Al Owski’s Reviews > An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln > Status Update

“When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe…slavery on the banner of armed revolt…and maintained "slavery to be a beneficent institution, indeed the only solution of the great problem of the relation of labor to capital" … then the working classes of Europe understood at once…that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor…” -Karl Marx

“I, too, like Mr. Johnson's policy less and less. His hatred of Negroes comes out more and more violently, while as against the old lords of the South he lets all power go out of his hands. If things go on like this, in six months all the old villains of secession will be sitting in Congress at Washington. Without colored suffrage nothing whatever can be done there...” -Engels

“the Confederate government has overreached itself in its violent efforts to fill the ranks of the army; That the states are asserting their "state rights" against the separatist Confederacy, just as the latter made them its pretext against the Union.”

“it is mortifying that a lousy oligarchy with only half the number of inhabitants proves itself just as strong as an unwieldly, helpless democracy” -Friedrich Engels

“even in America the bourgeois republic exposes itself in thoroughgoing fashion so that in the future in can never again be preached on its own merits but solely as a means and a transition to a social revolution...” -Friedrich Engels

“I must say I cannot work up any enthusiasm for a people which on such a colossal issue allows itself to be continually beaten by a fourth of its own population…” -Friedrich Engels

“Despite all the screams of the Yankees, there is still no sign whatever available that the people regard this business as a real question of national existence.” -Friedrich Engels

“It will take years for Lincoln to learn to combine his legal scruples as an attorney with the demands of the Civil War. This is the appalling condition of a democratic government and its greatest evil. In France a hundred men, convinced for good reasons, would carry the nation with them, but in order that our government may take a step, nineteen millions must previously put themselves in motion.”

“Hence [Lincoln's] appeal to the border states to renounce the institution of slavery voluntarily and under the conditions of a favorable contract. He knows that it is only the continuance of slavery in the border states that has so far left slavery untouched in the South and prohibited the North from applying its great radical remedy. He errs only if he imagines that the...slaveholders are to be moved by...speeches”

“Anxiety to keep the "loyal" slaveholders of the border states in good humor and fear of driving them into the arms of the secession—in a word, a tender regard for the interests, prejudices, and sensibilities of these ambiguous allies have afflicted the Union government with incurable paralysis since the beginning of the war, driven it to take half measures, forced it to hypocritically disavow the principle at issue”