Marx and Douglass in Their Time

Jason Dawsey

The Communist and the Revolutionary Liberal in the Second American Revolution:
Comparing Karl Marx and Frederick Douglass in Real-Time
By August H. Nimtz and Kyle A. Edwards
Leiden: Brill, 2024, 425 pages, $185 hardback
Haymarket edition 2025, $28 paperback.

IN JANUARY 1865, writing on behalf of the International Workingmen’s Association, Karl Marx composed one of the more remarkable missives in the entire history of socialism.

Congratulating the people of the United States of America on the recent reelection of Abraham Lincoln as president, Marx boldly urged the Lincoln Administration, “if resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your reelection is Death to Slavery.”

He did not hesitate to proclaim that it was the United States, “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,” which held the hopes of a nascent proletarian socialism at a time of deep reaction.

“From the commencement of the titanic American strife [the U.S. Civil War], the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class,” Marx asserted. In the letter, he termed Lincoln “the single-minded son of the working class” and characterized the Civil War as a “matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.”(1)

Civil War As Revolution

These lines from Marx, still largely unknown on the American Left, are the point of departure for this review of August Nimtz and Kyle Edwards’ The Communist and the Revolutionary Liberal in the Second American Revolution: Comparing Karl Marx and Frederick Douglass in Real-Time.

Both born in 1818, these two men need little introduction. What can the audience of Against the Current learn by juxtaposing them?

Douglass, along with Harriet Tubman, has long been one of the most familiar individuals from the African-American freedom struggle prior to Reconstruction.

Students across the United States still read his 1845 narrative of his years enslaved and “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” (1852), and his connections to the women’s suffrage movement have been thoroughly explored.

Marx’s life and thought of course are of foundational import for socialists. In treating their political biographies together, Nimtz and Edwards force us to revisit, with fresh eyes, an absolutely critical period in not only American history but in modern world history.

A brief review cannot do justice to this excellent work of committed scholarship, part of the outstanding Historical Materialism book series. While it would be easy to note its importance for our time of right-wing assaults on “race and gender ideology,” mass xenophobia, and fascistic cults of personality, the book speaks to a much broader, long-term project of political reclamation.

For this project, political scientist August Nimtz, a scholar who has produced so much good work on Marx, Engels, and Lenin, has joined with his University of Minnesota colleague, Kyle Edwards, author already of a study of Douglass.(2)

Neither is a professional historian of the Civil War, the central focus of the book, yet the absence of academic specialization does not detract from the analysis. Instead, it yields new insights by treating in parallel fashion two towering figures of the 19th century who stood against the enslavement of human beings.

The authors characterize their work as a “comparative real-time political analysis of the responses of Douglass and Marx to America’s Second Revolution, the struggle to end chattel slavery. It compares how the two made and acted on judgments about what needed to be done in the moment, not after the fact.”(2)

In roughly 380 pages of clear, effective prose, Nimtz and Edwards pull us back into the “real-time” of the bloody abolition of American chattel slavery, the emergence of workers’ movements in the United States and Europe, and possibilities for “the reconstruction of a social world.”

While perhaps not the most evocative terminology, they refer to a “trans-Atlantic mind-meld” and a “Douglass-Marx mind-meld” to indicate lines of convergence. (83, 135) Seeing and contextualizing the divergences between Douglass and Marx, however, is the real boon of the book.

The Revolutionary 19th Century

“The bookends that frame our comparison,” Nimtz and Edwards write, are the 1848-49 Revolutions in Europe and the Paris Commune of 1871. (274) Not only inserting Douglass back into the context of Western European developments and Marx into American ones, they wish for their analyses to “offer fruitful lessons to those who wish to change the world as Marx and Douglass both did.” (13)

What the authors provide in the first chapter is especially illuminating with respect to Douglass. After his escape from bondage in Maryland, Douglass “embraced every tenet of the movement” for abolition led by William Lloyd Garrison — “nonviolent moral suasion,” rejection of the Constitution as a compromise with slavery, refusal to participate in elections, and secession of the North from the Union. (24)

Subsequently, Nimtz and Edwards track Douglass through the 1840s “from chattel slave to revolutionary liberal” and, at the same time, Marx’s path “from a radical democrat to communist.” (17, 33)

Douglass’s stops in Ireland and England in 1845-47, they indicate, brought about contacts with the Irish nationalist Daniel O’Connell, who blasted American slavery, and moderates in the working-class Chartist movement. At the time Douglass evinced great admiration for the limited monarchy in the United Kingdom; O’Connell’s influence provided an international political and moral framework for his abolitionism.

During these years Marx and Engels established ties with the radical wing of Chartism. While numerous biographies over the last century have documented Marx’s transformation from a “radical democrat” into the champion of revolutionary international proletarian socialism, the authors enhance that change by highlighting Marx’s commentaries on slavery, particularly in his 1847 critique of Proudhon in The Poverty of Philosophy.

After tracing them through that seminal decade, Nimtz and Edwards argue, “Nothing distinguished the two subjects of this comparison more from one another than what they desired as a final goal: one of them sought only to abolish chattel slavery in North America, while the other sought the same but as the necessary means to the end of abolishing class society.”(53)

Contrasting Views

This remarkable Americanization of Marx and Europeanization of Douglass proceeds through a discussion of the experience and impact of the 1848-1849 Revolutions.

The authors demonstrate that Douglass was already pushed to break with the Garrisonian rejection of electoral politics by his encounter with the Chartists, but the abolition of slavery in the Second French Republic struck like thunderbolt. Yet he condemned the workers’ uprising against the bourgeois republican government in June 1848 (when several thousand French workers were slaughtered) and criticized what he believed were violent tendencies in Chartism.

Putting forward his famed “philosophy of reform” the following year, Douglass spoke of “power” conceding “nothing without a demand” and of the necessity to stamp out oppression “by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.” (80)

Thus, Douglass’s crucial statement on reform, quoted frequently in 2025 by Bernie Sanders on his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, leaves leftists with a double-sided argument. If it is “Douglass’s singular and underappreciated contribution to liberal democratic theory,” as Nimtz and Edwards assert, it is major evidence of “his limits as a revolutionary liberal” as well. (79, 81-82)

Marx, as is well known, emerged from the “cauldron” of 1848-1849 with an adamantine insistence that no longer would the proletariat restrict itself to acting as the left wing of bourgeois-democratic revolution. (56) Instead, it must form its own organizations and pursue an independent course aimed at social revolution and its own total emancipation from the rule of Capital.

Toward the Civil War

For Marx, the rise of Louis Bonaparte in France and the ultra-reactionary Prussian Constitution of 1850 signalled the ebbing of revolutionary hopes in Europe. As Marx dove into research on political economy, these events seemingly mirrored those in the United States. The imperialist U.S. war against Mexico was followed by the Compromise of 1850 with its Fugitive Slave Act, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case in 1857.

If 1848-49 was the “opening act of the Civil War” as they call it, Nimtz and Edwards push through the succeeding decade and show that political darkness did not completely mar the 1850s. (102) The Republican Party was founded, and Abraham Lincoln emerged as a key figure in the new party by the end of the decade.

Douglass, who began the 1850s as a supporter of the Liberty Party, became one of the “reluctant supporters” of Lincoln. (96) So did Marx, Engels, and what the authors term “the Marx party” — German “48ers” who had emigrated to the United States after the defeat of the revolutions on the European continent.

Their number included men like Joseph Weydemeyer, who published The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx’s pathbreaking analysis of Bonapartism, in 1852.

One also cannot neglect August Willich and Adolph Douai. These individuals rallied support in the German-American community for the Republican Party and, in the case of Weydemeyer and Willich, would contribute markedly to the Union war effort after Fort Sumter.

In these sections of the book, Nimtz and Edwards’ intent to flesh out transatlantic connections and not bend to purely national histories pays handsome dividends.

By far, the most important connection the authors detail is reaction to Marx’s articles in Horace Greeley’s New York Daily Tribune (1852-1862). These were likely read by both Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.

Marx wrote about the Harper’s Ferry uprising of December 1859 that had been organized by John Brown. Over the years Douglass had provided money and weapons to Brown and seemed to sanction slave insurrection as one of the few defensible acts of armed resistance. Brown’s failed revolt did rouse Marx’s hopes about the United States:

“The spectre of John Brown, not surprisingly, hung over the truly consequential presidential election of 1860. . . Harpers Ferry and what it portended, namely an armed showdown between pro-and anti-slavery forces, prompted the still new anti-slavery Republican Party to take, unlike in its 1856 campaign with the [John C.] Frémont candidacy, a less intransigent stance on ending the peculiar institution with a candidate to match.” (92)

As is well known, Lincoln publicly opposed the spread of slavery but promised not to challenge it where it already existed. Consequently, Douglass did not support Lincoln, the compromise choice for the Republicans. And Marx, writing from London, would continually express his frustrations with Lincoln after the outbreak of the Civil War in the spring of 1861.

Nimtz and Edwards vividly demonstrate how both Marx and Douglass, the communist and the revolutionary liberal, would soon alter their views of the Sixteenth President.

Convergence

Because of its large-scale historical framing, the book takes some time to get to the Civil War. The Communist and the Revolutionary Liberal really gathers momentum, then, in Chapters 3 and 4 when the narrative enters the maelstrom of the Civil War and grips the reader.

There, the authors bring the story of “convergence” between Douglass and Marx to its conclusion. “The exigencies of the War brought Douglass and Marx closer politically, not only on the domestic side of the conflagration, but in terms of its international repercussions as well. Nine months into the War the two were in objective if not conscious collaboration with one another in the promotion of the Union cause,” they contend. (105)

The road to “collaboration” had been a long one, however. Both men emphatically affirmed that the conflict must place the emancipation of enslaved Black people at its center. As the title of Chapter 4 has it, the war had to shift from a “constitutional to a revolutionary civil war” to use Marx’s language. (160)

Still, in the first year of the war Douglass remained deeply pessimistic about Lincoln and castigated the latter for not removing the ultra-ineffective General George McLellan.

If Engels shared Douglass’s grim outlook about the Union’s chances for victory in 1861 and into 1862, Marx discerned an opening to emancipation on Lincoln’s part. He hammered away at the necessity for a clear stand on abolition, something that could be initiated on the battlefield.

According to Nimtz and Edwards, “It took Douglass almost a year to give the kind of detailed attention to the battlefield that Marx and Engels had given it from the commencement of the conflagration.” (214)

The fall of the city of New Orleans on the Mississippi River in April 1862, a victory accompanied by unrest within the enslaved population in the surrounding area, sparked a fierce confidence that the North could win after such a disappointing first year.

Then in that same year Lincoln, who had been so fearful about the border states, decided to issue a Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in late September 1862, giving the Confederate states until January to rejoin the Union. That, of course, preceded the release of the truly momentous Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863.

Nimtz and Edwards cover this so powerfully. They quote Douglass saying in 1862, “that I should live to see the President of the United States deliberately advocating Emancipation was more than I ever ventured to hope.” (160)

During this time, Douglass also offered a class analysis of white supremacy that would have looked quite familiar to Marx. Both strongly advocated for the recruiting and arming of Black troops, with Douglass expending much time and energy directly in the effort. In fact, his son Lewis joined the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, made famous by the film Glory.

Whatever their misgivings about the Lincoln Administration, he was the most progressive politician on the planet at that moment. As for Marx, about whom the question naturally arises, Nimtz and Edwards say clearly, “We read Marx and Engels to have understood that during the U.S. Civil War the revolutionary class was not the proletariat but instead the bourgeoisie represented by Lincoln and the Republican Party in opposition to the retrograde slavocracy.” (142)

Throughout these chapters, they accent Marx’s trenchant political journalism (not only the New York Daily Tribune but the Austrian paper, Die Presse), describing, for instance, his August 1862 “A Criticism of American Affairs” this way:

“Only about a thousand words in length, Marx’s ‘Criticism’ ranks with, word for word, the richest documents in what some of us call the Marx/Engels arsenal, exemplary in its combination of theory, evidence, and a course for a way forward.” (194)

Such close attention to and admiration for Marx’s journalistic texts serves as an effective and much needed counter to the saturation point in recent Marx scholarship reached in overreliance on the Grundrisse and Capital.

Revolution to Emancipation

While hardly uncritical of Lincoln, Douglass and Marx strongly supported his resolve to prosecute the war, now transformed into a “revolutionary war” against the Confederacy, to its conclusion in 1864-1865.

Invited to the White House by Lincoln in August 1864, Douglass was asked by Lincoln “to come up with a plan that would not only inform the enslaved about the document [the Emancipation Proclamation] but also with the organizational means to convince them to flee their enslavers.” (234)

Douglass had become a national political actor, and threw his weight behind Lincoln’s 1864 campaign for president. Marx, who commented at some length about the Union’s impressive generals like Grant and Sherman, recognized how crucial Lincoln’s reelection was.

Nimtz and Edwards do not lose sight of the international political context for this struggle. The year of Lincoln’s reelection saw the founding in London of the International Workingmen’s Association, the First International. Union victory and the abolition of slavery in the United States would hold enormous consequences for workers’ struggles elsewhere, a truth gladly acknowledged by Marx in his congratulatory letter to Lincoln and the American people.

That triumph, sealed by the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in January 1865, eliminating slavery in the country, and Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House just over two months later, was blighted by Lincoln’s assassination.

Liberalism and Its Limits

As Nimtz and Edwards move their analysis toward a conclusion, in their discussions of Reconstruction and the Paris Commune they draw us back to the reopening of a gulf between Marx and Douglass.

For them, Douglass represents the best of American liberalism, especially that phase of his life when he espoused a “revolutionary liberalism.” They take Douglass’s “most consequential actions” to be the support he provided to John Brown and his attempts to recruit Black soldiers for the Union army. (297)

Examining Federal policy during Reconstruction, Nimtz and Edwards bluntly assert the need for resolute counter-violence against white terror in the South — and they wonder why Douglass did not (as abolitionist Wendell Phillips did).

They assess that this had more to do with Douglass’s ascent in the Republican Party — that he did not want to criticize too harshly the Grant and Hayes Administrations. Strikingly different from Marx, Douglass “could not see or agree with Marx and Engels’s call for ‘abolishing private property in general.’” (279)

This blindspot in Douglass manifested most glaringly at a time of extreme urgency for breaking the power of Southern landowners, through systematic expropriation and redistribution of land to freed Blacks — as demanded by Thaddeus Stevens, the formidable Republican representative from Pennsylvania — and challenging industrial capital in the North.

Among the most startling contrasts is that between Marx and Douglass’s views on the Paris Commune. An appendix by Edwards details Douglass’s scathing comments on the Communards. By this point, the differences between Douglass, no longer a “revolutionary liberal” but a reformist one, and the communist Marx had turned into a deep abyss.

For Edwards, Douglass’s politics from this period cam be condensed into this: “free men, free soil, free speech, a free press, the ballot for all, education for all, and fair wages for all.” (346)

Needless to say, Marx dedicated The Civil War in France, one of his greatest writings, to defending the Commune. Although the Commune was crushed with enormous slaughter, he praised it as the “Republic of Labor,” “essentially a working-class government, the produce of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labor,” and enshrined the courage, resolve, and sacrifice of the Communards in socialism’s annals.(3)

In those years, Reconstruction and the Paris Commune each succumbed to a “bloody counterrevolution” with reverberations down to our own day. (297, n. 39)

Nimtz and Edwards point to the fact that, in one of the last eras of heightened radical expectation for societal reconstruction, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X confronted the legacies of the unfinished revolution from Marx and Douglass’s time.

The Communist and the Revolutionary Liberal in the Second American Revolution should have a broad and dedicated readership. Socialist intellectuals and activists will quickly discern the currency of this subject matter.

The thrust of the book’s argument eventuates in a full-throated, and most welcome, defense of Marxist analysis. In so doing, it repudiates many pseudo-leftist assumptions that Marxism has had little of value to say about racism. Responding to familiar charges that Marx held antisemitic stereotypes and utilized anti-Black racial epithets, Nimtz dismisses both claims and strongly maintains, “one should be cautious and not rush to judgment based on the vapid criteria of ‘political correctness.’” (365-366)

Nimtz and Edwards do align with a growing tendency to retake the word “communism” from old calumnies. Contra “the Stalinist baggage it later acquired and continues to carry,” they also defend Marx’s vital notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat. (142)

Even though the book is already quite lengthy, this reviewer did want to see the global context delineated a bit more.

Benito Juarez’s battle against Franco-Austrian imperialism in Mexico, the 1863-1864 uprising in Congress Poland, a new round of insurgency against British control in Ireland in 1867, and the short life of the First Spanish Republic (1873-1874) — all developments of great salience for Marx — fill out an epoch of revolutionary possibility laid out in the authors’ sections on Reconstruction and the Paris Commune.

Finally, Nimtz and Edward are indebted to Marxist intellectual and political historian George Novack for the comparative framework they utilize, and they also invoke the name of James P. Cannon. This standpoint of criticism, drawn from the critical work of American Trotskyists like Cannon and Novack, deserves more elaboration in the monograph.

These things aside, the word that comes to mind for this book is “stirring.” A much less expensive paperback version, published by Haymarket Books in 2025, makes it far more accessible for interested readers.

Will socialists strive, though, to reappropriate this history, a history which matters so profoundly? After all, it is their history.

Notes

1. All quotations from Marx in this paragraph are from “International Workingmen’s Association to Abraham Lincoln,” January 7, 1865, in Robin Blackburn, An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln, (London: Verso, 2011), 211-212.
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2. For a small selection of August H. Nimtz’s writings, see Marx and Engels: Their Contribution to the Democratic Breakthrough (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000); Marx, Tocqueville and Race in America: The ‘Absolute Democracy’ or ‘Defiled Republic’ (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2003); “The Ballot, the Streets, or Both? From Marx and Engels to Lenin and the October Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019). For Kyle A. Edwards, see his “Those Deluded, Ill-Starred Men: Frederick Douglass, the New National Era, and the Paris Commune,” New North Star 4 (2022): 1-19.
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3. Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker, 2nd. Ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 636, 634-635.
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March-April 2026, ATC 241