Address of the
International Working Men's Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America
We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by
a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword
of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to
Slavery.
From the commencement of the titanic American strife the
workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that
the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for
the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the
virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or
prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?
When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe,
for the first time in the annals of the world, "slavery" on the
banner of Armed Revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the
idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first
Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the
European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on those very spots
counterrevolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding
"the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old
constitution", and maintained slavery to be "a beneficent
institution", indeed, the old solution of the great problem of "the
relation of capital to labor", and cynically proclaimed property in man
"the cornerstone of the new edifice" — then the working classes of
Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper
classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the
slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of
property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the
future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on
the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the
hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the
proslavery intervention of their betters — and, from most parts of Europe, contributed their quota of blood to the good
cause.
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