The Abominable Practice Came to an End on the Battlefield

First, we’d like to thank Liberal Currents for reviewing our book, a review that reveals a close reading, and for the opportunity to respond to Paul Crider’s thoughtful essay. Crider clearly takes our book seriously for which we’re grateful—“remarkable,” in fact, early in his comments is his characterization of the book from which he admits to having “learned” a lot. Crider also raises several fruitful suggestions for future research that were outside the scope of our project, namely Douglass’s advocacy for female suffrage, his participation in the underground railroad, and Douglass’s speeches on the labor question in the 1880s and how his views and actions may have compared to Marx or Marxists in America. One topic Crider didn’t raise but would make for an interesting contrast with Marx is Douglass’s endorsement of nascent US imperialism, the annexation of the Dominican Republic.

Yet, as Crider’s review title indicates, “The Communist and the Caricature: The Missed Opportunity in August Nimtz and Kyle Edwards’ ‘The Communist and the Revolutionary Liberal in the Second American Revolution,’” he has a complaint that apparently is fatal for him—one we think is, however, disingenuous. 

We say so because the basis for his charge is the claim about Douglass we make on p. 81, what Crider quotes and takes issue with: “Consider the assertion that Douglass held fast to a belief that Providence must prevail in the end and vanquish slavery. Unlike Douglass, Marx was no inevitablist about the progress of human emancipation. If so, then why the need for the Manifesto? … ‘For Douglass, at that moment in his career, Providence and natural law were most decisive in the unfolding of the history of society, whereas for Marx the conscious intervention of human beings (shaped by circumstances beyond their control) was most decisive in this unfolding. This marked the fundamental epistemological difference between the two protagonists’” (81). Given Douglass’s later actions, it is incorrect, Crider charges, for us “to claim that such a man rested comfortably waiting for Providence to carry the day.”

“At that moment” is, in fact, incorrect, our error. We were referring to an earlier era in Douglass’s political trajectory, when under the influence of Garrison. But because Crider read us closely, he certainly knows what we later wrote about Douglass’s political evolution from the more Providence-dependent Douglass of the 1840s to the Douglass of June 1861, two months into the Civil War. In a speech we quoted, Douglass said "However much abolitionists … should be grateful to 'the Divine powers of the universe ... our faith is at once to be suspect at the moment it leads us to fold our hands and leave the cause of the slave to Providence ... No doctrine is more grateful to the heart of the slaveholder, than that which would leave slavery to Divine Providence ... He fears more from the human conscience than from the Divine conscience. A meeting for prayer gives far less alarm than a meeting for works’" (113). 

In other words, we offer unmistakable evidence, in Douglass’s own words, that by the time the “irrepressible conflict” had begun the one-time Garrisonian abolitionist had moved “epistemologically, closer to Marx.” For Crider, therefore, to ignore exactly what he claims we ignored is to caricature our text.

Noteworthy about Crider, in our opinion, is his failure to acknowledge what we regard as crucial in Douglass’s political evolution, the entreaties of John Brown for an armed struggle alternative, a perspective that was increasingly attractive to Douglass given the increasing hegemony of the slave oligarchy in US politics, exemplified best by the notorious Dred Scott 1857 decision. Brown’s singular role in ending chattel slavery in the U.S., which we make a case for, is, we suspect, an inconvenient truth for Crider. The abominable practice came to an end on the battlefield and not by liberal-constitutional means—what Brown knew better than anyone.

Crider accuses us of also caricaturing Marx, specifically, his use of the historical materialist method and the supposed hubris that came with it. Marx’s “scientific historical materialism informed him that it was virtually impossible for the North to lose the war.” “[Nimtz and Edwards] go on to praise Marx for his prophetic confidence that the North must win the war based on the ‘scientific’ principles of historical materialism.”

Crider refers to Marx’s very first usage of the method once the war commenced. Quoting Marx, here’s exactly what we wrote: “Marx emphasized the distinction—all so important as events would soon demonstrate—between ‘the SECEDED STATES’ and ‘all 8 BORDER STATES’, which he listed. ‘The acts of violence … perpetrated not only’ by the former but ‘some of the latter … have rendered all compromise impossible’ . . . Then, most accurately, Marx predicted that ‘there can be no doubt that, in the early part of the struggle, the scales will be weighted in favor of the South, where the class of propertyless white adventurers provides an inexhaustible source of martial militia’.”

We continued: “Of more significant prescience, Marx then declared: ‘IN THE LONG RUN, of course, the North will be victorious since, if the need arises, it has a last card up its sleeve in the shape of a slave revolution’.”

Lastly: “If Marx and Douglass agreed about ‘a slave revolution’ in ‘the long run’, what about the immediate situation? ‘For the North’, Marx continued, ‘the great difficulty is the QUESTION [of] HOW TO GET THEIR FORCES TO THE SOUTH’ . . . To prove his point Marx provided detailed mileage from Northern staging areas like Boston, New York and Washington D.C. to Charleston and Montgomery, Alabama, the Confederate Capitol. Because the ‘use of the railways by the NORTHERN INVADERS would merely lead to their destruction … all that remains is sea transport and naval warfare’. But the latter, he noted with remarkable foresight, ‘might easily lead to complications with foreign powers’—as events would soon confirm” (Nimtz and Edwards, pp. 109–110).

As the reader can see, Marx’s method combined an analysis of material reality, both in time and space, and, most importantly, political judgements. How else to describe Crider’s description of what we wrote other than caricature itself? Along the way we compared and contrasted Marx’s and Douglass’s judgments, which Crider conveniently ignored in his review.

Marx knew better than anyone the caution needed in using his historical materialist method. Why? The three-year-old debate he had with the co-originator of the method, his partner Engels, about the actual course of the Civil War and a Northern victory. We put readers on notice at the beginning, p. 7, that the disagreement revealed that historical materialism “was a tool for political analysis and not a template for reaching political conclusions . . . Employing their . . . method. . . required a degree of nuance that Marx proved in the end to be more adept at.” Our book highlights, pp. 189–196, Marx’s 1862 article and the work he put in to satisfy Engels’s doubts about the course of the war, which illustrates all so convincingly that fact. Crider, it seems, couldn’t resist dragging up the timeworn liberal canard about their method despite having read what we said at the outset and then later presented. Another, therefore, disingenuous charge.

One other issue that we think is worth responding to (we’re open, of course, to engaging him about his other criticisms about our book) is Crider’s response to our critique of Douglass’s generally anti-labor and anti-socialist positions: “Yet Douglass,” claims Crider, “felt that labor must ultimately win in the contest with capital for the sake of humanity." Yes, while Douglass would speak, earnestly at times and other times demagogically, about the concerns of working people and the necessity of a multiracial alliance against slavery, he often took the side of employers in labor disputes, opposed striking workers’ picket lines, repudiated the utopian socialism of John A. Collins, disparaged the London Chartists in 1848 and the Parisian proletarian uprising of the same year, not to mention his extended editorial campaign against the Paris Commune of 1871, and absented himself from the fight for land in the early years of reconstruction—limitations, we ague, of his liberal outlook and ideology.

He himself was a landlord, potentially a slum landlord^[1] according to at least one researcher. Douglass’s explicit theoretical endorsement in the New National Era—his Reconstruction-era newspaper—of the harmony of interests between capital and labor, directly contradicts Crider’s claim.

The essence of Crider’s complaint, we contend, is our failure to make a case for his professed project—reconciling liberalism and socialism, “the missed opportunity,” for which we plead guilty. Our position is that communism is a genuine alternative to liberalism, one which is more adequate for human emancipation. The gap between our perspectives is not one that lends itself to reconciliation. That’s not what Crider was hoping to find.

[1] John R. McKivigan and Jeffery A. Duvall, “Frederick Douglass, Slum Landlord?,” New North Star, 2023; 5: 76-79.

Featured image is Karl Marx and Frederick Douglass.