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The Communist and the Revolutionary Liberal in the Second American Revolution. Comparing Karl Marx and Frederick Douglass in Real-Time

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Published Aug 2024

August H. Nimtz and Kyle A. Edwards

Authors: August H. Nimtz and Kyle A. Edwards
Nimtz’s and Edwards’s real-time comparative political analysis offers a unique look at two historically consequential figures with two very different theoretical and political perspectives, both of whom expertly examined the most contentious issue of the nineteenth century. By juxtaposing the political thought and activism of Karl Marx and Frederick Douglass, Nimtz and Edwards are able to make insightful observations and conclusions about race and class in America. The Communist and the Revolutionary Liberal reveals how two still competing political perspectives, liberalism and Marxism, performed when the biggest breakthrough for the millennial-old democratic quest after the French Revolution occurred – the abolition of chattel slavery in the United States. In so doing, it presents potential lessons for today.

Biographical Note

August H. Nimtz, beginning with his 2000 Marx and Engels: Their Contribution to the Democratic Breakthrough, seeks to bring Marx back to the world he consciously chose to join in 1843, namely politics. This co-authored Marx-Douglass comparison is his latest contribution toward that goal.

Kyle A. Edwards is a Curriculum Administrator at the University of Minnesota. He is a member of AFSCME 3800 and author of Those Deluded, Ill-Starred Men: Frederick Douglass, the New National Era, and the Paris Commune.

Readership

American historians, political scientists, academic libraries, political theorists, sociologists, political comparativists, racial justice activists, union activists, socialists, graduate students, American studies.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Two Biographies – or, Two Routes to the Quest for ‘True Democracy’
1 From Chattel Slave to Revolutionary Liberal
2 From Radical Democrat to Communist

2 Prelude to the Conflagration: From Paris to Fort Sumter
1 The European Spring
2 The Coming American Spring

3 Toward the Convergence of Douglass and Marx: From Fort Sumter to the Trent Affair
1 The ‘Fall of Sumter’
2 Douglass Gets on Board
3 Marx’s Return
4 Marx and Douglass Converge
5 ‘What’s Happening at Manassas Junction?’
6 ‘Complications with Foreign Powers’: The Trent Affair

4 From a Constitutional to a Revolutionary Civil War: ‘the Cruel and Apocalyptic War Had Become Holy’
1 ‘A Turning Point in the War Policy Had Been Reached’
2 ‘At Last the Tide of Battle Seems Fairly Turned’
3 Two Real-Time Assessments of ‘the Tremendous Conflict’
4 Slouching Toward Redemption
5 Redemption Time
6 The Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation
7 The Slave’s Appeal to Great Britain

5 The End of the War and the Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction
1 The Long Grinding Road to Appomattox
2 ‘That the Paper Proclamation Must Now Be Made Iron, Lead and Fire’
3 The Reality of Recruitment
4 Toward Lincoln’s Re-election and Union Victory
5 ‘A Missed Revolutionary Opportunity’
6 Weydemeyer’s ‘On the Negro Vote’
7 Douglass and Marx on the Same Political Page – Almost

Conclusion
1 The Key Takeaways of the Comparison
2 ‘What Is to Be Done?’– Today

Appendix A: Douglass and Marx on the Paris Commune and the Labour Question in the United States
Appendix B: Marx and Engels on the Race Question: A Response to Critics
Bibliography
Index