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MARX GOES TO TEXAS  
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Ryan Moore
August 11, 2024
Protean [[link removed]]

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_ In October of 1845, having been silenced by government
censors—and on the run from possible extradition—Karl Marx once
thought about moving to Texas. _

, All illustrations by Anobelisk.

 

_This article appears in Protean Magazine Issue IV: Special
Relativity. [[link removed]]_
 

In October of 1845, having been silenced by government censors—and
on the run from possible extradition—Karl Marx once thought about
moving to Texas. Earlier that year, he had been expelled from Paris at
the behest of Prussia’s King Friedrich Wilhelm IV. Marx, along with
his wife Jenny and their infant daughter, eventually fled to Brussels,
where they were joined in exile by Friedrich Engels and a cadre of
other dissident intellectuals. But the political and intellectual
environment of Brussels was no match for Paris, and, as a condition of
his exile, Marx had pledged to the Belgian government that he would
not publish anything about politics. So, on October 17th, 1845, Marx
wrote to Prussian officials in Trier, his hometown, to request an
emigration certificate to the United States. 

It’s not clear how serious Marx was about coming to America. His
intent in applying for emigration might simply have been to keep the
Prussian authorities from extraditing him by renouncing his
citizenship. But Marx biographer Saul Padover, and more recently the
historian Robin Blackburn, have suggested that he was specifically
interested in Texas. While it may be hard to imagine that antebellum
Texas would have been hospitable to the founder of modern communism,
the connection turns out to be closer than one might think.

During the 1840s, more than 10,000 Germans came to Texas through a
colonization program known as the Adelsverein, or German Emigration
Company. They would settle large tracts of land in the Texas Hill
Country north of San Antonio, establishing towns like Fredricksburg
and New Braunfels. In some of these settlements, German intellectuals,
feminists, and “free-thinkers” formed utopian communities based on
socialist ideals. One of these settlements was Bettina, a commune
founded on the north bank of the Llano River by followers of the
utopian socialists Étienne Cabet and François Marie Charles Fourier.
And Edgar von Westphalen, Marx’s brother-in-law and drinking buddy
from his student days in Berlin, emigrated to another experimental
community, Sisterdale.

A much larger wave of German dissidents would come to the U.S. in the
decade after the uprisings of 1848-49: the so-called Forty-Eighters.
As revolutions were defeated in Europe, more utopian socialist
communities sprouted across the American countryside, including La
Réunion, founded by Fourier’s French and German devotees in Dallas
County, Texas. After 1848, a number of Marx’s contemporaries and
comrades from the Communist League arrived in the U.S. Many immigrants
who had participated in the German revolution would later play vital
roles in the labor and anti-slavery movements.

Particularly in industrializing Midwestern cities, they represented a
crucial Republican constituency, aiding Lincoln’s election in 1860.
In Texas, émigrés Ernst Kapp and Adolph Douai published anti-slavery
newsletters and became prominent figures in abolitionist societies;
the German community was generally opposed to secession and made up a
stronghold of Union support. Their stances later led to the
perpetration of numerous acts of political violence against German
Texans, most notoriously the 1862 massacre committed by Confederate
troops at the Nueces River.

This makes it easier to imagine why Marx, in a moment of desperation,
might have seriously considered emigrating to Texas—as well as to
speculate about what he may have done during his time there. It’s
certainly amusing to picture him in the Texas Hill Country, siding
with abolitionists and supporting the Union while mercilessly debating
utopian socialists and bourgeois liberals alike, much as he did in
Europe. But even as a historical “what if,” the prospect of a
Texan trajectory in Marx’s life invites more significant
consideration about how the environment might have influenced his
intellectual work. What if Marx had developed his critique of
political economy from the vantage point of 19th-century Texas?

In _Capital_ and other economic writings, Marx focused on Britain as
the most advanced model of capitalism—the one he believed other
societies would follow. He did write sporadically about the U.S.,
particularly during the Civil War. But whereas England’s industrial
revolution took off in the late 18th century, allowing Marx to analyze
its development historically, the making of a full-blown capitalist
society in the U.S. occurred during his lifetime. Westward imperial
expansion was both a catalyst and a consequence of the triumph of
American capitalism in the period falling roughly between the war
against Mexico in 1846 and the end of Reconstruction in 1877, with the
Civil War and the end of slavery presenting pivotal moments of
transition. At the end of his life, in a preface for the 1882 Russian
edition of _The Communist Manifesto_, Marx wrote that the
“tremendous industrial resources” of the United States had brought
the young nation to the verge of surpassing England and Western Europe
as the world’s dominant capitalist power.

If Marx had found himself in Texas, it could have been equally
fruitful for him to forecast the development of capitalism from
there—today, the GDP of Texas alone is comparable to that of modern
Italy, the birthplace of merchant capital. In 1845, he would have
arrived as the U.S. empire was metastasizing, on the brink of the
annexation of Texas and a war against Mexico waged under the banner of
manifest destiny. The state’s annexation was a major achievement for
the extension of Southern slavery, and the consequences of westward
expansion would eventually trigger the Civil War. Texas thus began its
transformation into a white supremacist hub of accumulation through
the exploitation of enslaved Black labor, the dispossession of
landowning Tejanos (i.e., Texans of Mexican descent), and the ethnic
cleansing of Indigenous people. Marx’s observation that “capital
comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and
dirt,” while applicable all over the world, was no less grotesquely
true in Texas.

We can faithfully reconstruct Marx’s perspective on the U.S. based
on his essays about the Civil War and other scattered writings, along
with the experiences of his German comrades who did emigrate. The
unique dynamics of social relations in the U.S., especially its
interrelated hierarchies of race and class, would have confronted Marx
with distinct challenges for theory and practice—some of the same
complexities that have long bedeviled the American left.

Writing in 1933, the nadir of the Great Depression, W.E.B. Du Bois
pondered how Marx might have contributed to the Black struggle in the
U.S. He began his essay by hailing Marx as “the greatest figure in
the science of modern industry.” Du Bois then quoted at length from
Marx’s 1864 letter to Abraham Lincoln, in which the former
demonstrated his sympathies with the oppressed Black population. The
labor movement, Marx wrote, would be held back as long as slavery and
racism “defiled” the U.S. republic—but, thanks to the
Emancipation Proclamation, “this barrier to progress has been swept
off by the red sea of civil war.”

At the end of his essay, Du Bois lamented that it was a “great
loss” that Marx’s “extraordinary insight into industrial
conditions” was never brought to bear on the history of Black
struggle in the U.S. Because Marx’s focus was mainly attuned to
events in Europe, Du Bois would conclude, “Whatever he said and did
concerning the uplift of the working class must, therefore, be
modified so as far as Negroes are concerned by the fact that he had
not studied at first hand their peculiar race problem here in
America.”

Indeed, the weaknesses in theoretical analyses and practical
strategies for addressing this “peculiar race problem” have
arguably been the Achilles heel of the U.S. left, and a reckoning with
racial capitalism looms ever-larger for the resurgent socialist
movement of our times. If Marx had set his eyes on Texas, he would
have had been confronted with a developing capitalist society with
immediate connections to slavery and genocide, enabled by the enduring
specter of racism. At the same time, he would have encountered a
convergence of abolitionist, labor, and suffrage movements engaged in
resistance struggles. Thus, while situating Marx in Texas is an act of
historical fantasy, it is motivated by the urgent concerns of the
present.

The enduring mythology of Texas history insists that its
“revolution” of 1835-36 was the clash of a deep-seated love of
liberty against the overreaching government of Mexico. To this day,
the romantic narrative of an epic struggle for freedom against tyranny
is a core element of Texan identity. But were this creation myth
subjected to a little ruthless criticism, it would reveal a decisive
triumph for white supremacy, an extension of the ethnic cleansing of
Indigenous peoples, and a major victory for the defenders of slavery.
Marx saw the U.S. Civil War as an offensive by Southern slaveholders
who thirsted for territorial expansion and sensed the incompatibility
of their system with “free” wage labor. The consequences of
Texas’s independence and later annexation would be catastrophic.

The Mexican government abolished slavery in 1829, but granted Texas an
exemption after Stephen F. Austin and other slaveholders howled in
protest. While slavery was not an immediate factor in the political
crisis of 1835-36, Texan independence would ensure its continuation
and sanction its expansion. The Texas Constitution enshrined slavery
as an inviolable institution in its General Provisions: it prohibited
Congress from passing any laws that might restrict slave trafficking,
made it illegal for slaveholders to emancipate their slaves, and
forbid free people of African descent from living anywhere in the Lone
Star Republic. Within the Republic’s brief decade of life, the size
of the enslaved population would quintuple, reaching 27,500.

After the Republic’s 1836 founding, Americans began pouring into
Texas, mainly from the Southern states, with rapacious land
speculators not far behind. Some arrivals were rich planters who
brought their slaves to establish cotton plantations in the fertile
valleys of East Texas. However, most were too poor to be slaveowners;
they carried heavy debts and came in search of cheap land. The popular
demand for land, and the promise of windfall profits in real estate
speculation, continually drove settlement further west. Still warring
with Mexico and fearful of Indian attacks, the new government actively
recruited Europeans as colonists by issuing land grants, including to
the Adelsverein, which would attract thousands of Germans after 1841.

As Texans moved along the Colorado, Brazos, and Trinity Rivers into
the countryside that would become Austin, Waco, and Dallas, they
encroached on the homelands and hunting grounds of numerous Indigenous
groups. Ethnic cleansing effectively became official state policy in
Texas after the election of Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar in 1838. The
Texas Rangers, a military force founded by Stephen F. Austin, would
spearhead a campaign of ghastly violence against Indigenous people,
plundering their villages and indiscriminately killing men, women, and
children.

Meanwhile, Tejanos in San Antonio, Goliad, and Nacogdoches had their
land and livestock stolen and were barred from voting in local
elections. Tejanos were accused of disloyalty and suspected of
sympathizing with Mexico; at the same time, they were subjected to the
racial classification of Mexicans as a “mongrel” people, unfit for
equality with whites. A social hierarchy based on white supremacy and
the subordination of multiple racialized groups was taking shape in
the Lone Star Republic.

In the U.S., the debate over annexing Texas was deeply entangled with
mounting sectional conflicts over the expansion of slavery,
accelerating the impending collision of North and South. As historian
Matt Karp has shown, Southern slaveholding elites, who dominated the
executive branch and foreign policy establishment, had an imperial
vision of defending and expanding slavery—not just in the U.S., but
throughout the Western hemisphere. For them, absorbing Texas into the
Union meant an extension of their peculiar institution, but also a
buffer against the influence of British abolitionism. In making a case
for annexation, they charged the British government with conspiring to
aid anti-slavery forces in Texas, citing fears that they would isolate
the South and provide a safe haven for runaway slaves.

The Presidential election of 1844, in which westward expansion emerged
as the central issue, would turn the tide. The Democrats—the party
of the South, slavery, and “states’ rights”— nominated James
Polk, a Tennessee slaveholder running an explicitly expansionist
campaign to annex Texas and Oregon. The Whig candidate, Henry Clay,
presciently warned that annexation would spark war with Mexico,
intensify sectional conflict within the U.S., and unleash boundless
imperial ambitions. The end result was a narrow victory for Polk,
which was perceived as a mandate for the annexation of Texas. On the
way out of office, the pro-slavery Tyler administration would take
advantage of shifting political winds during a lame-duck session of
Congress to introduce a joint resolution offering statehood for
Texas—which passed in the Senate with a slim margin of 27-25.

By annexing Texas, Tyler had finally accomplished the main foreign
policy objective of the slaveholding elite. But Polk, his successor,
was just getting started. His eyes were affixed farther west, towards
Oregon. Polk took a diplomatic path with Britain to acquire that
state; in the South, his strategy was more belligerent by design.
Polk’s true aim was to provoke war with Mexico. In 1846, he sent
American troops into disputed territory near the Rio Grande. When they
were attacked by Mexican forces, Polk immediately pushed for a
declaration of war, which was authorized with nearly unanimous
Congressional support. Two years later, the war would end with the
U.S. acquisition of more than half a million square miles of land. The
newly expanded nation now stretched to the Pacific Ocean, encompassing
all or part of seven present-day U.S. states.

At the same time, Marx and Engels were in Brussels, undertaking their
final reckoning with the idealist philosophies of the Young Hegelians.
Together they drafted a lengthy manuscript; never published in their
lifetimes, it would later be titled _The German Ideology_. Marx and
Engels polemicized against philosophers who conceived of ideas as
autonomous entities that were independent of social conditions.
Through this critique of idealism, they developed their own
revolutionary method of historical materialism. Building on Marx’s
early writings from 1843-44 about religion, alienation, and estranged
labor, the two used the concept of ideology to describe an inverted
relationship between consciousness and material life, wherein ideas
mystify and justify social domination.

But if Marx had turned his critical gaze towards contemporaneous
events in Texas, he likely would have produced some incisive critiques
of the function of ideology in another context. Strains of a
particularly American ideology glorified and sanctified the imperial
conquest of the West: the notion of “manifest destiny.” This
enduring mantra, coined in 1845, exemplified the power of ideology to
serve the ruling class by legitimating their rule as natural, even
divinely ordained.

In _The German Ideology_, Marx and Engels used the concept of
ideology to describe ideas that were not simply wrong-headed, but were
distorted in particular ways so as to harmonize with ruling class
interests. They traced the development of ideology to an increasingly
complex division of labor, which allows a privileged segment to
legitimate social domination across various media of knowledge
production and communication. Hence, “The ideas of the ruling class
are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the
ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling
intellectual force.”

The words “manifest destiny” first appeared in an 1845
pro-annexation article in the Democratic Party’s leading
journal, _The United States Magazine and Democratic Review_. Raising
the specter of foreign interests that were purportedly maneuvering to
intervene in Texas, the author, John O’Sullivan, railed against
“hostile interference” and affirmed “our manifest destiny to
overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free
development of our yearly multiplying millions.”

The editorial portrayed annexation as a predetermined organic process
rather than a calculated political conquest: Texas had
“disintegrated from Mexico in the natural course of events,” and
its absorption into the U.S. was “the inevitable fulfillment of the
general law which is rolling our population westward.” Looking
ahead, O’Sullivan foretold of an inexorable force fated to make
California independent from an “imbecile and distracted” Mexico,
the territory certain to fall once “the advance guard of the
irresistible army of Anglo-Saxon emigration has begun to pour down
upon it.” 

The lofty language of “manifest destiny” exemplified Marx and
Engels’s notion that ideology naturalizes social domination, making
economic and political processes seem like unstoppable celestial
powers. As a slogan, it contained the toxic brew of white supremacy,
religious nationalism, violent masculinity, and domination over nature
that endured as a ruling ideology in American society and foreign
policy long after 1845. Manifest destiny would continue to mystify the
material incentives of accumulation that drove conquest and expansion,
making dispossession and exploitation appear as preordained
consequences of Anglo-Saxon superiority, American exceptionalism, and
divine prophecy.
 

The revolutionary tumult of 1848 captivated Marx and Engels, along
with the rest of the radicals of their generation. That February, the
London-based Communist League published the duo’s incendiary
pamphlet: The Communist Manifesto. Meanwhile, revolution spread from
the barricades of Paris, eventually toppling the French government;
from there, the movement blossomed across Europe into what became
known as the Springtime of the Peoples.

Marx was arrested for revolutionary agitation and kicked out of
Brussels by a Belgian government petrified that the fervor might
spread. His return to France began with a brief stint in Paris, after
which he immersed himself in the workers’ movement in Cologne and
spent the next year there publishing a radical newspaper. But this
revolutionary upheaval was quickly quashed and rolled back across
Europe, enabling the restoration of undemocratic regimes. With great
bitterness, Marx would chronicle how the revolution in France was
betrayed by the bourgeoisie, ultimately resulting in the nation’s
descent into the despotic rule of Louis Bonaparte.

The 1850s, to adopt historian Eric Hobsbawm’s view on the decade,
would come to comprise not an age of revolution, but of capital.
Reflecting on this period, Marx and Engels wrote that the most
significant world-historical event of 1848—“still more important
than the February revolution”—was the discovery of gold in the
newly acquired U.S. territory of California. Marx and Engels saw the
significance of the California Gold Rush in terms of its consequences
for world trade and the expansion of capitalism.

The extraordinary wealth that would soon be extracted from the Pacific
coast—not only by mining, but in agriculture, fishing, forestry, and
the harvesting of animal furs and oils—immediately positioned
California as a regional epicenter of accumulation. Marx and Engels
situated the Gold Rush within a long history of mercantile capitalism,
proclaiming that, “for a second time world trade has found a new
direction.”

The expansion westward to the Pacific coast would indeed prove
essential to the development of U.S. capitalism, but its dominance was
also fed by accumulation from all corners. In the decades before the
Civil War, the transformation of the Northern countryside also
generated a surge in manufacturing and industrial agriculture. To keep
their land, farmers were increasingly compelled to shift from
independent household production to petty commodity production for the
market. As they transitioned away from self-sufficient agriculture to
focus on cash crops, farming households were left with less ability to
meet their own needs and craft their own tools, coming to depend on an
expanding marketplace of consumer goods for items they had previously
supplied themselves.

The result of this reciprocal process of specialized production and
domestic consumption was the explosive growth of industries that
processed raw materials for food or clothing and manufactured farm
machinery, tools, and supplies. With their populations buoyed by this
industrialization in the Northern countryside, the cities of Chicago
and St. Louis—key nodes of exchange linking east and west—grew
exponentially during the 1840s and 50s.

More than four million people emigrated to the U.S. between 1840 and
1860, at least 1.5 million of them German. Most were peasants and
artisans dispossessed by the onset of economic liberalization and
industrialization, which had forced them into wage labor. The
revolutionary Spring of 1848 mobilized these largely propertyless
masses, but by November an explicitly counter-revolutionary government
had regained power in Berlin. German authorities outlawed leftist
groups, censored newspapers, and imprisoned revolutionaries. After
this repression, the trickle of German immigration to the U.S.
suddenly became a flood.

In 1845, the year Marx applied for emigration, about 34,000 Germans
came to the U.S. But following the counter-revolution, their numbers
would annually exceed 140,000 in 1852 and 1853, peaking at 215,000 in
1854. Though their most common destination was New York City, Germans
made up a disproportionately larger part of the working class in the
rapidly developing cities of the American Midwest.

Meanwhile, westward conquest and expansion had set in motion the
opposing forces that would collide in the Civil War. Industrial
capital based on wage labor was advancing across the continent, but so
too was Southern slave power—and the acquisition of Texas, as well
as incursions into Cuba, Mexico, and Central America, revealed the
latter’s insatiable thirst for territory. From the standpoint of
Northern capital, the problem was not slavery per se but rather its
further expansion, which threatened to encroach on burgeoning
manufacturing and petty commodity production. Whereas the relationship
between merchant capital and slavery had been more harmonious, leading
many wealthy merchants in New York and London to support the
Confederacy, the ascendance of industrial capital was incompatible
with slavery’s spread in the West. In the lead-up to the Civil War,
political and ideological divisions congealed around the competing
social formations of Southern slavery and Northern wage labor.  

Far from fading into the dustbin of history, Southern slavery was
proliferating; its elites incessantly sought ever-more land and
slaves. Nowhere were these material motives more evident than in
Texas. After annexation, the state’s enslaved population swelled
from 30,000 in 1846 to over 180,000 in 1860, and the average price of
slaves increased from $345 to $765 in roughly the same period. King
Cotton rose to the throne of the Texas economy during this time, with
production septupling within a decade. Texas, with its mostly rural
population and relative absence of industrialization, was already
aligned with the political economy and culture of the antebellum
South, setting the state up to become the western frontier of the
wealthiest slave empire the world has ever known.
 

The abolitionist movement and anti-slavery politics were gaining
momentum in opposition to this rising power, and German Forty-Eighters
would play a pivotal part. After his imprisonment in Germany, educator
Adolph Douai came to New Braunfels, Texas in 1852. Soon thereafter, he
founded the San Antonio Zeitung, a social-democratic German-English
newspaper that took a strong stance against slavery.

At the same time, a group of German Texans, among them geographer
Ernest Kapp and the writer August Siemering, formed Die Freier Verein
(Free Society), which convened in 1854 in San Antonio to issue a
statement condemning slavery. This immediately made German
abolitionists into reviled targets of the Know-Nothings, Texas’s
anti-immigrant American Party. The San Antonio Zeitung would soon come
under fire for publishing a series of editorials denouncing slavery,
and in 1856 Douai was forced to sell his newspaper and flee the state.

One of Marx’s closest associates from the Communist League, the
journalist Joseph Weydemeyer, had also emigrated to the U.S. in 1851
and would take on a vital role in advancing socialist and abolitionist
ideas within the incipient U.S. labor movement. Shortly after arriving
in New York City, Weydemeyer founded the journal _Die Revolution_,
which published Marx’s _18th Brumaire_; soon, he had also
established the nation’s first Marxist labor organization. He later
moved to the Midwest and immersed himself in the German-American
working class, writing and lecturing on abolition’s paramount
importance for the labor movement, as did allies that founded New
York’s Communist Club.

Another Forty-Eighter, August Willich, was dubbed “the reddest of
the red” after he was expelled from the Communist League and
challenged Marx himself to a duel. Willich emigrated to the U.S. in
1853 and eventually made his way to Cincinnati, where he edited a
German-language labor newspaper and organized an interracial
demonstration with local abolitionists and trade unions to protest
John Brown’s execution.               

So while Marx never came to the U.S., the Forty-Eighters who did were
influential in spreading socialist ideas within the working class and
linking them to anti-slavery politics. Douai, Weydemeyer, Willich, and
many other Forty-Eighters campaigned for Lincoln and played a decisive
role in winning him the 1860 election—although they saw him as a
moderate and thought the Republican platform was too soft on slavery.

When the Civil War began the following year, German immigrants
volunteered in droves to join the Union forces—over 200,000
German-born soldiers fought for the North, constituting around 10% of
all Union troops. Weydemeyer enlisted and was quickly promoted to
lieutenant colonel; he would lead a volunteer artillery regiment to
defend Missouri from Confederates. Willich, commanding an all-German
regiment, reached the rank of brigadier general, delivering Union
victories in decisive battles. 

Marx himself took great interest in the Civil War. In its early years,
from 1861-62, he wrote a series of articles for the Vienna
newspaper _Die Presse_ that specified the defeat of slavery as an
essential precondition for the liberation of the working class—not
just in the U.S., but also throughout Europe. Marx saw the Civil War
as nothing less than a second American Revolution, incited by the
unresolved contradictions and limitations of 1776. From the beginning,
Marx insisted that enslaved people should be emancipated and armed,
predicting that this would be crucial for a Union victory; he would
also lambaste Lincoln for the latter’s hesitancy in declaring
abolition.             

Marx put slavery at the center of his analysis, scorning alternative
narratives (still familiar today) that the conflict was really about
trade tariffs or states’ rights or some other cause. Since the
1840s, he had understood that slave labor in the Americas was crucial
for the development of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution:
“Without slavery you have no cotton, without cotton you have no
modern industry.” Modern slavery in the Americas was not to be
confused with the slave mode of production of ancient Greece and
Rome—it contributed immensely to the international accumulation of
capital.      

The Civil War would also generate new contradictions. Marx saw the
sectional conflict as driven by the Southern slavocracy’s need for
territorial expansion—first and foremost because their exploitative
forms of agriculture depleted the soil, but also to maintain social
order, appeasing poor white men by dangling the possibility of
becoming landowners and slaveholders. Still, the North was developing
at a much faster pace as a result of industrialization and
immigration-driven population growth. This created another incentive
for Southern expansion: to continue to wield power in the federal
government. Lincoln’s election was a clear signal that their grasp
was faltering. Marx described an inevitable collision between these
opposing forces, both hell-bent on westward expansion: “[T]he two
systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North
American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system
or the other.” 

Less than a month after the Civil War began with the attack on Fort
Sumter, Marx wrote a letter to his uncle Lion Phillips. In it, he
predicted that the Confederacy would have an initial advantage, as it
could mobilize a vast supply of “propertyless white adventurers.”
Indeed, the South would score a major victory later that summer at the
First Battle of Bull Run, and it largely dominated the war’s first
year. Still, Marx was confident the North would eventually prevail.
“In the long run,” he wrote, the North “has a last card up its
sleeve in the shape of a slave revolution.”

The slave revolt Marx anticipated began to emerge in what Du Bois
would later describe as America’s first general strike: a series of
uprisings and desertions, in the course of which thousands of enslaved
people fled Southern plantations to seek refuge with the Union Army.
Still, from afar, Marx was growing frustrated with Lincoln’s
hesitance to play the “last card.” In November 1861, when Major
General John C. Frémont decreed that slaves owned by Confederates in
Missouri were free, Lincoln instructed him to retract his order.
Frémont refused, and Lincoln promptly relieved him of his command.

Marx criticized Lincoln for respecting the property rights of
slaveholders in the border states, pandering to them in an attempt to
secure loyalty to the Union. He maintained that the war could only be
won with a revolutionary abolitionist strategy, whereas Lincoln
insisted on fighting it within the bounds of a Constitution that
protected slavery. As thousands of slaves continued to desert the
plantations, Lincoln eventually caught up to Marx’s way of thinking.
The Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves in Confederate states,
implementing a strategy to bolster the Union military and bring the
Southern economy to a halt. The executive order still neglected to
emancipate slaves in the loyal border states; nevertheless, it was a
key turning point. 

In any case, the North’s action was initiated largely to take
advantage of the general strike in the South—where runaway slaves
had already effectively freed themselves. As Du Bois put it,
“Lincoln’s proclamation only added possible legal sanction to an
accomplished fact.” Despite the Union forces’ lower pay and
pervasive racism, former slaves joined the ranks in large numbers and
would be vital for replenishing troops—especially after a summer
1863 draft order incited massive riots in New York City. In total,
more than 200,000 Black people served in the Union Army and Navy,
about three-quarters of whom were former slaves.

Although Marx was only a distant spectator to events in the U.S., he
did help cultivate international working-class solidarity with the
struggle against slavery. In 1863, he wrote to Engels about a London
meeting of trade unions that would support the North and oppose
lingering Southern sympathies among the British ruling class. Doing so
was crucial: if the British government—officially opposed to slavery
but keen to preserve the supply of cotton—had intervened or
recognized the Confederacy, it could have tipped the scales towards a
Union defeat.

The meetings in London would also factor into another noteworthy
event. Connections Marx made there would help spawn the International
Workingmen’s Association (IWMA), later known as the First
International. In its inaugural address, Marx recounted the role of
proletarian abolitionism in its formation: “It was not the wisdom of
the ruling classes, but the heroic resistance to their criminal folly
by the working classes of England, that saved the west of Europe from
plunging headlong into an infamous crusade for the perpetuation and
propagation of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic.”

By November 1864, the tide had turned in the Civil War, and Lincoln
would win re-election handily. Marx wrote to congratulate him on
behalf of the IWMA: “If resistance to the Slave Power was the
reserved watchword of your first election,” his letter began, “the
triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.”
Abolition and the impending Confederate defeat promised to open a new
phase of international class struggle. Marx, optimistically, wrote,
“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.”

The Civil War officially came to an end when Robert E. Lee surrendered
in Appomattox on April 9th, 1865. But in Texas, Confederate troops
refused to stop fighting for another two months. The state had seen
relatively little combat in the Civil War and had not been under
threat of Union occupation. Texas, in other words, could effectively
ignore the Emancipation Proclamation. As a result, Southerners quickly
began to smuggle their “property”—an estimated 50,000
slaves—into the Lone Star State. Texas was to become the final
frontier of combat. Though informed of Lee’s surrender, rebels
engaged Union forces (among them the 62nd U.S. Colored Infantry
Regiment) in the Battle of Palmito Ranch—the final land conflict of
the Civil War. Ex-Confederates continued to rampage until federal
forces arrived in Galveston on June 19th, 1865. That day, their
commander, Gen. Gordon Granger, issued the famous General Order No. 3,
announcing that “all slaves are free” and that former masters and
slaves now existed with “absolute equality of personal rights and
rights of property.”

This occasion of “Juneteenth” has since become a day for
celebrating the end of slavery, first in Texas and eventually
nationwide. It would be another five years before Texas ratified the
13th Amendment to abolish slavery, making it the last state in the
Confederacy to rejoin the U.S. General Order No. 3 had been a
monumental event for enslaved people in Texas, but its final sentences
also contained a portent of things to come in the postbellum age.

Those words were no cause for celebration: “The freedmen are advised
to remain at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed
that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that
they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”
In no uncertain terms, the U.S. was telling newly freed people that
they could not depend on the federal government—they needed to stay
put and get a job.

In the first volume of Capital, published in 1867, Marx’s continued
optimism about the U.S. was still perceptible. His critique of
political economy mainly drew on empirical evidence from Britain, but
observations about the U.S. also appear across several chapters. In
Capital’s preface, Marx repeated the earlier statement he’d made
as IWMA spokesman: the Civil War had sounded an alarm for European
workers. He also saw reason for hope in comments by a Republican
Senator from Ohio who suggested that, following emancipation, a
struggle between labor and capital was now underway.

In his lengthy chapter on the working day, Marx famously restated his
previous observation about how slavery had impeded class struggle in
the U.S.: “Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where
in the black it is branded.” He then took note of the workers’
movements that had emerged after the Civil War, which were now calling
for an eight-hour workday. In 1866, those forces would coalesce into
the National Labor Union in Baltimore. The labor movement was on the
march in America, with shorter working hours as its core demand.

But at the end of _Capital_—in fact, on the last page of the final
chapter—Marx called attention to the metastasizing growth of banks,
railroad companies, and land speculators in the postwar U.S. The Civil
War created massive national debts that enriched “a financial
aristocracy of the vilest type.” Western lands expropriated from
Indigenous people were being privatized and sold for a song to
railroads and mining companies. Marx concluded that the Civil War
“has brought a very rapid centralization of capital.”

The postbellum class struggle prophesied by Marx would indeed advance
across the U.S., producing conflicts like the one that would come to
be known as the Great Upheaval of 1877. That summer, wage cuts by the
railroads triggered a strike in West Virginia, which spread across the
country in a matter of days. Striking workers fought with federal
troops, state militia, local police, and Pinkerton agents, setting
fire to railroad buildings while destroying locomotives and cars. In
many cities, things quickly escalated from railroad strikes to general
strikes that saw local workers engaged in pitched battle against
public and private soldiers that served their employers. The Great
Upheaval would involve more than 100,000 workers across the country;
at least a hundred were killed in its various skirmishes. 

Despite some significant acts of interracial working-class solidarity
in 1877, the gains that Marx had anticipated for the U.S. labor
movement went mostly unfulfilled—especially his hopes that white
workers would discard their racism with the end of slavery. What Marx
did not foresee from his viewpoint in London was how America’s
“peculiar race problem” would endure after emancipation. Du Bois
described how white identity obtained a “public and psychological
wage” which compensated for white workers’ low actual wages. The
persistence of compensatory bigotry undermined possibilities for
solidarity, disempowering white and Black workers alike. The gruesome
events in San Francisco in 1877, when Chinatown was pillaged for three
days following a rally of unemployed workers, exemplified how the
wages of white supremacy could also be redeemed in violence against
non-white fellow workers.   

In the 1870s, the extraordinary opportunities of Reconstruction were
foreclosed by an ascendant capitalist class that achieved hegemony
over the Republican Party. Freed people were infamously promised “40
acres and a mule,” in an early gesture towards reparations that
would have redistributed the land of the Confederate planter class.
Yet those hopes were quickly dashed. Ruling-class opposition to land
redistribution confirmed the secret of primitive accumulation that
Marx revealed in the final chapters of _Capital_: people turn to wage
labor only after they have been robbed of their access to land and
other forces of production.

Federal officials tried to induce a transition to wage labor, but the
former slaves wanted land, not jobs. The Freedmen’s Bureau did
facilitate some significant accomplishments in building schools,
enhancing social welfare, and protecting voting rights. But once the
industrial bourgeoisie secured power over the Republican Party, the
radical wing was marginalized, and the initial gains for freed slaves
were first stalled, then rolled back. A racialized politics of
austerity took hold as part of a capitalist counter-offensive against
Reconstruction and the labor movement. As W.E.B. Du Bois would later
mourn, “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then
moved again back toward slavery.”

Texas reemerged as a lucrative center of accumulation in this new
capitalist order. Immediately after the Civil War, a torrent of
violence and terror was directed against freed people and Republicans
in Texas. Like other ex-Confederate states, the Texas legislature
passed a series of laws, commonly known as Black Codes, which
curtailed civil rights while also reasserting control over Black labor
and criminalizing “vagrancy.” The work of cotton cultivation was
undertaken by tenant farmers and sharecroppers who often accrued
massive debts that effectively bound them to landowners. Its reign
temporarily interrupted by the Civil War, King Cotton regained power
and made Texas into the nation’s leading state for cultivation by
1890.

Another profitable commodity came to the fore that would define Texas
in the years ahead. Free-ranging Texan cattle, or “mavericks,”
could be corralled and driven north to Kansas, where they fetched a
much higher price. From there, they would be transported by rail to
the slaughterhouses of Chicago to meet the nation’s growing demand
for beef. The workers who led these cattle drives would come to
personify postbellum capitalist ideology: cowboys.

Although in reality cowboys were seasonal agricultural laborers who
performed hazardous work for little pay (and would engage in labor
action that included initiating a strike wave across the Texas
panhandle in 1883), in popular culture they came to embody an ideal of
rugged individualism. As the federal government retreated from
Reconstruction, cowboys were held up as paragons of self-reliance,
contrasted with ostensibly slothful ex-slaves and striking urban
workers. Though their techniques and traditions were adopted from
Mexican vaqueros—and many of the original cattle herdsmen in Texas
were Black—the cowboy quickly became an archetype of white
masculinity in popular narratives about the American West.
 

In 1874, U.S. military forces launched a major offensive to seize West
Texas from the tribes of the Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Arapaho in
the Red River War: the last stand for Indigenous people in Texas.
Attacks by the U.S. military coincided with the near-total
annihilation of the massive bison population in the southern plains.
Postbellum railroad construction tore into the countryside where the
buffalo roamed, and tanners soon improved their methods for making
bison hides into leather products, setting off a frenzy of commercial
hunting.

But, of course, the slaughter was most useful in that it effectively
starved the Indigenous population. During Marx’s lifetime, the U.S.
government continued to wage its decisive campaign of ethnic
cleansing, later culminating in the defeat of Apache and Lakota forces
of resistance led by Geronimo and Crazy Horse.

Karl Marx would die in 1883. In his final years, Marx considered the
possible futures of communism and capitalism. Looking beyond Western
Europe, he noted revolutionary potential in Russia’s rural communes.
Marx also nurtured an interest in colonized non-western societies,
particularly India, and developed a budding appreciation for the
communal social relations of various Indigenous peoples. His
scientific readings had also made him increasingly conscious of
capitalism’s destructive impact on the planet. At the end of his
life, he was charting a new trajectory, breaking decisively with any
sort of linear, evolutionary metanarrative whereby history progresses
in stages determined by the development of productive forces.  

We can imagine how late Marx might have absorbed lessons from the
U.S., and Texas in particular, into his final theories. As the U.S.
entered its Gilded Age, Marx would give the nation renewed focus,
intent on further analysis of the trajectory of capitalism. In 1879,
he wrote that the U.S. had “overtaken England in the rapidity of
economic progress.” He noted the mounting power of the railroads,
banks, and joint-stock companies, remarked on the financial perfidy of
robber baron Jay Gould, and looked with interest to California, as
capital had concentrated there at an unprecedented rate since 1849.

Though Marx was not confronted with America’s  “peculiar race
problem” in London, in his later years, he did begin to draw
parallels with the English colonization of Ireland. In a letter to
German émigrés in the U.S. dated April 9th, 1870, Marx lamented that
the English and Irish proletariat had been “split into two hostile
camps” such that “any serious and honest cooperation between the
working classes of the two countries [is] impossible.” The deceptive
ideology of empire misled the English worker to hate the Irish worker
so that, Marx wrote, “he sees in him a competitor who lowers his
standard of life.”

Later in the letter, Marx made a comparison with the racist attitudes
of “poor whites” towards Black people in the U.S. South. He would
conclude that, “the decisive blow against the English ruling
classes… cannot be struck in England, but only in Ireland.” It’s
compelling to wonder if, had he further pursued this line of thought,
he might have assigned the same primacy to the Black struggle in the
U.S.

Against all of Marx’s hopes for U.S. workers, the fully capitalist
social formation that solidified in the postbellum U.S. would continue
to be fortified by the ideology of white supremacy. The rollback of
Reconstruction that Du Bois dubbed a “counter-revolution of
property” secured the hegemony of the capitalist class, largely by
coaxing popular consent dispensed in the “public and psychological
wage” of whiteness.

And so Texas headed into the 20th century not as a loser tainted with
the stench of the Confederacy, but as a juggernaut of capitalism and
conservatism sustained by white supremacy. Texas would provide a link
between the labor-intensive extractive economies of Southern cotton
cultivation and Western mining and meat production—and, by the late
1890s, oil. An anti-democratic capitalist class arose from the nascent
American Southwest and would propel right-wing politics in the
Republican Party for generations to come. They were able to achieve
and maintain hegemony by disseminating an individualistic ideology
(invoking, to this day, the “cowboy” mythos) and by disbursing the
wages of white identity.

The right wing that consolidated in Texas, and around the country,
would employ all manner of racist and free-market ideologies to divide
the working class, crush labor, and clear the way for the dominance of
the formidable oil industry—which, by refusing to relinquish its
profits, now poses a severe and immediate threat to the biosphere, and
to civilization itself. Marx’s theories could have benefited greatly
from his looking to Texas and incorporating analyses of capital’s
reliance on slavery, racism, ethnic extermination, and environmental
destruction. But perhaps Marx himself would be grateful that he did
not live to see the undoing of all he had dreamed of for the U.S.
working class, or to witness the nation’s ascent to the zenith of
capitalism’s global empire.♦

_RYAN MOORE teaches Sociology and is the author of Sells like Teen
Spirit: Music, Youth Culture, and Social Crisis (NYU Press)._

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