160 THE UTOPIAN COMMUNISTmight view the slavery question in its true light. In 1853, Die
Republik der Arbeiter carried a long article exposing the nonsense
underlying theories of racial superiority.
Nevertheless, Weitling had no special interest or part in the
agitation of the abolitionists. Unlike Heinzen, he did not make
his paper an instrument of the great crusade for freedom of the
Negro. Weitling knew very little about the economics of slavery.
His editorial guns were trained on the whole system of wage
slavery and he was afraid that concentration on Negro slavery
alone would divert attention from his more basic program. Thus
abolitionism became a side issue. Moreover, Weitling did not re
late the problems of free labor in the North to the existence of a
slave system in the South, as a few of his contemporaries did. In
the first German workers' congress held in America in 1850,
sponsored by Weitling, there was not a single reference to slavery.
It is well to remember that German immigrants as a class were
slow to take up the antislavery issue. Kriege in 1846 actually
argued that the slave system was essentially a question of property
and that if the abolitionist crusade should succeed, it would only
increase competition among free workers, depressing the white
worker without elevating the black.^22 Though he took no part
in the abolitionist movement as such, Weitling predicted that
eventually there would be a political realignment around an anti-
slavery party which would attract other reformers who cham
pioned such issues as land and labor reforms and equal suffrage. He
himself continued to support the Democratic party, not because
of its attitude toward the sectional controversy, but because of
its greater friendliness toward the immigrant, and because he be
lieved the Whig party was full of nativists and antilabor men. By
the time of the Civil War, Weitling no longer had an organ for
the expression of his views on public issues, and he had virtually
retired from the arena of public debate. He followed the course
of the war with great interest and accumulated quite a file of
(^22) New York Volkstribun, quoted in Hermann Schlüter, Die Anfänge der
deutschen Arbeiterbewegung in Amerika (Stuttgart, 1907), 189.