A rare essay from me. Thanks for the indulgence. RN.

‘1859 and John Brown, The Return of Charles Beard’s Civil War and the Left Today: Rant of a Leftist Historian’ by Revolution’s Newsstand.

That a revival among the Left and in wider understanding of the Civil War–the only genuine, deeply flawed and incomplete–revolution ever waged in this country, of the Charles Beard school of U.S. history. The return of Beard’s vulgar materialist, abolitionist-devoid, almost Black-free, clash of Northern industrial capitalism and Southern feudal agriculture is a sure sign that the Left is now largely unmoored from its hard-won traditions and intellectual inheritance. Yet another devastation the break in the generational chain, of culture, organization, and called-upon tradition suffered in the neo-liberal era.

1859 was the darkest of times. A decade of the Fugitive Slave act that saw whole communities of Black northern activists forced to exile in Canada; hard-fought Bleeding Kansas became a (pro-slave) stalemate; Pennsylvania’s President Buchanan acted as chief lobbyist for slavery’s expansion, proposing the annexation of Mexico and Cuba for the purpose; 1857’s Dred Scott decision codified open war on Black people and destroyed any legal possible recourse; the end of that year saw the heroic ‘failure’ of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, with the death and execution of his vanguard army; the aftermath saw even the most prominent abolitionists lower their heads, with Frederick Douglass himself leaving for Europe.

Dark days indeed.

The end of the 1850s saw the Slave Power expanding, vastly wealthy, confident, and utterly unwilling to compromise. I venture to say that every person in the world would have thought it an IMPOSSIBILITY–let alone even entertained a thought on the possibility–that within four years the Federal Government would be engaged in a war with Southern slave society that would ultimately kill more than three-quarters of a million people; that the President of the U.S. would issue an Emancipation Proclamation, however inadequate; that the U.S. army(!) would enlist 200,00 Black men so recently “with no rights a white man was bound to respect,” a majority of them formerly enslaved, to give them guns and march against their former Masters and kill them; that 1865 would see the formal destruction of chattel slavery and the world’s largest single expropriation of capitalist property before the Russian Revolution; usher in a slew of Constitutional changes drafted by the most progressive U.S. Congress in history (thanks to no Southern whites) that would inaugurate birthright citizenship, one of history’s largest single expansion of rights and the war’s greatest legal accomplishment, formally provide for equal access to the law, and male voting rights where Black man could vote in Mississippi before Michigan, get elected to state and federal office where they would help rewrite constitutional arrangements…all this in less than a decade.

Sometimes what was impossible becomes possible, but it requires those who are determined to take every opportunity, to make opportunities, to push for the ‘impossible.’ Every single gain made mentioned above was won because activists and organized people fought for them. None of them happened because a Northern industrialist sought to expand his stove manufactory to Birmingham, but was stymied by the ‘feudal’ economy so decided on Total War to introduce the wage-system and modern production because more surplus can be made.

Indicative of a larger intellectual trend in the Left, the revived (neo)-Beardian take the Civil War–basically a comment on what the ruling class did, with its ‘pox on both your houses’ while at the same time celebrating the North’s (progressive) capitalist victory over the (pre-capitalist) ‘feudal’ South erases the enormous, generations-long struggle, sacrifice, and martyrdom of ten of thousands, many if not most the enslaved and ‘free’ Blacks, who successfully, if incompletely, turned a War for the Union into a war that destroyed chattel slavery.  

Beard’s vulgar economism would be entirely rejected by most Marxists—largely in the context of the growing 1920s Left focus on Black liberation–with a whole new school of Left historians refuting it. With the South and its slave system, not seen as a feudal backwater, but a thoroughly capitalist regime; an integrated engine of industrial and imperial expansion.

The modified return of Beard’s approach is a sad indicator of a Left that seems only able to comment on what the ‘other side’ is doing and saying; where it is increasingly devoid of an animating future vision; where it has lost faith in its own ability to intervene in the world, a world seen fixed by identities and technocratic materialism. Currently the Left seems convinced of barbarism, but not of socialism. John Brown was also convinced, deeply convinced, of barbarism when he and the Provisional Army rode into Harper’s Ferry before dawn on October 8, 1859. But it was his animating future vision, a vision that relied on the oppressed freeing themselves, and his willingness to intervene in that service that led him there.

I always think of 1859 when the world seems hopeless. And it was, but for the actions of revolutionaries.

Matt Siegfried.