What do you know about the American Civil War?
Just saying these words — “the Civil War” — probably brings some familiar images to
mind.
Northern soldiers in Union blue marching against Southern troops in Confederate gray.
Epic battles at Shiloh and Gettysburg.
Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the end of slavery.
The victory of the Union over the Confederacy.
But there’s something else you should know about that era — something that ties these
events together, and that you probably didn’t learn in school.
The Civil War was also America’s greatest left-wing revolution.
Here’s how.
In the early nineteenth century, African slavery was the foundation of social and economic
life in the American South.
Millions of black workers were owned as property by wealthy plantation owners, who denied them
education, controlled their family lives, and reaped the fruits of their labor.
This system was wildly profitable, and the wealth it produced allowed a tiny elite to
dominate Southern and national politics.
And before the Civil War, it was expanding across the Western Hemisphere.
In 1860, between the United States, Brazil and Cuba, there were more enslaved people
than ever before.
For years, a small group of American abolitionists denounced slavery as an abomination.
These radical activists were scorned by much of society, and ignored by both of the two
mainstream political parties.
But in the 1850s, as slaveholders tried to extend slavery across the West, their opponents
made a breakthrough.
The old two-party system melted down, and the new Republican Party won massive Northern
support by opposing slavery’s expansion, while putting bondage itself on a road to
“ultimate extinction.”
The abolitionists broke through, in part, because they named “the Slave Power” as
the oppressive ruling class it was.
They pointed out that slaveholders were just 1 percent of the population, but controlled
every branch of government.
They argued that black bondage was not just morally wrong, but a threat to free labor
everywhere.
The struggle between antislavery and slavery, said Abraham Lincoln, was part of “the eternal
struggle” between “the common right of humanity” and “the divine right of kings,”
“the same spirit that says, ‘you toil and work and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’”
It was the common worker, black or white, against the rich.
These populist assaults on the ruling class helped Lincoln’s party win the election
of 1860.
Contemporaries called it a “political revolution.”
Its threat to slaveholders was so serious that they formed their own separate republic,
the Confederate States of America.
In the Civil War that followed, the stakes were clear.
The Union fought against human bondage, for a democratic majority, and for the dignity
of all labor.
The Confederacy fought to preserve bondage and elite rule.
Confederates fought, as Lincoln told Congress in 1862, to put “capital” — wealth,
measured in human beings — “above labor in the structure of government.”
Enslaved laborers understood these stakes — hundreds of thousands fled to the Union
lines even before emancipation was proclaimed.
Radical abolitionists knew it too: Frederick Douglass barnstormed the country, rousing
black men to enlist in the Union army.
By war’s end, around 200,000 black soldiers and sailors had taken up arms to crush the
rebellion.
The cause of the Union was the cause of the international Left.
While conservative aristocrats and capitalists in Europe sympathized with the Confederacy,
radicals and labor organizations supported the Union.
In 1864 a German journalist named Karl Marx declared that “the American antislavery
war” would launch “a new era of ascendency” for “the working classes.”
Emancipation, as Marx understood, was not a middle-class reform project: it was a true
social revolution.
Only in the United States and in Haiti was emancipation sudden, uncompensated, and enforced
by former slaves themselves.
That revolution remains incomplete.
After the war, former slaves and radical Republicans were defeated by what the scholar W.E.B.
Du Bois called “a counterrevolution of property,” led by former slaveholders and conservative
businessmen.
Under the terror of Jim Crow segregation, many of the Civil War’s victories for labor
and democracy were rolled back.
But not all.
The destruction of American chattel slavery was a historic victory.
It meant that black southerners were able to create the schools and churches that seeded
the fight against Jim Crow.
It radically expanded American democracy and made the modern labor and civil rights movements
possible.
The Civil War was America’s greatest left-wing revolution.
Even now, its work remains unfinished.
But every left-wing struggle — for the rule of democratic majorities, for the rights of
labor over property, and for meaningful freedom and equality — can claim its legacy.
I’m Matt Karp, associate professor of history at Princeton University, for the Gravel Institute.