From the Rhine to the Mississippi: Property, Democracy, and Socialism in the American Civil War

From within the common national, gradualist, and liberal narrative of emancipation, Maj. Gen. John C. Frémont’s August 30, 1861, proclamation freeing all the slaves of disloyal Missourians appears as a recklessly premature step threatening to derail the progress of freedom in the United States. Frémont’s proclamation, however, was not simply a misstep in the national process of legislating emancipation. Rather, it reflected, and perhaps attempted to justify, extralegal processes of emancipation already taking place in the trans-Mississippi West. These were the self-emancipatory efforts of slaves, the ongoing antislavery guerrilla warfare of Kansas Jayhawkers, and the military strategies of European, especially German, revolutionary socialists. This essay focuses only on the last group, the European socialists, to highlight how the Civil War, arguably the central turning point in U.S. history, was also an important episode in a larger revolutionary drama pitting plebian proponents of democracy against concentrations of wealth, whether of slaveholders or of capitalists, and also against concentrations of elite power in the limited, liberal state.