Marx's writing on the American Civil War are incredible, especially as he was mainly observing it from a desk in the British Library. He correctly identified it as a war over the spread of slavery to the West and was understandably a strong partisan for the Union. However,... 1/

I do wonder whether his partisanship inhibited subsequent Marxists from making a materialist analysis of why Lincoln and the Republicans prevented the South from seceding. What did they have to gain from keeping the South in the Union? 2/

What I argue in my paper 'King Cotton, the Munificent' is that they feared the South would become a gateway to the West, depriving New York of its entrepôt role and decimating the tariff revenues that had traditionally financed the Federal Government. 3/ http://joefrancis.info/pdfs/Francis_US_slavery.pdf

As this article by Douglas Irwin shows, there was a historical background to this fear, since politicians from the South and the West had traditionally allied in favour of low tariffs. 4/ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/590131traditionally

The fear of this alliance being rekindled became particularly acute in Spring 1861 as the Morrill Tariff was due to come into effect in April, making the North a much higher tariff country, increasing incentives for importers to use the Southern gateway. 5/

Few historians really consider why the North went to war, but the existing literature on the subject points towards the Morrill Tariff as pushing Lincoln to act. References here in footnote 124 from my paper. 6/

Finally, the quote from Marx at the start of this thread is from the Internet Archive version of http://Marxists.org . Damn you Lawrence & Wishart for making them take the live version down. fin/ https://www.marxists.org/admin/legal/lw-response.html