OAH Distinguished Lecturer Profile

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels agreed that the American Civil War was the most important event of the nineteenth century, and they wrote extensively about the American Conflict. Through thousands of German exiles who fought in the Union ranks, they remained distant participants in what they saw as a great labor struggle -- a war against slavery. This lecture reveals how they understood the Civil War, how the Civil War shaped their own political theories, and suggests that US history can be placed in a much broader international and intellectual context than is often supposed to be the case.

Many consider the Civil War to be the most important event in the history of the United States. Yet, the American Civil War was both an international and a national event, with European, Caribbean, Latin American, and African histories influencing, and in turn being influenced by, the war over slavery in the United States. This lecture highlights the international currents at work in the states around the Mississippi River during the Civil War. When war came to this region in 1861, the struggle between secession and union was joined by revolutionary socialist émigrés from Europe, African American rebels against slavery, and evangelical anti-slavery fighters from ‘Bleeding Kansas’ and elsewhere. These groups helped create a winning ‘war-by-emancipation’ strategy for the Union Army by building on international experiences of armed struggle against slavery, against aristocracy, against capitalism, and for a wide range of secular and religious ideas of a just society. At the same time, some slaveholders sought to be as international in their defense of slavery as these opponents, and looked to top-down, conservative socialisms of Napoleon III in France and Robert Owen in Britain, as well as to their own Caribbean and Latin American slaveholding counterparts, to modernize the ideologies and institutions of slavery. This lecture will suggest just how international our national history is by focusing on the Civil War as the most American of international revolutions.