The American Civil War Through European Eyes

When the cannons roared across American battlefields from 1861 to 1865, the echoes reached European shores with surprising intensity. The American Civil War became a proxy conflict for Europe’s own ideological battles, with conservatives generally supporting the Southern Confederacy while liberals and leftists rallied behind the Union. This transatlantic engagement revealed deep fractures in European society and foreshadowed the coming struggles between labor and capital, democracy and aristocracy.

European workers emerged as the most passionate advocates for slave emancipation. The working classes saw in Lincoln’s struggle against slavery a parallel to their own fight against economic oppression. This solidarity reached its peak on March 1863 when London’s St. James’s Hall hosted a massive workers’ meeting expressing support for President Lincoln and demanding abolition – a direct challenge to Prime Minister Palmerston’s pro-Southern leanings. The gathering represented more than sympathy for a foreign conflict; it signaled the awakening political consciousness of Europe’s industrial proletariat.

The Birth of the First International

The revolutionary currents stirred by the American conflict culminated on September 28, 1864, with the founding of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) in London. Known as the First International, this loose federation of workers’ parties and trade unions across Europe and America became the organizational vehicle for Karl Marx’s vision of proletarian internationalism. Elected as the German correspondence secretary of the General Council, Marx drafted the organization’s founding documents and penned its congratulatory letter to Lincoln upon his 1864 reelection.

Marx’s message to Lincoln contained striking revolutionary language, hailing the American president as “the single-minded son of the working class” leading an “unprecedented battle for the liberation of an enslaved race and the transformation of social institutions.” This rhetoric revealed how European radicals viewed the American conflict through the lens of their own revolutionary aspirations. The Civil War became, in Marxist analysis, a bourgeois revolution that might create conditions favorable for proletarian revolution.

The German Labor Movement’s Divisions

While engaging with American affairs, Marx simultaneously waged ideological battles within the European labor movement. The First International became his platform to counter the influence of Ferdinand Lassalle’s General German Workers’ Association (ADAV), founded in Leipzig in May 1863. Lassalle’s approach – focusing on universal suffrage and state-supported worker cooperatives – represented a reformist path that Marx vehemently opposed.

The ideological gulf widened when Marx discovered Lassalle’s secret negotiations with Otto von Bismarck. The Prussian chancellor saw tactical value in Lassalle’s suffrage campaign as a means to divide liberal opponents. For Marx and Engels, this collaboration with the reactionary state represented betrayal of revolutionary principles. They maintained that true working-class emancipation could only come through international proletarian revolution, not state-sponsored reform.

Lassalle’s dramatic death in an 1864 duel left German labor divided between his pro-Prussian followers and a more radical faction influenced by Marx. August Bebel, a lathe operator from Cologne, emerged as leader of the latter group through the Leipzig Workers’ Education Association. These divisions reflected broader tensions in European socialism between revolutionary and reformist approaches to social change.

The Challenge to Bourgeois Liberalism

The rise of independent workers’ organizations like the ADAV profoundly unsettled German bourgeois liberals. Much like the French Third Estate in 1789, liberal elites still viewed themselves as representing the “general estate” into which workers should assimilate through education. The ADAV’s very existence challenged this paternalistic vision and the liberal principle of self-help championed by Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch.

Lassalle’s 1862 Berlin speech exposed liberal vulnerabilities by arguing that constitutional questions were fundamentally about power, not law. This critique struck at liberal opposition to Bismarck during Prussia’s constitutional conflict, where legalistic protests avoided direct confrontation with state power. Liberals found themselves squeezed between conservative state power and rising working-class assertiveness.

Several factors constrained liberal responses: traumatic memories of 1848’s failed revolution, persistent fear of “red” radicalism, and the enduring political influence of rural Junkers over peasants. Prussia’s three-class voting system actually inflated liberal representation; equal suffrage might have empowered conservatives or workers at liberal expense. The military reforms that strengthened Prussia’s army simultaneously weakened bourgeois influence, creating liberals’ primary grievance against the government.

The Schleswig-Holstein Question and National Unification

European attention shifted in 1863 when the Schleswig-Holstein crisis reignited German nationalist passions. Denmark’s attempt to annex Schleswig provoked outrage across German states, with most medium-sized powers supporting the Augustenburg claimant. Prussia and Austria alone insisted on restoring the 1852 London Protocol’s international framework.

The subsequent 1864 war saw Prussian forces deliver crushing blows at Düppel, forcing Denmark to surrender both duchies. The Vienna Peace Treaty left Schleswig-Holstein’s final disposition unresolved under Austro-Prussian condominium. For Prussian liberals, this created a dilemma between supporting Augustenburg’s claim or backing Prussian annexation as a step toward national unification.

The National-Zeitung, voice of liberal right-wingers, argued by August 1864 that Prussian annexation could alleviate military burdens and advance German unity. This marked a significant shift as some liberals began prioritizing national power over constitutional principles. Democratic opponents retorted that “German unity can only be achieved through German freedom,” foreshadowing coming divisions.

The Road to Königgrätz

The Gastein Convention of August 1865 temporarily divided the duchies between Austria and Prussia but solved nothing. By 1866, tensions escalated toward inevitable war. Bismarck secured Russian neutrality and allied with Italy against Austria. His April 1866 proposal for a reformed German Confederation under equal suffrage – though rejected – positioned Prussia as the progressive force against Austrian reaction.

The Seven Weeks’ War culminated in Prussia’s decisive victory at Königgrätz on July 3, 1866. The Peace of Prague dissolved the German Confederation, excluded Austria from German affairs, and established Prussian dominance north of the Main River. Bismarck’s magnanimous terms preserved Austria as a potential future ally while creating the North German Confederation.

The Liberal Dilemma: Unity vs. Freedom

Königgrätz created a crisis for Prussian liberals who had opposed Bismarck’s unconstitutional government since 1862. The simultaneous liberal electoral defeat and Prussian military triumph forced reconsideration. When Bismarck offered indemnity for his past constitutional violations, liberals split. The majority Progressives rejected this, while the right wing accepted it as the price for national unification.

By October 1866, these right-wing liberals formed the National Liberal Party, embracing Bismarck as Germany’s Cavour. As Ludwig Bamberger rhetorically asked: “Is not unity itself a form of freedom?” This marked the birth of German Realpolitik – sacrificing some liberal principles to achieve national power under Prussian leadership.

Legacy and Historical Significance

The 1866 war fundamentally transformed German politics, ending Habsburg-Hohenzollern dualism that had shaped Central Europe since 1740. Engels later called it a “genuine revolution,” while Jacob Burckhardt saw it as history’s “supreme crisis resolution.” By eliminating the Großdeutsch solution, it made kleindeutsche unification under Prussia inevitable.

For European labor movements, the period solidified ideological divisions between Marxist revolutionary socialism and Lassallean reformism. The First International’s engagement with the American Civil War demonstrated workers’ growing international consciousness, while its internal struggles previewed the coming split between communists and social democrats.

Ultimately, 1866 answered one half of the 1848 revolution’s dual demand – unity was achieved where freedom had failed. The National Liberal compromise established a pattern where German liberals traded political principles for national power, with profound consequences for Germany’s democratic development. As Austria turned inward toward the 1867 Ausgleich with Hungary, Prussia stood unchallenged as the engine of German unification, setting the stage for the even greater transformations of 1870-71.

The transatlantic connections between America’s civil conflict and Europe’s ideological battles reveal how deeply intertwined these societies had become by the industrial age. Workers in London cheered Lincoln while Marx analyzed the war’s revolutionary potential; Bismarck studied American federalism while preparing his own constitutional solutions. In this era of emerging global consciousness, national histories became inseparable from their international contexts.