Taken from the “Address to President Lincoln” drafted by Karl Marx from the International Workingmen’s Association. This piece of an essay is from Book V called “Revolt.” This chapter is summarized as to pertain to “The struggle to abolish injustice; the battle cries of the new army which is gathering for the deliverance of humanity.”
When an oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders, for the first time in the annals of the world, dared to inscribe “Slavery” on the banner of armed revolt; when on the very spot where hardly a century ago the idea of one great democratic republic had first sprung up, whence the first declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century, when on the very spot the counter-revolution cynically proclaimed property in man to be “the new corner-stone of the new edifice”- then the working classes of Europe understood at once that the slaveholders’ rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy war of property against labor; and that for men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even the past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic.
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