One half of our shipping would lie idle at our wharves. Our coastwise trade would pass into other hands. An editorial in the Chicago Daily Times warned that if the South left the Union ‘in one single blow, our foreign commerce must be reduced to less than one half of what it is now. The South threatened secession and the North was outraged. When recession hit in the 1850s Congress hiked the import tax from 15 to 37 per cent. The South, which had an agricultural economy and had to buy machinery from abroad, ended up footing the bill. The North financed its industrial development through crippling taxes imposed by Congress on imported goods. Prior to fighting, relations between the North and South had been poisoned by disputes over taxes. What Marx and the modern reader understands to be a moral question – the question of whether or not one man could own another – many contemporaries understood in terms of economics and law. The war is, further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery and in fact turns on Northern lust for sovereignty.’ That view was shared by Charles Dickens, who wrote: ‘The Northern onslaught upon slavery is no more than a piece of specious humbug disguised to conceal its desire for economic control of the United States.’ In October 1861 Marx, who was living in Primrose Hill, summed up the view of the British press: ‘The war between the North and South is a tariff war. Yet throughout the war British public sentiment favoured the slave-holding South. The victory of the latter made possible the eventual recognition of the human dignity and the civil rights of African-Americans. Karl Marx defined it as a struggle between two historical epochs – the feudal and the capitalist. The year 2011 marks the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the American Civil War.
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