For months the leading weekly and daily papers of the London 
press have been reiterating the same litany on the American Civil 
War. While they insult the free states of the North, they anxiously 
defend themselves against the suspicion of sympathising with the 
slave states of the South. In fact, they continually write two articles: 
one article, in which they attack the North, and another article, in 
which they excuse their attacks on the North. Qui s’excuse s’accuse. 

In essence the extenuating arguments read: The war between 
the North and South is a tariff war. The war is, further, not for 
any principle, does not touch the question of slavery and in fact 
turns on Northern lust for sovereignty. Finally, even if justice is 
on the side of the North, does it not remain a vain endeavour to 
want to subjugate eight million Anglo-Saxons by force! Would not 
separation of the South release the North from all connection 
with Negro slavery and ensure for it, with its twenty million 
inhabitants and its vast territory, a higher, hitherto scarcely 
dreamt-of, development? Accordingly, must not the North wel- 
come secession as a happy event, instead of wanting to overrule it 
by a bloody and futile civil war? 

Point by point we will probe the plea of the English press. 

The war between North and South—so runs the first excuse— 
is a mere tariff war, a war between a protectionist system and a 
free trade system, and Britain naturally stands on the side of free 
trade. Shall the slave-owner enjoy the fruits of slave labour in 
their entirety or shall he be cheated of a portion of these by the 
protectionists of the North? That is the question which is at issue 
in this war. It was reserved for The Times to make this brilliant 

discovery. The Economist, The Examiner, The Saturday Review and 
tutti quanti? expounded the theme further. It is characteristic of 
this discovery that it was made, not in Charleston, but in London. 
Naturally, in America everyone knew that from 1846 to 1861 a 
free trade system prevailed, and that Representative Morrill 
carried his protectionist tariff through Congress only in 1861,* 
after the rebellion had already broken out. Secession, therefore, 
did not take place because the Morrill tariff had gone through 
Congress, but, at most, the Morrill tariff went through Congress 
because secession had taken place. When South Carolina had its 
first attack of secession in 1831,*” the protectionist tariff of 1828 
served it, to be sure, as a pretext, but only as a pretext, as is 
known from a statement of General Jackson.‘ This time, however, 
the old pretext has in fact not been repeated. In the Secession 
Congress at Montgomery * all reference to the tariff question was 
avoided, because the cultivation of sugar in Louisiana, one of the 
most influential Southern states, depends entirely on protection. 

But, the London press pleads further, the war of the United 
States is nothing but a war for the forcible maintenance of the 
Union. The Yankees cannot make up their minds to strike fifteen 
stars from their standard.** They want to cut a colossal figure on 
the world stage. Yes, it would be different if the war was waged 
for the abolition of slavery! The question of slavery, however, as 
The Saturday Review categorically declares among other things, has 
absolutely nothing to do with this war. 

It is above all to be remembered that the war did not originate 
with the North, but with the South. The North finds itself on the 
defensive. For months it had quietly looked on while the 
secessionists appropriated the Union’s forts, arsenals, shipyards, 
customs houses, pay offices, ships and supplies of arms, insulted 
its flag and took prisoner bodies of its troops. Finally the 
secessionists resolved to force the Union government out of its 
passive attitude by a blatant act of war, and solely for this reason 
proceeded to the bombardment of Fort Sumter near Charleston. 
On April 11 (1861) their General Beauregard had learnt in a 

England”, The Economist, No. 942, September 14, 1861; “Mrs. Stowe on the 
American War”, The Examiner, No. 2798, September 14, 1861; “Mrs. Beecher 

Carolina, December 11, 1832 (see Note 24).— Ed. 

meeting with Major Anderson, the commander of Fort Sumter, 
that the fort was only supplied with provisions for three days more 
and accordingly must be peacefully surrendered after this period. 
In order to forestall this peaceful surrender, the secessionists 
opened the bombardment early on the following morning (April 
12), which brought about the fall of the fort in a few hours. News 
of this had hardly been telegraphed to Montgomery, the seat of 
the Secession Congress, when War Minister Walker publicly 
declared in the name of the new Confederacy: “No man can say 
where the war opened today will end.”* At the same time he 
prophesied “that before the first of May the flag of the Southern 
Confederacy will wave from the dome of the old Capitol in 
Washington and within a short time perhaps also from the 
Faneuil Hall in Boston”.*° Only now ensued the proclamation in 
which Lincoln called for 75,000 men to defend the Union.” The 
bombardment of Fort Sumter cut off the only possible constitu- 
tional way out, namely the convocation of a general convention of 
the American people, as Lincoln had proposed in his inaugural 
address. For Lincoln there now remained only the choice of 
fleeing from Washington, evacuating Maryland and Delaware and 
surrendering Kentucky, Missouri and Virginia, or of answering 
war with war. 

The question of the principle of the American Civil War is 
answered by the battle slogan with which the South broke the 
peace. Stephens, the Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy, 
declared in the Secession Congress that what essentially distin- 
guished the Constitution newly hatched at Montgomery from the 
Constitution of the Washingtons and Jeffersons was that now for 
the first time slavery was recognised as an institution good in itself, 
and as the foundation of the whole state edifice, whereas the 
revolutionary fathers, men steeped in the prejudices of the 
eighteenth century, had treated slavery as an evil imported from 
England and to be eliminated in the course of time.‘ Another 
matador of the South, Mr. Spratt, cried out: “For us it is a 
question of founding a great slave republic.” * If, therefore, it was 

Tribune, No. 6231, April 15, 1861.— Ed. 

¢ A. Lincoln, “The Inaugural Address” [March 4, 1861], New-York Daily 
Tribune, No. 6196, March 5, 1861.— Ed. 

4 Stephens’s speech in Savannah on March 21, 1861.— Ed. 

indeed only in defence of the Union that the North drew the 
sword, had not the South already declared that the continuance of 
slavery was no longer compatible with the continuance of the 
Union? 

Just as the bombardment of Fort Sumter gave the signal for the 
opening of the war, the election victory of the Republican Party of 
the North, the election of Lincoln as President, gave the signal for 
secession. On November 6, 1860, Lincoln was elected. On 
November 8, 1860, a message telegraphed from South Carolina 
said: “Secession is regarded here as a settled thing”*; on Novem- 
ber 10 the legislature of Georgia occupied itself with secession 
plans, and on November 13 a special session of the legislature 
of Mississippi was convened to consider secession. But Lincoln’s 
election was itself only the result of a split in the Democratic camp. 
During the election struggle the Democrats of the North 
concentrated their votes on Douglas, the Democrats of the South 
concentrated their votes on Breckinridge, and to this splitting of 
the Democratic votes the Republican Party owed its victory. 
Whence came, on the one hand, the preponderance of the 
Republican Party in the North? Whence, on the other, the disunion 
within the Democratic Party, whose members, North and South, 
had operated in conjunction for more than half a century? 

Under the presidency of Buchanan the sway that the South had 
gradually usurped over the Union through its alliance with the 
Northern Democrats attained its zenith. The last Continental 
Congress of 1787 and the first Constitutional Congress of 1789-90 
had legally exciuded slavery from all Territories of the republic 
northwest of the Ohio.” (Territories, as is known, is the name 
given to the colonies lying within the United States itself which 
have not yet attained the level of population constitutionally 
prescribed for the formation of autonomous states.”') The 
so-called Missouri Compromise (1820), in consequence of which 
Missouri became one of the States of the Union as a slave state, 
excluded slavery from every remaining Territory north of 36°30’ 
latitude and west of the Missouri.”? By this compromise the area of 
slavery was advanced several degrees of longitude, whilst, on the 
other hand, a geographical boundary-line to its future spread 

Tribune, No. 6098, November 9, 1860.— Ed. 

seemed quite definitely drawn. This geographical barrier, in its 
turn, was thrown down in 1854 by the so-called Kansas-Nebraska 
Bill, the initiator of which was St[ephen] A. Douglas, then leader 
of the Northern Democrats. The Bill, which passed both Houses 
of Congress, repealed the Missouri Compromise, placed slavery 
and freedom on the same footing, commanded the Union 
government to treat them both with equal indifference and left it 
to the sovereignty of the people, that is, the majority of the 
settlers, to decide whether or not slavery was to be introduced in a 
Territory. Thus, for the first time in the history of the United 
States, every geographical and legal limit to the extension of 
slavery in the Territories was removed. Under this new legislation 
the hitherto free Territory of New Mexico, a Territory five times 
as large as the State of New York, was transformed into a slave 
Territory, and the area* of slavery was extended from the border 
of the Mexican Republic to 38° north latitude. In 1859 New 
Mexico received a slave code that vies with the statute-books of 
Texas and Alabama in barbarity. Nevertheless, as the census of 
1860 proves,” among some 100,000 inhabitants New Mexico 
does not count even half a hundred slaves. It had therefore 
sufficed for the South to send some adventurers with a few slaves 
over the border, and then with the help of the central government 
in Washington and of its officials and contractors in New Mexico 
to drum together a sham popular representation to impose slavery 
and with it the rule of the slaveholders on the Territory. 
However, this convenient method did not prove applicable in 
other Territories. The South accordingly went a step further and 
appealed from Congress to the Supreme Court of the United 
States. This Court, which numbers nine judges, five of whom 
belong to the South, had long been the most willing tool of the 
slaveholders. It decided in 1857, in the notorious Dred Scott 
case,” that every American citizen possesses the right to take with 
him into any Territory any property recognised by the Constitu- 
tion.© The Constitution, it maintained, recognises slaves as 
property and obliges the Union government to protect this 
property. Consequently, on the basis of the Constitution, slaves. 
could be forced to labour in the Territories by their owners, and 

No. 23903, April 10, 1861.— Ed. 

March 7, 1857.— Ed. 

so every individual slaveholder was entitled to introduce slavery 
into hitherto free Territories against the will of the majority of the 
settlers. The right to exclude slavery was taken from the 
Territorial legislatures and the duty to protect pioneers of the 
slave system was imposed on Congress and the Union govern- 
ment. 

If the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had extended the 
geographical boundary-line of slavery in the Territories, if the 
Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854 had erased every geographical 
boundary-line and set up a political barrier instead, the will of the 
majority of the settlers, now the Supreme Court of the United 
States, by its decision of 1857, tore down even this political barrier 
and transformed all the Territories of the republic, present and 
future, from nurseries of free states into nurseries of slavery. 

At the same time, under Buchanan’s government the severer 
law on the surrendering of fugitive slaves enacted in 1850 was 
ruthlessly carried out in the states of the North.™ To play the part 
of slave-catchers for the Southern slaveholders appeared to be the 
constitutional calling of the North. On the other hand, in order to 
hinder as far as possible the colonisation of the Territories by free 
settlers, the slaveholders’ party frustrated all the so-called free-soil* 
measures, i. e., measures which were to secure for the settlers a 
definite amount of uncultivated state land free of charge.” 

In the foreign, as in the domestic, policy of the United States, 
the interests of the slaveholders served as the guiding star: 
Buchanan had in fact obtained the office of President through the 
issue of the Ostend Manifesto, in which the acquisition of Cuba, 
whether by purchase or by force of arms, was proclaimed as the 
great task of national policy.** Under his government northern 
Mexico was already divided among American land speculators, 
who impatiently awaited the signal to fall on Chihuahua, Coahuila 
and Sonora.*’ The unceasing piratical expeditions of the filibusters 
against the states of Central America were directed no less from 
the White House at Washington. In the closest connection with 
this foreign policy, whose manifest purpose was conquest of new 
territory for the spread of slavery and of the slaveholders’ rule, 
stood the reopening of the slave trade,” secretly supported by the 
Union government. St{ephen] A. Douglas himself declared in the 
American Senate on August 20, 1859: During the last year more 
Negroes have been imported from Africa than ever before in any 
single year, even at the time when the slave trade was still legal. 

The number of slaves imported in the last year totalled fifteen 
thousand.?* 

Armed spreading of slavery abroad was the avowed aim of 
national policy; the Union had in fact become the slave of the 
300,000 slaveholders who held sway over the South. A series of 
compromises, which the South owed to its alliance with the 
Northern Democrats, had led to this result. On this alliance all the 
attempts, periodically repeated since 1817, to resist the ever 
increasing encroachments of the slaveholders had hitherto come to 
grief. At length there came a turning point. 

For hardly had the Kansas-Nebraska Bill gone through, which 
wiped out the geographical boundary-line of slavery and made its 
introduction into new ‘Territories subject to the will of the 
majority of the settlers, when armed emissaries of the slavehold- 
ers, border rabble from Missouri and Arkansas, with bowie-knife 
in one hand and revolver in the other, fell upon Kansas and 
sought by the most unheard-of atrocities to dislodge its settlers 
from the Territory colonised by them. These raids were supported 
by the central government in Washington. Hence a tremendous 
reaction. Throughout the North, but particularly in the North- 
west,” a relief organisation was formed to support Kansas with 
men, arms and money.” Out of this relief organisation arose the 
Republican Party, which therefore owes its origin to the struggle for 
Kansas. After the attempt to transform Kansas into a_ slave 
Territory by force of arms had failed, the South sought to achieve 
the same result by political intrigues. Buchanan’s government, in 
particular, exerted its utmost efforts to have Kansas included in 
the States of the Union as a slave state with a slave constitution 
imposed on it.” Hence renewed struggle, this time mainly 
conducted in Congress at Washington. Even St{ephen] A. Douglas, 
the chief of the Northern Democrats, now (1857-58) entered the 
lists against the government and his allies of the South, because 
imposition of a slave constitution could have been contrary to the 
principle of sovereignty of the settlers passed in the Nebraska Bill 
of 1854. Douglas, Senator for Illinois, a Northwestern state, would 
naturally have lost all his influence if he had wanted to concede to 
the South the right to steal by force of arms or through acts of 
Congress Territories colonised by the North. As the struggle for 

No. 5720, August 23, 1859.— Ed. 

New-York Daily Tribune, No. 5171, November 16, 1857.— Ed. 

Kansas, therefore, called the Republican Party into being, it at the 
same time occasioned the first split within the Democratic Party itself. 

The Republican Party put forward its first platform for the 
presidential election in 1856. Although its candidate, John 
Frémont, was not victorious, the huge number of votes cast for 
him at any rate proved the rapid growth of the Party, particularly 
in the Northwest. At their second National Convention for the 
presidential elections (May 17, 1860), the Republicans again put 
forward their platform of 1856, only enriched by some additions.* 
Its principal contents were the following: Not a foot of fresh 
territory is further conceded to slavery. The filibustering policy 
abroad must cease. The reopening of the slave trade is stigmat- 
ised. Finally, free-soil laws are to be enacted for the furtherance 
of free colonisation. 

The vitally important point in this platform was that not a foot 
of fresh terrain was conceded to slavery; rather it was to remain 
once and for all confined within the boundaries of the states where it 
already legally existed. Slavery was thus to be formally interned; but 
continual expansion of territory and continual spread of 
slavery beyond its old limits is a law of life for the slave states of the 
Union. 

The cultivation of the southern export articles, cotton, tobacco, 
sugar, etc., carried on by slaves, is only remunerative as long as it 
is conducted with large gangs of slaves, on a mass scale and on 
wide expanses of a naturally fertile soil, which requires only 
simple labour. Intensive cultivation, which depends less on fertility 
of the soil than on investment of capital, intelligence and energy 
of labour, is contrary to the nature of slavery. Hence the rapid 
transformation of states like Maryland and Virginia, which 
formerly employed slaves in the production of export articles, 
into states which raise slaves to export them into the deep South. 
Even in South Carolina, where the slaves form four-sevenths of 
the population, the cultivation of cotton has been almost complete- 
ly stationary for years due to the exhaustion of the soil. Indeed, by 
force of circumstances South Carolina has already been trans- 
formed in part into a slave-raising state, since it already sells slaves 
to the sum of four million dollars yearly to the states of the 
extreme South and Southwest. As soon as this point is reached, 
the acquisition of new Territories becomes necessary, so that one 
section of the slaveholders with their slaves may occupy new fertile 

Tribune, No. 5950, May 19, 1860.— Ed. 

lands and that a new market for slave-raising, therefore for the 
sale of slaves, may be created for the remaining section. It is, for 
example, indubitable that without the acquisition of Louisiana, 
Missouri and Arkansas by the United States, slavery in Virginia 
and Maryland would have become extinct long ago. In the 
Secessionist Congress at Montgomery, Senator Toombs, one of the 
spokesmen of the South, strikingly formulated the economic law 
that commands the constant expansion of the territory of slavery. 

“In fifteen years,” said he, “without a great increase in slave territory, either 

the slaves must be permitted to flee from the whites, or the whites must flee from 
the slaves.” 

As is known, the representation of the individual states in the 
Congress House of Representatives depends on the size of their 
respective populations. As the populations of the free states grow 
far more quickly than those of the slave states, the number of 
Northern Representatives was bound to outstrip that of the 
Southern very rapidly. The real seat of the political power of the 
South is accordingly transferred more and more to the American 
Senate, where every state, whether its population is great or small, 
is represented by two Senators. In order to assert its influence in 
the Senate and, through the Senate, its hegemony over the United 
States, the South therefore required a continual formation of new 
slave states. This, however, was only possible through conquest of 
foreign lands, as in the case of Texas, or through the transforma- 
tion of the Territories belonging to the United States first into 
slave Territories and later into slave states, as in the case of 
Missouri, Arkansas, etc. John Calhoun, whom the slaveholders 
admire as their statesman par excellence, stated as early as 
February 19, 1847, in the Senate, that the Senate alone placed a 
balance of power in the hands of the South, that extension of the 
slave territory was necessary to preserve this equilibrium between 
South and North in the Senate, and that the attempts of the South 
at the creation of new slave states by force were accordingly 
justified. 

Finally, the number of actual slaveholders in the South of the 
Union does not amount to more than 300,000, a narrow oligarchy 
that is confronted with many millions of so-called poor whites,* 
whose numbers have been constantly growing through concentra- 
tion of landed property and whose condition is only to be 
compared with that of the Roman plebeians in the period of 

Rome’s extreme decline. Only by acquisition and the prospect of 
acquisition of new Territories, as well as by filibustering expedi- 
tions, is it possible to square the interests of these “poor whites” 
with those of the slaveholders, to give their restless thirst for 
action a harmless direction and to tame them with the prospect of 
one day becoming slaveholders themselves. 

A strict confinement of slavery within its old terrain, therefore, 
was bound according to economic law to lead to its gradual 
extinction, in the political sphere to annihilate the hegemony that 
the slave states exercised through the Senate, and finally to expose 
the slaveholding oligarchy within its own states to threatening 
perils from the “poor whites”. In accordance with the principle 
that any further extension of slave Territories was to be prohibited 
by law, the Republicans therefore attacked the rule of the 
Slaveholders at its root. The Republican election victory was 
accordingly bound to lead to open struggle between North and 
South. And this election victory, as already mentioned, was itself 
conditioned by the split in the Democratic camp. 

The Kansas struggle had already caused a split between the 
slaveholders’ party and the Democrats of the North allied to it. 
With the presidential election of 1860, the same strife now broke 
out again in a more general form. The Democrats of the North, 
with Douglas as their candidate, made the introduction of slavery 
into Territories dependent on the will of the majority of the 
settlers. The slaveholders’ party, with Breckinridge as_ their 
candidate, maintained that the Constitution of the United States, 
as the Supreme Court had also declared,* brought slavery legally 
in its train; in and of itself slavery was already legal in all 
Territories and required no special naturalisation. Whilst, there- 
fore, the Republicans prohibited any extension of slave Ter- 
ritories, the Southern party laid claim to all Territories of the 
republic as legally warranted domains. What they had attempted 
by way of example with regard to Kansas, to force slavery on a 
Territory through the central government against the will of the 
settlers themselves, they now set up as law for all the Territories of 
the Union. Such a concession lay beyond the power of the 
Democratic leaders and would only have occasioned the desertion 
of their army to the Republican camp. On the other hand, 
Douglas’s “settlers’ sovereignty” could not satisfy the slaveholders’ 
party. What it wanted to effect had to be effected within the next 
four years under the new President, could only be effected by the 

resources of the central government and brooked no further 
delay. It did not escape the slaveholders that a new power had 
arisen, the Northwest, whose population, having almost doubled 
between 1850 and 1860, was already pretty well equal to the white 
population of the slave states—a power that was not inclined 
either by tradition, temperament or mode of life to let itself be 
dragged from compromise to compromise in the manner of the 
old Northeastern states. The Union was still of value to the South 
only so far as it handed over Federal power to it as a means of 
carrying out the slave policy. If not, then it was better to make the 
break now than to look on at the development of the Republican 
Party and the upsurge of the Northwest for another four years 
and begin the struggle under more unfavourable conditions. The 
slaveholders’ party therefore played va banque! When the Demo- 
crats of the North declined to go on playing the part of the “poor 
whites” of the South, the South secured Lincoln’s victory by 
splitting the vote, and then took this victory as a pretext for 
drawing the sword from the scabbard. 

The whole movement was and is based, as one sees, on the slave 
question. Not in the sense of whether the slaves within the existing 
slave states should be emancipated outright or not, but whether 
the 20 million free men of the North should submit any longer to 
an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders; whether the vast Territories 
of the republic should be nurseries for free states or for slavery; 
finally, whether the national policy of the Union should take 
armed spreading of slavery in Mexico, Central and South America 
as its device. 

In another article we will probe the assertion of the London 
press that the North must sanction secession as the most 
favourable and only possible solution of the conflict. 

October 25, 1861