Frederick Douglass and Karl Marx on the Paris Commune and the Labour Question in the United States

Abstract

The Paris Commune was the first time the working class took political power. Frederick Douglass covered the events of the Commune closely in his newspaper. Douglass’s views on the Commune illuminate his relationship to socialist and labour movements abroad and in the United States. This essay examines the liberal analysis in Douglass’s newspaper while comparing his reaction to that of Karl Marx. Douglass’s revolutionary abolitionism did not necessarily extend to oppressed wage workers. The Commune abroad and labour unrest in the US bought to light Douglass’s free labour prescription, with its assumption of a harmony of interests between capital and workers. His reaction to the Commune exposes the limitations of his liberal political thought to take on an analysis of class conflict and labour struggles, especially when compared to contemporaries such Marx and others. This study offers a unique contribution on Douglass while juxtaposing him with a Marxist perspective.

 

When did Radical Reconstruction come to an effective end? Historians continue to debate the issue. Heather Cox Richardson points to the Military Reconstruction Act of 1867, ‘far reaching and radical’, as ‘the last gasp of Lincoln’s Republican Party’. Richardson also argues persuasively that the reaction of liberal Republican opinion to the Paris Commune and ‘the rise of labour unions’ at home, was a decisive moment in the five years that followed where ‘party members would abandon their commitment to equality and tie the party to big business’.^[1] If true, then how did Frederick Douglass, a revolutionary liberal, respond to the Commune in Paris and the rise of labour unions in the United States and what, if any, were the implications of his response for how he viewed the way forward in the US? What about the reaction of Karl Marx and the Marxist current in the US?[2]

Douglass was initially inspired by the revolutions in France in 1848. The overthrow of slavery, the institution of republican foundations, and the overthrow of the monarchy led Douglass to believe that the downfall of slavery in America might be at hand. When Chartists in England and the workers of Paris sought to enter the fray, however, Douglass denounced the mass demonstrations and violence-baited the rebellious labourers.[3] This might suggest how Douglass would respond to insurgent workers once again in France’s capital in 1871. However, world-changing events, between 1848 and 1871, along with a major shift in Douglass’s political philosophy from a pacifist Garrisonian to a political abolitionist willing to endorse slave insurrection, might suggest otherwise.

In addition, between 1853 and 1855, Douglass sought to make a case for a transracial class alliance amongst US toilers in the fight against slavery. Douglass’s insights about the similarities and differences of exploitation under the capitalist and the slave mode of production were remarkable, ones that Marx with his historical materialist perspective could have agreed with.

Douglass’s embrace of class collaborationism, the harmony of interests between labour and capital, was most pronounced after the Civil War as he sought to convince workers through his newspaper and in the Colored National Labor Union of this thesis. As he would editorialise in 1871, ‘Capital and labour meet and part as friends in these columns’.^[4] In other words, Douglass staked his opposition to the idea that the interests of workers and their employers were antithetical. However, during the pre-war and war years Douglass spoke out for the need to build an alliance between white workers, slaves, and abolitionists to overthrow the slave system.

In 1853, Douglass told an interracial audience at the thirteenth annual convention of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society that ‘prejudice and hate are excited against’ the Black worker – ‘enmity is stirred up between him and other laborers’. Irish immigrants, specifically, were ‘instantly taught on arriving in this Christian country to hate and despise the coloured people’. Douglass was sure, though, that ‘the Irish American will find out his mistake one day’. At an anti-slavery convention in Cincinnati the next year, Douglass posited ‘that three millions of people in the south who own no slaves, will in time by the aid of education and enlightenment, come to see that the slaveholder’s humiliation is necessary for the elevation of the slave and themselves. The intelligent working men of Virginia and Kentucky begin to understand this; they see that white slaveholders are against them as much as they are against the slaves; they are so: labor, white and black must fall or flourish together; and when laboring men fully see this, then will they stand with us on the anti-slavery platform’.^[5] Douglass understood that, if Black and white workers and producers did not join together to fight slavery and racial discrimination the divisions would allow for attacks on the political rights of all – no matter if they had privileged skin or not. The racism taught to workers both North and South by the slaveholders and their allies was not immutable but instead a terrain of struggle.

In his 1855 autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass shared with his readers the working conditions he experienced as a slave in Baltimore, including the enmity he felt from white workers. But the brutality Douglass experienced pointed him to what would need to happen to overthrow slavery:

 

That phase is this: the conflict of slavery with the interests of the white mechanics and laborers of the south. In the country, this conflict is not so apparent; but, in cities, such as Baltimore, Richmond, New Orleans, Mobile &c., it is seen pretty clearly. The slaveholders, with a craftiness peculiar to themselves, by encouraging the enmity of the poor, laboring white man against the blacks, succeeds in making the said white man almost as much a slave as the black slave himself. The difference between the white slave, and the black slave, is this: the latter belongs to one slaveholder, and the former belongs to all the slaveholders, collectively. The white slave has taken from him, by indirection, what the black slave has taken from him, directly, and without ceremony. Both are plundered, and by the same plunderers. The slave is robbed, by his master, of all his earnings, above what is required for his bare physical necessities; and the white man is robbed by the slave system, of the just results of his labour, because he is flung into competition with a class of laborers who work without wages. The competition, and its injurious consequences, will, one day, array the non-slaveholding white people of the slave states, against the slave system, and make them the most effective workers against the great evil. At present, the slaveholders blind them to this competition, by keeping alive their prejudice against the slaves, as men – not against them as slaves. They appeal to their pride, often denouncing emancipation, as tending to place the white working man, on an equality with negros, and, by this means, they succeed in drawing off the minds of the poor whites from the real fact, that, by the rich slave-master, they are already regarded as but a single remove from equality with the slave … ^[6]

 

Thus, was there any likelihood that Douglass’s recognition of a potential alliance between labourers of different skin colours plus the political education of the Civil War would have prompted him to change his outlook on revolutionary workers in Europe? Or would his natural rights liberal philosophy, including the near-sanctity of the rights of private property, override those history-making events and innovative ideas?

Reading the Commune from Two Very Different Class Perspectives

The Paris Commune emerged from the Franco-Prussian War. The abdication of Louis Bonaparte in September 1870 and the new government’s anti-working-class character combined to radicalise France’s working masses, especially its advanced contingents in Paris. After the Third Republic was established, the French Army surrendered to the Prussians and the Commune, a revolutionary workers’ movement and government, took power in March 1871.

No one did more to promote the Communards as heroes than Karl Marx. No one’s name, as well as the International Workingmen’s Association, born out of British working-class resistance to London and Paris’s moves to come to the aid of the slavocracy in the United States, was more associated with the uprising. On 12 April 1871, Marx wrote from London to a colleague in Germany, ‘What resilience, what historical initiative, what a capacity for sacrifice in these Parisians!’ While the future of the Paris Commune was still in doubt and opportunities to consolidate the revolutionary government had been missed, Marx believed that, ‘However that may be, the present rising in Paris – even if it be crushed by the wolves, swine and vile curs of the old society – is the most glorious deed of our Party since the June insurrection [of 1848] in Paris’.^[7] To conclude his May Address of the General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association, Marx wrote, ‘Working men’s Paris, with its Commune, will be for ever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class’.^[8]

Douglass, on the other hand, saw the workers in rebellion as deluded tools of communist agitators, too dim-witted to even know what they fought for.

 

With Paris surrounded by Bismarck’s troops after the French defeat in the siege that began in September 1870, Marx knew that any attempts on the workers’ part to try to take up from where they left off in 1848-9 would be ill-advised. Through the French representatives on the General Council (GC) of the IWA, the body’s executive committee, he, along with his partner Engels – who was now living in London and a member of the GC – counselled revolutionary restraint. The task of the proletariat, he instructed the representatives to tell them, was to use the new space of the Republic – declared on 4 September – to begin organising not only in Paris but elsewhere for the preparatory work needed to successfully take power. ‘Let them calmly and resolutely improve the opportunities of Republican liberty’, Marx advised, ‘for the work of their own class organisation’.^[9]

 

Douglass began his commentary on the Paris Commune in the 30 March 1871 edition of his newspaper, The New National Era, and, at first glance, seemed to echo Marx’s advice to use the newly opened space. Douglass started by explaining what he saw as the progressive results of ‘the struggles which have been convulsing Europe of late … the downfall of Louis Napoleon and of the Pope’. Douglass did not give France or the French people credit for declaring the Republic, but, instead, he claimed they had ‘been freed from an odious despotism by a beneficent enemy’, the armies of Prussia. With this freedom, however, ‘France, indeed, offers a truly distressing sight’. For Douglass, republican institutions were key, both in and of themselves and as an inspiration for other anti-monarchical fights. The task for France was ‘the higher glory of demonstrating to the world not only their own capability of self-government, but the excellence of republican institutions generally’. The example of the French Republic was ‘needed as a moral counterpoise to the enormous ascendency of the monarchical power in Europe, strengthened as it has been by the establishment of the German Empire’. Most importantly, France needed to become ‘a true republic, resting on a solid foundation’.^[10] The Republic was the culmination of the struggle for Douglass, not the most favourable terrain to continue the struggle as it was for Marx.

In one of his additions to Prosper Olivier Lissagaray’s History of the Commune of 1871, Marx, contra Douglass, gave credit ‘to the personal intervention of the people in [France’s] history’ for bringing down the Second French Empire. He traced the beginning of the end of Napoleon’s rule to the spontaneous strikes that broke out in 1868 in France. The workers offered themselves to fight the German invaders in 1870 and then the workers ‘crushed the hand that strangled him’, with the institution of the Commune.^[11]

Douglass hoped to see the population of France united in creating a true republic, but, instead, he wrote, ‘we see them arrayed against each other before the German armies have evacuated the country’. Most alarming, ‘Radicalism has again run mad. The Commune, the city of Paris, has risen against the country, the Provisional Government, the Constituent Assembly, in short against everything and everybody that is not emphatically and unconditionally committed to the Reds’. On 18 March, the National Guard, a civic militia composed mainly of workers, in the Parisian neighbourhood of Montmartre, refused orders of the French Army to disarm. The soldiers then fraternised for a time with the protestors and refused to attack, marking the birth of the Paris Commune. ‘A few shots were fired by both sides’, writes Daniel Gaido, ‘but generally the soldiers ignored their officers’ orders to force back the crowds. Some handed over their rifles and fraternised with the civilians’. Douglass denounced these events, writing, ‘Discipline and subordination are at an end, and mob-law is supreme’. The Republic, Douglass thought, was under attack. ‘The spectacle is the more disheartening and disappointing to all Republicans, here as well as in Europe, since they hailed the French republic most enthusiastically, and built great hopes on its example in Europe’.^[12]

While Douglass lamented the events in Paris, Marx sprang into action in its defence. One of the immediate tasks was to counter the slanders in the bourgeois press like the Times of London that the Franco-Prussian War and uprising had provoked a split between the German and French sections of the International. To this end, Marx, on behalf of the General Council (GC), wrote numerous letters to the editor of newspapers in Germany, France, and England of which a number were actually published. Having beaten back one attack, Marx was then forced to respond to press insinuations that he and the GC had engineered the insurrection. He sent off another round of letters that the Times and at least one other London paper published, ridiculing the allegations. The GC, with Marx’s encouragement, also took initiatives to win support for the Commune in England. Marx, himself, began an extensive effort to solicit aid for the insurgents from IWA sections. Six weeks after the uprising, he told Léo Frankel and Louis Varlin, two of the Commune’s leaders and IWA members: ‘I have written hundreds of letters on behalf of your cause to all the corners of the earth where we have branches.^[13]

In addition to Marx’s letter writing campaign, he strove to gain accurate information by asking Auguste Serraillier, a GC member, to return to Paris to provide some leadership and keep the GC informed on developments; shortly afterwards Serraillier was elected to the Commune. Marx’s need for accurate information was also one of the reasons that the young Russian revolutionary, Elisaveta Dmitriyeva Tomanovskaya, who the Marx family had befriended the previous summer, went to Paris and organised the Women’s Union for the Defence of Paris as a branch of the IWA and eventually emerged as one of the Commune’s leading socialists. Douglass, at variance with Marx, seemed to rely on the capitalist press in gathering information about events in France.^[14]

The events of fall 1870 left Douglass hopeful that France would know ‘this time how to form a true Republic’. The working-class movement in Paris shattered these hopes. ‘It is consequently with feelings of deep regret that we look on the spectacle of disastrous failure’, Douglass explained, ‘and almost feel like despairing of the fitness of the French for self-government’. Douglass sided with ‘the regular Government’ in their attempt ‘to save the Republic from the attempts of those Reds who, while honestly professing and believing themselves true republicans, evince a spirit of lawlessness and intolerance which, among us, would be considered anything but republican’. Douglass regarded the national elections that took place on 8 February 1871 as legitimate. These elections, according to Gaido, ‘resulted in a reactionary majority … and the formation of a counterrevolutionary provisional government headed by Adolphe Thiers’. While he recognised the odiousness of such a possibility, Douglass predicted ‘it is quite probable that German assistance will be required for the suppression of the insurrection, since there appears to be no organised military force ready that could be trusted with the task’, a consequence of troops fraternising with the Communards.^[15]

Douglass described for his readers, ‘A government, a constituent assembly elected by the people, and not guilty of any treasonable or tyrannical acts’. Douglass expressed his disappointment that the Thiers government ‘is rebelled against; and the national guards, just those who are counted of the strongest supports of a republican government, form the strength of the insurrection’.^[16] If Douglass did not think that the Thiers government did anything tyrannical to justify the insurrection of the Commune, Marx, on the other hand, laid out what he saw as the threats and actions that forced Parisian workers to revolt. In addition to the attempt of Thiers to disarm the workers of Paris on 18 March,

Then Paris was exasperated by the frantic anti-republican demonstrations of the ‘Rural’ Assembly and by Thiers’s own equivocations about the legal status of the republic; by the threat to decapitate and decapitalise Paris; the appointment of Orleanist ambassadors; Dufaure’s laws on over-due commercial bills and house rents, inflicting ruin on the commerce and industry of Paris; Pouyer-Quertier’s tax of two centimes upon every copy of every imaginable publication; the sentences of death against Blanqui and Flourens; the suppression of the republican journals; the transfer of the National Assembly to Versailles; the renewal of the state of siege declared by Palikao, and expired on the 4th of September; the appointment of Vinoy, the Decembriseur, as governor of Paris–of Valentin, the imperialist gendarme, as its prefect of police–and of D’Aurelles de Paladine, the Jesuit general, as the commander-in-chief of its National Guard.^[17]

Marx, more accurately, saw the attacks on the republic, workers’ economic situation, and the closing of political space that Thiers engaged in compared to Douglass’s rosy picture of the reactionary leader.

In the same 12 April letter referenced above to Ludwig Kugelman, Marx, in order to drive home the significance of the revolt, referred him back to his Eighteenth Brumaire where ‘you will find that I say that the next attempt of the French revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic military machine from one hand to another, but to break it, and that is essential for every real people’s revolution on the Continent. And this is what our heroic Party comrades in Paris are attempting’.^[18]

Marx also pointed to the Prussian troops, as Douglass did, as a crucial factor but in a diametrically opposed analysis to Douglass’s. For Marx, it was a fortuitous set of circumstances that Prussian troops surrounded Paris. These circumstances

 

presented the Parisians with the alternative of taking up the fight or succumbing without a struggle. In the latter case, the demoralization of the working class would have been a far greater misfortune than the fall of any number of ‘leaders’. The struggle of the working class against the capitalist class and its state has entered upon a new phase with the struggle in Paris. Whatever the immediate results may be, a new point of departure of world-historic importance has been gained.^[19]

 

Douglass attributed the current insurrection to the work of socialist agitators, acknowledged that there were such agitators in the United States, and reprinted a story from the Pall Mall Gazette intended to characterise the ordinary supporters of the Commune as dim-witted. To obtain a ‘proper understanding of the Red movement in the French capital’, Douglass wanted his readers to know that the Commune ‘is the work of the Socialist agitators, who obtain supporters among the more ignorant class of workingmen by promising them what no community and no Government on earth can give them – a division of property and a life of ease without labor’. If anyone thought that only Europe contained radicals like this, that America was exceptional, Douglass assured his audience, ‘These agitators are not unknown among us, and they will be recognised by the ingeniously suggestive platitudes’ mentioned in the story printed in the Pall Mall Gazette. Douglass then reproduced the article where a correspondent conversed with a National Guard member stationed at a barricade intending to show that the rebellious workers did not understand the doctrines for which they were fighting.^[20]

The Communard in the story related that ‘the rich had everything and the poor nothing; the time has come for changing all that’. He belonged to an organisation whose programme included, ‘No more imposts, no more usury, no more misery. Work for all, property for all … What is the workman? Nothing. What ought he to be? Everything’. The correspondent then attempted to exhibit his cleverness and the worker’s cluelessness. The worker explained he was a cabinetmaker who earned five francs per day and demanded to share in the gains of his employer. ‘But was your employer a very rich man?’ the correspondent asked. The worker replied that his employer was ruined. ‘Then you are agitating for the privilege of sharing his losses!’ the correspondent jousted. ‘He looked at me, gave a shrug, and said I didn’t seem to understand the principle. He would explain it more carefully’. Douglass shared this story to place himself among the refined and intelligent while deriding militant workers of ‘the more ignorant class’.^[21]

In a 4 May 1871 article titled ‘Dark Prospects’, a title used repeatedly while covering the events in Paris, Douglass employed the nation-state as his unit of analysis rather than opposing classes. ‘For weeks’, he declared, frustrated, ‘a struggle is carried on, in which the insurrectionists evince as much bitterness and animosity against the regular Government as they did against the victorious Germans’. This sort of conflict within the nation led him to characterise the events as the ‘most distressing and heart-sickening spectacle in the world’. As for the reason for this ‘heart-sickening spectacle’, he pointed to ‘the state of demoralization, of corruption, and mutual distrust, which lead the unfortunate people to rage more furiously and destructively against each other than any foreign enemy could do’. There was a ‘spirit of distrust pervading the minds of the people’.^[22]

As for the claims of the Communards – ‘The demand of the Commune to elect its own municipal officers is reasonable enough’, Douglass wrote. John Merriman, a historian of France, points out that ‘Unlike all the other 36,000 cities, towns and villages in France, Paris did not have the right to elect a mayor’. In addition, Napoleon appointed the arrondissement municipal council. Nevertheless, Douglass deplored the means used by Parisian workers to achieve their ends. ‘There is, however, no cause in the world so good’, Douglass wrote, ‘that would not become bad when pressed by such outrages and excesses as are the order of the day: when political assassinations are openly advocated and practiced, and a despotism is exercised in the name of liberty hardly less oppressive and odious than the yoke of the Emperor’.^[23] Douglass seemed to be reading news from sources friendly to the Thiers regime. Future scholarship would reveal that the bourgeois government enabled the slaughter of tens of thousands of prisoners from the beginning of hostilities, while only 66 or 68 hostages were killed by the Commune.^[24]

While Douglass deplored the slaughter of prisoners by Thiers’s troops during the last days of the Commune, he mistakenly reported to his readers that the brutality came from each side in equal measure. Multiple articles in the 1 June 1871 issue focused on the property destruction that occurred in Paris during the last days of barricade fighting. ‘They are acts of vandalism’, Douglass claimed, ‘prompted by a love of destruction peculiar to the most degenerate among human brutes … The demolition of the column of the Place Vendome, the monument of bygone French glory; the burning of the Tuileries, the Palais Royal, the Hotel de Ville … will tell heavily in history against this generation of the French people’. Douglass did not examine the strategic importance of demolishing key buildings during street fighting or consider what monuments glorifying the French monarchy might mean to workers fighting for a social and democratic republic. It escaped his attention that while, the Communards destroyed property as they retreated, Versailles troops carried out ‘the notorious slaughter … beyond anything that Paris had seen then or since’.^[25] Marx wrote later that the decree to bring down the column of the Place Vendome was ‘popular, humane, profound, showing that a war of classes was to supersede the war of nations, aimed at the same time a blow at the ephemeral triumph of the Prussian’.^[26] A war of classes to supersede the war of nations – something Douglass would never condone.

As if speaking directly to Douglass, Marx wrote, ‘no sooner do the working men anywhere take the subject into their own hands with a will, then uprises at once all the apologetic phraseology of the mouthpieces of present society … as if capitalist society was still in its purest state of virgin innocence, with its antagonisms still undeveloped, with its delusions still unexploded, with its prostitute realities not yet laid bare’.^[27]

Marx, in his Civil War in France, described more accurately than Douglass, who regurgitated propaganda tales of assassinations and mob rule, the violence of the conflagration. ‘From the 18th of March to the entrance of the Versailles troops into Paris’, Marx wrote, ‘the proletarian revolution remained so free from the acts of violence in which the revolutions, and still more the counter-revolutions, of the “better classes” abound, that no facts were left to its opponents to cry out about, but the execution of General Lecomte and Clement Thomas, and the affair of the Place Vendome’. In fact, it was ‘this magnanimity of the armed working men’ that convinced Thiers and his generals that they could cut down thousands of prisoners with no fear of reprisals. Once Theirs had become aware ‘that the Communal decree of reprisals was but an empty threat, that even their gendarme spies caught in Paris under the disguise of National Guards, that even sergeants-de-ville, taken with incendiary shells upon them, were spared … the wholesale shooting of prisoners was resumed and carried on uninterruptedly to the end’. Marx had the advantage over Douglass in that he had reliable sources other than the anti-Commune reporting in American papers to rely on. As mentioned above, August Nimtz writes that Marx and Engels ‘had very close ties to some of the insurgent leaders, through whom they sought to influence its course’.^[28]

The New National Era, in July, gave space to a view of the Commune from Civil War General Benjamin Butler that differed from its editorial line. Douglass featured a long article, taken from ‘a speech at the dedication of the new town hall in Gloucester’, given by the now Congressman Butler, which Phillip Katz describes as a ‘campaign speech’. In the speech, Butler situated the Commune as of equal or greater importance in its effect on human liberty than the US Civil War – ‘the great event which has distinguished this year, and perhaps its effect on human liberty will distinguish this century, possibly overshadowing the great act of emancipation by which this country liberated four millions of people’.^[29]

Butler seemed to reply directly to Douglass when he defended the destruction of property by the retreating Communards. He lamented the slander and misconceptions facing the defeated Parisian workers. Of the structures built ‘by kings and princes’ set aflame, Butler defended destroying property dedicated to the ‘great deeds of the first Napoleon … erected as an emblem of the military glory of a despot’. He explained to his audience, ‘The first act of a free people was to tear it down and level it to the ground’, and asked, ‘Was not that in accordance with the spirit of free institutions?’^[30]

Analogous to the analysis Butler gave in his speech at the town hall in Gloucester, Marx examined the fires during the last week of the Paris Commune. ‘The working men’s Paris’, Marx wrote, ‘in the act of its heroic self-holocaust, involved in its flames buildings and monuments’, which dismayed Douglass. ‘While tearing to pieces the living body of the proletariat, its rulers must no longer expect to return triumphantly into the intact architecture of their abodes … The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar!’^[31] While Douglass acknowledged and condemned the massacre once it became apparent to him, the destruction of the architecture of the monarchy and the bourgeoisie disgusted him.

Douglass also lent space to the reformer Wendell Phillips to defend the Communards. Phillips pointed to Paris as an example of what could happen in America if the oppression of labour continued. In May he warned, if you ‘scratch New York … you will find Paris just below the surface’. Douglass shared a speech by Phillips in the 2 November issue of his newspaper on ‘theories of labor’. Phillips briefly addressed the Paris Commune in this lecture. ‘The moment you make a rich class and a poor class by the cunning of corporations’, he argued, ‘there is no republic’. The goal of the labour movement, in Phillips’s mind, was to find where poverty and misery came from and solve the problem facing millions of people. There were different methods to solve this problem. ‘Paris wrote her indignation in fire and blood in opposition to wrong’. Phillips did not prefer this method, continuing, ‘This is the Prussian and Italian method, and to some extent the German, but the English and American people do not take the sword into the council chamber’. Betraying his voting fetishism tendencies,[32] Phillips, like Douglass, claimed, ‘Our weapon is the ballot’. But, unfortunately, ‘The great mass of this country is verging towards a European condition of affairs as regards capital’. This is the consequence of rich men ‘making vassals of our institutions … in one half of the States there is no republic’. Phillips’s remedy for these ills was discussion and voting, not the fire and blood of the Paris Commune.^[33]

Even though Douglass acknowledged that Thiers ‘always was a steadfast supporter of Louis Philippe’, he thought ‘the accusation set forth by the Commune that the Government intends to turn traitor to the Republic and to erect another monarchy on its ruins’, was groundless. Instead, it was the communists who threatened the republic and opened the door to royal restoration. ‘The real danger to the Republic seems rather to threaten from the Reds, who, if successful, would establish a reign of terror, bring disgrace on the very name of the Republic, and republican institutions generally, and finally open the path for another line of monarchs, either ‘by the grace of God’ or by the right of usurpation’.^[34]

For the moment, in early May 1871, Douglass saw both opportunity and threat, writing ‘there is little doubt that the Government will finally come out victorious, and that order will be restored for a while; yet the elements of trouble and discord are too powerful to hope that an era of quiet and prosperity is to follow’. He instructed his readers and the French people that, ‘The only safeguard against monarchism on the one side, and the tyranny of political fanaticism and mobocracy on the other, is in that truly republican spirit which, while securing fair play, equal rights, and equal liberty, and protection to all, leaves everything else to free development, and abstains entirely from meddling with particular social and religious theories or systems, and from the attempt to force them on a people’.^[35]

Two weeks later, Douglass cheered the Versailles government troops, disparaged communism in comparison with true republicanism, and contrasted class conflict in France with that in the United States. Douglass had been reading news ‘with promises of the speedy suppression of the insurrection’ and concluded ‘that the insurrection is near its collapse’. He did not believe meritorious generalship on the part of the government had led to their success but instead cited ‘the demoralization, the dessensions [sic], the general distrust, and the lack of discipline among the Reds’, along with the fact that ‘the provinces have remained quiet, instead of echoing and following the actions of the Commune’.^[36]

Marx had his eye on the provinces as well – the worker-peasant alliance always at the forefront of his mind. A letter from Tomanovskaya suggests that Marx advised the Communards to do what he and Engels had long-ago concluded, based on the lessons of 1848, would be necessary for a victory in any new upsurge in Paris. In the words of the young Russian revolutionary, ‘We must at all costs stir up the provinces to come to our aid’.^[37]

In the first draft of Marx’s Civil War in France, he wrote that in contrast to the French state from 1848 onwards, the Commune objectively represented the interests of the rural toilers. Hence, the reason why Versailles did all it could to prevent the realisation of its worst nightmare – a worker-peasant alliance between Paris and the countryside.^[38] The lack of an alliance between the revolutionary workers in Paris and the small farmers in the rest of the country was not a nightmare for Douglass, but a development to celebrate. Douglass had worried earlier in May, ‘It is true that thus far the troubles have been almost entirely confined to Paris’, giving the Thiers government in Versailles the advantage, ‘but since, from old times, Paris has been the representative of the intellect, the knowledge, and enlightenment of the country, and has always laid down the law for all France, we have to take the present manifestations for the expression of the spirit of the people generally’.^[39] Douglass was not aware of the divide between the more religious peasants in France’s rural areas whom the government drew on for fresh troops, and the anti-clerical workers in Paris and other large cities such as Lyons.

Crushing the Commune would not necessarily lead to a successful French Republic, according to Douglass. The issues at stake were too fundamental. ‘The conflict between wealth and poverty, between capital and labour … and others of equal importance are at the bottom of it, besides distrust of the honesty of the government and its fidelity to the republican cause’. These issues did not inevitably lead to violent conflict. ‘It is true’, he argued, ‘the difficulties arising from these sources do not necessitate a bloody revolution; indeed, they agitate more or less the whole civilised world, our own country as well as others … there indeed be no apprehension that they will lead to violent uprising and bloodshed of a formidable character’. As Douglass wrote in late-March, ‘Capital and labour meet and part as friends in these columns’. In the United States, Douglass thought ‘[f]ull liberty’ would act as a safety valve. Americans were free to agitate, discuss, and experiment ‘under the protection of republican institutions, taking away any need to resort to revolution’.^[40]

On the contrary, there was something, Douglass alleged, about the French temperament that prevented them from acting on the same principles. They had ‘the insurmountable obstacle opposed by their own unfortunate disposition, their incapacity to comprehend the very rudiments of true republican liberty’. French radicals had a ‘lawless spirit, that prompts them to achieve by revolution that which ought to be left to free development, the tyrannical disposition that assumes to lay down laws, to regulate and decree in matters which concern only the choice and convictions of the individual’. This ‘knowledge of the French character’ impelled Douglass ‘to look on the future of the French republic with as much apprehension as sorrow over the delusions of a people, which even in its errors, inspires more pity than indignation, when we remember how for ages it has been the victim of misrule and despotism’.^[41]

Marx argued, contra Douglass, that the Commune actually embodied a ‘true Republic’. The institutions and actions of the Commune, workingmen’s wages for government officials and the replacement of the standing army by the National Guard, ‘made that catchword of bourgeois revolutions, cheap government, a reality by destroying the two greatest sources of expenditure – the standing army and state functionalism … It supplied the republic with the basis of really democratic institutions’. And the secret to this, the Commune’s essence, was that power was in the hands of the workers. The Commune, as Marx argued, ‘was essentially a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of Labour’.^[42]

Marx’s most important and enduring contribution to the Communards came in the immediate aftermath of their demise with the publication in mid-June 1871 of The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council of the International Working-Men’s Association. Marx read this address to the General Council on 30 May, two days after the Commune’s fall, after writing multiple drafts throughout April and May. What Marx wrote for the GC, written in the heat of the Commune’s final days, was as much a defence of the Communards as a political analysis. The political heart of the 40-page document – sandwiched between details leading up to and after the insurgency – is the fifteen-page third section which analyses the Commune itself, ‘where the proletariat for the first time held political power’.^[43]

After quoting from the manifesto that the National Guard’s Central Committee issued to justify its actions on 18 March – ‘The Proletarians of Paris … have understood that it is their imperious duty and their absolute right to render themselves masters of their own destinies, by seizing upon the governmental powers’^[44] – Marx declared: ‘But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purpose’. This was proven by the fact that the largely working-class National Guard replaced the standing army with itself.

Marx then distilled in The Civil War the Commune’s essence:

 

The multiplicity of interpretations to which the Commune has been subjected, and the multiplicity of interests which construed it in their favor, show that it was a thoroughly expansive political form, while all previous forms of government had been emphatically repressive. Its true secret was this. It was essentially a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of Labor.

Except on this last condition, the Communal Constitution would have been an impossibility and a delusion. The political rule of the producer cannot coexist with the perpetuation of his social slavery. The Commune was therefore to serve as a lever for uprooting the economical foundations upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule. With labor emancipated, every man becomes a working man, and productive labor ceases to be a class attribute.^[45]

 

 In one of Douglass’s last sustained treatments of the events in France, he hoped for ‘truly prominent, distinguished men’ to come forward to lead, analysed and compared the morals of the French people to the people of the German Empire, while continuing his criticism of monarchists and communists alike. A main feature of the turmoil in France, according to Douglass, ‘is the total absence of truly prominent, distinguished men on the stage of events’. Almost wishing for another Bonaparte, Douglass wrote, ‘not one man has yet appeared to relieve the darkness of the picture, none to give promise by his patriotism, his love of liberty, and his energy to pacify the conflicting elements, of vindicating the dignity of the nation, and of making a living reality of the present sham of a Republic’. At the same time, he searched for a great man, or great men, to take the helm, he warned against Bonapartism. When a population is demoralised, it is less likely that the ‘[m]ost honest man should obtain supreme influence, but rather the most adroit, the shrewdest plotter and intriguer, the one who will best know how to avail himself of the passions, the ambition and avarice of other plotters and intriguers, and seem to offer them the greatest advantages, the one who will besides have the gift of flattering the vanity of the masses by empty promises of future glory’. Another Napoleon would lead to another conflagration. ‘A man possessed of no higher abilities and worth than Napoleon might again succeed for a while’, Douglass argued, ‘to be sent into exile by another revolution’.^[46]

Douglass focused on what he saw as the national traits of the French and the German people when comparing them. Of the results of the Franco-Prussian War, Douglass wrote, ‘Never has a nation won greater glory than the Germans, and never more crushing defeats have been seen than those suffered by the French’. The Germans did not provoke the war and went into it with ‘a unanimity, and enthusiasm never surpassed in the history of nations, and going into it as a politically divided people, they came out the greatest, most powerful, most united nation in Europe’. In contrast, a ‘people so deeply fallen as the French, in such a state of social and moral dissolution, one, in fact, of whose formerly so highly admired qualities hardly a shadow is left, could not possibly conquer a nation in its full mental, physical, and moral health and vigor’. Douglass blamed the Second Empire of Napoleon which acted to ‘demoralize and corrupt the people more and more, yet it required the Commune and its insurrection, it required the unworthy Assembly, with all its intriguing, unscrupulous Orleanists, Bonapartists, and Legitimists, to reveal the whole depth of rottenness’.^[47]

Marx agreed with Douglass that ‘rottenness’ had matured during the Second Empire, but his solution, notwithstanding his earlier counsel of revolutionary restraint, was the ‘revolutionary overthrow of the political and social conditions that had engendered’ the Empire, which the Commune attempted as the ‘self-sacrificing champion of France’.^[48] To Douglass the communists and monarchists were two sides of the same coin. The conservative assembly might have wanted to institute a terror, but if the communists were successful an era of tyranny would have followed their ascent. As Douglass put it, ‘If the Assembly consists largely of plotters and conspirators, watching the opportunity to betray the Republic and erect another reign of white terror, like the Restoration, on its ruins, the radical Republicans are contaminated with communism and red fanaticism, and their victory would mark the beginning of an era of the most odious despotism of the mob’.^[49] Without an honest man with the ability to institute on his own a true republic, Douglass called for a pox on the houses of both the monarchists and the democratic mob.

Once the horrors of the suppression of the people of Paris by the Versailles politicians, generals, and troops became apparent to Douglass, he became a severe critic of the conservative bourgeois republican government while never converting to the cause of the Commune.[50]

Douglass implied he had not heard of the mass executions the Versailles military had been carrying out since the start of the conflict. ‘For weeks the world has been the horrified spectator of the bloody deeds committed by the French insurgents, and to-day the weight of sympathy is almost reversed in consequence of the savage cruelty with which the government is wreaking its revenge on those deluded, ill-starred men’. While he believed some of the acts could be waved off as carried out by individual soldiers, he also understood that ‘many, too, are the acts of cruelty by which a government calling itself republican is asserting its authority’. He recognised now that monarchists and reactionaries headed the Versailles army. ‘Old politicians of the times of Louis Philippe’, Douglass wrote, ‘and generals of the Empire never suspected of republicanism, much less of Red republicanism, have instituted a reign of terror reminding one of the first French revolution’.^[51]

Readers of the New National Era were given a glimpse at the criminality and barbarism that went into suppressing the Commune. While the guillotine of revolutions past was objectionable enough, ‘the victims sentenced now-a-days by drumhead court-martial are slaughtered by hundreds, by means of mitrailleuses or volleys fired by whole companies’. This sort of indiscriminate firing into crowds of prisoners was not efficient, leading to ‘all stages of mutilation and agony, until after repeated volleys the merciful bullet will reach them that is to give them the final blow’. Douglass admonished this ‘government calling itself republican’ and advised leniency, if only because the rebels were under a ‘revolutionary spell’. He thought, ‘it is safe to assume that by far the larger number, when looked upon from a higher stand-point, must be considered innocent, since in an insurrection of such dimensions the masses are always the blind and deluded tools of their leaders’.^[52]

 

Douglass and the Labour Question in 1870–1

The Paris Commune, along with labour unrest in the United States, compelled Douglass to address the labour question throughout 1871 in various editions of his newspaper, the New National Era. ‘The labor question’, Douglass wrote in October, ‘of which in this country the abolition of slavery, of property in man, was the first grand step – is not free from the evils of ignorance, passion, ambition, selfishness, and demagogism’. It was natural, Douglass thought, that working people, Chinese, Irish, or Black, felt discontent when the ‘non-producers now receive the larger share of what those who labor produce’.^[53]

In the 15 June edition, Douglass used a strike in Washington DC to compare the US reality to France, promote his free labour theory of labour relations, or, from a working-class perspective, class collaborationism, and offer advice to American workers. Douglass saw the strike as a danger whose worst impacts were avoided: ‘A cloud no bigger than a man’s hand … its bolts were withheld’. In Douglass’s opinion, this was thanks to the Territorial Governor of Washington DC, Republican Henry Cooke, appointed by President Ulysses S. Grant in late February 1871, and other politicians.^[54]

Douglass reported, using language at variance with his usually sympathetic treatment of workers, that, ‘A large body of muscle and of untrained mind and heart was in a perilous condition running loose in our streets. It wanted higher wages and fewer hours of labor, and struck for both’. Where ‘pride and fury’ guided Thiers and his government, ‘temperance, forbearance, and wisdom’ guided Cooke and the government in Washington DC. Class conflict evident in Paris was not limited to the Old World, ‘riot and bloodshed’ was possible ‘in the streets of Washington’. Douglass warned some were ‘forgetful that we might have the same [the hell of horrors enacted in Paris] here on a smaller scale’. He recognised, ‘There is a terrible gulf between capital and labor constantly liable to tempests and whirlwinds’. But fortunately, ‘the strike is now ended, the men are at work, good sense on both sides has prevailed, the laborers get not all they demanded, but more than they formerly received, and all goes on peacefully again’.^[55]

Douglass then provided guidance to workers considering going on strike and those who would advise them to do so. Influenced, no doubt, by memories of racist white workers who had violently prevented him from working, and his sons’ denial of membership in an all-white printers’ union, Douglass opposed blocking strike-breakers from crossing picket lines.^[56] ‘It may be well and needful at times to strike’, Douglass cautioned, ‘but it can never be well to take the law into your own hands and undertake to prevent other men from working’. This would amount to ‘despotism and anarchy’ which could not ‘be safely tolerated for an hour’. Workers had attempted to engage in such action and Douglass wrote, ‘should the law be defied in this city by such conduct again, sterner measures of repression will doubtless be resorted to than were seen ten days ago’. Douglass, after giving cover to stern measures of repression against strikers, assured his readers that his sympathy was with labourers, and he understood their plight as a freeman and former slave. Because he empathised with their suffering, ‘we are slow to favor strikes among laborers, for they almost in every instance get the worst of it’.^[57]

Friedrich Sorge, a German-American Marxist and member of the International, in a report to Marx, painted a different picture of the DC strike and had different hopes for what it might lead to. There are only two explicit mentions of Black workers in International Workingmen’s Association records. One is in a report that Sorge wrote in June 1871 to the GC about the state of the American labour movement. ‘A great strike occurred lately in Washington amongst the colored laborers for an increase of their extremely low wages’, Sorge reported. ‘They were momentarily defeated by the stepping in of the white laborers. The result will probably be the emancipation of the colored workingmen from the grip of the political suckers who kept them till now almost exclusively in the ranks of the so-called Republican Party’. Did Sorge have Douglass specifically in mind with his ‘political suckers’ epithet? If not directly, Douglass’s report on the strike, the absence of a commentary on the way race was used to break the strike – instead criticising picket lines to stop strike-breakers – and his praise of the Republican Territorial Governor made him a prime candidate. Sorge’s hope, not to be fulfilled, of a major strike acting as an impetus for Black workers to break with the Republican Party echoed what Marx hoped for six years later in 1877 with the withdrawal of the last federal troops from the South. This was not to be the case in either instance.^[58]

Sometimes, Douglass’s paper supported employers against striking workers. Other times he sounded radical as when he wrote, ‘The civilization, then, looked at in its material aspect alone, which on the one hand constantly increases its wealth-creating capacities and on the other as steadily leaves out of the direct benefits thereof at least seven-tenths of all who live within its influence, cannot have realised the fundamental condition of its continuance’. The number of workers joining the labour movement would compel a hearing, Douglass thought, and could not be ignored. ‘It is the duty of those who have been lifted up by this general movement, this attrition of classes, of which the coming struggle of the “proletariat” (to use a word common in European discussion, though hardly yet generally applicable to our condition) is the final and natural consequence’. Douglass’s solution was to urge his readers to support a bill introduced in Congress that would set up a commission of three people to ‘investigate the subject of the wages and hours of labor, and of the division of the joint profits of labor and capital between the laborer and the capitalist’.^[59]

However, Douglass’s prescriptions are less convincing than his insights. He believed, ‘Those abuses we are outgrowing however, and not even the conservatism of monarchical Europe can stem the tide of modern ideas’. If workers decided to strike, Douglass stated he would support them ‘always provided, however, that such results are achieved solely by moral persuasion, and neither violence nor intimidation are resorted to … such deeds only serve to reverse the balance of wrong, and would substitute one odious tyranny for another’.^[60] Douglass’s liberal worldview allowed him to argue that workers defending their picket lines were just as despicable as capitalists driving workers as beasts of burden.^[61]

Nicholas Buccola argues, ‘Douglass was concerned about the fundamental unfairness and legitimate discontent of the burgeoning industrial capitalist system’ and his ‘response to the labor question reveals that on this issue he was closer to the reform liberal view than he was to the libertarian view’. While Buccola examines Douglass’s commitment ‘to the institution of private property and the idea of free labor as pillars of individual liberty’, and the tension between that commitment and the ‘gross inequalities’ of postbellum America, he avoids treatment of Douglass’s criticism of labour organisations and their defence of picket lines. Douglass’s defence of strike-breakers – even white scabs breaking the strike of Black labourers – and his response to the Paris Commune provide more evidence of Douglass’s position ‘as a member of the liberal family’.^[62]

When he examined two October 1871 strikes, where workers were demanding a reduction in the ten-hour work day, Douglass saw the employers as reasonable. But he also conceded that it was ‘evident that ten hours’ uninterrupted hard work, with the addition of the time required to commute to the factory and back, will, in the long run, reduce the laborer to the level of a beast of burden’. Douglass was able to discern cracks in free labour ideology via the proletarianisation of labour. He wrote, ‘the uniform, mechanical, and exhausting factory work, which keeps him busy uninterruptedly year after year, without offering him any prospect of ever becoming independent, nay, of ever achieving more than keeps starvation from his door, cannot fail either to make him desperate, or to smother all higher impulses and aspirations in him’.^[63]

Waldo E. Martin Jr. explains that Douglass evinced a ‘procapitalist spirit’ and ‘criticized trade unions for excessive hostility toward their capitalist antagonists’. Part of the reason why, as David Blight notes, Douglass did not turn to labour organisations was ‘largely because of their discriminatory practices against black and Chinese workers’. Labour unions, Douglass also believed, stood in the way of workers becoming capitalists themselves. As opposed to workers’ self-organisation, he looked to an enlightened Republican government, which had gained legitimacy in his eyes via the crusade to overthrow slavery, and their proposed commissions on labour and capital. Unions, whether they were enforcing picket lines, limiting overtime, or excluding Black workers, were ‘utterly incompatible with true republican principles and institutions’. Martin persuasively maintains that Douglass’s contention that capital and labour were on more equal footing in the United States than in Europe ‘contradicted the increasing degradation of labour as well as the overwhelming dominance of capital in the rapidly industrializing United States’. The free labour ideology of Douglass and the Republican Party made sense ‘in the preindustrial world from which men like Lincoln’ – and Douglass – ‘came’, Heather Cox Richardson explains. However, the Civil War ‘had nurtured a booming manufacturing sector, with huge factories worked by hundreds of employees who never saw, let alone worked with, their employer’. Eric Foner describes this free labour social vision as ‘already being rendered obsolete by the industrial revolution and the appearance of a class of permanent wage laborers’.^[64]

 

Douglass and the Colored National Labor Union 

Even with Douglass’s support of property and wariness of labour unions which would be more fully developed in the early 1870s, he was included in the Call for the Colored National Labor Union Convention as a member of the Co-operative Executive Committee in September 1869.^[65] The first meeting of the Colored National Labor Union saw few workers attend, mainly, according to Philip Foner, because they were ‘too poor to come to Washington’. This led to attendees mainly composed of ‘lawyers, preachers, teachers, or merchants’. The platform of this national labour union of lawyers and merchants stated, as Douglass would promote, ‘capital and labor were complementary and necessary to each other, harmony between the two should be cultivated’ in order to avoid strikes. Calls for land and disputes over support for a form of independent working-class political action dominated parts of the proceedings, and would cause future rifts between Blacks and the National Labor Union. Douglass, and many others, would not support a move to a workers’ party out of genuine dedication to the Republicans, but also lesser-evilism; a victory for the Democratic Party would be disastrous and support for a labour party might have made that possible. The white leader of the National Labor Union, Richard F. Trevellick, called for unity between Black and white workers but refused to support legislation that would have allowed Black workers to enter factories and workshops. He instead focused his ire on the monetary system. Trevellick, according to Foner, asked ‘the Negro to abandon the Republican Party while offering nothing meaningful in return. On the contrary, he in effect promised to do nothing himself about restrictive union practices, since he regarded them as local matters’.^[66]

Douglass was later elected the CNLU’s second president in January 1871. Douglass was active in writing and promoting an address to his old nemesis, the African Colonization Society, demanding they cease any propaganda among Black workers. The CNLU convention in January 1871 endorsed the New National Era as the group’s national organ and ‘several members subscribed largely to the stock of the paper’ to help defer Douglass’s costs.^[67]

Douglass emphasised at the January 1871 gathering that he was no longer a labourer and actually held power over those now looking for work – as men from the shipyard he worked at in Baltimore came to him for assistance to find work in Washington DC.^[68] In doing so, he emphasised the free labour ideology that dominated the liberals and Republican Party. He denied or deemphasised the proletarianisation of work in the United States and the creation of a hereditary proletariat in the working class. Given his opposition to picket lines and support of a harmony of interests between capital and labour examined above, it may be pertinent to ask – was Douglass one of the first misleaders of American labour? By 1874, the New National Era was publishing editorials titled, ‘The Folly, Tyranny, and Wickedness of Labor Unions’, where striking miners in Pennsylvania were severely castigated while the owner of the iron works who employed the workers was praised. Foner and Lewis describe the position of Douglass and his paper as, ‘The most curious position on blacks and labour unions … Douglass’s basic disposition toward unionism was hostile. In the end, the only solution seemed to be for blacks to become capitalists themselves, or convince the capitalists to obey the Golden Rule, neither of which were very constructive alternatives’.^[69]

While freed people were becoming more proletarianised between 1865 and 1871 after the abolition of slavery, a portion becoming wage workers and others becoming farmers, sharecroppers, or farm workers, the process was still too immature to become a proletarian movement led by anyone other than Douglass or his cohorts – ‘lawyers, preachers, teachers, or merchants’. The proletarianisation of Black labour that Douglass rejected, which would make, in his words, the workers ‘desperate’, but, better, would organise and wake them up to their self-worth, would take decades before making decisive inroads into the union movement, and a century before the Black working class could put its stamp on what became the Second Reconstruction.

The revolutionary potential of the Black toilers would be personified in the luminary of Malcolm X – but that was a century away. When Douglass became president of the Colored National Labor Union in January 1871, only about 11 percent of Blacks were free workers^[70] – so the fledgling movement could not be anything other than one of the professionals, ministers, and other middle-class layers. If only 11 percent of free Blacks were free workers, that means they would have comprised a miniscule percentage of the overall proletarian population in the United States. As George Novack reminds us, ‘The southern revolution was not proletarian in its character or socialist in its aims, as Du Bois believed, but plebeian and petty-bourgeois in its social basis and bourgeois in its tasks. It did not pass beyond the foundations of private ownership, production for the market, and capitalist relations’.^[71] And, because more than ninety percent of Blacks were still living in the South at the end of the war, the socio-political reality there inevitably determined what the Black population as a whole could do.

The practical refusal of white labour to heed Marx’s call to ‘to remove every shackle from freedom’s limb’, continued to haunt the working class. The CNLU report by the Committee on Capital and Labor, written by George Downing, severely castigated ‘the unkind, estranging policy of the labor organizations of white men, who, while they make loud proclaims as to the injustice … to which they are subjected, justify injustice … by excluding from their benches and their workshops worthy craftsmen and apprentices only because of their color, for no just cause’. The resolution continued, illustrating the yawning gap between Black and white workers and their labour leaders, ‘We say to such, so long as you persist therein we cannot fellowship with you in your struggle, and look for failure and mortification on your part’. Real unity was not possible, Foner writes, ‘so long as the white trade unions refused to remove the economic barriers against black workers’.^[72]

Foner takes issue with the interpretation of the election of Douglass to head the Colored National Labor Union as proof of politicisation of the movement or that the organisation looked to suffrage alone as the solution to the problems of Blacks. Foner describes interracial labour gatherings that met together under the call of the CNLU in Texas, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and Missouri. He documents CNLU organisation of unions and successful strikes. These laudable actions and gains may have been in spite of Douglass and not because of his leadership. He remained focused on legislation in DC, mentioned above, supporting the appointment of a commission to investigate the condition of workers in the United States. And, in fact, ‘the CNLU itself never met again after 1871’.^[73]

Against ‘all those who attempt to stir up hostility to wealth and encourage outrage and violence’, almost certainly in response to the events in Paris, on 20 April 1871 the New National Era tried to convince its readers of ‘The True Labor Reform’. The editorial blamed pauperism and poverty in Europe on monarchism and in the Southern states on slavery, both ‘faulty political institutions’. Douglass admitted that it is ‘a long step from the wage system to the complete emancipation of the working people. The relation of laborer to employer is servitude for a consideration – a modified slavery entered voluntarily by the laborer himself, and terminable at his pleasure, subject to forfeiture of pay if terminated before the expiration of a specific contract’. Labour leaders, the editorial argued, ‘more or less adherents of communism’, attack capital and wrongly denounce it ‘as the chief cause of the poverty of the labouring classes’. It is not capital or capitalism that caused poverty – ‘real pauperism … can always be traced back to faulty political institutions; first of all, to monarchism with all the veils and wrongs attending it’. In the United States, poverty is ‘indigenous only in those States where liberty and equality have been mere mockeries until lately; where the black man was debarred by law from acquiring knowledge and wealth, and the white man who owned no slaves was the obedient tool and servant of the master of the whip’. The editorial’s solution to poverty: an ill-defined ‘co-operation – co-operation both in production and distribution’.^[74]

Douglass, or his son Lewis, editorialised in September 1870 in opposition to a labour party, encapsulating their liberal worldview, and showing the gulf that had developed between Douglass and Marx over the previous few years:

 

There is no justice or safety in any organization which seeks to specially promote the interests of any one class of citizens at the expense of others. A capitalists’ party, a producers and manufacturer’s party, or a workingman’s party within the circumscribed meaning of these terms, would be at once a menace to all other class interests, and would not only provoke the organization of political parties or factions for the special protection of each distinctive class, but create such divisions that anarchy and violence would sooner or later become inevitable. Hence, we must not for a moment tolerate the idea of arraying the employer against the employee, the capitalist against the business man, the manufacturer and producer against the laborer, the rich against the poor, the strong against the weak, nor encourage any of the antagonisms, so freely prated about and advocated by the shallow if not vicious demagogue. We must seek rather, by just laws and efficient administration, to harmonize all these superficially antagonistic interests, justice, universal justice, and not special privileges and advantages, is what we should perpetually aim at. Equal justice will wrong no man, and give no good cause for complaint even to the most selfish.^[75]

 

 

RTG Letter

As we have seen, Marx described the Commune as essentially a working-class government. An unambiguously anti-working-class letter published on the front page of the 19 October 1871 edition of the New National Era provides more evidence that Douglass never would have accepted or advocated for such a government and gives insight into why he reacted to the Commune the way he did. The letter was signed by the paper’s Philadelphia correspondent, RTG, likely Richard Theodore Greener.^[76] While the issue opens with a disclaimer that ‘The New National Era does not hold itself responsible for views expressed by correspondents’, Douglass let Greener’s attack on the Colored National Labor Union go unanswered. Marx’s name was mentioned in this correspondence – the only time, from what we can tell, in any of Douglass’s newspapers, writings, or speeches.^[77]

After telling Douglass that he did not see land ownership as important, but rather that agriculture was ‘a primitive, though to a degree a necessary state’, Greener turned to the Colored National Labor Union. ‘I notice that the [Colored] National Labor Union’, he wrote, ‘whatever that high sounding name may mean, is soon to meet in the city of Columbia, South Carolina’. Greener had followed the CNLU and found its speeches ‘incongruous’ and its resolutions ‘indefinite’. He worried ‘all of our prominent men, yourself among the number’, were being attracted to the movement.^[78]

What is the purpose of the CNLU? ‘Is it merely another name for Communism, or La Commune under another form?’ Greener asked Douglass and the readers of the New National Era in a set of leading questions.

 

Does it propose to make labor the equal of capital – to furnish every man with a farm, or a house, and make him keep it? Or to give ten hours’ pay for eight hours’ work? Or is it merely a coloured offshoot of the notorious Internationale, which now has its branches throughout the world; which ruled Paris under the name of La Commune, and proposes to overthrow stable government in England, and eventually to give us a mobocracy in America?^[79]

 

A spectre was haunting Greener – a coloured offshoot of the International Working Men’s Association, or an international, interracial alliance of workers.^[80]

Greener, like many middle-class Northerners, worried about what would happen after working people organised together to demand rights. ‘As I have yet to read a clear statement of its object, from its high priest, Carl Marx, down to Bradleugh in England, or Phillips, Cummings, or Myers in America, I should like to know what these gentlemen propose to do with the giant they are conjuring up and assuring about his strength, after he shall have recovered all his ‘rights’ and be monarch over capital?’^[81]

What would happen to people like Greener, a trailblazing Black man who graduated from Harvard in 1870 and would go on to become a law professor in South Carolina, once working people came to power? He implied that industrial workers would come for those ‘who work with our brains instead of our hands. … Are we to be emancipated’, Greener asked,

 

who are compelled to do our eight or nine hours’ work, and then work several more hours to get ready for the next day’s labor? How many editors, how many ministers, how many lawyers, how many capitalists – ogres, monsters that they are! – how many professors and school teachers … would not hasten to join this labor movement – this uprising of hard-handed toil, of sinewy workmen, and all the other glorious adjectives applied to our modern Volcan, if he would only guarantee to us, also, eight hours’ pay for six hours’ work, and a chance to spend our evenings in the beer shops, or at the varieties, or in witnessing prize fights and other exhibitions laudatory of mere muscle, mere brawn, which the time-serving, tyrannical capitalist knows nothing of, and the ‘aristocratic’ intellectual man counts inferior in the long run to brains!^[82]

 

Appealing to that side of Douglass who had left the plantation and shipyard, Greener wrote in conclusion:

 

It is because I, like you, Mr. Editor, have sprung from the ranks of these myrmidons, and have shaken off the service of Vulcan, preferring to follow Minerva, even though she bid me to work fifteen hours a day, that I am anxious, yes, alarmed, lest the modern disciples of the limping god bring us back to his service. Do you long for the ship-yard again? I surely do not for the drudgery of a store with out the prospect of promotion. I prefer the rule of a judicious and sensible few to that of the mirmidons race seconde.^[83]

 

It is curious that Douglass, ostensibly the President of the Colored National Labor Union Greener was attacking, would let this assault go unanswered. Curious, that is, until we understand that Douglass harboured many of the same feelings. As Peter Myers explains, ‘Douglass held that the often-despised bourgeoisie, or what Locke termed the ‘industrious and rational’ class, in collaboration with the practitioners of modern science, represented at its best the most progressive and revolutionary class in human history’.^[84]

  

Douglass, the Paris Commune, and the Retreat from Reconstruction

The Paris Commune demanded intense scrutiny from Americans, who were in the middle of the first nationwide attempt at interracial democracy, that is, Reconstruction. This section places Douglass’s views on the Commune in political context, especially amongst other liberals in the US. The reaction of many Americans to the Paris Commune – Republicans and abolitionists included – did not portend well for this first attempt, now beginning to fail, at interracial democracy. As Katz instantiates, radicals like Lydia Maria Child attacking Wendell Phillips for his support of the Parisian workers, and other abolitionists associating social change with anarchy was not a promising sign for the experiment of Reconstruction ‘whose end would be hastened by association with the Paris Commune’. The Commune ‘became an excuse to assert a bolder elitism, or even to retreat from Reconstruction’, Katz convincingly writes.^[85]

Douglass never retreated from his vision of Reconstruction as a project to win equal citizenship for Black Americans, especially the right to vote, but he was unwilling to defend the only coalition that could have made it a reality – the multiracial working class, Caucasian wage workers and farmers, immigrant and native born, along with the freed people – with the eventual goal of instituting a state that not only represented the interests of the producing classes for the first time but also defended those interests. His platform of free men, free soil, free speech, a free press, the ballot for all, education for all, and fair wages for all was tenuous in the hands of Northern and Southern capitalists.^[86]

‘The growing American tension over workers and the nature of the nation’s political economy heightened dramatically with the establishment of the Paris Commune’, explains Heather Cox Richardson. By this time, Douglass certainly counted himself among the propertied Americans terrified by the Commune and opposed what he saw as the turmoil of the mob in power. Douglass’s commentary on the outbreak of strikes and the labour question seemed to indicate he was one of the many Americans Richardson describes who were too nervous about workers using force to defend their interests to offer them true solidarity. Events after the Civil War fed Republican fears that workers would try to gain property through collective action. Republicans, liberals, and even radical abolitionists formed part of a group ‘that clung to the idea that the true American system depended on a harmony of interest between labor and capital’.^[87] The editorial position of Douglass’s New National Era, as well as its analysis of strikes and labour organisations, clearly placed him among this group. While Douglass expressed sympathy with striking workers, he opposed effective defences of their picket lines and their drive to affect their working conditions through their own organisations.

 

Great Railroad Strike of 1877

While we have yet to uncover any extant views from Douglass about the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, we feel there is enough evidence from earlier periods to speculate.^[88] Nothing in his past indicates he would have supported the ‘general railroad strike’ that ‘developed into a national conflagration that brought the country closer to a social revolution than at any other time in its century of existence except for the Civil War’, as Philip Foner put it.^[89]

Douglass had just entered the Rutherford B. Hayes administration as the marshal of the District of Columbia. The office ‘helped run the federal court that once adjudicated fugitive-slave cases’, ironic evidence of the progress made through the social revolution brought on by the Civil War, by posting bankruptcies and holding prisoners as they moved between jail and the courts.^[90] As Hayes withdrew troops from the Southern states, leaving freed people to the mercy of accelerating and deepening white supremacy, it is more likely Douglass would have supported the moves of law and order to restore tranquillity and crush the strikers.

He had warned of a cloud withholding its bolts when a strike of labourers did not develop into a wider conflagration back in 1871. Editorials against independent working-class political action, strikes, and the defence of picket lines regularly materialised in the paper he owned and edited, the New National Era. The milieu he operated within as evidenced from the RTG letter, even as he was elected president of the National Colored Labor Union, reinforced Douglass’s bourgeois outlook. Why would we expect Douglass, now established in a presidential administration, would have acted any differently in this instance?

Marx and Engels, on the other hand, were sympathetic to the general strike but sober about its chances, likely to ‘be suppressed’. More importantly, it pointed the way forward for them, ‘a point of departure for the constitution of a serious workers’ party in the’ US for the first time. Also propitious in Marx’s opinion, it took place when the new President Hayes administration was withdrawing Union troops from the South, and thus likely to provoke an angry response from Blacks, while small farmers in the West were being squeezed out by the capitalist monopolies. Both developments, Marx anticipated, would turn the Blacks and small farmers ‘into militant allies of the workers’.^[91] Though not to be, Marx could not have been more correct about the alliance of social forces that would have to be at the centre of a successful revolution in the United States – the working class, toilers who are Black, and exploited farmers’.^[92]

 

Conclusion

Speaking on 4 July 1862, Frederick Douglass, praising the American revolutionaries of 1776, told an audience that ‘rebellions are quite respectable in the eyes of the world, and very properly so. They naturally command the sympathy of mankind, for generally they are on the side of progress. They would overthrow and remove some old and festering abuse not to be otherwise disposed of, and introduce a higher civilization, and a larger measure of liberty among men’. However, not all rebellions were created equal. For example, the slaveholding rebels waging war against the United States fought ‘for the guilty purpose of handing down to the latest generations the accursed system of human bondage’.^[93]

Peter Myers writes that ‘Douglass aligned himself with revolutionary movements everywhere they arose to vindicate the principle of equal rights or equality in liberty against a prevailing order of entrenched inequality’.^[94] But there was at least one ‘revolutionary movement’ that repulsed Douglass which in essence did seek to ‘vindicate the principle of equal rights in liberty against a prevailing order of entrenched inequality’. Without social equality, the chief lesson of capitalism’s first century or less of existence, ‘equality in liberty’ for the proletariat would be a chimaera – a lesson not lost on the Parisian proletariat. Douglass’s negative reaction to the Communards of March 1871 and the concurrent fledgling labour movement in the United States betrayed his classical liberal sensibilities and its free labour assumptions about the presumed harmony of interests between capital and labour, its solution for addressing the needs of the proletariat. Contra Douglass, Marx portrayed the Commune as ‘the idea’ and ‘the workers’ government is the fact in which the 18th of March culminates’. While the revolutionary party in Paris was too disorganised and immature to succeed, the struggle was a ‘prelude’ – ‘an unforgettable example of initiative, boldness and courage. If it did not triumph, at least it showed the way’.^[95] No one instantiated that forecast better than Lenin for whom the lessons of the Commune served as essential reading for his playbook for the October 1917 Revolution.

Consistent with his analysis of the European Spring in 1848, Douglass denounced and criticised the attempt of workers in Paris to take history into their own hands after the institution of republican structures. He accepted the accounts of mob-rule and anarchy promoted by the Thiers government and printed in American newspapers. While he opposed the Second Empire of France, Douglass concluded that communism tainted French republicanism and formed just as much an antithesis to true republicanism as the restoration of the monarchy. Marx believed a true republic required real democratic institutions in the hands of working people – what the Commune briefly realised, notwithstanding Douglass’s less flattering portrait. Douglass’s reaction to the Paris Commune exposes the limitations of his liberal political thought to take on an internationalist analysis of class conflict and labour struggles.

The Paris Commune and the labour upsurge coming out of the Civil War in the United States pressured Douglass to spend time and space in his newspaper analysing the labour question. While he expressed sympathy with workers attempting to improve their lives, he advocated for conciliation between capital and workers while condemning labour organisations and their picket lines. Further investigation into Douglass’s writings in the New National Era on workers, unions, the Depression of 1873, the National Labor Union and the Colored National Labor Union would be fruitful, confirming or complicating this finding.

Douglass relied on the newly consolidated Republican-led capitalist government, rightly credited with crushing the Confederacy and enactment of the Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution, to mediate between workers and their bosses with the goal of finding a harmony of interests.^[96] Douglass did not agree with the claim that only the working class, in all its skin colours and other identities, has a class interest in ridding the world of social inequality. He resisted any move to independent working-class political action through a labour party, as those calls came from white workers insufficiently opposed to organising workers of all colours into their unions. The vast majority of Blacks, not only Douglass, were unwilling to break with the Republican Party. The eventual downfall of Reconstruction constituted the worst setback in the history of the American working class because workers and producers were forcibly divided along racial lines by Klan violence while solidarity was crippled and Jim Crow oppression enshrined.^[97]

To make an ironclad case that Douglass contributed to Reconstruction’s failure is probably impossible. However, the views he expressed about the Paris Commune, until now unexamined, and his opposition to effective labour organisation after the Civil War dovetailed with the views of other Northern liberals that historians, such as Heather Cox Richardson, have identified as playing a significant role in the retreat from Reconstruction. As white supremacist redemption, terror, and violence increased, liberals in the North, frightened by a surging labour movement, retreated from their original embrace of Reconstruction. As David Montgomery teaches, Radical Republicans’ goal was equality before the law within a unified nation. ‘But beyond equality lay demands of wage earners to which the equalitarian formula provided no meaningful answer, but which rebounded to confound the efforts of equality’s ardent advocates. Class conflict, in other words, was the submerged shoal on which Radical dreams foundered’.^[98]

Marx would have been in agreement with Douglass that the American labour movement’s ‘first grand step’ toward the emancipation of labour was ‘the abolition of slavery, of property in man’, as Douglass put it in October 1871. In November 1864, Marx, on behalf of the International Workingmen’s Association, congratulated Lincoln on his re-election. He took the opportunity to remind the president that as long as ‘the working men, the true political power of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic; while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned labourer to sell himself and choose his own master; they were unable to attain the true freedom of labour or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation, but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war’.^[99]

Three years later, in Capital, published in 1867, Marx returned to his pregnant insight that still has currency. ‘In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded’.^[100]

Both Marx and Douglass wholeheartedly backed the abolition of slavery and the Union cause in the Civil War – the ‘first grand step’ – but Marx saw the reconstructed bourgeois republic as an indispensable means to an end, more favourable terrain to organise for power in the hands of the working class, and not the end in itself, as Douglass did.

The real-time political analysis comparing Marx and Douglass offered here is expanded upon to include the European Spring, the tumultuous decade of the 1850s, the Civil War, and Reconstruction in a book recently co-authored with August Nimtz. We reveal how their two competing political perspectives, liberalism and communism, performed during these history-changing events. We believe The Communist and the Revolutionary Liberal in the Second American Revolution is the definitive account of Marx’s writings and actions on race, class and revolution in the US Civil War era and a defence of Marx against present-day critics. Looking at how revolutionaries like Marx and Douglass converged and diverged on the defining issues of their day helps us grasp the fundamental issues facing working people today.

 

Kyle A. Edwards is a worker at the University of Minnesota and a member of AFSCME 3800. He is author of ‘“Those Deluded, Ill-Starred Men”: Frederick Douglass, the New National Era, and the Paris Commune’. Along with August Nimtz, he co-authored The Communist and the Revolutionary Liberal in the Second American Revolution: Comparing Karl Marx and Frederick Douglass in Real-Time (Brill, 2024). This work will be presented during a panel discussion at the 2024 Historical Materialism Conference in London.

[1] Heather Cox Richardson, To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party (New York: Basic Books), 2014, pp. 66, 70, 93–4. Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865–1901 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). 2001.

[2] An earlier version of this article was published as Appendix A in August H. Nimtz and Kyle A. Edwards, The Communist and the Revolutionary Liberal in the Second American Revolution: Comparing Karl Marx and Frederick Douglass in Real-Time (Leiden: Brill), 2024. See also Kyle A. Edwards, ‘“Those Deluded, Ill-Starred Men”: Frederick Douglass, the New National Era, and the Paris Commune’, New North Star, 4 (2022), pp. 1–19.

[3] Nimtz and Edwards, The Communist and the Revolutionary Liberal, pp. 63-68.

[4] ‘Position of the New National Era’, New National Era, 30 March 1871.

[5] John W. Blassingame, (ed.), The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews Volume 2: 1847–1854 (New Haven: Yale University Press), 1982, pp. 433, 474.

[6] Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press), 2014, pp. 246–7.

[7] Karl Marx, letter to Ludwig Kugelmann, 12 April 1871, in Marx & Collected Works Volume 44: Marx and Engels: Letters 1870-1873 (London: Lawrence & Wishart), 1989, pp. 131-2.

[8] Karl Marx, ‘The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council of the International Working-Men’s Association’, in Marx & Engels Collected Works Volume 22: Marx and Engels: 1870-1871 (London: Lawrence & Wishart), 1986, pp. 311-55, here p. 355.

[9] Ibid, pp. 334-5.

[10] ‘Aspects and Prospects in Europe’, New National Era, 30 March 1871.

[11] Daniel Gaido, ‘The First Workers’ Government in History: Karl Marx’s Addenda to Lissagaray’s History of the Commune of 1871’, Historical Materialism, 29:1, pp. 1–64, here p. 24.

[12] ‘Aspects and Prospects in Europe’, New National Era, 30 March 1871. Gaido, ‘The First Workers’ Government in History’, p. 18. John Merriman, Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune of 1871 (New Haven: Yale University Press), 2014, pp. 40–5. August H. Nimtz, Marx and Engels: Their Contribution to the Democratic Breakthrough (Albany: SUNY Press), 2000, p. 211.

[13] Karl Marx, letter to Leo Frankel and Louis Eugène Varlin, 13 May 1871, in MECW Vol. 44, pp. 148-9, here p. 149.

[14] As Richardson writes, ‘American newspapers plastered details of the Commune on their front pages, describing it as a propertied American’s worst nightmare’. Richardson, To Make Men Free, p. 93.

[15] ‘Adulterated Republicanism’, New National Era, 6 April 1871. Gaido, ‘The First Workers’ Government in History’, p. 17. On the elections, see also Merriman, Massacre, pp. 1, 32–3, 39. Nimtz, Marx and Engels, p. 211.

[16] ‘Adulterated Republicanism’, New National Era, 6 April 1871.

[17] Karl Marx, ‘The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council of the International Working-Men’s Association’, in MECW Vol. 22, pp. 311-55, here pp. 319-20.

[18] Karl Marx, letter to Ludwig Kugelmann, 12 April 1871, in MECW Vol. 44, pp. 131-2, here, p. 131.

[19] Karl Marx, letter to Ludwig Kugelmann, 17 April 1871, in MECW Vol. 44, pp. 136-7, here p. 137.

[20] ‘The Revolters’ Delusion’, New National Era, 27 April 1871.

[21] Ibid.

[22] ‘Dark Prospects’, New National Era, 4 May 1871.

[23] Ibid. Merriman, Massacre, pp. 13–14. The role being deprived of the right to elect a mayor played in making the Commune, ‘the focal point of the popular aspirations in the French capital’, is contained in Marx’s additions to Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray’s History of the Commune of 1871 and examined in Gaido, ‘The First Workers’ Government in History’, pp. 19–20.

[24] Merriman, Massacre, pp. 118–22, 203–24.

[25] ‘The Last Act of the Insurrection’, New National Era, 1 June 1871. Nimtz, Marx and Engels, p. 214.

[26] Gaido, ‘The First Workers’ Government in History’, p. 34.

[27] Karl Marx, ‘The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council of the International Working-Men’s Association’, in MECW Vol. 22, pp. 311-55, here, p. 335.

[28] Karl Marx, ‘The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council of the International Working-Men’s Association’, in MECW Vol. 22, pp. 311-55, here, pp. 323-4, 327., pp. 323–4, 327. Nimtz, Marx and Engels, p. 213.

[29] ‘General Butler on the French Situation’, New National Era, 6 July 1871. Phillip M. Katz, From Appomattox to Montmartre: Americans and the Paris Commune (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 1998, p. 237n40.

[30] ‘General Butler on the French Situation’, New National Era, 6 July 1871.

[31] Karl Marx, ‘The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council of the International Working-Men’s Association’, in MECW Vol. 22, pp. 311-55, here, p. 350.

[32] On voting fetishism, the mistaken belief that what takes place in the electoral arena or the voting booth is the actual exercise of power, see August H. Nimtz ‘The Trump Moment: Why It Happened, Why We “Dodged the Bullet”, and “What Is To Be Done?”’, Legal Form, 24 February 2021, available from: https://legalform.blog/2021/02/24/the-trump-moment-why-it-happened-why-we-dodged-the-bullet-and-what-is-to-be-done-august-h-nimtz/ (last accessed 21 October 2024).

[33] ‘The May Anniversaries’, New National Era, 18 May 1871. ‘Wendell Phillips – Speech at Springfield-His Theories on Labor’, New National Era, 2 November 1871. For another example of Phillips’s voting fetishism, see Brenda Wineapple, The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation (New York: Random House), 2020, p. 75.

[34] ‘Dark Prospects’, New National Era, 4 May 1871.

[35] ‘Ibid.

[36] ‘No Peace in France’, New National Era, 18 May 1871.

[37] Stewart Edwards (ed.), The Communards of Paris, 1871 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press) 1973, p. 134.

[38] Karl Marx, ‘First Draft of The Civil War in France’, in MECW Vol. 22, pp. 437-515, here, p. 494-5..

[39] ‘Dark Prospects’, New National Era, 4 May 1871.

[40] ‘No Peace in France’, New National Era, 18 May 1871. ‘Position of the New National Era’, New National Era, 30 March 1871.

[41] ‘No Peace in France’, New National Era, 18 May 1871.

[42] Karl Marx, ‘The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council of the International Working-Men’s Association’, in MECW Vol. 22, pp. 311-55, here, p. 334. Nimtz, Marx and Engels, p. 216. The ‘distinguishing traits of the Commune as a workers’ government’ are examined in Gaido, ‘The First Workers’ Government in History’, pp. 39–40.

[43] How Marx and Engels expressed it in the ‘Preface’ to the 1872 German edition of the Manifesto.

[44] See Stewart Edwards, The Paris Commune, 1871 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books),1973, pp. 155–6, for a longer excerpt from the statement. That the Central Committee’s statement employed ‘proletarians’ is significant given subsequent debates about Marx’s characterization of the Commune as the proletariat in power for the first time.

[45] Karl Marx, ‘The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council of the International Working-Men’s Association’, in MECW Vol. 22, pp. 311-55, here, pp. 334–5.

[46] ‘The Coming Man’, New National Era, 22 June 1871.

[47] Ibid.

[48] Karl Marx, ‘The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council of the International Working-Men’s Association’, in MECW Vol. 22, pp. 311-55, here, p. 322.

[49] ‘The Coming Man’, New National Era, 22 June 1871.

[50] A more generous interpretation of Douglass’s reaction to the Commune is included in Manisha Sinha, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860–1920 (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton & Company), 2024, pp. 353–4.

[51] ‘Dark Prospects’, New National Era, 8 June 1871. As Merriman demonstrates, Thiers had expressed support for the restoration of the monarchy in the past and ‘three commanders of the army – Joseph Vinoy, Patrice de MacMahon, and Gaston Galliffet – were conservatives, Bonapartists to be sure, but who would prefer without question a monarchy to a republic’. Merriman, Massacre, p. 34.

[52] ‘Dark Prospects’, New National Era, 8 June 1871.

[53] Philip S. Foner, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass Volume 4: Reconstruction and After (New York: International Publishers), 1955, pp. 264, 282.

[54] ‘Wisdom in the Counsels of Washington’, New National Era, 15 June 1871.

[55] Ibid.

[56] David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (New York: Simon & Schuster), 2018, pp. 91, 504. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, pp. 242–54, 277–80.

[57] ‘Wisdom in the Counsels of Washington’, New National Era, 15 June 1871.

[58] August H. Nimtz, Marx, Tocqueville and Race in America: The ‘Absolute Democracy’ or ‘Defiled Republic’ (Lanham: Lexington Books), 2003, pp. 153, 175.

[59] Foner, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, pp. 283–4.

[60] ‘The Labor Question’, New National Era, 26 October 1871.

[61] Douglass’s liberal worldview included the defence of private property, a harmony of interests between capital and labour, the end of property in man, a defence of bourgeois republican institutions, and equality before the law. Nicholas Buccola’s The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass and Peter C. Myers’ Frederick Douglass  are the two most recent treatments of Douglass’s liberal political thought. Waldo Martin Jr.’s The Mind of Frederick Douglass is more critical and influences this study’s understanding of Douglass.

[62] Nicholas Buccola, The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass: In Pursuit of American Liberty (New York: New York University Press), 2012, p. 54. See also, ibid., pp. 52–3, 135–6.

[63] ‘The Labor Question’, New National Era, 26 October 1871.

[64] Waldo Martin Jr., The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press), 1984, p. 129. Blight, Frederick Douglass, p. 560. ‘The Labor Question’, New National Era, 26 October 1871. ‘Labor in Iron–Manufactories and Workingmen’, New National Era, 28 December 1871. Richardson, To Make Men Free, p. 44. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row), 1988, p. 29.

[65] Philip Foner and Ronald L. Lewis (eds.), The Black Worker, Volume 2: The Black Worker During the Era of the National Labor Union (Philadelphia: Temple University Press), 1978, p. 4.

[66] Philip Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619–1981 (New York: International Publishers), 1981, pp. 30–1, 36–8, 43.

[67] Foner and Lewis, The Black Worker, pp. 82, 87, 92, 94–5.

[68] ‘Annual Convention of the National Labor Union’, New National Era, 12 January 1871.

[69] Foner and Lewis, The Black Worker, pp. 140, 178–9. P. Foner and Lewis indicate that the editorials on the National Labor Union were written by Frederick’s son Lewis who served as Secretary to the Colored National Labor Union.

[70] W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: The Free Press), 1998, p. 3. See also James S. Allen, ‘The Struggle for Land during the Reconstruction Period’, Science & Society, vol. 1, no. 3 (Spring, 1937), pp. 378-401., here p. 397–8.

[71] George Novack, America’s Revolutionary Heritage (New York: Pathfinder Press), 2013, p. 354.

[72] Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, pp. 40–1.

[73] Ibid., pp. 41–3.

[74] Foner and Lewis, The Black Worker, pp. 171–3. Blight, Frederick Douglass, p. 560, credits these views to Douglass, not his son Lewis.

[75] Foner and Lewis, The Black Worker, pp. 170–1.

[76] Greener would later become ‘a cantankerous intellectual nemesis of Douglass’s’ regarding the Kansas Exodus. Blight, Frederick Douglass, pp. 601–3.

[77] ‘Communications. Letter from Philadelphia’, New National Era, 19 October 1871.

[78] ‘Ibid.

[79] Ibid.

[80] Without acknowledging the source of the column, W.E.B. Du Bois, in a brief comment, sees the RTG letter as evidence of a ‘rivalry between the economic and political objects of the Negro’. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, pp. 366–7.

[81] ‘Communications. Letter from Philadelphia’, New National Era, 19 October 1871.

[82] Ibid.

[83] Ibid.

[84] Myers, Frederick Douglass, p. 135.

[85] Katz, From Appomattox to Montmartre, pp. 93, 117.

[86] This platform comes from the ‘Position of the New National Era’, New National Era, 30 March 1871.

[87] Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction, pp. xii-xiii, 24, 44, 85–6, 89, 94.

[88] I am appreciative of the effort John McKivigan put into a fruitless search. Historian Nikki M. Taylor writes that Peter H. Clark was ‘the only African American on record in the nation to speak publicly about the Great Railroad Strike of 1877’. Nikki M. Taylor, America’s First Black Socialist: The Radical Life of Peter H. Clark (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky), 2013, p. 147.

[89] Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877 (New York: Pathfinder Press) 2002, p. 8.

[90] Blight, Frederick Douglass, p. 583.

[91] Karl Marx, letter to Frederick Engels, 25 July 1877, in Marx and Engels Collected Works Volume 45: Letters 1874-1879 (London, Lawrence & Wishart), 1991, pp. 250-3, here p. 251.

[92] Barnes 2020, p. 366. There was, in fact, a considerable amount of Black participation in the strike, including the socialist Peter H. Clark in Cincinnati. See P. Foner 2002, pp. 154–8 and the entry ‘Blacks’ in Index. For more on Clark and Great Railroad Strike see Taylor 2013, pp. 143–7.

[93] Blassingame 1985, pp. 526–7.

[94] Myers, Frederick Douglass, p. 122.

[95] Gaido, The First Workers’ Government in History’, pp. 37–8.

[96] As David Blight writes, ‘To [Douglass], the Republican Party had been the author of emancipation, the embodiment of Union victory, and the custodian of black citizenship’. Blight, Frederick Douglass, p. 532.

[97] On the defeat of Radical Reconstruction as ‘the worst setback’ for the American working class in

history, see Farrell Dobbs, Revolutionary Continuity: The Early Years, 1848–1917 (New York: Pathfinder Press), 2009, p. 69.

[98] David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), 1967, p. x.

[99] Karl Marx, ‘To Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America’, in Marx and Engels Collected Works Volume 20: Marx and Engels 1861-68 (London: Lawrence & Wishart), 1985, pp. 19-21, here, p. 20.

[100] Paul North and Paul Reitter (eds)., Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy Volume 1, (Princeton: Princeton University Press) 2024, p. 270.