4 - The whigs and u.s. industry
Via The NY Transfer News Service ~ All the News that Doesn't Fit
How Capitalists Rule/Pt.4
THE DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS:
HOW CAPITALISTS RULE IN A CAPITALIST DEMOCRACY
By Vince Copeland
Fourth in a series:
THE WHIGS AND U.S. INDUSTRY
The Whig Party, founded in 1834 in opposition to Andrew Jackson and the Democrats, was preoccupied with building "big government"--or so it seemed to the very poor and hard-working farmers. The Whigs wanted the farm population to help build a unified, centralized country. This really came down to building a great common market at the partial expense of people who didn't think they had any interest in it. Nevertheless, the Whigs did grow and by 1840, with the victory of William Henry Harrison, they took the White House for one term, although they didn't do very much with it.
The interests of the New York banks were different--at least insofar as they remained purely merchant banks, and had not yet amalgamated with industry to produce finance capital and monopoly.
The New York bankers weren't too impressed with the drive of the manufacturers--and the Whigs--for government-sponsored improvements like canals, highways, bridges, etc., since they had already got New York to make such improvements far ahead of the other states. They actually felt they had an interest in keeping the rest of the country backward, so they could profit from their relatively advanced position.
The Jackson period (1829-1837) aroused some of the banking elements to join the new Whig Party in self-defense against the demands of the small farmers, who were in the great majority and responded to Jackson's demagogy.
More fundamentally, perhaps, the character of the bankers began to change a little as their interests diverged from those of the slave owners. Some, particularly those who loaned money to railroads, for instance, saw the need for national improvements. In addition, the railroad barons needed land, and so did the poor farmers who were now pressing on the boundaries of the old settlements with the second and third generation of children who wanted farms of their own.
Slavery interfered with all this. The slave system was choking off any further progress. For instance, the Southern representatives in Congress refused to pass the Homestead Act, which would have given land to small farmers.
While the bankers and merchants of New York City ruled the country hand-in-glove with the slave masters through the Democratic Party, the rising industrial class had different interests. The iron furnaces and foundries, the glass works, the woolen and cotton mills, the wagon makers, wheel wrights, and railroads had more interest in a protective tariff and in national improvements for which the whole people paid.
This was the main focus of the Whig Party, although it wasn't always consistent. Most of the Northern Whigs would become the core of the new Republican Party in the 1850s and 1860s. But the Whig Party itself was not especially anti-slavery.
Northern Democrats
By the 1850s the Southern Democrats were weakening. The Democratic Party had to put Northerners into the presidency in order to get Northern mass support--and Northerners from other states than New York, where the Whig and anti-slavery agitation was getting very strong.
Pierce (1853-57) from New Hampshire and Buchanan (1857-61) from Pennsylvania were shameless puppets of the slave masters. Buchanan pretended to be helpless against the depredations of the slavers in the "civil war in Kansas," (1856-57), for example.
The Compromise of 1850 should have warned the Democrats to be careful and yield some ground to the burgeoning North. But they didn't. The Fugitive Slave Law, part of the Compromise and an extremely regressive as well as repressive piece of legislation, aroused great indignation in the North. And the infamous Dred Scott decision in 1857 was a further provocation.
Democrats in 1860
Insofar as elections have any effect on progress or reaction, the election of 1860 was the watershed event of two centuries. The Democratic Party broke up into three sections. The six-year-old Republican Party won with Abraham Lincoln and the Southern states began seceding a few days after the election. The crisis had begun.
The Democratic Party (Northern Democrats) ran Stephen Douglas of Illinois and got 1,376,000 votes.
The Democratic Party (Southern Democrats) ran John Breckenridge of Kentucky and received 848,000 votes.
The Constitutional Union Party, which included a good number of old Southern Whigs, as well as some pro-Union Democrats, fielded 501,000 votes.
Lincoln won with 1,866,000.
The Northern Democrats had moved left to some degree. Douglas was opposed to extending slavery into the West enough to antagonize the slave masters, but not enough to win the relatively radicalized masses away from the new Republican Party. Both the "War Democrats" and the "Copperheads" were Northern Democrats. But the former were pro-Union while the Copperheads--whose name is similar to today's Cuban "gusanos," or worms--were counter-revolutionists.
It was a revolution
This is not the story of the struggle against slavery, but it is important to emphasize that a real struggle did take place among the previously inert Northern white population. The white Abolitionists, along with the few Black ones who could get enough freedom to play a public role, did finally have a tremendous influence on their generation.
William Lloyd Garrison became one of the great leaders of North American life. And Wendell Phillips, who never took a political office or ran for one, became by some newspaper estimates "the most powerful man in America" during Reconstruction. Frederick Douglass came into his own and became Ambassador to Haiti, even under the very conservative reign of President Grant.
However, only 20 years earlier, these leaders and their collaborators had been mobbed and some even killed.
But the leaders you hear about are usually not the real leaders. As in nearly all great revolutions, the usual political picture is reversed, like a negative of itself. The lower echelons are to the left of the higher, and the great rank-and-file is to the left of them. Failure to take this into account leads to an inability to understand the Civil War itself or the political parties and positions involved.
Revolutionary slaves
The military form of the struggle during the Civil War masked its revolutionary content. The nearly 200,000 African American soldiers alone who enlisted gave it a revolutionary character. They were seldom taken prisoner and fought to the death.
Many more African American soldiers would have enlisted if Lincoln had not been so dilatory at the beginning of the war. When masses of slaves fled to the Union armies, the generals at first actually returned them to their old slave masters!
But in addition a large section, perhaps a majority, of the young Northern farmers were extremely opposed to slavery by 1861. They went into battle singing "John Brown's Body." And there had been none more revolutionary in action than John Brown and his Black and white band of heroes. (They electrified the country when they raided the government arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Va., in 1859 to get weapons to arm a slave rebellion. Brown and others were hanged.)
Our generation has difficulty understanding this phenomenon. We are confronted by such a heavy barrage of racism that such a genuine revolt against human slavery on the part of white people seems impossible. It is necessary to remember that the issue at that time was not racism, but slavery. Many people we might call racists today consciously gave their lives in the fight against slavery. It is hard to ask for more than that.
The Black Republicans
In trying to picture the political situation, it is also hard to believe that there was such a sudden sweep to victory by a party that had not existed just six years earlier.
This cannot be explained by the magnetism of Abraham Lincoln, who didn't join the party until two years after its establishment. Nor can the foresight of Horace Greeley and William Seward, its most prominent founders, explain it. The answer lies in the veritable prairie fire of protest that swept the West and Midwest, adding fresh new blood to the old opponents of the slave system in the Northeast.
The fuel for this fire was hunger for land in the West and the feeling that the new party, free from the domination of the slave holders, would open this land for settlement.
The flames of this fire also reached into the hearts of thousands and thousands of youths and lit up the slavery question, appealing to their idealism as much as to their self-interest.
As with most great social upheavals, the leadership did not come directly from the class with the most to gain from a successful revolution. The Republicans were the party of the industrial capitalist class. And only a minority of their leaders were resolute and uncompromising against the slave barons, or advocated the immediate emancipation of the Black masses--the program of the Abolitionists.
The so-called Black Republicans, the radical minority of the bourgeois party, were close to the Abolitionists in their outlook. But they could not prevail in the long run.
Even when the Republicans moved further left as a whole during the revolutionary period of Reconstruction, they still could not pass the Black Homestead Act. That would have given each former slave family "40 acres and a mule" and would have completely crushed the power of the old slavocracy by dividing up their large estates.
The failure to pass this measure was the outstanding failure of the Black revolution. Its passage would have changed the political physiognomy of North America and laid the material basis for Black equality, social as well as political.
(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if source is cited. For more info contact Workers World,46 W. 21 St., New York, NY 10010. Phone (212) 206-8222. On NY Transfer or PeaceNet, write "workers".)
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