Marx and Lincoln

Puttering around at marxists.org I found a couple of official letters from the International Workingmen's Association, one to President Lincoln upon his reelection, the other to his successor upon his assassination.

The IWMA was the First International, largely steered by Karl Marx from its founding in 1864 until it moved to New York (mostly marking its decease) in 1872. The two letters are remarkable for their praise for the U.S. and the two presidents they're addressed to, considering Marx himself seems to have penned them.

To Lincoln, upon his reelection after the Civil War:

The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.

Did they really think that? It seems so optimistic to think that the end of slavery would "initiate a new era of ascendancy for the working classes!" And I like Lincoln well enough, but "single-minded son of the working class?" Hard to swallow.

Marx, we presume, was even so moved by Lincoln's murder, which he calls an "infamy," that he wrote a letter to the succeeding president, Andrew Johnson. Among other things, here is his elegy for Abe:

[H]e was a man, neither to be browbeaten by adversity, nor intoxicated by success, inflexibly pressing on to his great goal, never compromising it by blind haste, slowly maturing his steps, never retracing them, carried away by no surge of popular favour, disheartened by no slackening of the popular pulse, tempering stern acts by the gleams of a kind heart, illuminating scenes dark with passion by the smile of humour, doing his titanic work as humbly and homely as Heaven-born rulers do little things with the grandiloquence of pomp and state; in one word, one of the rare men who succeed in becoming great, without ceasing to be good. Such, indeed, was the modesty of this great and good man, that the world only discovered him a hero after he had fallen a martyr.

What! I thought we were just sort of supposed to revile our heads of state. Oh well. And again to President Johnson, who gets to share with Lincoln the dubious title "man of labour":

Yours, Sir, has become the task to uproot by the law what has been felled by the sword, to preside over the arduous work of political reconstruction and social regeneration. A profound sense of your great mission will save you from any compromise with stern duties. You will never forget that to initiate the new era of the emancipation of labour, the American people devolved the responsibilities of leadership upon two men of labour--the one Abraham Lincoln, the other Andrew Johnson.

Again, "the new era of the emancipation of labour." Great writer, old Karl. Some of that is so well-written it's nearly impossible to understand.

It's really worth cruising through random parts of the marxists.org archives for stuff like this. Among other gems, I've amused myself with "Marx and Engels' Early Literary Experiments," here - it's a boost to laugh at their early poetry and short stories, and a reassurance that they went on to be such awesome dudes.