6

THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR CONSIDERED AS A BOURGEOIS REVOLUTION

INTRODUCTION

Consideration of any of the great bourgeois revolutions tends to suggest two speculative questions about the outcome: whether it could have been more radical than the one that was actually achieved, and whether it could have been achieved even if the revolution had not taken place. What do these involve in the specific case of the American Civil War? The alternative ending involves a permanent democratization of the former Confederate states, thus preventing the continuing oppression of the black population that in fact took place, albeit in different forms than under slavery. The alternative path to abolition involves a process of gradual, if reluctant, adaptation to capitalist norms of free labor on the part of the South, rather than having them imposed—and even then, incompletely—by military conquest. The point of making these queries is not of course to indulge in the type of “alternative history” most frequently associated with figures of the political right from Winston Churchill to Niall Ferguson, but to explore the balance between the objective limits and subjective possibilities present in this revolutionary situation. These limits and possibilities depended not only on developments internal to the United States of America but also on external pressures exercised by the expansion of capitalist economy on a global scale and the emergence of a states system whose main component parts were increasingly being reconfigured as centers of capital accumulation. In what follows I hope to demonstrate that while the first alternative was at least conceivable, the second was not.

MARXISM AND THE US CIVIL WAR

Marxist interpretations of the Civil War fall into two broad historical periods, each with its own characteristic approaches. In the first, which encompassed the overlapping eras of the Second and Third Internationals, the war appeared as an uncomplicated conflict between two opposed and incompatible social systems—although paradoxically, what most distinguished the South as a distinct society, namely chattel slavery, received little attention. As a consequence, discussion of racism was perfunctory at best and the role of slaves or former slaves in achieving their own liberation tended to be dismissed.¹ Whatever other virtues these works possess—and I am not suggesting that these are entirely negligible—they were strongly economistic, often to the point of implying that the outcome of the war was inevitable.

The second period is coextensive with the emergence of the New Left in the US. The main movements of the time, the struggle for black civil rights and opposition to the war in Vietnam, inevitably influenced the attitude of those writing about the Civil War. In the case of the civil rights movement, it helped to refocus attention onto the situation of the slaves themselves, both before and after emancipation. In the case of the anti–Vietnam War movement, opposition to contemporary US imperialism began to influence retrospective judgments on the role of the North. Above all, the fact that the North did not initially enter the war to free the slaves and subsequently abandoned the freed black population after 1877 seemed to confirm the view that the US had always been a self-interested power, and that the motives of its leaders should, throughout history, always be treated with the greatest suspicion. The most important of these interpretations have not, however, dealt so much with the Civil War as with the societies that entered and emerged from it, with perhaps the two single greatest achievements of the historiography dealing respectively with the nature of antebellum Southern slave society and the failure of Reconstruction.² So great is the continuing sense that the war was (in the slogan of the time) “a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight” that it is still possible to produce books—often excellent on their own terms—dealing solely with the experience of “the people,” and in which the actual issues at stake in the outcome are treated merely as which “elite” would emerge victorious from its “center of power.”³

In both periods the dominant “bourgeois revolution” interpretations of the Civil War were not of Marxist origin, nor did they employ the actual term. The first, dating from the late twenties, was the work of Charles and Mary Beard, historians who explicitly rejected Marxism for a politics that bridged progressivism and moderate reformist socialism while espousing their own brand of economic determinism.⁴ Their conceptualization of the Civil War as a “Second American Revolution” that finally allowed the unfettered expansion of capitalism on the basis of industrialization and free farming was—as we shall see—not original to them, but their version became the dominant explanatory framework through which the period was understood by the left. A comparison between the Beards’ version of the Civil War in The Rise of American Civilization (1927–30) and the nominally Marxist account by Louis Hacker in The Triumph of American Capitalism (1940), for example, does not reveal any fundamental differences of approach.⁵ The Beards’ influence spread far beyond the ranks of orthodox Communism, being accepted by later left-wing professional historians, independent Marxist scholars, and Trotskyists.⁶ Followers of the Beards among professional historians also established the theoretical perspective on Reconstruction. Comer Vann Woodward placed the events explicitly in the context of comparable periods in earlier cases, specifically the French, describing Reconstruction as the “final phase of the revolution, the phase the French refer to as Thermidor” and writing that “if the Men of 1787 made the Thermidor of the first American Revolution, the Men of 1877 played a corresponding part in the Second American Revolution.”⁷ This account too had an influence on the revolutionary left.⁸ The other interpretation, dating from the mid-sixties, was produced by Barrington Moore, who belongs to that tradition of radical sociology that is influenced by Marxism but by no means committed to the core doctrines of historical materialism. In Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966), Moore traced what he called three different roads to “modernity” and expressed skepticism about the concept of bourgeois revolution, at least as it had been conventionally understood for most of the twentieth century.⁹Nevertheless, he wrote that “the American Civil War was the last revolutionary offensive on the part of what one may legitimately call urban or bourgeois capitalist democracy.”¹⁰ Moore himself referred back to the Beards, and many writers who had been influenced by them treated his work as a confirmation of or supplement to their earlier analysis, although in many respects Moore is more subtle, allowing—correctly, in my view—the possibility that the South might have won.¹¹

John Ashworth’s outstanding work on the origins of the Civil War must therefore be welcomed as an important attempt to deal with the sources of the conflict in explicitly Marxist terms. His first volume traces the growing divergence between North and South and concludes by anticipating the outcome of their antagonism: “The result would be war, emancipation, social upheaval—and the consolidation of capitalist relations of production in the United States. In other words the result would be a bourgeois revolution.”¹²Yet in his second volume, an element of ambiguity enters. Ashworth shifts his focus from the consequences of the war (“the consolidation of capitalist relations of production”) to the motivations of those who defended the Union, highlighting in particular their ideological support for wage labor and opposition to slavery: “Slavery was criticized, condemned, and finally destroyed in the United States essentially because by the norms of northern society it was increasingly unacceptable. These were the norms of northern free-labor society, one characterized by ‘bourgeois social relations,’ as they are often termed, with wage labor at their core.”¹³ According to Ashworth, in economic terms the North was not in crisis before the war (although there was a high level of internal class struggle) and the further development of industrial capitalism would not have been constrained by the continued existence of agrarian slavery in the South, however much of an abomination many Northerners found it. Indeed, as far as the South itself was concerned, conditions after the War were scarcely more advantageous to capitalism than before—a situation that would take decades to overcome. The triumph of the bourgeois revolution in the US was therefore coextensive with the ascendancy on a national scale of a hitherto sectional ideology encapsulated in the prewar Republican Party slogan of “free soil, free labor, and free men.”

I agree with Ashworth that the American Civil War was a bourgeois revolution—or, more precisely, it constituted a major part of the global process of bourgeois revolution as it unfolded within the US. Where I disagree with him is over why this was so. Different ideologies were clearly important in the Civil War, but if they did not express different means of organizing social relations, then it simply involved two essentially capitalist powers, distinguished by the nature of their political regimes and in conflict because of overlapping territorial claims. Such a situation is quite familiar and can be explained in a number of ways, for example as secessionist nationalism or geopolitical rivalry, but it does not require a concept of bourgeois revolution. An attempt to understand the American Civil War in this way must therefore begin by defining the concept.

The issues at stake were clearly set out back in the sixties by a US academic called Gerald Runkle, in one of the most comprehensive attempts by a non-Marxist to assess the writings of Marx and Engels on the Civil War. Runkle argued that the very validity of historical materialism turned on whether the concept of revolution as understood by Marx and Engels was applicable to events between 1861 and 1865. What did Runkle understand this to involve?

According to the basic Marxian theory, revolutions occur when the mode of production of a society becomes incompatible with the forces of production of that society. But that this was not so in the South is evident from the almost total absence of bourgeois development there. The “revolution” came from without, not from within. . . . The “class struggle” was indeed an unusual one, for one class was supreme in the South (and virtually non-existent in the North), another was powerful in the North (and virtually non-existent in the South). The great enemies of the privileged class in the South were not the people directly exploited by that class, the Negroes and the “poor whites,” but the people in the North! . . . That great changes occurred in the North before, during, and after the war does not mean that the North was spear-heading a revolution in the Marxian sense. Marx’s mistake here (and elsewhere) is to mistake the results of the war with the cause of the war. He anticipated very well the results of the war. A more capitalistic America did emerge. The “forces of production” developed rapidly during the war, industry grew, and fortunes were made. The bourgeoisie entered into a period of almost unchallenged supremacy. The economy and society of America were indeed revolutionized. This does not mean, however, that the growing strength of industrial capitalism brought about the war. Many other factors operated with it to bring about the war which was in turn a great causal factor for modern capitalism. In short, the advance of capitalism was a conspicuous, but not the only, result of a war which was brought about by many factors of which bourgeois development was only one.

Consequently, the question of why Marx did not continue to develop his analysis of the Civil War after it concluded presents no great mystery: “One suspects that the American Civil War did not, therefore, lend itself to the kind of interpretation that would enhance or confirm dialectical materialism. If this is so, then the war constitutes a tacit refutation of basic Marxian theory.”¹⁴

It is true that some care needs to be exercised in trying to extrapolate a general view of the Civil War from Marx’s and Engels’s contemporary writings. They expressed their views on the subject in three places: personal correspondence between the two men (much of which is taken up with analysis of the military conduct of the war, a subject over which they regularly disagreed until the very final stages); reports for the abolitionist Horace Greeley’s paper, the New York Daily Tribune, and the Viennese Die Presse; and two public pronouncements, in the form of letters to Presidents Lincoln and Johnson, on behalf of the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA).¹⁵ Each of these presents its own difficulties. In the private letters, a number of shared assumptions were obviously taken for granted, and this theoretical context has to be recreated by the reader. In the articles, certain complexities were omitted for a general newspaper audience, which tends to give an oversimplified picture of their views. In the open letters, the need to define a working-class position in relation to the conflict inevitably took precedence over the requirements of theory. In addition, the sources on which Marx and Engels based their analysis were limited to often inaccurate newspaper reports and a handful of books on the subject of the South, the two most important of which appeared only during the first year of the War.¹⁶ Their correspondence suggests that they also received updates from German émigrés in the North like August Willich, who fought for the Union. The resulting inconsistencies and flaws in their writings have led to accusations of, among other things, their being over-sympathetic to Lincoln, of neglecting the imperial dimension of Northern war aims on the one hand and the popular character of Southern smallholder resistance to them on the other, of exaggerating working-class opposition to slavery in the North and in Britain, and of succumbing to economic reductionism.¹⁷

In fact, although much of their work remains of interest, a coherent Marxist analysis is more likely to emerge by starting from first principles rather than from trying to synthesize these fragments. Such an analysis should be able to demonstrate that the elements that Runkle claimed disproved historical materialism—the lack of internal class contradiction within Southern society, the external imposition of revolutionary change, the lack of causal connection between the Northern victory and subsequent capitalist development—do nothing of the kind. Although Marx and Engels did have a very general theory of revolution as resulting from the conflict between the forces and relations of production, they conceived of bourgeois and proletarian revolutions as taking very different forms. In the first part of this article I will therefore offer a general definition of bourgeois revolutions, abstracted from their development down to the 1870s but excluding from consideration at this stage either the American Civil War era or earlier revolutionary periods in US history. In the second I will attempt to show that the real cause of the war, what made it inescapable, was not so much capitalist development in the North as—to use the term used by the slave owners themselves—the “peculiar” nature of class society in the South.

WHAT WERE THE BOURGEOIS REVOLUTIONS?

The “bourgeois revolution” is a concept, a way of identifying historical processes that belong to the same class or category: the difficulty is that there is no agreement about what the essential qualities of the concept are. One solution might be to adopt the procedure Marx outlined in the preface to the first edition of Capital—in other words, select the “classic” case where the fundamental characteristics of the concept are most fully developed, as he did in relation to the development of capitalism in England.¹⁸ In one sense this is exactly what Marx and particularly Engels did in relation to bourgeois revolutions, where the “classic” case is taken to be that of France.¹⁹ The French Revolution can indeed yield many insights into the dynamics of subsequent revolutionary movements in which mass mobilizations are central; but the most important of these cases, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79, were not bourgeois revolutions. In other words, the French Revolution illuminates the process of revolution from below in a general sense, but it cannot do so in relation to the underlying nature of the bourgeois revolutions as a specific category, precisely because one of the questions at issue is whether they necessarily involve popular mobilizations.

The key problem, in this context, is the general applicability of the procedure outlined by Marx and Engels. It is certainly appropriate when discussing the capitalist mode of production, which by definition has certain indispensable characteristics, such as generalized commodity production or the self-expansion of capital. It would be equally appropriate in a discussion of any other embodiment of structured social relationships, like the absolutist state, where the French case before 1789 can also be treated as “classic.” But the bourgeois revolution is not the embodiment of a structured relationship like that of wage labor to capital or peasants to the tax collector; it is the unfolding of a process. Consequently, to treat the characteristics of the French case as the highest level of bourgeois revolutionary development is to imply that countries that do not display these characteristics have either undergone an incomplete experience or failed to undergo the experience at all.²⁰

Perhaps another revolution might be more suitable as a “classic” case then? Geoff Eley has argued that the German experience, in avoiding the “volatile scenario of the English and French Revolutions,” is actually a better model.²¹ But is Otto von Bismarck any more of a representative figure than Oliver Cromwell or Maximilien Robespierre? In fact, the German experience of territorial expansion by military conquest at the hands of an internally transformed absolutist state has close parallels only with the contemporary events of the Italian Risorgimento.

The problem is irresolvable so long as we treat “bourgeois” as referring to the dominant agency and “revolution” as taking a particular form. An alternative approach would be to place the concept of bourgeois revolution on the terrain of what Andrew Abbott calls “turning point” analysis, in which “neither the beginning nor the end of the turning point can be defined until the whole turning point has passed, since it is the arrival and establishment of a new trajectory . . . that defines the turning point itself.” Consequently, “turning point analysis makes sense only after the fact.”²²What would the turning point be in the case of bourgeois revolutions? Alex Callinicos has argued that we should “judge a bourgeois revolution by the degree to which it succeeds in establishing an autonomous center of capital accumulation, even if it fails to democratize the political order, or to eliminate feudal social relations.”²³ The test is therefore whether it can be empirically demonstrated that a particular sequence of events (“a bourgeois revolution”) led directly to an outcome (the establishment of “an independent center of capital accumulation”) that would not otherwise have taken place at that point in history. Since the two characteristics that Callinicos cites as nonessential to the completion of the bourgeois revolution—democratization of the political order and the elimination of feudal and other precapitalist social relations—are central to the American case, their lack of relevance requires some elaboration.

I have dealt with the issue of democracy earlier in this book.²⁴ The possibility of feudalism in any form surviving a bourgeois revolution is perhaps an even more controversial issue. For if one outcome can be expected of bourgeois revolutions, surely it is to eliminate feudal and other precapitalist modes of production? In fact, this need not be the case. As Geoffrey Ste Croix has pointed out, the key issue in determining the class nature of any society is not necessarily how most labor is performed, but rather how the labor that produced the surplus accruing to the ruling class is performed.²⁵ It is therefore quite conceivable that a postrevolutionary society might contain precapitalist social relations, perhaps even involving a majority of the direct producers, as long as the ruling class—which by definition includes those in ultimate control of the state—occupied their position through the competitive accumulation of capital based on wage labor. In practice, of course, precapitalist and capitalist modes of production have not coexisted in some dualist fashion, as the former would then be subject to capitalist laws of motion—indeed, another way of defining a bourgeois revolution might be the process by which political obstacles to their unimpeded sway are removed. Jairus Banaji once argued that Marx used the term “mode of production” (produktionsweise) in two ways: one to refer to the technical process of production, or the labor process more generally; the other to encompass an entire epoch in the history of the social organization of production. The existence of wage labor, for example, does not necessarily signify the emergence of the capitalist mode of production; wage labor also took place under feudalism, but primarily as a means of meeting the consumption requirements of the lords rather than contributing to the self-expansion of capital. It is rather that the existence of the capitalist mode of production determines that wage labor becomes the central means through which surplus extraction takes place. Equally, however, various types of unfree labor associated with precapitalist modes of production, including slavery itself, can also take place within the context of the capitalist mode of production and, in the terms Marx uses in the Grundrisse, both posit and produce capital.²⁶ The relevance of this argument to our theme is that it perfectly possible for feudal, absolutist, or tributary states to be overthrown, thus removing the last obstacle to establishing “an independent center of capital accumulation,” while some social relations remain, initially at least, those associated with precapitalist modes in the purely technical sense.

If the historical role of the bourgeoisie is contingent in an outcome-based definition of bourgeois revolution, then it should be clear from the preceding discussion that the transformation of the state is necessary in each case. The state was central to both the process and the outcome, since the seizure of state power was the goal of the revolutionaries, and—if achieved—it ensured that the territory they controlled could become the site of “an autonomous center of capital accumulation”: this theme remained constant across the overlapping periodizations in the overall pattern of development down to the consolidation of the capitalist system. The first period, characterized by revolutions primarily from below, encompasses those in the United Netherlands and England, where economic life was already subject to capitalist laws of motion and only the absolutist state needed to be overthrown to complete the process of transition. The second, still characterized by revolutions primarily from below, begins with the French Revolution and includes all the subsequent, mainly unsuccessful revolutions that followed it down to 1848, where capitalism was still subordinate to feudal laws of motion in addition to the bourgeoisie being politically subordinate to the absolutist state. The third, now characterized by revolutions primarily from above, is compressed into the years between 1859 and 1871, which saw the Italian Risorgimento, German unification, the Japanese Meiji Restoration, Canadian Confederation, and (less decisively) the liberation of the serfs in Russia. In these cases, levels of capitalist development are mixed, extensive in Canada outside of the former French colonies, minimal in Japan and Russia; but the impetus for change comes from a ruling-class fraction within the absolutist state or, in the case of Canada, the colonial state. The central paradox of this shifting trajectory is that as the outcome of capitalist and particularly industrial capitalist development becomes more explicit, the agents of revolution become further and further removed from the capitalist class.

There are, however, two revolutions that do not fit these periodizations. Separated from each other in both scale and time, they are linked by virtue of being the only two examples where a fully conscious bourgeoisie set out to establish capitalism in a part of the sovereign territory of the state from which it had previously been excluded, and in both cases their ability to do so was dependent on prior control of a centralized military and juridical apparatus. One was the Scottish Revolution, during the suppression of the Jacobite Rising of 1745–46 and the transformation of agricultural relations in the decades that followed—a process that seems to have been the first example of the bourgeois revolution from above characteristic of the mid-nineteenth century. Although in no sense a prototype or model for its successors, it did involve the same set of elements that produced them: a favorable geopolitical context (the global inter-systemic conflict between Britain and France); a centralizing and expansionist capitalist territory seeking to unify a new nation-state (England and Britain); and the formation of a new ruling class drawn from those of the previously existing nations (England and Scotland).²⁷ The other was, of course, the American Civil War, to which we can now return.

The first problem for any Marxist analysis of the bourgeois revolutionary process in the United States is to set its chronological parameters. We should not be constrained by the time periods deployed in conventional narratives of national history. The English Revolution does not correspond to the period of the Civil Wars (i.e., 1642–49), but encompasses the entire period from the beginning of Scottish resistance to Charles I in 1637 through to the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660, together with the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89. Similarly, the duration of the American Revolution cannot be restricted to the period of the Civil War, but must include the subsequent period of reconstruction, since it was during the postwar years to 1877 that the form taken by the US as a capitalist nation-state was finally established. Chronologically, then, it falls into the last period, the period of revolutions from above, and has one important characteristic in common with most of them. Prussia, Piedmont, and Upper Canada (i.e., modern Ottawa) successfully incorporated, by a variety of means, a range of smaller, less powerful or less economically developed regions into the new nation-states of Germany, Italy, and Canada. The North played the same role in relation to the US, although here the objective was to prevent the secession of a major part of the existing nation-state, rather than to initiate state formation. Yet in other respects the Civil War era has more in common with earlier periods of bourgeois revolution, in terms of increasing political radicalization and popular involvement, military suppression, and juridical abolition of precapitalist social relations—and a conservative resolution that disappointed radical hopes and failed to complete the liberation of the oppressed.

THE US WAR OF INDEPENDENCE AS A POLITICAL REVOLUTION

What does dating the American Revolution from 1861 to 1877 mean for our assessment of the most important episode in American history prior to the Civil War, the one officially regarded by the US state as “the Revolution”? One approach would be to regard these conflicts as the opening and closing moments of a prolonged period of revolutionary transformation, a view first expressed in the aftermath of the Civil War by several of the participants. Here, for example, is the Northern military commander and twentieth president of the United States, James Garfield: “It will not do to speak of the gigantic revolution through which we have lately passed as a thing to be adjusted and settled by a change in administration. It was cyclical, epochal, century-wide, and to be studied in its broad and grand perspective, a revolution of even wider scope, so far as time is concerned, than the Revolution of 1776.”²⁸

This conception of a prolonged process has some Marxist support. Mike Davis, for example, writes: “It is possible to see the Revolution of 1776 . . . as very much a civil war against Loyalist comprador strata, and the Civil War as a continuing revolution against an informal British imperialism that had incorporated the cotton export economy of the South in an alliance of neo-colonial dependency.”²⁹ More commonly, however, the two wars have been treated as distinct episodes, with the second resolving the issues left unfinished by the first. Although the interpretation of the Civil War as a “Second American Revolution” was made famous by the Beards, it too goes back to the Civil War itself and indeed predates it. “Revolutions never go backward,” wrote the abolitionist James Redpath, in the wake of the mini–civil war in Kansas: “The Second American Revolution has begun. Kansas was its Lexington. Texas will be its Bunker Hill, and South Carolina its Yorktown.”³⁰ During postwar reconstruction, the French Radical Georges Clemenceau, who lived and worked in the US between 1866 and 1869, described the leading Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens as the “Robespierre” of the “Second American Revolution.”³¹ And as we have seen, the notion has subsequently exercised a wide influence over both professional historians and Marxist revolutionaries. More recently the notion of a “second revolution” has been generalized by Anderson to encompass all the major states that experienced bourgeois revolutions.³² Nevertheless, there are two difficulties involved in seeing the Civil War as either the culmination of a prolonged process or a “corrective” second revolution.

One is that from referring to decisive turning points that removed obstacles to capitalist development, the concept of bourgeois revolution is stretched to include subsequent alterations in the form of the existing capitalist state that brings it into more perfect alignment with the requirements of competitive accumulation—realignments to which there can be no foreseeable end this side of the socialist revolution. Why then could there not be a third American Revolution in the form of the New Deal, or—given the way in which the Civil War and Reconstruction notoriously failed to achieve equality for the former slave population—a fourth in the form of the civil rights movement? Nor need we stop at this point: some Marxists have referred to the neoliberal ascendancy since the late seventies in general terms as a “bourgeois revolution from above.”³³

The other difficulty, which again has particular resonance for the US, is that it presupposes that the first bourgeois revolution did at least begin to remove barriers to capitalist development, yet this is precisely what is at issue in the case of the War of Independence. The Dutch Revolution and, to a far greater extent, the English Revolution both involved two distinct movements that temporarily converged in opposition to foreign or native absolutism. One successfully consolidated the supremacy of capitalist relations of production; the other failed to achieve equality of condition, a goal that was, implicitly at least, directed as much against the new capitalism as the old feudalism. The American War of Independence was different. It certainly involved the second type of movement, and in this context socialists have rightly emphasized the element of internal class struggle within the independence movement, together with the often contradictory role of minorities. These accounts have provided a necessary corrective to a bourgeois historiography that tends to argue that economic or social issues were largely absent from the war, and that the key motives of the revolutionaries were entirely political and ideological.³⁴ Marxists have occasionally expressed similar views, albeit linked to different value judgments, where they have allowed their hostility to contemporary US imperialism to overwhelm their historical judgment.³⁵ This essentially conservative conception has more recently allowed the American Revolution to be celebrated by neoliberal ideologues as providing a model of revolution that, unlike its French and Russian successors, did not involve any utopian attempts at fundamental social transformation.³⁶ But valuable though alternative accounts are, they do not answer the question of whether or not events between 1776 and 1783 constituted a bourgeois revolution, since popular insurgencies during these years tended to be concerned either with the defense or extension of the franchise, or with resisting the inequalities resulting from existing capitalistrelations of production.

Unlike the Dutch or the English, the Americans did not have to liberate themselves from a feudal-absolutist state, but rather from the constitutional monarchy that emerged from the settlement of 1688, which they accused of betraying them by behaving in a despotic and tyrannical manner. William Gordon, author of one the first histories of the Revolutionary War, argued in 1776 that property qualifications for voting were “the most hurtful remnant of the Feudal Constitution.”³⁷ The most detailed discussion of the question was however by John Adams, in a series of articles published in the Boston Gazette in 1765 and eventually published as “A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law.” Adams cited Kames and Rousseau as authorities to prove “the feudal system to be inconsistent with liberty and the rights of mankind.” His main point, however, is to demonstrate that the British monarchy was intent on imposing feudalism on the colonies. What he meant by this, however, was mainly the imposition of the Stamp Act.³⁸ Alas, both restrictions on the franchise and interference with the freedom of the press are compatible with, or even characteristic of, capitalist societies.

It is true that capitalist development was uneven across the colonies. It is also true that there were three genuine attempts to install or “revive” systemic feudalism in the new colonial context, in New York, Maryland, and the Carolinas—the latter with a constitution involving hereditary serfdom drawn up by Mr. Agrarian Capitalism himself, John Locke. All were resisted; all failed. The main feudal mechanism that landlords consistently attempted to impose was the charging of quit rents in lieu of certain kinds of labor service or other obligations. But since these obligations had not, in most cases, been performed by tenants in the first place, this represented less the introduction of feudalism and more a device by absentee capitalist owners to supplement the rent paid by their tenants.³⁹ The real obstacle to capitalist development in North America was not feudalism but slavery. Slavery is not, of course, necessarily incompatible with capitalism, nor was it in the US, where even in the North many sectors of the economy, such as the New England textile mills, assumed the existence of slavery in the South. But there are definite structural limits to how far capitalist self-expansion can proceed on this basis. More importantly, as we shall see, in the South slavery became the basis of an entire society and ultimately of a short-lived state (the Confederacy), the expansionist aims of which, had they been successful, would have blocked and even rolled back the development of capitalism in the Americas, and perhaps beyond. The continued existence of slavery is therefore the main objection to regarding the War of Independence as a bourgeois revolution, even an incomplete example. For if the definition of a bourgeois revolution is that it allows the unimpeded development of capitalism, then it is difficult to see how a conflict that also strengthened and allowed the extension of a rival, noncapitalist mode of production can be described in this way.

Bourgeois revolutions are a type of social revolution, a struggle to consolidate the transformation of one type of society into another, which involves not merely seizing but transforming the state itself. Historically, social revolutions are extremely rare, and if we leave aside the transition to feudalism as not involving a revolution (except in a metaphorical sense), and the socialist revolution on the grounds that it has not yet been permanently achieved, the bourgeois revolutions are the only successful examples that we have. As this degree of rarity suggests, most revolutions are not social but political.⁴⁰ Political revolutions are struggles within society for control of the existing state, but leave the nature of that state, and economy and society, fundamentally intact. They may involve more or less popular participation, may result in more or less improvement in the condition of the majority, but ultimately the class that was in control of the means of production at the beginning will remain so at the end (although individuals and political organizations may have been replaced on the way), and the class that was exploited within the productive process at the beginning will also remain so at the end (although concessions may have been made to secure its acquiescence or participation). The French Revolution of 1848, or in more recent years the Iranian Revolution of 1978, the displays of “people power” in the Philippines, Thailand, and Serbia, and the “color revolutions” in the former republics of the USSR, were all revolutions of this type. Political revolutions sometimes have social aspects and social revolutions always have political implications, but the terms indicate an essential difference. The relation between political revolutions and the bourgeois revolutions is therefore a complex one. Some revolutions that, taken by themselves, appear to be merely political are in fact parts of a more extended bourgeois revolution: the English Revolution of 1688, for example, has this relationship to the Revolution of 1640. By 1688 the overwhelming majority of the English ruling class faced an absolutist regime with virtually no support within the country itself. Consequently the Stuarts had to seek support internally among the more peripheral or colonial areas ruled by the composite monarchy in Scotland and Ireland, as well as externally among the feudal-absolutist rivals to English power in Continental Europe—above all, France. In 1861 the Northern ruling class faced a vibrant and expansive society that since secession had established its own rival state. In other words, unlike 1688, 1861 was not the final move in a game where the course of play has already decided the nature, if not the timing, of the outcome; it signaled the opening of the game itself. Interestingly, the Beards themselves seem to have come to this conclusion, writing in their major work not only that “the so-called civil war was in reality a Second American Revolution” but also that it was “in a strict sense, the First.”⁴¹

The War of Independence is therefore best understood as political revolution, more akin to 1688 or 1830 than 1640 or 1789. In the case of the US, the chronological order of importance is reversed: it is the latter period that is decisive. The Civil War did not “complete the unfinished tasks of the War of Independence” because, except for a minority of radicals, the latter was never intended as a means of accomplishing these “tasks” in the first place. Instead, the end of British rule allowed all of the social relations that existed in the US—including small commodity production, capitalism, and slavery—to continue as before, but without the interference of the Crown in Parliament. But of all the different types of social relations it was capitalism that was initially the weakest. As Michael Merrill has pointed out, the principal difference between the Democratic Republicans and the Federalists following the achievement of independence was in their attitude to “commercial society.” Adam Smith could be invoked by both sides, of course, but insofar as he was in favor of a stable agrarian society in which the main economic actors were yeoman farmers and landowners (slave owners were a different matter), this could be done with greater credibility by the former. The latter, above all Andrew Hamilton, were interested in developing something closer to what we would now think of as capitalism—although as Merrill notes, this was largely as a means to an end, the end being the elevation of the monied commercial and industrial interest as a base to provide revenue through tax and customs, to construct a viable state power.⁴² As one of Hamilton’s biographers observes, unlike the other founders of the republic, who “were content merely to effect a political revolution,” Hamilton saw the role of Lawgiver differently: “He set out to effect what amounted to a social revolution.”⁴³ In this respect there are interesting parallels with the later careers of Bismarck and Cavour as instigators of revolution from above, but unlike them he did not succeed, as, in the short-term at least, it was the agrarians organized in the Democratic Republican Party who won out, following the victory of Thomas Jefferson in the presidential election of 1800.

THE UNIQUENESS OF THE OLD SOUTH

The “social” nature of the impending conflict was well understood on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line long before the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter. Southern ideologists were quite aware of the threatening historical precedents. One author, William Drayton, compared abolitionists to English Puritans during the days of the Commonwealth: “Their columns are almost nasal with cant; and it might be supposed, from the aspect of their publications, that the days of Cromwell were revived, and that his fanatical followers, heated into tenfold fury, were abroad in the land.” He argued that if abolitionists succeeded in freeing the slave population it would lead to a repetition of the Haitian Revolution: “Have they studied the history of St. Domingo; and are they prepared to let loose upon the refined and innocent ladies of the South, the savage Negro, incapable of restraint, and wild with ungovernable passions?” Finally, Drayton saw parallels with the French Revolution, claiming that once the opponents of slavery had established equality for blacks, the next stage in their madness would be to establish it for women! Naturally, a quotation from Edmund Burke fell to hand to support his case:

The French revolutionists, from whom the fanatics derive their notions of abolition, directly undertook to assert the rights of women. The French legislature took up this subject in 1789. “Succeeding Assemblies”; says Burke in his Regicide Peace, “went the full length of the principle, and gave a license to divorce at the mere pleasure of either party, and at one month’s notice.” The reason alleged was “that women had been too long under the tyranny of parents and husbands.” To such lengths will these abstractionists carry their insane zeal.⁴⁴

Interestingly, Georgian secessionists actually described the establishment of the Confederacy as a “political revolution,” which had been made necessary to forestall the social revolution that the abolitionists would otherwise unleash upon them.⁴⁵ The more radical elements in the North were clear that this was exactly what they were planning, although they tended to hold the South responsible for forcing such a course of action upon them. In the debates on confiscation of slaveholder property from the second session of the 37^th Congress in 1862, for example, Senator Morrill of Maine offered a robustly materialist explanation for the conflict: “Sir, what we are witnessing and encountering is the old struggle of a class for power and privilege which has so often convulsed the world repeating itself in our history. A class identified with a local and exceptional institution, grown powerful through political representation, demands to govern.”⁴⁶

Marx was therefore in the unusual situation, for once, of being in broad agreement with his bourgeois contemporaries in terms of his interpretation of events. Although Marx did not use the term bourgeois revolution in relation to the war, he did situate it within his conception of a struggle between two different societies that he first raised in the “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts” (1844) and first made concrete in “The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-revolution” (1848).⁴⁷ In his discussion of the implications of a Confederate victory, Marx wrote:

What would in fact take place would be not a dissolution of the Union, but a reorganization of it, a reorganization on the basis of slavery, under the recognized control of the slaveholding oligarchy. . . . The slave system would infect the whole Union. In the Northern states, where Negro slavery is in practice unworkable, the white working class would gradually be forced down to the level of helotry. This would fully accord with the loudly proclaimed principle that only certain races are capable of freedom, and as the actual labor is the lot of the Negro in the South, so in the North it is the lot of the German and the Irishman, or their direct descendants. The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labor. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other.⁴⁸

There is little dispute about the capitalist nature of the North; but for Marxists at least, if the Civil War was indeed a struggle between two expansionist social systems, then we need to consider in more detail what kind of economy and society prevailed in the South.

All class societies have involved the ownership of slaves at some point in their history; but very few have been slave societies, societies dominated by the slave mode of production where, in the terms used by Robin Blackburn, slavery is not “ancillary” but “systemic.” In effect, there have only been five. Two were in the ancient world: the Greek city-states and parts of the Roman Empire, including Rome itself. Three arose during the transition to capitalism: the South of the United States until 1865, Cuba until 1886, and Brazil until 1888. The proportion of slaves in the South was broadly similar to that in Greece and Rome, at 30–35 percent of the population; in Cuba and Brazil it was higher, nearer 40 percent; yet it was the South that was the most committed to slavery. Why?⁴⁹

I earlier argued that it is possible for a mode of production that was precapitalist in the technical sense to still be subject to capitalist laws of motion: was this true of slavery in the South? Shortly before the Civil War broke out Marx wrote in the notebooks that would become the Grundrisse: “Negro slavery—a purely industrial slavery—which is besides, incompatible with the development of bourgeois society and disappears with it, presupposes wage labor, and if other free states with wage labor did not exist alongside it, if, instead, the Negro states were isolated, then all social conditions there would immediately turn into pre-civilized forms.”⁵⁰ In a further entry he adds: “The fact that we now not only call the plantation owners in America capitalists, but that they are capitalists, is based on their existence as anomalies within a world market based on free labor.”⁵¹Marx is making a number of different claims here, which superficially appear inconsistent, leading many later Marxists to resolve them in unsatisfactory ways. David Roediger, for example, writes that “the form of appropriation makes a vital difference [between North and South],” but “the logic of both systems was, for Marx, capitalist.”⁵² Why then did Marx argue that the war was intersystemic in nature?

The central issue here is the relationship of the South to capitalism. Marx identified at least one contemporary society, Tokugawa Japan, as being classically feudal.⁵³ Clearly, the society based on chattel slavery in the South was not of the same order; but neither did it simply involve a variant of capitalism. As was the case in the Americas more generally, slavery in the South began in the seventeenth century as way of resolving the shortage of labor by acquiring and organizing the direct producers in a particular way. As Peter Kolchin has noted, it therefore “had more in common with the serfdom that was emerging in Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe than with many of the premodern slaveries.”⁵⁴ It is also true that both the Eastern European feudal estates established under the “second serfdom” and American slave plantations produced for the world market; yet this should not blind us to the essential difference between them. The former was originally a response to depopulation that eventually found a market for cereal crops in Western Europe, but did not import manufactured goods in return. The latter existed and expanded entirely because of the Western market for cotton and was mainly dependent on the West for manufactured goods. In short, they were not, as Blackburn puts it, “equivalently distant from the capitalist mode.”⁵⁵ The plantations were therefore integrated into the capitalist world economy, even though they did not correspond to the capitalist mode of production in the purely technical sense, since both involved slave labor. As we have seen, however, this is not the only issue involved: it is also important whether the plantations were “capital positing” and “capital producing,” which they were.

A more plausible argument for the noncapitalist nature of the plantations is that they effectively involved a form of merchant capital—that is, one of the two forms of capital (the other being usury) that coexisted with virtually all previous modes of production, where profit is realized through “buying cheap and selling dear” rather than by increasing value in production. On these grounds, it is possible to argue, as Banaji does, that the plantations were not fully subordinate to capitalist laws of motion, because they involved simple reproduction, the formal subsumption of labor, and the production of absolute surplus value through lengthening the working day and intensifying labor. Where expansion took place, it was not through improvements to technological capacity but by extending the territory of the plantation; reproduction of the labor force involved the external supply of slaves through the market.⁵⁶ While this is all true, I am not convinced that it proves the noncapitalist nature of the slave plantations. Indeed, it would only do so if they had existed in an environment in which feudal or tributary laws of motion otherwise prevailed, in which case the comparison with, say, medieval merchant capital would be truly apt.

The real issue here is not that some social relations of production in the South had an ambiguous relationship to capitalism; it is that the South had constructed an entire society around these relationships and that, with the secession of the Confederacy, that society had consolidated itself in a new and aggressive state. Although the South was not feudal, it did derive much of its self-image from a particular romantic version of feudal society. Mark Twain was being his usual hyperbolic self when he held Sir Walter Scott responsible for the Civil War in chapter 46 of Life on the Mississippi.⁵⁷ There is no doubt that Scott’s romanticism contributed to the self-identity of the Southerner, as did the entire mythical heritage of Scottish clanship, not least in the formation of the Ku Klux Klan in December 1865.⁵⁸ One young Confederate, the son of a South Carolina planter, wrote to his mother during the war: “I am blessing old Sir Walter Scott daily, for teaching me, when young, how to rate knightly honor, and our noble ancestry for giving me such a State to fight for.”⁵⁹ There is a double irony here. One is that Scott, for all his conservatism, was a characteristic figure of the Scottish Enlightenment whose novels were intended to demonstrate to his contemporaries that no matter how heroic Scottish feudal society had been, the warlike pursuit of honor was rightly doomed to be replaced by commerce and the peaceful pursuit of money: in the South his elegies were misunderstood as celebrations. The other is that, in due course, the Southern planters were to be destroyed in the way that in history most closely corresponded to the demise of the Highland chiefs and feudal lords traced by Scott in the Waverley novels.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese claim that the Old South could have gone in two directions: either toward industrialization, which would have meant abandoning slavery and investing capital in expanded reproduction (“qualitative development”); or toward an expansion of slavery where capital is essentially tied up in simple reproduction (“quantitative development”).⁶⁰ In fact, the ruling class in the South was faced with two related difficulties that did not exist in other societies with widespread slavery, and that meant the latter “choice” was the only real option, as can be seen by contrasting the Old South with other types of society that employed forms of unfree labor. As many historians have noted, even by mid-century, it was the South, rather than the North, that most resembled the rest of the world: free labor was still relatively rare outside of Western Europe and the Northern states. But although unfree labor was still more common, it was also inescapably in retreat: “At the time of the American Revolution, slavery could be found almost everywhere in the New World; on the eve of the Civil War, far more slaves resided in the Southern states than in all the other slave societies combined . . . and—together with Russian serfdom—Southern slavery had come to symbolize for much of the Western world a retrograde system resistant to change.”⁶¹ In the same year as the outbreak of the Civil War, the Russian Tsar began what Lenin called “the era of the Russian bourgeois revolution” by liberating the serfs.⁶² This was a diluted version of a much more widespread process of “self-transformation” by feudal lords who realized that, subject to the pressures generated by an increasingly capitalist world, the only way to halt their decline, let alone preserve their current position, was to embrace capitalist landownership. In this way they could at least remain members of a dominant class, albeit within a new set of social relations and using new methods of exploitation. Prussia was at the forefront of this process.

Terence Byres has characterized the “Prussian Path” as a form of “capitalism from above” in two senses, not only because the feudal landlord class transformed itself into a capitalist class, but also because they consequently controlled the process, “in a manner which stifled any development of the peasant economy . . . whereby a capitalist agriculture might emerge from an increasingly differentiated peasantry.”⁶³ The top-down nature of the process was then increasingly adopted by other feudal ruling classes, such as those in Hungary and Bohemia, as the nineteenth century progressed.⁶⁴ As in the earlier case of Scotland after the Jacobite defeat at Culloden, military defeat precipitated the reform process. In the case of Prussia, it was defeat by the Napoleonic armies at Jena and Auerstadt in 1806, the outcomes of which seemed to demonstrate the superiority of free peasants over serfs as a source of manpower, while the indemnities imposed by the victorious French demanded an increase in revenues that was unlikely to be produced as long as serfdom endured.⁶⁵

Why did the Prussian Junkers and the Southern planters take such different attitudes to the introduction of wage labor? Slavery was widespread in the South but in most cases relatively small-scale. On the eve of war, over 97 percent of slaveholders owned less than fifty slaves, and only 0.1 percent had estates with more than two hundred.⁶⁶ But the majority of Southerners were not slave owners, and it is not as if there were no major class differences between the farmers and the slave owners. According to Fox-Genovese and Genovese, the yeoman farmers accepted the system “not because they did not understand their position, or because they were panicked by racial fears, and certainly not because they were stupid, but because they saw themselves as aspiring slaveholders or as non-slaveholding beneficiaries of a slaveholding world that constituted the only world they knew.”⁶⁷ The problem for the ruling class was not so much with the yeomen, however, as with the whites below them in the social structure, those who did not own slaves and who had little or no chance of ever owning them. As Theodore Allen has pointed out, it was in order to prevent the emergence of solidarity between this group and black slaves that the condition of racialized slavery had to be absolute: “If the mere presumption of liberty was to serve as a mark of social status for masses of European-Americans without real prospects of upward social mobility, and yet induce them to abandon their opposition to the plantocracy and enlist them actively, or at least passively, in keeping down the Negro bond-laborer with whom they had made common cause in the course of Bacon’s Rebellion, the presumption of liberty had to be denied to free African-Americans.”⁶⁸

Both Prussian Junkers and the Southern planters understood that commercial success was essential if they were to continue as landed classes, but the Prussian serfs were not a group distinct from the rest of their society, and the Junkers were consequently more vulnerable to the threat of a democratic movement uniting all the oppositional forces against them, perhaps in the form—long hoped for by Engels—of a repetition of the Peasant War of 1525, alongside an urban insurrection by the modern working class. In one sense, the Southern planters were in a stronger position than their German contemporaries, precisely because the slaves had been absolutely separated from all other subordinate social groups and were not in a position to make common cause with them. But the paradox of this position was that, unlike serfdom, slavery was not a system that could be reformed out of existence, because the entire social structure was based on the position that blacks were racially inferior and incapable of any other role than that of slaves, and could be expected to revert to savagery and exact revenge if freed from the supposedly paternalistic but firm restraints imposed by their masters.⁶⁹ There was manufacturing, but it too was constrained by slavery. Firms tended to be smaller and less productive than in the Midwest, and were often operated on a part-time basis, as a supplement to income mainly derived from agriculture. There is no reason to suppose that Southern manufacturers were intrinsically less capable of being successful capitalists than their Northern cousins, but the restricted market characteristic of the Southern economy acted as a barrier to them, both in terms of the limited consumption demands of the large proportion of the workforce who were slaves, and the fact that the larger farms and plantations produced their own small-scale goods for use.⁷⁰ As we have already noted, large-scale machinery was imported from Western Europe, and especially Britain. It is not that the Southern slave economy was incapable of either dynamic spurts of growth or adaptation to changing conditions; in fact it displayed both characteristics at different times between 1783 and 1861. It is rather that a system of absolutely racialized slavery tended toward self-imposed limits on expansion. Was there any way for the South to circumvent them?

The fact that social relations of production were based on an absolute connection between skin-color racism and exploitation might have been overcome if the South had been an imperial or colonial outpost of a metropolitan power; but it was the metropolitan power. These two factors made reform impossible and consequently made the South different not only from other societies with slaves, but from other slave societies. In the latter, like other societies with unfree labor, slaves were closer to peasant status in that they generally had their own land with which to cultivate crops, this providing for their own subsistence and perhaps even giving them the opportunity to sell any surplus in local markets. In the South, even this was much restricted, as the masters suspected any arrangements that would diminish slave dependence upon them.⁷¹ More importantly, while there was undoubtedly racism toward the black slaves who worked on the sugar plantations in, for example, the British colony of Jamaica, whether or not they remained slaves or became wage laborers and peasants was not crucial to the survival of the British state and society. In the end, slavery was abolished in Jamaica in 1838 as a result of calculations over profitability and the reproduction of the labor force, together with concerns over a repetition of the slave rebellion of 1831.⁷² In both of the other slave societies of the Americas, Cuba and Brazil, the state began to lessen the necessity for slave labor by introducing other types of unfree labor, which formed a bridge between slavery and free labor. In Cuba these involved Chinese and even Spanish coolies.⁷³ In Brazil free blacks and mulattoes could serve in the militia and, crucially, could own slaves themselves.⁷⁴ None of this was possible in the South.

The nature of the resulting society was set out, without direct reference to the slaves, in a diatribe by a Southern politician, delivered immediately prewar and recorded by William Howard Russell, a foreign correspondent for the London Times. Here, the antibourgeois, anti-urban, and anti-industrial bias of the Southern ruling class is made quite explicit:

We are an agricultural people; we are a primitive but a civilized people. We have no cities—we don’t want them. We have no literature—we don’t need any yet. We have no press—we are glad of it. We do not require a press, because we go out and discuss all public questions from the stump with our people. We have no commercial marine, no navy—we don’t want them. We are better without them. Your [British] ships carry our produce, and you can protect your own vessels. We want no manufactures: we desire no trading, no mechanical or manufacturing classes. As long as we have our rice, our sugar, our tobacco, and our cotton, we can command wealth to purchase all we want from those nations with which we are in amity, and to lay up money besides. But with the Yankees we will never trade—never. Not one pound of cotton shall ever go from the South to their accursed cities; not one ounce of their steel or their manufactures shall ever cross our border.⁷⁵

Individual plantations could only grow by moving or adding new land; but the same was true of the society that they supported. Slavery in one society was never going to remain viable unless it could be guaranteed further territory. In the North, capital expanded, labor productivity grew, and, potentially at least, both could continue indefinitely. In the South, increased productivity was achieved from moving operations to or extending existing plantations into more fertile soil, but as Richard Ransom and Richard Sutch point out, “there is a natural limit to gains that can be achieved from geographical relocation”:

The South, therefore, grew but did not develop. Slaveholders were capitalists without physical capital. Their wealth was in the form of slaves and land. Slave capital represented 44 percent of all wealth in the major cotton-growing states of the South in 1859, real estate (land and buildings) was more than 25 percent, while physical capital amounted to less than 10 percent of the total. Manufacturing capital amounted to only 1 percent of the total wealth accumulated. . . . [T]he relative shortage of physical capital in the South can be explained by the presence of slavery. In a capitalist society physical capital is owned by private entrepreneurs who are induced to invest in and hold capital by the flow of returns they hope to receive. In the American South slaves were an alternative to physical capital that could satiate the demand for holding wealth. In short, slaves as assets crowded physical capital out of the portfolios of southern capitalists.⁷⁶

Those limits could of course be overcome if the boundaries of Southern slave society were widened, up into the northwest or south and east into the Caribbean and the Americas beyond the US. In a speech made in Mississippi three years before the opening of the war, Southern Congressman Albert Gallatin Brown set out these expansionist aims, which he justified, logically enough, on the grounds that the republic had been founded on the theft of land from the Native Americans: “It may seem strange to you that I thus talk of taking possession of Central America, or any part of it, seeing, as you suppose you do, that it belongs to someone else. Yes, it belonged to someone else, just as this country once belonged to the Choctaws. When we wanted this country we came and took it.” After reminding his audience about the biblical endorsement of slavery and of the happy situation of the Negro in the South compared to that of his compatriots in Africa, Brown returned to his main theme:

I want a footing in Central America for other reasons, or rather for a continuation of the reasons already given. I want Cuba, and I know that sooner or later we must have it. If the worm-eaten throne of Spain is willing to give it up for a fair equivalent, well—if not, we must take it. I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican States; and I want them all for the same reason—for the planting or spreading of slavery. And a footing in Central America will powerfully aid us in acquiring those other states. It will render them less valuable to the other powers of the earth, and thereby diminish competition with us.⁷⁷

Brown was still assuming that the US, rather than an independent South, would carry out these annexations—a reasonable assumption given the way in which the South had dominated national politics, at least until the 1850s and the formation of the Republican Party. Robert Fogel has pointed out that the Confederacy could have dominated Central and South America, and even formed alliances further afield with other slave-trading nations, although this might have brought it into conflict with Britain, which was still applying diplomatic pressure on Brazil and in Africa.⁷⁸ But given Britain’s reliance on Southern cotton, and her tacit support for the Confederacy during the Civil War, it is very likely that British state managers would have overlooked these transgressions in the spirit of compromise on which they tended to rely when their material interests were in conflict with their moral values. There was, however, a much more serious obstacle to territorial expansion, emblematic of a tension between the individual and collective interests of the slave owners.

Individual slave owners may have wanted to increase cotton production in order to boost their income; but collectively they had an interest in restricting it on the grounds that generalized increased supply would have the effect of lowering prices. Similarly, they did not want the slave population to grow too quickly, as this would have a comparable downward impact on the relatively high price of slaves. As Gavin Wright notes, “these attitudes had roots in their property interest and reflected the kind of economy which that property interest had created”: “By slowing the growth of the regional population, both free and slave, that property interest also retarded territorial expansion and political weight. Since this political weight was a factor in secession, and since sheer manpower was a factor in the South’s military defeat, in these ways we may say that the economics of slavery contributed to its own demise.”⁷⁹ As Brown’s speech suggests, this was why it was important for the Southern slave owners to move into areas where other crops than cotton could be produced on the basis of slavery; the crucial failure of that class was to delay establishing a state until its Northern opponent was in a position to defeat it.

What then was the nature of the Old South? What mode of production exercised its laws of motion there? The societies over which the slave owners ruled cannot be directly assimilated to those of the ancient world; the insertion of the South into the emergent capitalist world economy meant that the context for the social relations of master and slave was unimaginably different from that of the tribal and tributary formations in which the Greek and Roman city-states developed. But neither can the South simply be regarded as a peculiarly backward variant of the capitalist societies that were consolidating in Western Europe, Australasia, and the rest of North America; the surplus accruing to the landowners did derive from the exploitation of slaves. Perhaps the solution is to regard the South as a society transitional to capitalism, but one in which the transition had never been able to progress beyond a certain point. The South therefore retained a form of production with the accompanying social relations, namely chattel slavery, which elsewhere had been merely one, albeit crucial, element in the primitive accumulation of capital. In other transitional societies the importance of slavery and other forms of unfree labor diminished over time, but in the South it remained and indeed became more central to the economic and social structure rather than less.

Nevertheless, this case of arrested development might simply have led to the South remaining, like the Scottish Highlands or the Italian Mezzogiorno, as the more backward component of a “dual economy,” within a nation-state in which the laws of motion were set by the capitalist mode of production. It did not. In order to survive, the Southern ruling class established, on the basis of this retarded early stage in the transition to capitalism, a new and expansionist state, the Confederate States of America, and it did so with the support of the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants who were not themselves slaves. In most societies where the economy was transitional from precapitalist modes of production to the capitalist mode, states remained under the control of the precapitalist ruling class, although they adapted to the new conditions, most typically in the emergence of absolutism: society became increasingly opposed to the state. As we have seen, these tensions were resolved either by a direct external challenge to the state from the new social classes created by capitalism or, in order to avoid this outcome while enabling the ability to compete in geopolitical terms, by internal challenge from sections of the existing ruling class who themselves undertook the process of transforming the state—or some combination of these two paths, with one predominating. None of these options was possible in the South. There was no alternative ruling class capable of overthrowing the plantocracy, but, because of the unbreakable divisions associated with racialized slavery, neither could the slave owners engage in self-transformation without unleashing the very social conflicts that, in Europe, the process had been undertaken to avoid.

Strictly speaking, the South is therefore sui generis, and its ideologues were more justified than they knew in referring to the “peculiarity” of Southern institutions. The South was exceptional; very few other societies—effectively only Cuba and Brazil—were so absolutely dependent on one particular transitional form of labor exploitation, and no other society became both developmentally “frozen” at such a fundamental level while embodying that stage of development in the state form. The South was exceptional; but it is not therefore inexplicable in Marxist terms—providing we reject the assumption that all immediately precapitalist states have to map tidily and conveniently onto our categories of tributary, feudal estates, or feudal absolutist monarchy.

DUAL POWER AND THE NORTHERN BOURGEOISIE

To summarize the argument so far: if slavery had been dispersed throughout the US, then the combined pressure of abolitionist campaigning on the one hand, and of slavery’s comparative economic inefficiencies on the other, would have led to its supersession, perhaps through a series of staged transitions to free labor, without the type of violence that ultimately ensued. But because it was territorially concentrated and the basis of a distinct society in which labor was defined in racial terms, this solution was not available. Instead, the Civil War acted as the resolution to a situation that Marxists would, in other contexts, immediately understand as one of dual power, involving a geographically based form of class opposition to the existing nation-state.

The concept of dual power was of course first used after the Russian Revolution of February 1917 to describe how the councils of workers—and later those of the peasantry and armed forces—came to constitute an alternative source of economic, social, and political organization to that of the state headed by the Provisional Government. “Two powers cannot exist in a state,” wrote Lenin shortly before one overthrew the other.⁸⁰ Trotsky also discerned similar experiences—involving different social classes and institutions—in earlier revolutions, such as the English and the French: “the two-power regime arises only out of irreconcilable conflicts—is possible, therefore, only in a revolutionary epoch, and constitutes one of its fundamental elements.”⁸¹ He was careful to add, however, that this situation does not arise merely where there are divisions of interest within a ruling class, and he cited as an example the conflict between the Junkers and the bourgeoisie in Germany under both the Hohenzollern Empire of 1871 and the Republic of 1918. He might have added to this the struggle between Whig and Tory in England during the first half of the eighteenth century. In the English and the French (although not the Russian) revolutions, the centers of dual power opposed to the absolutist state were in territories seized through military onslaught or urban insurrection by forces opposed to the regime.

In the US two territorially bounded societies, within the same state, were in competition to determine the direction taken by a third, the West. Once battle was joined the aims of the Confederacy were to expand slave production northward to areas where it had never previously existed, retarding the advance of industrial capitalism and free wage labor. One unintended result would have been to place the US as a whole under the informal control of the British Empire, for whom most of the Southern cotton exports were destined. The Northern bourgeoisie were not the initiators of the struggle, but had to respond to the act of secession and declaration of war by their enemy; yet they were ultimately compelled to fight to a decisive conclusion. Moore’s famous claim that the Civil War was “the last capitalist revolution” involves a rather restricted notion of capitalism, but it was certainly the last to directly involve the bourgeoisie, and virtually the only one to involve actual industrial capitalists. “Unpalatable as it is to many,” writes Andrew Dawson of this class in Pennsylvania, “manufacturers constituted the revolutionary class and not their workforce”:

Industrialists threw themselves wholeheartedly into preserving the Union. They reserved jobs for volunteers, supported widows and orphans, sponsored the Great Sanitary Fair and organized factory militias in case of invasion. Their finest political achievement, though, came in 1862 with the foundation of the Union League. The League represented the demise of the merchant class and the ascent of manufacturing. Tirelessly publicizing the northern cause, the League raised regiments of soldiers, called for the end of slavery, and supported black civil rights in Pennsylvania.⁸²

The level of revolutionary commitment displayed by the bourgeoisie was extremely unusual by this date. The Northern bourgeoisie were faced by a factory proletariat that had already demonstrated its militancy. After the experience of the German Revolution of 1848–49, Marx tended to believe that the bourgeoisie were incapable of fighting on their own behalf. The half-hearted conduct of Northern politicians and their military commanders for the first two years of the war only seemed to offer a further confirmation of this tendency. In 1862 Engels wrote to Marx complaining about the “indolence” and “indifference” displayed in the North: “Where, amongst the people, is there any sign of revolutionary vigor?” So bad was the situation that Engels added the most insulting comparison of which he was capable: “I’ve never encountered the like of it before, not even in Germany at the worst of times.”⁸³ Marx even argued that the Northern bourgeoisie would have to be rescued by “a slave revolution.”⁸⁴ In the end, some elements of this did occur in the formation and intervention of the black regiments, which involved a quarter of a million former slaves and signaled the long-delayed adoption of decisive revolutionary tactics by Lincoln. Indeed, one of the reasons for the somewhat exaggerated praise with which Marx and Engels regularly lauded Lincoln after the Emancipation Declaration may have simply been their relief at this development.⁸⁵How was it possible?

Within the North as a whole the dominant reason for opposition to slavery was the perception that its citizens were potentially or actually oppressed by what they called the “slave power,” an attitude that involved hostility to the slave owners without necessarily displaying any sympathy for the slaves. Accordingly, attitudes within the working class were complex, dividing between those who supported the war on abolitionist grounds, those who supported it on antisecessionist grounds (which could be quite compatible with racism toward the slaves), those who opposed it on grounds of opposition to the draft or the economic hardships it caused (“a poor man’s fight”), and those who opposed it on straightforwardly racist grounds. What the bourgeoisie did not face was a revolutionary working class attempting to drive the revolution forward in the North in a more radical direction, in the manner of the “permanent revolution” envisaged by Marx in 1850. Indeed, the biggest upheavals were directed against the war and the free black population in the shape of the New York anti-draft riots of 1863. It is in this context that the territorial dimension assumes great importance. The fact that revolutionary violence could be directed outward to a now effectively external enemy, through the mechanism of disciplined state power, meant that a far greater degree of radicalism could be attempted than if the struggle had been a purely internal one, conducted, as it were, by civilians. In other words, the Northern bourgeoisie were ultimately prepared to embrace the logic of total war rather than face defeat, even if this meant emancipating the slaves and harnessing the freedmen against their former masters as part of the Union’s military apparatus.

But these enabling conditions for the overthrow of the Confederacy also indicate reasons for the retreat from radicalism once the war was won. “Nothing renders society more restless than a social revolution but half accomplished,” wrote Carl Schurz, a veteran of the German Revolution of 1848 and a Northern commander and politician, at the end of the war: “The South will have to suffer the evil of anarchical disorder until means are found to effect a final settlement of the labor question in accordance with the logic of the great revolution.”⁸⁶ Yet the Northern politicians, including figures like Schurz himself, are usually seen as “leaving the social revolution unfinished,” and in some cases the Republican Party is accused of “betraying” the former slaves.⁸⁷ As I suggested above, this seems to rest on a misunderstanding of what bourgeois revolutions in general and this one in particular involve. Once the Confederacy had been defeated; once the coherence of the South as a society had been shattered and its potential to dominate the US ended; once actual slavery had been dismantled and the threat of subjugation to the former British colonial power removed—then the majority of the Northern ruling class, many of whom were themselves racists, had no particular interest in ensuring equal rights and democratic participation for the black population. In the end, the “anarchy” invoked by Schurz—or the process of black liberation, as we would see it—could not be endured when it was no longer absolutely necessary for the security of US capitalism, particularly if the possibility existed of black radicalism in the former South coinciding, or even overlapping, with renewed worker militancy in the North. “The North’s conversion to emancipation and equal rights was primarily a conversion of expediency rather than conviction,” writes James McPherson. “It became expedient for Northern political and business interests to conciliate Southern whites and to end federal enforcement of Negro equality in the South was part of the price of that conciliation.”⁸⁸ The necessary importance given by socialists to the question of racism has perhaps obscured the way in which this outcome was absolutely typical of the bourgeois revolutions from above, to which the American Revolution in most respects belongs. The fate of the rural masses in the Italian Mezzogiorno, for example, remained unchanged after the Risorgimento, as they continued to labor on the same latifundia for the same landowners. Racism added another, deeper level of oppression to the black population of the South, but their abandonment by a triumphant bourgeoisie, now safely in command of state power, was entirely typical. Free labor as conceived in the ideology of the prewar Republican Party was very distant from the types of labor into which blacks were now forced, such as sharecropping, let alone a prison system in which inmates were forcibly conscripted into production; but the latter were perfectly compatible with capitalism—as, indeed, were several other identity-based restrictions on the freedom of labor. As Lisa Lowe notes: “In the history of the US, capital has maximized its profits not through rendering labor ‘abstract’ but precisely through the social production of ‘difference,’ restrictive particularity and illegitimacy marked by race, nation, geographical origins and gender. The law of value has operated, instead, by creating, preserving and reproducing the specifically racialized and gendered character of labor power.”⁸⁹ And in that sense, the actual outcome of Reconstruction foreshadowed how US capitalism has developed ever since.

CONCLUSION

We can now return to the question of alternatives with which I began this essay. First, the potential for a more democratic outcome to radical Reconstruction existed: we are not dealing with a situation in which the objective was literally impossible of realization, like Anabaptist or Digger attempts to achieve Communism in sixteenth-century Germany or seventeenth-century England. The issue is rather one of balance between objective and subjective conditions. Those who refer to “betrayal” by Northern politicians have to accept the implication of this position, which is that the achievement of equality was dependent on the actions of the reunified state and its military and juridical apparatus. For the reasons given in the preceding section, the Northern bourgeoisie was always collectively going to be more influenced by the necessity for social stability than by the desirable but, from its point of view, optional quest for political equality. This is virtually an objective condition. In these circumstances the decisive issue was whether the former slaves could form an alliance with the majority of non–ruling class whites, both groups then allying with the organized working class in the North and forcing through a democratic (i.e., political) revolution “from below.” Obviously the Southern ruling class did everything they could to prevent such an outcome. The question—and this still seems to me to be an open question—is whether its success in doing so was preordained by the strength of a racism that was impossible to dislodge in the decade following Lee’s surrender, or whether a different strategy on the part of the Radicals could have overcome it. This at least introduces the possibility that the subjective element might have been determinate here.

The question of whether the war was necessary is, I think, more straightforward. By some point in the second half of the eighteenth century—let us say from the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War in 1763—the capitalist system took on a purely economic momentum that made bourgeois domination ultimately unstoppable and irreversible, regardless of the temporary political setbacks suffered by individual revolutions such as, for example, those of 1848–49. For most historians, therefore, Gettysburg in 1863 does not have the same significance as, for example, Culloden in 1746. According to the Beards: “The main economic results of the Second American Revolution would have been attained had there been no armed conflict, for the census returns with rhythmic beats were recording the tale of the fates.”⁹⁰ McPherson concludes perhaps the greatest single-volume history of the Civil War with essentially the same argument: “Of course the northern states, along with Britain and a few countries in northwest Europe, were cutting a new channel in world history that would doubtless have become the mainstream even if the American Civil War had never happened. Russia had abolished serfdom in 1861 to complete the dissolution of ancient institutions of bound labor in Europe.”⁹¹ What McPherson ignores here is that it took the Russian Revolution of 1917 to complete the liberation of the serfs. The assumption, which I used to accept, is that, even if the Confederacy had won that battle and gone on to win the Civil War, the ultimate victory of industrial capitalism across the entire territory of what is now the US would sooner or later have followed, either through a renewed attempt by the North or adaptation by the Confederate plantocracy to the new order, in the manner of the Prussian Junkers or Japanese Samurai.⁹² But this view ignores the fact that a Confederate victory or—what amounts to the same thing—a Northern refusal to oppose the expansionist drive of the South in the first place would have altered the conditions under which capitalism would then have developed, on a continental and ultimately global scale. The Confederacy, after all, was not intent on preserving a compromise with the North but on imposing a new and—in the literal sense of the word—reactionary settlement on the US as a whole. We should therefore recognize that the American Revolution was probably the most decisive and significant of all the nineteenth-century bourgeois revolutions. The issues that it left unresolved could not have been resolved by the bourgeoisie and cannot now: they will have to be accomplished by a genuine second American Revolution that can only be socialist in nature.