Abe Lincoln and Karl Marx

Karl Marx wrote Lincoln after he was reelected to the Presidency in 1864.

From the cover of the book, An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln

(LAGUNA BEACH) - The Republican Party started out in 1854 as an anti-slavery coalition of folks living in the Northeast and upper Midwest who were opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

The first meeting of the new Republican Party was held in a school house in Ripon, Wisconsin. Because the Kansas-Nebraska Act allowed slavery to spread outward from the south, northern activists organized themselves around the slogan, “Free Labor, Free Land, Free men!”

Elaborating on the idea of Free Labor, Abraham Lincoln, who became the first President elected by Republican Party in 1860, gave the following annual address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, at Milwaukee, Wisconsin, September 30, 1859:

“

...But another class of reasoners hold the opinion... that there is no such thing as a free man being fatally fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer.... They hold that labor is prior to, and independent of, capital; that, in fact, capital is the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed; that labor can exist without capital, but that capital could never have existed without labor. Hence they hold that labor is the superior and greatly the superior of capital.

”

After Lincoln was reelected to the Presidency in 1864, Karl Marx on behalf of the International Working Men’s Association centered in London, England, wrote Lincoln the following letter:

“

Sir: We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority...From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class....the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes (in Europe) for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slave holders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic....The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world

”

Karl Marx received the following reply via the American Ambassador to Great Britain Charles Francis Adam:

“

I am directed to inform you that the address of the Central Council of your Association, which was duly transmitted through this Legation to the President of the United [States], has been received by him. So far as the sentiments expressed by it are personal, they are accepted by him with a sincere and anxious desire that he may be able to prove himself not unworthy of the confidence which has been recently extended to him by his fellow citizens and by so many of the friends of humanity and progress throughout the world.

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Abraham Lincoln as a leading champion of the rights of the working class? My-oh-my has the Republican Party changed its spots.