This article appears in Protean Magazine Issue IV: Special Relativity.
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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