Revolutionary socialists were thus one of the many groups that won the Civil War. Defeated and sent into American exile after a wave of European revolutions in 1848-49, many discovered in the struggle against slavery more hopeful strategies than any they had previously pursued. Marx also followed the progress of the Civil War closely because so many of his fellow exiled European revolutionaries fought in the ranks of the Union Army. The emancipation of the enslaved through the abolition of slavery represented a world-transforming step in this direction. Marx had been calling for the “emancipation” of workers through the “abolition” of oligarchic concentrations of property - capital - for decades. Elsewhere, wealthy elites claimed similarly that their ownership of factories gave them the right to manage, and to live off the work of, "their" employees. The Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter began what Marx, in an 1864 letter to President Abraham Lincoln, called a “general holy Crusade of Property against Labour.” By claiming to own people, a wealthy elite in the South accorded to itself the right not only to brutalize their "property" but also to take for themselves the wealth created by four million African-American workers. Slavery, for Marx and other radicals, was an especially cruel version of a much broader conflict between democracy and the rights of property owners. For revolutionary socialists, the Civil War was a decisive victory in an even larger struggle between democracy and private property.
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