Paying close attention to the U.S. Civil War, Marx writes perceptively to Engels of the defeat of Lee’s northern offensive at the Battle of Antietam which gave political cover for Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and the Federal’s financing of the war by printing money.

‘As for America’ (1862) by Karl Marx from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Correspondence, 1846-1895. International Publishers, New York. 1936.

October 29, 1862.

As for America, I believe that the Maryland campaign was decisive in so far as it showed that even in this section of the border states most sympathetic to the South support for the Confederates is weak. But the whole struggle turns on the border states. Whoever gets them dominates the Union. At the same time the fact that Lincoln issued the forthcoming Emancipation Act at a moment when the Confederates were pushing forward in Kentucky, shows that all consideration for the loyal slave-owners in the border states has ceased. The emigration of the slave-owners from Missouri, Kentucky and Tennessee to the South, with their black chattels, is already enormous, and if the war is prolonged for a while, as it is certain to be, the Southerners will have lost all hold there. The South began the war for these territories. The war itself was the means of destroying its power in the border states, where, apart from this, the ties with the South were becoming weaker every day because a market can no longer be found for the breeding of slaves and the internal slave trade. In my opinion, therefore, for the South it will only be a matter now of the defensive. But their sole possibility of success lay in an offensive. If the report is confirmed that Hooker is getting the active command of the Potomac army, that McClellan is being “retired” to the “theoretical” post of Commander-in-chief and that Halleck is taking over the chief command in the West, then the conduct of the war in Virginia may also take on a more energetic character. Moreover the most favourable time of year for the Confederates is now past.

There is no doubt at all that morally the collapse of the Maryland campaign was of the most tremendous importance.

As to finance, the United States know from the time of the War of Independence, and we know from observation of Austria, how far one can go with depreciated paper money. It is a fact that the Yankees never exported more corn to England than they have this year, that the present harvest is again far above the average and that the trade balance was never more favourable for them than it has been for the last two years. As soon as the new system of taxation (a very ridiculous one, it is true, exactly in Pitt’s style) comes into operation, the paper money which up to now has only been continually emitted will also at last begin to flow back again. An extension of the paper issue on the present scale will therefore become superfluous and further depreciation will thus be checked. What had made even the present depreciation less dangerous than it was in France, and even in England, in similar circumstances, has been the fact that the Yankees never prohibited two prices, a gold price and a paper price. The actual mischief done resolves itself into a state debt for which the proper equivalent has never been received and a premium on jobbing and speculation.

When the English boast that their depreciation was never more than 11 per cent. (other people’s belief is that it was more than double this during some time), they conveniently forget that they not only continued to pay their old taxes but every year paid new ones as well, so that the return flow of the banknotes was assured from the beginning, while the Yankees have actually carried on the war for a year and a half without taxes (except the greatly diminished import duties), simply by repeating the issue of paper. In a process of this kind, of which the turning point has now been reached, the actual depreciation is still comparatively small.

The fury with which the Southerners have received Lincoln’s Acts proves their importance. All Lincoln’s Acts appear like the mean pettifogging conditions which one lawyer puts to his opposing lawyer. But this does not alter their historic content, and indeed it amuses me when I compare them with the drapery in which the Frenchman envelops even the most unimportant point.

Of course, like other people, I see the repulsive side of the form the movement takes among the Yankees; but I find the explanation of it in the nature of “bourgeois” democracy. The events over there are a world upheaval, nevertheless, and there is nothing more disgusting in the whole business than the English attitude towards them.

International Publishers was formed in 1923 for the purpose of translating and disseminating international Marxist texts and headed by Alexander Trachtenberg. It quickly outgrew that mission to be the main book publisher, while Workers Library continued to be the pamphlet publisher of the Communist Party.

PDF of later edition of book: https://archive.org/download/in.ernet.dli.2015.227457/2015.227457.Selected-Correspondence.pdf