Karl Marx

To Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America

Translated from the English

*Der Social-Demokrat.*  
No. 3, 30 December 1864

To Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America.

We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority! If resistance to the power of the slaveholders was the measured watchword of your first election, then: Death to slavery! is the triumphant battle-cry of your re-election.

From the outset of the titanic American struggle, the workers of Europe felt instinctively that the fate of their class hung upon the star-spangled banner. Was not the struggle for the territories, which opened this dreadfully mighty epopee, to decide whether the virgin soil of immeasurable tracts should be wedded to the labour of the immigrant, or be defiled by the foot of the slave-driver?

When the oligarchy of the 300,000 slaveholders for the first time in the annals of the world dared to write the word slavery upon the banner of armed rebellion; when on that very soil where hardly a century before the idea of a great democratic republic had first sprung up, whence the first declaration of the rights of man issued, and the first impulse was given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on that very soil the counter-revolution, with systematic thoroughness, boasted of overturning “the ideas prevailing at the time of the construction of the old constitution,” and represented “slavery as a salutary institution”—yea, as the sole solution of the great problem of the “relations of labour to capital,” and cynically proclaimed the right of property in man as the “cornerstone of the new edifice”; then the workers of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatical partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate aristocracy had warned them, that the rebellion of the slaveholders would toll the tocsin for a general crusade of property against labour, and that for the men of labour, besides their hopes for the future, their past conquests, too, were at stake in this gigantic struggle on the other side of the ocean. Everywhere, therefore, they bore patiently the sufferings which the cotton crisis imposed upon them, opposed enthusiastically the intervention in favour of slavery which the higher and “educated” classes were so eager to bring about, and, from most parts of Europe, paid their tax of blood for the good cause.

As long as the workers, the true bearers of political power in the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic; as long as, in relation to the Negro, who had a master without his consent and was sold, they boasted as the highest privilege of the white labourer that he himself could sell himself and choose his master—so long were they incapable of attaining the true freedom of labour or of supporting their European brothers in their struggle for emancipation. This obstacle to progress has been swept away by the Red Sea of the Civil War.

The workers of Europe are firmly convinced that, just as the American War of Independence inaugurated a new era of unfolding of power for the middle class, so the American war against slavery will inaugurate a new era of unfolding of power for the working class. They regard it as a token of the coming epoch that to Abraham Lincoln, the stubborn, iron son of the working class, has fallen the lot to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the redemption of an enslaved race and for the transformation of the social world.