Status Updates From Love and Capital: Karl and ...

“Engels forgave Marx. Like Jenny, Lenchen, and countless others, he recognized Marx’s personal flaws but he, like they, loved him too much to allow those flaws to overshadow the brilliant qualities - his mind, his wit, even his capacity for love and loyalty (as hard as it must have been to remember those at such moments. Engels also felt it was his role to protect this man, from whom he expected great thing.”

“As the war progressed, Marx’s admiration for Lincoln grew. Marx declared that though couched in lawyerly phrases, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (which Marx called his ‘manifesto abolishing slavery’) was ‘the most important document in American history since the establishment of the Union’… Marx said of the U.S. at that moment, ‘events over there are such as to transform the world.’”

“Marx considered slavery the basest form of capitalist exploitation, and both he and Engels saw ending it as a major step in the global march toward revolution.”

“As he prepared to leave, Marx put Jenny and the family’s needs in Engels’ hands… He promised to write Engels from Holland and added an uncharacteristically candid closing: ‘You will know without my telling you how grateful I am for the outstanding proofs of friendship you have given me.’”

“Abraham Lincoln had just been elected president, and Southern states had begun seceding from the Union. Marx and Engels cheered Lincoln’s election and also the turmoil in the South.”

“He said he would discuss it with Jenny, his ‘critical conscious.’”