Marx and DeForest: The Idea of Class Struggle in Miss Ravenel's Conversion

Abstract

one of the points that John William DeForest makes in Miss Ravenel's Conversion (I867) iS that the Civil War was essentially a class struggle. This is precisely the thesis of a series of articles on the American war that Karl Marx published in i86i and I862 in the Vienna newspaper Die Presse. Because Marx was also a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune and contributed a total of 487 articles between 185I and I862, it might appear that DeForest could have derived the idea of the Civil War as a class struggle directly from Marx. But the seven Tribune articles in which Marx deals with the war concern themselves only with European reactions to it and do not mention the class struggle idea explicitly. However, this notion appears frequently, throughout the war, in the editorials of the Tribbune. It is my contention therefore that DeForest did not get the idea of the war as a class struggle directly from Marx-I believe he did not even know who Marx was-1 but that he got it from the editors of the Tribune who in turn had been influenced by Marx. A comparison of passages from Miss Ravenel's Conversion, from Marx's essays, and from Tribune editorials and an examination of the relationship between Karl Marx and the Tribune editors will support this theory.