THE FORTY-EIGHTERS, MARX, AND THE LINCOLN ADMINISTRATION
(Another great article by Mindy Esposito, well worht the follow through link - DD)
(Mindy Esposito) - A reader asked me recently who the Forty-Eighters were, and why any of it matters today. It is a fair question, and the short answer deserves the long version, because the story runs straight through Karl Marx, the German vote that helped elect Lincoln, and the Union officer corps itself.
WHO THE FORTY-EIGHTERS WERE
The Forty-Eighters were the refugees of the failed European revolutions of 1848 and 1849, most of them from the German states. When those revolutions collapsed, the men who had led them, organized them, and fought in their street battles left Europe by the boatload and landed in America. They came to a country that offered land, work, and a political fight of its own already building.
They were not a single ideological bloc. There were nationalists, socialists, and a hard core of committed communists among them. What bound them together was 1848 itself, not a shared program.
That hard core matters, because the Forty-Eighters were the first substantial, organized influx of…
