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THE CIVIL War is the defining event in the history of the United States, yet also the most misunderstood. More books are written on this war than on any period of US history, yet for all the words poured across the pages, the real cause of the war—slavery—is usually missed or obscured. Rather, there are tales of chivalrous Confederate generals heroically leading charges, drunken Union generals butchering their men in horrible frontal assaults, brothers fighting brothers in a pointless war that ravaged the land and wounded a people. Was the Civil War just a tragic mistake? A war like any other imperialist war the United States ruling class has its soldiers fighting in today? While some answer these questions with a yes, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels would have been taken aback. They would have resoundingly answered “no.” The Civil War, they believed, was not just another horrible atrocity, but rather a revolution that ended slavery and destroyed the slave-owners’ power as a class.
