‘US Civil War was greatest revolution of 19th century’

Below is an excerpt from Democracy and Revolution: From Ancient Greece to Modern Capitalism by George Novack. It is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for April. Novack joined the communist movement in 1933, and remained a member and leader of the Socialist Workers Party until his death in 1992. The piece is from the section “The Rise and Decline of Bourgeois Democracy.” Copyright © 1971 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY GEORGE NOVACK

The mass of participants in the revolutionary events who shouldered these historical tasks and carried them through were not endowed with exceptional individual abilities. They were indeed less literate, well-informed and historical-minded than the average citizen of today. But peoples who get caught up in and swept along by a mighty and irresistible tide of social change are capable of hitherto unimaginable accomplishments.

The creative capacities of the insurgent masses were shown in the successive revolutionary combats which toppled the old regimes in the West and ushered in the new bourgeois order. During the formative stages of capitalism, six great upheavals marked the decisive steps in the forward march of the bourgeois-democratic revolution.

The first was the Dutch revolution of the late sixteenth century by which the Netherlands won its independence and set up its republic. The second was the English revolutions of the seventeenth century, which secured the supremacy of the British bourgeoisie and their parliament. The third was the revolt of the American colonists, which created the United States. The fourth was the French Revolution, which was decisive in demolishing the old order in Western Europe. The fifth was the less successful Revolutions of 1848 on that continent. The American Civil War was the concluding act in this series of struggles by which the world bourgeoisie attained sovereignty and the democratic revolution fulfilled its mission. …

The American Civil War, which erupted thirteen years after 1848, has a twofold importance in the annals of the bourgeois revolution. It was the second and closing act of the democratic revolution in the United States. And it was the greatest revolution of the nineteenth century, the last thoroughgoing mass struggle carried through by the radical bourgeoisie in the Western world.

The second American revolution had both national and international roots. It was necessitated by the incompleteness of the first and by the vast economic and social changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution and the expansion of commercial agriculture on a domestic and world scale.

The first American revolution had liberated the thirteen colonies from British rule, created the federal union and set up a democratic republic. But it had failed to deliver state power firmly into the hands of the northern bourgeoisie or to extirpate slavery. The economic and political ascendancy of the cotton nobility during the first half of the nineteenth century held back the reconstruction of American society along purely capitalist lines and threatened to make the capitalist class along with the rest of the nation subordinate to the slave power. The Civil War was the showdown between these two chief contenders for supremacy in North America.

The victory of the Union shattered the last of the precapitalist social formations and ruling classes that blocked the expansion and challenged the hegemony of the native American capitalists. The defeat of the southern slaveholding oligarchy prevented the United States from becoming Balkanized and preserved the unity of the nation. The illegalization of chattel slavery formally liberated the black men from bondage and warded off the dangers to the democratic rights of the people posed by the aggressions of the ultrareactionary slave power….

For a few years during the postwar Reconstruction of the South, the ex-slaves helped set up and participated in highly progressive state governments which replaced the despotism of the planters with an extension of the power of the people. The radical Reconstruction regimes improved educational facilities, equalized taxes, cut down illiteracy, abolished imprisonment for debt, did away with property qualifications for voting and holding office and instituted other reforms in city, county and state government. For the first time, black men were elected to state legislatures and Congress.

These governments rested on a coalition of freedmen and their allies among the small farmers and poor whites. But the decisive power was held by the federal government and its armed forces, which occupied the South and supervised its affairs.

The radical Republicans in Washington pursued a contradictory agrarian policy. In the unorganized western territories, they gave free homesteads to white settlers and immense tracts of land to railroad companies, real-estate speculators, lumber and mining interests. Their land policy in the South was very different. There they feared to carry through an agrarian revolution which would have involved the expropriation of the land owned by the secessionist planters and distribution of it among the landless laborers.

Although they nullified three billion dollars worth of property in slaves, the triumphant capitalists were unwilling to confiscate landed property for the benefit of the freedmen. To the contrary, in some places the blacks were deprived of the lands they had taken over and were cultivating on their own account. …

The experience of Reconstruction and its aftermath also exemplified the incapacity of the capitalist class, even in its most radical days, to realize bourgeois democracy to the full or extend full and enduring equality to national minorities. So long as the northern bourgeoisie needed the black masses as a pawn in their combat against the cotton nobility, they granted a certain increment of freedom to them. But once they had cinched total mastery in the nation and over the South, the managers of the Republican Party turned against the southern masses. To keep the presidency in 1876, they made a deal with the new bourgeoisie and planters of the South at the expense of the plebeians and delivered the freedmen back into peonage.

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