Lincoln in the World (28 page)

Despite the high profile, Marx complained that the “newspaper muck” irritated him. He often wrote through the night, then napped on his sofa once the sun rose. When he was done, Marx’s wife would copy the philosopher’s illegible scrawl into a readable format. Marx referred to the reports as his “letters.” The
Tribune
sometimes felt the need to apologize for its controversial contributor. The editors
cautioned readers that they did not always agree with their opinionated London correspondent. And yet, Marx’s bosses continued, “those who do not read his letters neglect one of the most instructive sources of information on the great questions of current European politics.” Marx, for his part, complained that the
Tribune
editors ruthlessly chopped up his material. In later years, they often printed his contributions as unsigned editorials. The
Tribune
, Marx wrote Engels in 1854, “has again appropriated all my articles as leaders and published only trash under
my
name.” In many cases the frustrated Marx simply farmed out the work to Engels, who was working at his father’s textile mill in Manchester.
³¹

The urban underclass of Manchester would one day play its own highly unlikely role in the international affairs of the Civil War. Diplomacy, in many ways, was still the province of kings and their representatives. Yet over the course of the nineteenth century, common people outside the world’s chancelleries were becoming increasingly capable of exerting pressure on high officials. The burgeoning culture of political activism in Britain, coupled with the boom in newspaper publishing, meant that organized groups of workers could manage to have some voice—however soft—in global politics.

Lincoln may have ultimately given this group too much credit for its ability to sway the sympathies of cold-eyed British statesmen. Still, as the Civil War intensified, the American president would eventually find himself appealing directly to British laborers, convinced that any bonds of affinity would help the Union’s cause. Textile workers in cities like Manchester would bear the most painful burdens of any potential cotton shortage. If they grew desperate enough, British officials might feel pressure to intervene to stop the war. Furthermore, Lincoln believed (correctly, this time) that a moral appeal could energize this constituency. Many of the same workers, after all, had mobilized to help abolish West Indian slavery earlier in the nineteenth century.
³²

As for Engels, working at his father’s mill provided an opportunity to stay in close contact with labor leaders and observe the
deprivations of English workers firsthand. The city, Engels observed, consisted of “a planless, knotted chaos of houses” situated along “a narrow, coal-black, foul-smelling stream, full of debris and refuse.” The creek ultimately emptied into “the most disgusting blackish-green slime pools.” Pigs rolled in the slop, and the stench of the local tanneries was oppressive. The disgusting conditions did not keep Marx from coming to visit regularly throughout the 1850s. Manchester, he found, was a convenient location to hide out from his creditors. Marx’s wife, Jenny, teased Engels that he had become “a great cotton lord.” Actually, Engels stole hundreds of dollars from his father’s company to send back to his collaborator in London. Marx was elated when he heard the postman knock. “There’s Frederick!” the philosopher would cry. “Two pounds extra! Saved!”
³³

Marx had withdrawn from politics during much of the 1850s. He maintained some contacts with the Chartists, a movement of British workers that sought voting rights and labor reforms. But he was frustrated by the failure of the working class to rise up. Instead he focused primarily on journalism and his longer economic treatises. Marx devoured European newspapers as research for his
Tribune
articles. He was ever on the lookout for signs of impending revolution. The outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853 offered one potential spark. The whole situation was “bubbling and boiling,” he wrote. A foreign crisis, Marx understood, could induce Manchester’s workers to take to the streets and demand change. “The times,” he wrote optimistically in 1856, “seem to me to be hotting up.”
³⁴

Marx’s financial situation improved slightly as the decade progressed. When two of Jenny’s aristocratic relatives died, the family inherited a couple of hundred pounds. They moved to more spacious accommodations near London’s Hampstead Heath. The new place, with its view of St. Paul’s Cathedral, “is truly a prince dwelling compared with the holes we used to live in,” as Jenny put it. Marx, whom his children called Moor because of his dark complexion, found time to relax a little, carrying the tots around on his back like a horse. But money ultimately remained tight. Marx felt that he
deserved a higher salary from the
Tribune
. “With three pounds per article,” he wrote Engels, “I could at last get out of the muck.” At first his bosses in New York agreed to raise his rate. But in 1857 they cut his weekly contributions from two articles to one—defeating the purpose of a raise. Marx, writing in his unique mishmash of German and English, complained to Engels that he was “from all sides
gebothert
.” He groused about the “lousy Yankees.” Marx’s wife was forced to cart their remaining linen and furniture to the local pawnshop.
³⁵

Marx, despite his poverty, never pulled his punches as a journalist. He reserved some of his most vehement criticism for Britain’s Lord Palmerston. The German radical considered the Most English Minister the tool of Britain’s bourgeoisie. Palmerston was a great phony, Marx believed. If he was too weak to confront a “strong enemy,” he predicted, Palmerston would find a straw man to knock down instead. In Palmerston’s vision, Marx wrote, “the movement of history is nothing but a pastime, expressly invented for the private satisfaction of the noble Viscount Palmerston of Palmerston.” Still, Marx observed, the aging statesman had become a hero to the middle class. His chief supporters consisted of Britain’s lords of industry, whom Marx derided as “vampyres, fattening on the life-blood of the young working generation.” The irresponsible Palmerston and the “industrial slaveholders” who supported him, Marx complained, sought foreign wars to distract from troubles at home.
³⁶

Marx, despite his uncompromising rhetoric, was actually willing to support middle-class revolutions if he thought they would lead to an uprising of the working class. The growing tension in North America on the slavery question enthralled him. By the winter of 1860, Marx considered the rising conflict over slavery one of “the biggest things now happening in the world.” He recognized that a Civil War across the Atlantic could have profound consequences in Europe. English textile mills like the one Engels helped operate depended on a steady supply of raw cotton from the slaveholding states in America. A shortage could lead to massive unemployment, perhaps
even revolution. “If things gradually get serious,” Marx wrote Engels in January 1860, “what will become of Manchester?”
³⁷

Marx was a careful student of the material elements of national power. The more he analyzed the state of play, the more a Northern victory appeared inevitable. In a letter to Engels in July 1861, Marx cited census figures to make the case that the burgeoning population of the American Northwest (including the modern-day Midwest) alone now far exceeded the total population of the seceding states. Northwesterners, Marx insisted, would not simply hand over the Mississippi Delta to a foreign power. Still, the war would be no easy victory. Marx believed that the South—teeming with angry, poor “adventurers”—would win some early battles. In the long run, however, the North was sure to prevail—not least, Marx observed, because it could always “play the last card, that of a slave uprising.”
³⁸

A Snake in the Bed

Marx considered the antislavery agitation in America part of a worldwide trend toward abolition. He saw parallels in Russian czar Alexander II’s emancipation of the serfs in 1861. Antislavery had in fact been sweeping the globe for decades prior to the American Civil War. In 1814 Mexico had abolished slavery, and a decade later Central America did the same. Britain banned the slave trade in 1807, and prohibited slavery altogether in 1833. In the 1850s, Colombia, Argentina, Venezuela, and Peru all joined the movement. The United States was well behind the times.
³⁹

Lincoln, of course, loathed slavery. For years he had been speaking out eloquently against the institution. Yet he also believed that the Constitution protected the property rights of slaveholders. As the secession crisis deepened, therefore, he made his goal the preservation of the Union—not abolition, which he initially believed would be both illegal and counterproductive. Furthermore, racism remained prevalent, even in the North. Lincoln recognized that he needed
to take those views into account. “A universal feeling,” he once remarked, “whether well or ill founded, cannot be safely disregarded.” Freeing slaves might alienate otherwise loyal plantation owners in border states like Kentucky. With territory slipping out of the Union by the day, the president could not afford to forfeit any supporters. “I think to lose Kentucky,” he wrote Orville Browning, “is nearly the same as to lose the whole game. Kentucky gone, we can not hold Missouri, nor, as I think, Maryland. These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us. We would as well consent to separation at once, including the surrender of this capitol.”
⁴⁰

Lincoln further clarified his position by reciting a parable. If “out in the street, or in the field, or on the prairie I find a rattlesnake,” he began, “I take a stake and kill him. Everybody would applaud the act and say I did right. But suppose the snake was in a bed where children were sleeping. Would I do right to strike him there? I might hurt the children; or I might not kill, but only arouse and exasperate the snake, and he might bite the children.” On another occasion, Lincoln compared the country to a sick man with a tumor on his neck. Remove the tumor, he warned, and the patient might die in the process.
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In Lincoln’s first inaugural, the new president went out of his way to reassure slaveholders in the border states. He had no intention, he explained, “directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery where it exists.” Seward relayed the message to his diplomats in the field: Slavery was not to be mentioned at all as a rationale for the war. (A frequently overlooked line in the secretary of state’s April Fools’ memo urges the president to “change the question before the public from one upon slavery” to “a question upon Union or disunion.” Lincoln agreed with this part of Seward’s counsel—at least at first.) Europe’s ruling classes took Lincoln and Seward at their word—not least because it was convenient for them. Europeans disliked slavery, but they also depended upon cotton from the Confederate states. If the war transformed into an antislavery crusade, it would complicate matters immensely. Marx, in his
Tribune
dispatches, tried to expose the hypocrisy in the attitudes of European aristocrats. He argued persuasively that slavery actually lay at the foundation of the conflict.
⁴²

Marx, in some ways, operated like a modern blogger. He did little original reporting. Instead, he pored over the proliferating English newspapers and magazines—and then critiqued them. Marx once revealingly complained that he could not do his job because he did not have enough money to buy newspapers. When he did have the money, there was never a lack of material. The number of American newspapers alone had more than doubled in the three decades before the Civil War.
⁴³

Lincoln, too, was a shrewd observer—and manipulator—of the media. Even before he became president, he worked carefully to control his own image.
⁴⁴
He spent a great deal of time in newspaper offices. He often lurked in composing rooms, watching as his speeches were set in type to make sure no mistakes crept in. Once, back in Illinois, he bought a printing press in an attempt to woo German voters. Sometimes he tried to bribe newspaper publishers. As president, Lincoln quizzed visiting correspondents for intelligence from the battlefield.

The flood of newspaper commentary sometimes overwhelmed Lincoln. He complained that he lost sleep over hostile editorials. At the White House on one occasion, an acquaintance observed that newspapers were not always “reliable.” Lincoln shot back that he agreed. “That is to say,” the president added, that “they ‘
lie
,’ and then they ‘
re-lie
’!” As the war unfolded, Lincoln soured particularly on the editor in chief of the
Tribune
. “Greeley is so rotten,” the president told his cabinet on one occasion, “that nothing can be done with him.”
⁴⁵

And yet the power of Greeley’s newspaper was impossible to ignore. Lincoln believed that emancipation would help the United States in Europe, but he could not shift America’s war aims without risking a backlash at home. The pressure from the
Tribune
and other newspapers—however aggravating—could help change American
minds. Still, Lincoln recognized that public opinion moved glacially. Any move toward emancipation, the president later explained, would have to wait for the “great revolution in public sentiment” that was “slowly but
surely
progressing.” Lincoln compared his approach to watching a pear ripen on a tree. Pick it too soon and the fruit is spoiled. Wait patiently, on the other hand, and the pear would fall on its own.
⁴⁶

By the fall of 1861, Lincoln was coming under increasing pressure to pluck the pear. In August, General John C. Frémont, the president’s commander in Missouri, issued a proclamation to free slaves in the territory he controlled. There was a certain logic to letting military commanders do the emancipating in a local, piecemeal fashion. It would dodge the border-state pitfalls, allow the president to stay above the fray, and avoid publicly shifting the war aims to an antislavery crusade. Yet the order deeply troubled the ever-cautious Lincoln. For one, such a gradual approach would be far less likely than a bold proclamation to make an impact on European powers. Lincoln let his dissatisfaction be known, and Frémont’s wife, Jessie—daughter of the renowned Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton—eventually traveled to Washington to defend her husband. When she arrived in the capital, she sent the president a note asking when would be a good time to call. “Now, at once,” Lincoln wrote back.