The workingmen of Europe... consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.
Sir:
We congratulate the
American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the
Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant
war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery. From the commencement
of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that
the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for
the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the
virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or
prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?
When an oligarchy of
300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the
world, "slavery" on the banner of Armed Revolt, when on the very
spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had
first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued,
and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth
century; when on those very spots counterrevolution, with systematic
thoroughness, gloried in rescinding "the ideas entertained at the time of
the formation of the old constitution", and maintained slavery to be
"a beneficent institution", indeed, the old solution of the great
problem of "the relation of capital to labor", and cynically
proclaimed property in man "the cornerstone of the new edifice" —
then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic
partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its
dismal warning, that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a
general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor,
with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in
that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they
bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis,
opposed enthusiastically the proslavery intervention of their betters — and,
from most parts of Europe, contributed their quota of blood to the good cause.
While the workingmen,
the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own
republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence,
they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell
himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom
of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for
emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of
civil war.
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 classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it
fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class,
to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an
enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.
Signed on behalf of
the International Workingmen's Association, the Central Council:
Longmaid, Worley,
Whitlock, Fox, Blackmore, Hartwell, Pidgeon, Lucraft, Weston, Dell, Nieass,
Shaw, Lake, Buckley, Osbourne, Howell, Carter, Wheeler, Stainsby, Morgan,
Grossmith, Dick, Denoual, Jourdain, Morrissot, Leroux, Bordage, Bocquet,
Talandier, Dupont, L.Wolff, Aldovrandi, Lama, Solustri, Nusperli, Eccarius,
Wolff, Lessner, Pfander, Lochner, Kaub, Bolleter, Rybczinski, Hansen,
Schantzenbach, Smales, Cornelius, Petersen, Otto, Bagnagatti, Setacci; George Odger,
President of the Council; P.V. Lubez, Corresponding Secretary for France; Karl
Marx, Corresponding Secretary for Germany; G.P. Fontana, Corresponding
Secretary for Italy; J.E. Holtorp, Corresponding Secretary for Poland; H.F.
Jung, Corresponding Secretary for Switzerland; William R. Cremer, Honorary General
Secretary.
18 Greek Street, Soho.
Ambassador Adams
Replies
Legation of the United
States
London, 28th January, 1865
London, 28th January, 1865
Sir:
I am directed to
inform you that the address of the Central Council of your Association, which
was duly transmitted through this Legation to the President of the United
[States], has been received by him. So far as the
sentiments expressed by it are personal, they are accepted by him with a
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 Government of the
United States has a clear consciousness that its policy neither is nor could be
reactionary, but at the same time it adheres to the course which it adopted at
the beginning, of abstaining everywhere from propagandism and unlawful
intervention. It strives to do equal and exact justice to all states and to all
men and it relies upon the beneficial results of that effort for support at
home and for respect and good will throughout the world.
Nations do not exist
for themselves alone, but to promote the welfare and happiness of mankind by
benevolent intercourse and example. It is in this relation that the United
States regard their cause in the present conflict with slavery, maintaining
insurgence as the cause of human nature, and they derive new encouragements to
persevere from the testimony of the workingmen of Europe that the national
attitude is favored with their enlightened approval and earnest sympathies.
I have the honor to
be, sir, your obedient servant, Charles Francis
Adams
