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It is easy to think of Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln as irreconcilables. Lincoln was, like Cobden and Bright, an apostle of free-market liberal democracy and a champion of the bourgeoisie. Marx was an intellectual, convinced that liberal democracy was merely one more phase of oppression and exploitation on the way to the eventual triumph of a working-class collective society. Yet, for one moment, the interests of the two coincided, and that moment was the abolition of slavery and the destruction of the semi-feudal slave oligarchy of the Southern Confederacy. And though they never met, Marx and Lincoln indirectly exchanged a muted recognition of each other through the First International's "Address of the International Workingmen's Association to Abraham Lincoln" (which Marx wrote) and the brief diplomatic acknowledgement which Lincoln's representative in London, Charles Francis Adams, returned to it in 1865.
It comes as a surprise to many students of the American Civil War, who often work within a narrowly parochial context, to realize how intensely Europeans watched the American convulsion (and indeed participated in it - even Garibaldi came close to adding the American Civil War to his repertoire of civil conflicts). Marx, who had himself once contemplated emigrating to America, was a close and shrewd analyst of the American scene, and had served as the New-York Tribune's London correspondent from 1852 until 1861. The Tribune dropped most of its foreign correspondents with the outbreak of the Civil War, but Marx shifted to writing about America for Vienna's Die...