https://themilitant.com/2020/04/04/the-us-civil-war-was-second-american-revolution/
The US Civil War was Second American Revolution
article
Vol. 84/No. 14
April 13, 2020
ALEXANDER GARDNER/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS President Abraham Lincoln meets
with officers of Union army in 1862. Second American Revolution
abolished chattel
slavery, also marked the end of progressive political role of U.S.
bourgeoisie, wrote Novack. figure
President Abraham Lincoln meets with officers of Union army in 1862.
Second American Revolution abolished chattel slavery, also marked the
end of progressive
political role of U.S. bourgeoisie, wrote Novack.
ALEXANDER GARDNER/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS President Abraham Lincoln meets
with officers of Union army in 1862. Second American Revolution
abolished chattel
slavery, also marked the end of progressive political role of U.S.
bourgeoisie, wrote Novack. figure end
America’s Revolutionary Heritage: Marxist Essays
by George Novack is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for April.
Novack joined the communist movement in the United States in 1933 and
remained a
member and leader of the Socialist Workers Party until his death in
1992. He wrote a series of valuable books on questions of Marxist
politics, history
and philosophy available from Pathfinder. This excerpt from the chapter
“The Civil War — Its Place in History” is a powerful answer to some
liberal or
radical political views current today that belittle or deny the
revolutionary character of both the 1776 War of Independence and the
1861-65 Civil War.
Copyright © 1976 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
BY GEORGE NOVACK
The Civil War had deep historical roots. It was the inevitable product
of two interlacing processes. One was the degeneration of the First
American Revolution,
which unfolded by slow stages until it culminated in open
counterrevolution. The other was the rise of capitalist industrialism
with its contradictory
effects upon American social development. The interaction of these two
fundamental factors, the first rooted in national soil and the second
stemming from
world conditions, constituted the principal driving force in American
history between the close of the first revolutionary struggle and the
outbreak of
the second.
It is impossible to understand the necessity for a Second American
Revolution without grasping the dynamics of these two interpenetrating
processes out
of which it emerged. The First American Revolution took place in the
last quarter of the eighteenth century. The second unfolded in the
middle of the nineteenth
century. Separated by an interval of almost seventy-five years, these
two revolutions are customarily regarded as totally different and
completely disconnected
events. This view is superficial and false. In reality the First
American Revolution and the Civil War form two parts of an indivisible
whole. They comprised
distinct yet interlinked stages in the development of the
bourgeois-democratic revolution in the United States.
The bourgeois-national revolutionary movement in North America had five
main tasks to fulfill. These were: (1) to free the American people from
foreign
domination; (2) to consolidate the separate colonies or states into one
nation; (3) to set up a democratic republic; (4) to place state power in
the hands
of the bourgeoisie; and (5) most important of all, to rid American
society of its precapitalist encumbrances (Indian tribalism, feudalism,
slavery) in
order to permit the full and free expansion of capitalist forces of
production and exchange. These five tasks were all bound together, the
solution of
one preparing the conditions for the solution of the rest. …
The social structure of the United States at the end of the eighteenth
century was a composite of slave and free labor, of precapitalist and
capitalist
forms of production. To complete the reconstruction of society along
bourgeois lines, it would have been necessary to break up the soil in
which slavery
was rooted. This proved impossible under the prevailing conditions. The
slave interests were sufficiently powerful at the time of the Revolution
to prevent
any tampering with the institution in its southern strongholds and even
to obtain constitutional warrant for its perpetuation. The opponents of
slavery
could do no more than restrict its scope by providing for the abolition
of the foreign slave trade at the end of twenty years, for emancipation
in certain
northern states where slavery was of slight economic importance, and for
its prohibition within the unsettled northwestern territories. …
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. …
The bourgeois Republicans, who had taken power on a program of
restricting the slave power, found that they could hold it against the
assaults of the Confederacy
only by resorting to increasingly revolutionary measures leading to the
overthrow and abolition of the slave power. In order to conserve the
conquests
of the First American Revolution, it was found necessary to extend them
through another. A supplementary upheaval of social-economic relations
was required
to support the political overturn in 1860.
In the course of this Second Revolution, the most radical
representatives of industrial capital and their plebeian allies
completed the tasks initiated
by their predecessors in the first. Placing themselves at the head of
the antislavery forces, the Radicals took complete control of the
federal government
and concentrated its apparatus in their hands. They defeated the armies
of the Confederacy on the battlefields of the Civil War; shattered the
political
and economic power of the slave oligarchy; consolidated the bourgeois
dictatorship set up during the war; and remodeled the Republic into
conformity with
their own class aims and interests.
This Second American Revolution not only installed a new governing class
in office but, by abolishing chattel slavery, scrapped the principal
form of property
and labor in the South. The great political and social problem which had
agitated the United States ever since the birth of the republic — how to
dispose
of the slave power and its “peculiar institution” — was definitively
settled.
The Second Revolution also concluded the progressive political role of
the American bourgeoisie. After it helped annihilate the slave power and
slavery,
its political usefulness was utterly exhausted. Like the plantation
aristocracy before it, the new ruling capitalist oligarchy rapidly
transformed itself
into a thoroughly reactionary force, until it came to constitute the
main obstacle to social progress not only within the United States but
throughout
the world.
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