by MICHAEL PERELMAN
Those economic textbooks that discuss Karl Marx are almost certain to charge him with the gross error of ignoring the role of nature and natural resources in the economic process. Nonetheless, Marx has a legitimate claim as the first environmental economist, a direction that he took in the midst of the Civil War. Marx was both an economic victim of the Civil War and apparently a major force in determining its outcome. If this claim does not seem too outlandish, bear with me when I tell you that Marx was also an important figure in the Republican Party.
Originally, Marx was influenced by the Enlightenment notion that humans could use science to unlock the secrets of nature and thereby be able to produce an almost infinite output until the Civil War upended his life. England was absolutely dependent on slave-produced cotton from the American South, which was even more dependent on the revenue from cotton exports. Realizing the Confederacy’s dependence on cotton exports, the Union government went to great lengths to prevent the export of cotton from the South, leading to what became known as the cotton famine in England, which pretty much brought the textile industry to a halt.
In 1848, Europe experienced widespread uprisings that caused many governments across the continent to fall. Here again, Marx was an important figure. He edited a paper with the widest circulation in Germany, founded by a market-friendly German businessmen. The paper published two additions: one given to the censors for their approval and one for the public. Knowing that the government was about to shut the paper down, Marx published its last edition with a bright red headline: “No More Taxes.”
Marx quickly fled the country for Brussels. His aristocratic brother-in-law, who served as justice minister, detested his sister’s non-aristocratic husband of Jewish descent. He would use his influence to try to get Marx deported from whatever country he moved to. Spies were sent to find out bad things about Marx, but they reported back on a very kindly man instead.
Because of his journalistic prominence during the uprisings of 1848, Charles Anderson Dana, the editor of the powerful Republican newspaper, the New York Tribune, hired Marx to be its chief foreign correspondent. After the uprisings of 1848 were crushed, many of the most militant Germans prudently left the country. Many settled in Texas (a place that Marx considered moving to), Oklahoma and Ohio. The 48-ers, many of whom were followers of Marx, became very active in the Republican Party. Senator Carl Schurz, an acquaintance of Marx, became a powerful senator from Missouri, as well as Secretary of the Interior. The 48-ers sometimes get credit for having been the major force that tipped the nomination of the party’s presidential candidate to Abraham Lincoln. Mark Lause’s book, A Secret Society History of the Civil War, makes a powerful case for their contribution.
Marx was living in England at the time when that country seemed poised to enter the American Civil War on the side of the Confederacy. Marx had organized a group called the International Working Men’s Association. Marx called for a mass meeting in London to demand that the English avoid fighting for the protection of slavery, even though the working class was especially hard hit by the cotton famine, the elimination of which would make their impoverishment less extreme. In that respect, the workers’ immediate interest was for the English to defeat the Union government and allow for the free flow of cotton to the British factories. Instead, the workers advocated an ethical rather than economic option. Nonetheless, Marx spoke to the meeting of 3000 union men, who opposed the war.
The Republican Senator from Massachusetts, George Frisbie Hoar gave a powerful speech, which can be found in the Congressional Record, attributing England’s choice of neutrality during the Civil War to the International Working Men’s Association. In addition, Charles Francis Adams, the grandson of John Adams, the second president of the United States and the son of Charles Francis Adams, the son of John Quincy Adams and ambassador to England, also wrote in praise of the efforts of the International Working men’s Association.
Years later, John G. Nicolay, Lincoln’s private secretary, would confirm Marx’s role in his 1881 book, The Outbreak of Rebellion (Cambridge, Mass. Da Capo Press, 2005.) He compared the different response of the British working class to the war with the capitalist class. “And when the hour of distress and trial finally came to the industrial classes of England, the noble devotion of the Manchester cotton operatives to universal liberty put to shame and impotence the greedy cupidity of the cotton merchants of Liverpool.”
Similarly, Marx, in a leaflet supporting Polish independence, contrasted the German bourgeois liberals’ betrayal of Poland with the English workers’ support of the Northern war effort. Marx proclaimed: “The English working class has won immortal historical honor for itself by thwarting the repeated attempts of the ruling classes to intervene on behalf of the American slaveholders by its enthusiastic mass meetings, even though the prolongation of the American Civil War subjects a million English workers to the most fearful suffering and privations.”
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