Lincoln in the World (27 page)

In the international arena, too, the human suffering was becoming unbearable. Although Southern threats about the power of King Cotton had been overstated, by the middle of 1862, Europeans were beginning to feel the pinch. Factory owners slashed working hours dramatically, throwing tens of thousands of Britons and Frenchmen out of a job. The economic turmoil threatened to turn European workers—many of whom otherwise loathed slavery—against the Union effort. Lincoln feared that the workers might put pressure on decision makers in London to stop the fighting. The president came to believe that a dramatic gesture that revised the war’s aims
to include the abolition of slavery might reassure suffering European workers—and buy the North the time to finish the war.

With the Emancipation Proclamation, the strategies of Lincoln and Marx finally began to converge. Each man recognized that only a bold moral appeal would infuse the Union effort with purpose and meaning—both at home and abroad. “National power,” the diplomatic scholar Thomas A. Bailey points out, “is moral as well as physical.” Yet in the tumultuous Victorian era—in which leaders increasingly found themselves amid a wasteland of ideological debris—marshaling the moral elements of power demanded audacious acts of reinvention. Throughout the conflict, both men struggled to manage and manipulate public opinion—a new and unpredictable force in the global arena. Amid the maelstrom of the Civil War, Lincoln and Marx rose to the challenge of their age.
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The Wild Boar

Karl Marx had been trying to reinvent himself—and the rest of the world, for that matter—for almost his entire adult life. He was born in the Prussian Rhineland city of Trier, a picturesque spot filled with vineyards situated along the banks of the Mosel River. He later studied law and philosophy at a series of German universities. The brilliant young scholar was captivated by the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel, and in particular his concept of historical dialectic. But much of his time was devoted to drinking and carousing. Classmates elected Marx co-president of the Trier Tavern Club, and university police once arrested him for disturbing the peace during a drunken spree. The rowdy student took to carrying a gun, and was wounded above the eye in a saber duel. Marx’s father complained about his son’s “musty brooding under a gloomy oil-lamp” and “unsociable withdrawal with neglect of all decorum.”
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In between drinking, fighting, and reading, Marx managed to find time to court Jenny von Westphalen, the daughter of a Prussian
baron. With her green eyes and auburn hair, Jenny was far out of Marx’s league. Her aristocratic family descended from the Earls of Argyll. Marx descended from a line of rabbis (although his father had converted to the state religion of Protestantism). Still, the passionate philosopher captivated the beautiful and well-bred young woman. The two became secretly engaged in 1836. Marx later boasted that he had snagged “the most beautiful girl in Trier.” Jenny affectionately referred to her short, hairy husband as her “little wild boar.”
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Marx earned his doctorate in 1841. Yet the young philosopher was never satisfied with pure theory. The day was approaching, he insisted, when philosophy must come into contact with “the real world.” Marx turned to journalism. In the early nineteenth century, the profession remained a dumping ground for “the disreputable, the meretricious, the unstable.” Still, Marx saw potential. He moved to the German city of Cologne, where he joined the staff of a newly formed newspaper, the
Rheinische Zeitung
, which was financed by the city’s rising business class. One of the paper’s founders recalls the young Marx as “a powerful man of twenty-four whose thick black hair sprung from his cheeks, arms, nose and ears. He was domineering, impetuous, passionate, full of boundless self-confidence.”
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Marx quickly went to work eviscerating both the Prussian aristocracy and his colleagues in the opposition. For a young journalist whose professed goal was to change the world, Marx could be surprisingly detached. After rising to the editorship of the
Rheinische Zeitung
, Marx warned his writers that he considered it “unsuitable, indeed immoral, to smuggle communist and socialist doctrines into casual theatre reviews.” Still, the young editor relentlessly advocated the liberalization of Prussian society. Eventually, the Prussian authorities began censoring Marx’s subversive newspaper. Soon they shut it down altogether.
¹⁹

Marx fled to Paris, then a hotbed of European revolutionaries. It was there that he got to know Frederick Engels, the son of a German industrialist whose parents owned a cotton mill in Britain. In August 1844, Marx and Engels met at a Paris café, then spent ten
days drinking red wine and comparing notes at Marx’s apartment. Engels was soon contributing articles to Marx’s publications, and he wrote some early rough drafts of the
Manifesto of the Communist Party
. Marx was eventually ordered to leave Paris by the French authorities. Jenny quickly sold the furniture, and the family set off for Belgium in the frigid winter weather. Finally ensconced in his new home in Brussels, Marx chain-smoked cigars as he completely rewrote Engels’s draft of the
Communist Manifesto
.
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The document was a political call to action, but it was also a profound portrait of the globalizing world. Marx and Engels observed that with the rise of the industrial classes, the constant quest for new markets meant that capitalism was destined to spread across the entire planet. The bourgeoisie, Marx and Engels insisted, “must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” New technologies like the steamship and the telegraph had the power to transform public opinion, spawning “a world literature.” As a result of the “immensely facilitated means of communication,” they continued, national differences were disappearing by the day. Ultimately, Marx and Engels concluded, “national one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible.” With the publication of the manifesto in 1848, the German exile and his partner had established themselves firmly as the leaders of a new global movement.
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Only a month after Marx completed the
Communist Manifesto
, revolution erupted in Paris. Soon the entire continent was aflame. Liberal protests attempted to topple autocratic regimes throughout Europe. For decades, conservative European statesmen had maintained a surprisingly sturdy peace on the Continent in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. Now, however, Europeans from Switzerland to Sicily were beginning to demand press freedoms and voting rights. The changes were partly fueled by the tremendous advances in communication spawned by the steam press and the telegraph that Marx had described in the
Communist Manifesto
. In a single month in Paris, 171 separate newspapers began publishing. Marx, however, was not
taking any chances. He sent revolutionaries in Prussia cash to pay for daggers and revolvers. On their own, Marx wrote in the years before the uprisings, “ideas can accomplish absolutely nothing. To become real, ideas require men who apply practical force.”
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Marx moved back to Cologne to help lead the effort in Prussia. He borrowed money to restart his newspaper; this time he named it the
Neue Rheinische Zeitung
. His employees stocked the offices with rifles and bayonets. Marx resumed his practice of carrying a pistol. Engels recalled that Marx ran the newspaper as “a simple dictatorship,” and wondered whether his abrasive partner was really temperamentally suited to the profession. “He is no journalist and will never become one,” Engels complained. “He pores for a whole day over a leading article that would take someone else a couple of hours as though it concerned the handling of a deep philosophical problem. He changes and polishes and changes the change and owing to his unremitting thoroughness can never be ready on time.”
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As the European revolutions intensified, the
New York Tribune
, which sympathized with the insurgents, dispatched one of its young writers, Charles A. Dana, to cover the protests. Dana wandered around Paris gathering string and dodging batteries of artillery in the streets, fearing visits from the secret police. The young
Tribune
reporter was particularly taken aback by the reactionary crackdowns in Germany and Austria. With the spread of press freedoms and universal education, Dana did not see how the old regimes could survive. “It is vain for barbarism and tyranny to attempt to regain the conquests of liberty,” he wrote home. “They may seem to triumph for a while, but they are destroyed by their triumph.” Dana was eager to see the revolutions succeed. The goal of the protests, he understood, was “not simply to change the form of government, but to change the form of society.” The
Tribune
reporter, a fluent German speaker, eventually left Paris for Berlin. Later, in Cologne, Dana met Marx through a mutual friend.
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Prussian authorities finally crushed the liberal revolt. Marx and his family fled to London amid the counterrevolution. At one point,
Marx had actually considered moving to the United States—to newly annexed Texas—but he discovered it was “hellishly expensive” and dropped the idea. Work as a radical communist, he was learning, did not pay the bills. “It is a pity,” Marx’s mother once remarked, “that Karl doesn’t make some capital instead of just writing about it.” The family eventually moved into a dingy, two-bedroom apartment on London’s Dean Street.

Marx and his group in London, biographer David McLellan notes, displayed a ferocious zeal, behaving “like the early Christians awaiting the Second Coming.” A Prussian spy who infiltrated one of the meetings found Marx’s home full of broken furniture and covered in a thick layer of dust and tobacco ash. “If you sit down,” the spook reported, “you risk a pair of trousers.” According to the agent, Marx led “the existence of a real bohemian intellectual. Washing, grooming and changing his linen are things he does rarely, and he likes to get drunk.” The whole place reeked so badly of cigar and coal smoke that the Prussian spy found his eyes watering.
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One of the group’s first tasks, the revolutionaries decided, would be to form a newspaper as part of their “secret propaganda society.” Yet Marx’s heart was not really in it. Both Marx and Engels were chastened by the failure of Europe’s liberal moment. “From now on,” Engels wrote Marx in 1851, “we are answerable for ourselves alone.” Marx, who had taken to wearing a fashionable scarf and a monocle in one eye, spent time teaching fellow German refugees political economy. Still, the philosopher could not stay away from the newspaper business for long. He remained convinced that the reactionary crackdown could not survive the swift pace of technological change. “King Steam,” a friend recalled Marx saying, “was being superseded by a still greater revolutionary—the electric spark.”

In 1851, a letter arrived from Charles Dana offering Marx a job writing for the
Tribune
. The paper wanted two articles each week, and would pay five dollars per piece. Marx immediately agreed to join the paper’s staff.
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The
Tribune
offer could not have come at a better time. Marx’s home life was on the verge of falling apart.
Money was so tight that Jenny sold their beds to pay the bills. Meanwhile, Marx had impregnated the family’s nanny, who had been a childhood friend of Jenny’s back in Prussia. The tension had become unbearable in the tiny Dean Street apartment. Nothing could soothe the pain of Marx’s betrayal, but at least the newspaper job allowed Marx to support his family. Jenny Marx later recalled that the family paid off old debts with the new income and managed to live a somewhat “less anxious life” free of their old “nagging daily worries.”
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Marx complained about the job, but he was increasingly fascinated by North America. His philosophic forebear, Hegel, considered America “the land of the future.” Soon, Hegel wrote, “the center of world-historical importance will be revealed there.” After gold was discovered in the American West in 1848, Marx identified the United States as the new “fulcrum of world commerce.” He complained about “the moneybag republicans of North America,” but he also marveled at the accelerating wave of technological innovation emerging from the United States. At one industrial exhibition, Marx wrote Engels in 1851, the Americans displayed new weapons, reapers, and sewing machines—alongside “a colossal lump of California gold ore.” The natural resources of North America were spawning a brisk trade across the Pacific, the economist observed. The New World was filling the role that Italy had played in the Middle Ages and England had taken on in recent years. America was still something of a backwater when it came to the issue of human bondage. Other countries in Europe and Latin America had emancipated their slaves years before. Still, there was no denying the increasing material strength of Britain’s former colonies. Marx considered America the rising “center of gravity of world trade.”
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Grinding Bones and Making Soup

Marx recognized that his dispatches for the
Tribune
had the power to influence two hundred thousand Americans each
week. Still, he had to hold his nose to work for a newspaper that he considered the house organ of the American bourgeoisie. “It’s truly nauseating,” Marx wrote, “that one should be condemned to count it a blessing when taken aboard by a blotting-paper vendor such as this. To crush up bones, grind them and make them into soup like paupers in the workhouse—that is what the political work to which one is condemned in such large measure in a concern like this boils down to.” Marx had no respect for Horace Greeley, despite the editor’s crusading editorial policies. He considered Greeley a second-rate thinker. Still, it was hard to beat the reach of the
Tribune
. Readers particularly looked to the paper for its international coverage, provided by a network of eighteen foreign correspondents.
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From his perch in London, Marx covered the entire world. He wrote about British trade with China. He analyzed the Greek insurrection against Ottoman rule. He composed dispatches on revolutions in Spain and revolts in India. Lincoln, as a lawyer in Springfield during the 1850s, carefully pored over the
Tribune
, noting that it was “extensively read in Illinois.” He sometimes wrote Greeley to complain about individual stories with which he disagreed. We have no record of whether Lincoln actually read Marx’s dispatches. But they would have been difficult to miss. Marx contributed more than 350 articles to the newspaper over the course of the decade. Many were printed on the front page under his own byline. It is certainly easy to imagine Lincoln stretching out on his couch in the offices of Lincoln & Herndon, reading Marx aloud, to the annoyance of his partner. Herndon often noted the power of the
Tribune
in letters to associates, referring to Marx’s employer as a “great paper” with a “wide-spread and almost universal circulation.”
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