Vol. 77/No. 26      July 8, 2013

Below is an excerpt from America’s Revolutionary Heritage, one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for July. George Novack (1905-1992), who was a leader of the Socialist Workers Party, authored many of its chapters, including the piece below “The Civil War—its place in history.” Copyright © 1971 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY GEORGE NOVACK

The victory of the Republican Party in the presidential elections of 1860 and the ensuing departure of the slave states brought to a head the struggle between the southern planters and northern bourgeoisie, the proslavery and antislavery camps, the counterrevolution and the revolution. The secessionist coup d’etat revived all the problems of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, including those which had presumably been forever settled. …

Between the close of the First American Revolution in 1789 and the beginning of the Second Revolution in 1861 a far greater revolution took place in the Western world. This revolution occurred in the field of production. The introduction of power-driven machinery transformed the technological basis of production, gave birth to the factory system, and made possible large-scale industry. The capitalist method of production for the first time stood upon its own feet and began to assert its mastery in the decisive spheres of economic life. The age of industrial capitalism had succeeded the age of commercial capitalism.

The rise of industrial capitalism, which began toward the end of the eighteenth century and lasted until the beginning of the twentieth, was a turbulent epoch in world history. With furious zeal the emissaries of capitalism attacked and destroyed the remnants of feudal and barbarian civilizations and erected a new world on their ruins. The extension of the exchange of products gave capital, labor, and culture an unprecedented mobility. Capital ranged throughout the globe, seeking openings for trade and investment; millions of people were redistributed from the Old World to the New in the greatest mass migrations in history; culture became more cosmopolitan. Science and invention quickened the pace of capitalist industry.

The Second American Revolution occurred during the height of this development. From 1852 to 1872 industrial capitalism experienced its most impetuous growth. The unprecedented volume of world trade during this period indicates the extraordinary tempo of economic expansion. After rising from $1.75 billion in 1830 to $3.6 billion in 1850, the volume of world trade leaped forward to $9.4 billion in 1870—an increase of well over two and a half times. This rate of increase has never been surpassed by world capitalism. It was during this century of industrial revolution that the modern capitalist world took shape.

The epoch of the most rapid expansion of capitalism, from 1847 to 1871, was likewise a period of wars and revolutions, in three consecutive phases. The crisis of 1847 produced the first mighty wave of uprisings. These were cut short by a series of victories for reaction and by the economic revival following the California gold strike of 1849.

After a prolonged period of prosperity, the world crisis of 1857 gave rise to a second sequence of wars and revolutions. This began with the first Italian War for Independence and was followed in rapid succession by the American Civil War of 1861, the Polish Insurrection of 1863, Napoleon III’s Mexican adventure, and the campaign against Denmark in 1864 which opened the series of Prussian wars led by Bismarck. This revolutionary impulse was felt as far away as Japan where, through the Meiji Restoration, the rulers partially adapted their economy and regime to the demands of the new industrial system.

The final period lasted from 1866 to 1871. Initiated by the crisis of 1866, it witnessed the republican uprising in Spain that toppled Queen Isabella from the throne, and the culmination of Bismarck’s campaign of expansion, beginning with the attack upon Austria in 1866 and ending triumphantly in the unification of Germany after the victory over France in 1871.

The civil war in France, following Bismarck’s defeat of Napoleon III, was the historical high water mark of this epoch. The Paris Commune was the first time in history that the proletariat seized power. With the crushing of the Communards and the restoration of bourgeois order in the Third Republic, the revolutionary tide receded for the rest of the century.

Thus for almost twenty-five years the entire Western world was a fiery furnace of war and revolution. These were the most turbulent years humanity had experienced since the Napoleonic Wars or was to know until the First World War. Within this furnace were forged not only the imperialist powers of modern Europe, which were to rule the earth until 1914, but the nation destined to outstrip them as the mightiest of world powers: the capitalist United States of North America.

The Second American Revolution must be viewed within this world-historical setting. Our Civil War was neither an isolated nor a purely national phenomenon. It was one of the most important links in the chain of conflicts that issued directly out of the world economic crisis of 1857 and constituted the great bourgeois-democratic revolutionary movement of the mid-nineteenth century. While the revolutions of 1848 and 1871 in France were the chief events in the first and final stages of that movement, the revolution that started in 1861 in the United States was the central event in its second chapter. This was the most important revolutionary struggle of the nineteenth century, as well as the most successful.  
 
 
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