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奴隶制是美国内战的根本原因 - 介绍两篇马克思的文章 -- Anonymous - (9580 Byte) 2003-9-08 周一, 上午12:23 (393 reads) |
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作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
The North American Civil War
London, October 20, 1861
For months the leading weekly and daily papers of the London press have been reiterating the same litany on the American
Civil War. While they insult the free states of the North, they anxiously defend themselves against the suspicion of sympathising
with the slave states of the South. In fact, they continually write two articles: one article, in which they attack the North, and
another article, in which they excuse their attacks on the North.
In essence the extenuating arguments read: The war between the North and South is a tariff war. The war is, further, not for any
principle, does not touch the question of slavery and in fact turns on Northern lust for sovereignty. Finally, even if justice is on
the side of the North , does it not remain a vain endeavour to want to subjugate eight million Anglo-Saxons by force! Would
not separation of the South release the North from all connection with Negro slavery and ensure for it, with its twenty million
inhabitants and its vast territory, a higher, hitherto scarcely dreamt-of, development? Accordingly, must not the North welcome
secession as a happy event, instead of wanting to overrule it by a bloody and futile civil war?
Point by point we will probe the plea of the English press.
The war between North and South -- so runs the first excuse -- is a mere tariff war, a war between a protectionist system and
a free trade system, and Britain naturally stands on the side of free trade. Shall the slave-owner enjoy the fruits of slave labour
in their entirety or shall he be cheated of a portion of these by the protectionists of the North? That is the question which is at
issue in this war. It was reserved for The Times to make this brilliant discovery. The Economist, The Examiner, The
Saturday Review and tutti quanti expounded the theme further. It is characteristic of this discovery that it was made, not in
Charleston, but in London. Naturally, in America everyone knew that from 1846 to 1861 a free trade system prevailed, and
that Representative Morrill carried his protectionist tariff through Congress only in 1861, after the rebellion had already broken
out. Secession, therefore, did not take place because the Morrill tariff had gone through Congress, but, at most, the Morrill
tariff went through Congress because secession had taken place. When South Carolina had its first attack of secession in 1831,
the protectionist tariff of 1828 served it, to be sure, as a pretext, but only as a pretext, as is known from a statement of General
Jackson. This time, however, the old pretext has in fact not been repeated. In the Secession Congress at Montgomery all
reference to the tariff question was avoided, because the cultivation of sugar in Louisiana, one of the most influential Southern
states, depends entirely on protection.
But, the London press pleads further, the war of the United States is nothing but a war for the forcible maintenance of the
Union. The Yankees cannot make up their minds to strike fifteen stars from their standard. They want to cut a colossal figure on
the world stage. Yes, it would be different if the war was waged for the abolition of slavery! The question of slavery, however,
as The Saturday Review categorically declares among other things, has absolutely nothing to do with this war.
It is above all to be remembered that the war did not originate with the North, but with the South. The North finds itself on the
defensive. For months it had quietly looked on while the secessionists appropriated the Union's forts, arsenals, shipyards,
customs houses, pay offices, ships and supplies of arms, insulted its flag and took prisoner bodies of its troops. Finally the
secessionists resolved to force the Union government out of its passive attitude by a blatant act of war, and solely for this
reason proceeded to the bombardment of Fort Sumter near Charleston. On April 11 (1861) their General Beauregard had
learnt in a meeting with Major Anderson, the commander of Fort Sumter, that the fort was only supplied with provisions for
three days more and accordingly must be peacefully surrendered after this period. In order to forestall this peaceful surrender,
the secessionists opened the bombardment early on the following morning (April 12), which brought about the fall of the fort in
a few hours. News of this had hardly been telegraphed to Montgomery, the seat of the Secession Congress, when War
Minister Walker publicly declared in the name of the new Confederacy: No man can say where the war opened today will
end. At the same time he prophesied that before the first of May the flag of the Southern Confederacy will wave from the dome
of the old Capitol in Washington and within a short time perhaps also from the Faneuil Hall in Boston. Only now ensued the
proclamation in which Lincoln called for 75,000 men to defend the Union. The bombardment of Fort Sumter cut off the only
possible constitutional way out, namely the convocation of a general convention of the American people, as Lincoln had
proposed in his inaugural address. For Lincoln there now remained only the choice of fleeing from Washington, evacuating
Maryland and Delaware and surrendering Kentucky, Missouri and Virginia, or of answering war with war.
The question of the principle of the American Civil War is answered by the battle slogan with which the South broke the peace.
Stephens, the Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy, declared in the Secession Congress that what essentially
distinguished the Constitution newly hatched at Montgomery from the Constitution of Washington and Jefferson was that now
for the first time slavery was recognised as an institution good in itself, and as the foundation of the whole state edifice, whereas
the revolutionary fathers, men steeped in the prejudices of the eighteenth century, had treated slavery as an evil imported from
England and to be eliminated in the course of time. Another matador of the South, Mr. Spratt, cried out: "For us it is a question
of founding a great slave republic." If, therefore, it was indeed only in defence of the Union that the North drew the sword, had
not the South already declared that the continuance of slavery was no longer compatible with the continuance of the Union?
Just as the bombardment of Fort Sumter gave the signal for the opening of the war, the election victory of the Republican Party
of the North, the election of Lincoln as President, gave the signal for secession. On November 6, 1860, Lincoln was elected.
On November 8, 1860, a message telegraphed from South Carolina said: Secession is regarded here as an accomplished fact;
on November 10 the legislature of Georgia occupied itself with secession plans, and on November 13 a special session of the
legislature of Mississippi was convened to consider secession. But Lincoln's election was itself only the result of a split in the
Democratic camp. During the election struggle the Democrats of the North concentrated their votes on Douglas, the
Democrats of the South concentrated their votes on Breckinridge, and to this splitting of the Democratic votes the Republican
Party owed its victory. Whence came, on the one hand, the preponderance of the Republican Party in the North? Whence, on
the other, the disunion within the Democratic Party, whose members, North and South, had operated in conjunction for more
than half a century?
Under the presidency of Buchanan the sway that the South had gradually usurped over the Union through its alliance with the
Northern Democrats attained its zenith. The last Continental Congress of 1787 and the first Constitutional Congress of 1789
-90 had legally excluded slavery from all Territories of the republic north-west of the Ohio. (Territories, as is known, is the
name given to the colonies lying within the United States itself which have not yet attained the level of population constitutionally
prescribed for the formation of autonomous states.) The so-called Missouri Compromise (1820), in consequence of which
Missouri became one of the States of the Union as a slave state, excluded slavery from every remaining Territory north of 36
degrees latitude and west of the Missouri. By this compromise the area of slavery was advanced several degrees of longitude,
whilst, on the other hand, a geographical boundary-line to its future spread seemed quite definitely drawn. This geographical
barrier, in its turn, was thrown down in 1854 by the so-called Kansas-Nebraska Bill, the initiator of which was St[ephen] A.
Douglas, then leader of the Northern Democrats. The Bill, which passed both Houses of Congress, repealed the Missouri
Compromise, placed slavery and freedom on the same footing, commanded the Union government to treat them both with
equal indifference and left it to the sovereignty of the people, that is, the majority of the settlers, to decide whether or not
slavery was to be introduced in a Territory. Thus, for the first time in the history of the United States, every geographical and
legal limit to the extension of slavery in the Territories was removed. Under this new legislation the hitherto free Territory of
New Mexico, a Territory five times as large as the State of New York, was transformed into a slave Territory, and the area of
slavery was extended from the border of the Mexican Republic to 38 degrees north latitude. In 1859 New Mexico received a
slave code that vies with the statute-books of Texas and Alabama in barbarity. Nevertheless, as the census of 1860 proves,
among some hundred thousand inhabitants New Mexico does not yet count half a hundred slaves. It had therefore sufficed for
the South to send some adventurers with a few slaves over the border, and then with the help of the central government in
Washington and of its officials and contractors in New Mexico to drum together a sham popular representation to impose
slavery and with it the rule of the slaveholders on the Territory.
However, this convenient method did not prove applicable in other Territories. The South accordingly went a step further and
appealed from Congress to the Supreme Court of the United States. This Court, which numbers nine judges, five of whom
belong to the South, had long been the most willing tool of the slaveholders. It decided in 1857, in the notorious Dred Scott
case, that every American citizen possesses the right to take with him into any territory any property recognized by the
Constitution. The Constitution, it maintained, recognises slaves as property and obliges the Union government to protect this
property. Consequently, on the basis of the Constitution, slaves could be forced to labour in the Territories by their owners,
and so every individual slaveholder was entitled to introduce slavery into hitherto free Territories against the will of the majority
of the settlers. The right to exclude slavery was taken from the Territorial legislatures and the duty to protect pioneers of the
slave system was imposed on Congress and the Union government.
If the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had extended the geographical boundary-line of slavery in the Territories, if the
Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854 had erased every geographical boundary-line and set up a political barrier instead, the will of
the majority of the settlers, now the Supreme Court of the United States, by its decision of 1857, tore down even this political
barrier and transformed all the Territories of the republic, present and future, from nurseries of free states into nurseries of
slavery.
At the same time, under Buchanan's government the severer law on the surrendering of fugitive slaves enacted in 1850 was
ruthlessly carried out in the states of the North. To play the part of slave-catchers for the Southern slaveholders appeared to be
the constitutional calling of the North. On the other hand, in order to hinder as far as possible the colonisation of the Territories
by free settlers, the slaveholders' party frustrated all the so-called free-soil measures, i.e., measures which were to secure for
the settlers a definite amount of uncultivated state land free of charge.
In the foreign, as in the domestic, policy of the United States, the interest of the slaveholders served as the guiding star.
Buchanan had in fact bought the office of President through the issue of the Ostend Manifesto, in which the acquisition of Cuba,
whether by purchase or by force of arms, was proclaimed as the great task of national policy. Under his government northern
Mexico was already divided among American land speculators, who impatiently awaited the signal to fall on Chihuahua,
Coahuila and Sonora. The unceasing piratical expeditions of the filibusters against the states of Central America were directed
no less from the White House at Washington. In the closest connection with this foreign policy, whose manifest purpose was
conquest of new territory for the spread of slavery and of the slaveholders' rule, stood the reopening of the slave trade,
secretly supported by the Union government. St[ephen] A. Douglas himself declared in the American Senate on August 20,
1859: During the last year more Negroes have been imported from Africa than ever before in any single year, even at the time
when the slave trade was still legal. The number of slaves imported in the last year totalled fifteen thousand.
Armed spreading of slavery abroad was the avowed aim of national policy; the Union had in fact become the slave of the three
hundred thousand slaveholders who held sway over the South. A series of compromises, which the South owed to its alliance
with the Northern Democrats, had led to this result. On this alliance all the attempts, periodically repeated since 1817, to resist
the ever increasing encroachments of the slaveholders had hitherto come to grief. At length there came a turning point.
For hardly had the Kansas-Nebraska Bill gone through, which wiped out the geographical boundary-line of slavery and made
its introduction into new Territories subject to the will of the majority of the settlers, when armed emissaries of the slaveholders,
border rabble from Missouri and Arkansas, with bowie-knife in one hand and revolver in the other, fell upon Kansas and
sought by the most unheard-of atrocities to dislodge its settlers from the Territory colonised by them. These raids were
supported by the central government in Washington. Hence a tremendous reaction. Throughout the North, but particularly in
the North-west, a relief organisation was formed to support Kansas with men, arms and money. Out of this relief organisation
arose the Republican Party, which therefore owes its origin to the struggle for Kansas. After the attempt to transform Kansas
into a slave Territory by force of arms had failed, the South sought to achieve the same result by political intrigues. Buchanan's
government, in particular, exerted its utmost efforts to have Kansas included in the States of the Union as a slave state with a
slave constitution imposed on it. Hence renewed struggle, this time mainly conducted in Congress at Washington. Even
St[ephen] A. Douglas, the chief of the Northern Democrats, now (1857 - 5 entered the lists against the government and his
allies of the South, because imposition of a slave constitution would have been contrary to the principle of sovereignty of the
settlers passed in the Nebraska Bill of 1854. Douglas, Senator for Illinois, a North-western state, would naturally have lost all
his influence if he had wanted to concede to the South the right to steal by force of arms or through acts of Congress Territories
colonised by the North. As the struggle for Kansas, therefore, called the Republican Party into being, it at the same time
occasioned the first split within the Democratic Party itself.
The Republican Party put forward its first platform for the presidential election in 1856. Although its candidate, John Fremont,
was not victorious, the huge number of votes cast for him at any rate proved the rapid growth of the Party, particularly in the
North-west. At their second National Convention for the presidential election (May 17, 1860), the Republicans again put
forward their platform of 1856, only enriched by some additions. Its principal contents were the following: Not a foot of fresh
territory is further conceded to slavery. The filibustering policy abroad must cease. The reopening of the slave trade is
stigmatised. Finally, free-soil laws are to be enacted for the furtherance of free colonisation.
The vitally important point in this platform was that not a foot of fresh terrain was conceded to slavery; rather it was to remain
once and for all confined with the boundaries of the states where it already legally existed. Slavery was thus to be formally
interned; but continual expansion of territory and continual spread of slavery beyond its old limits is a law of life for the slave
states of the Union.
The cultivation of the southern export articles, cotton, tobacco, sugar , etc., carried on by slaves, is only remunerative as long as
it is conducted with large gangs of slaves, on a mass scale and on wide expanses of a naturally fertile soil, which requires only
simple labour. Intensive cultivation, which depends less on fertility of the soil than on investment of capital, intelligence and
energy of labour, is contrary to the nature of slavery. Hence the rapid transformation of states like Maryland and Virginia, which
formerly employed slaves on the production of export articles, into states which raise slaves to export them into the deep South.
Even in South Carolina, where the slaves form four-sevenths of the population, the cultivation of cotton has been almost
completely stationary for years due to the exhaustion of the soil. Indeed, by force of circumstances South Carolina has already
been transformed in part into a slave-raising state, since it already sells slaves to the sum of four million dollars yearly to the
states of the extreme South and South-west. As soon as this point is reached, the acquisition of new Territories becomes
necessary, so that one section of the slaveholders with their slaves may occupy new fertile lands and that a new market for
slave-raising, therefore for the sale of slaves, may be created for the remaining section. It is, for example, indubitable that
without the acquisition of Louisiana, Missouri and Arkansas by the United States, slavery in Virginia and Maryland would have
been wiped out long ago. In the Secessionist Congress at Montgomery, Senator Toombs, one of the spokesmen of the South,
strikingly formulated the economic law that commands the constant expansion of the territory of slavery. "In fifteen years," said
he, "without a great increase in slave territory, either the slaves must be permitted to flee from the whites, or the whites must flee
from the slaves."
As is known, the representation of the individual states in the Congress House of Representatives depends on the size of their
respective populations. As the populations of the free states grow far more quickly than those of the slave states, the number of
Northern Representatives was bound to outstrip that of the Southern very rapidly. The real seat of the political power of the
South is accordingly transferred more and more to the American Senate, where every state, whether its population is great or
small, is represented by two Senators. In order to assert its influence in the Senate and, through the Senate, its hegemony over
the United States, the South therefore required a continual formation of new slave states. This, however, was only possible
through conquest of foreign lands, as in the case of Texas, or through the transformation of the Territories belonging to the
United States first into slave Territories and later into slave states, as in the case of Missouri, Arkansas, etc. John Calhoun,
whom the slaveholders admire as their statesman par excellence, stated as early as February 19, 1847, in the Senate, that the
Senate alone placed a balance of power in the hands of the South, that extension of the slave territory was necessary to
preserve this equilibrium between South and North in the Senate, and that the attempts of the South at the creation of new slave
states by force were accordingly justified.
Finally, the number of actual slaveholders in the South of the Union does not amount to more than three hundred thousand, a
narrow oligarchy that is confronted with many millions of so-called poor whites, whose numbers have been constantly growing
through concentration of landed property and whose condition is only to be compared with that of the Roman plebeians in the
period of Rome's extreme decline. Only by acquisition and the prospect of acquisition of new Territories, as well as by
filibustering expeditions, is it possible to square the interests of these poor whites with those of the slaveholders, to give their
restless thirst for action a harmless direction and to tame them with the prospect of one day becoming slaveholders themselves.
A strict confinement of slavery within its old terrain, therefore, was bound according to economic law to lead to its gradual
effacement, in the political sphere to annihilate the hegemony that the slave states exercised through the Senate, and finally to
expose the slaveholding oligarchy within its own states to threatening perils from the poor whites. In accordance with the
principle that any further extension of slave Territories was to be prohibited by law, the Republicans therefore attacked the rule
of the slaveholders at its root. The Republican election victory was accordingly bound to lead to open struggle between North
and South. And this election victory, as already mentioned, was itself conditioned by the split in the Democratic camp.
The Kansas struggle had already caused a split between the slaveholders' party and the Democrats of the North allied to it.
With the presidential election of 1860, the same strife now broke out again in a more general form. The Democrats of the
North, with Douglas as their candidate, made the introduction of slavery into Territories dependent on the will of the majority of
the settlers. The slaveholders' party, with Breckinridge as their candidate, maintained that the Constitution of the United States,
as the Supreme Court had also declared, brought slavery legally in its train; in and of itself slavery was already legal in all
Territories and required no special naturalisation. Whilst, therefore, the Republicans prohibited any extension of slave
Territories, the Southern party laid claim to all Territories of the republic as legally warranted domains. What they had
attempted by way of example with regard to Kansas, to force slavery on a Territory through the central government against the
will of the settlers themselves, they now set up as law for all the Territories of the Union. Such a concession lay beyond the
power of the Democratic leaders and would only have occasioned the desertion of their army to the Republican camp. On the
other hand, Douglas's settlers' sovereignty could not satisfy the slaveholders' party. What it wanted to effect had to be effected
within the next four years under the new President, could only be effected by the resources of the central government and
brooked no further delay. It did not escape the slaveholders that a new power had arisen, the North-west, whose population,
having almost doubled between 1850 and 1860, was already pretty well equal to the white population of the slave states -- a
power that was not inclined either by tradition, temperament or mode of life to let itself be dragged from compromise to
compromise in the manner of the old North-eastern states. The Union was still of value to the South only so far as it handed
over Federal power to it as a means of carrying out the slave policy. If not, then it was better to make the break now than to
look on at the development of the Republican Party and the upsurge of the North-west for another four years and begin the
struggle under more unfavourable conditions. The slaveholders' party therefore played va banque. When the Democrats of the
North declined to go on playing the part of the poor whites of the South, the South secured Lincoln's victory by splitting the
vote, and then took this victory as a pretext for drawing the sword from the scabbard.
The whole movement was and is based, as one sees, on the slave question. Not in the sense of whether the slaves within the
existing slave states should be emancipated outright or not, but whether the twenty million free men of the North should submit
any longer to an oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders; whether the vast Territories of the republic should be
nurseries for free states or for slavery; finally, whether the national policy of the Union should take armed spreading of slavery in
Mexico, Central and South America as its device.
In another article we will probe the assertion of the London press that the North must sanction secession as the most favourable
and only possible solution of the conflict.
作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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