The Lincoln Putsch: America's Bolshevik Revolution (The 48'ers)
The Lincoln Putsch: America's Bolshevik Revolution (The 48'ers)
Regardless of how "conservative" the Republican Party may or may not be, it is easy to forget that there was a time when the Party was far from conservative, that in the early days of the party, socialists and outright communists played an active role. In fact, it can and will be argued here that the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 was made possible by communists and socialists, most of them German immigrants in the Midwest, and indeed the prosecution of the War depended in large part on those same alien people. Consider, for example, the following.
Union General Franz Sigel had been a leader in the communist Revolution of 1848, a revolution fought to destroy the individual state governments of Germany, and forciby unite them under an all-powerful central, socialist government. Thanks to some inept leadership, part of it provided by the young Sigel, that revolution failed and Sigel, along with thousands of other "forty-eighters," fled Europe for America, bringing their revolutionary socialist ideas with them. During the War, his troops declared "I fights mit Sigel." After his diastrous retreat at the Battle of Wilson's Creek, a Confederate song made fun of Sigel and his Hessian troops this way:
...
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Massachusetts Yankee transcendentalist and hater of the South, wrote so approvingly of Sigel and his countrymen: "This revolution has a feature new to history, that of socialism."
[Were Communists using the U.S. Civil War to wage war against private ownership of property?]
Communist communities were numerous in the North and the Midwest in the 1850s: Fruitlands at Concord, Mass.; the Owenite community of New Harmony, Indiana; the various Amanite communities in Iowa. Emerson's own personal favorite communitarian was Fourier , who inspired a number of communist utopian communities and became the spiritual leader of Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune. Students of the War are well-acquainted with the role of Greeley and his newspaper. They may not be aware that the Tribune had avidly covered the Revolution of 1848, and frequently employed Karl Marx as a correspondent. (In fact, Marx and Engels' book, The Civil War in the U.S., consists of collected articles and dispatches from the Tribune. In those pieces, the two inventors of Communism fret over every Union setback and cheer every Union advance.)
Another communist community in the midwest was that of Communia, Iowa, founded by a German immigrant named Wilhem Weitling, who had been one of the principal revolutionary figures in Europe as a leader of the communist organization known as the League of the Just. Coming to America after the Revolution, he involved himself in a number of communist causes, included the Arbeiterbund, a German workers' association, and in Communia. His life and ideals, which are detailed in his biography, The Utopian Communist, by Carl Wittke, present an excellent case study in communist revolutionary thought in America in the years leading up to the War.
These German immigrants were different, socially, religiously, and politically from those who had come before. Colonial German immigrants and those prior to 1848 were mainly farmers, a mixture of Lutherans and various small sects, all of whom were pious Christians. Most became Democrats. In America, they settled in Pennsylvania, then began to filter down the Great Wagon Road to places in the South such as Salem (now Winston-Salem), North Carolina. These Germans were hard-working and of sturdy stock, though considered somewhat dull and plodding.
...
Forty-eighters, on the other hand, came to America for its socialist promise, such as that of free land as was represented by the Homestead movement. Most settled in cities, however. They were rootless, with no particular attraction for a homeland. As Marx said, "the proletarian knows no fatherland."These Germans coming after 1848 were more urban, more educated, less willing to work and more apt to look to the welfare state. They tended to be irreligious, even atheistic.
(source/more)
