Karl Marx: A biography by David McLellan

LONDON (^233)
his Revelations', to which Marx responded with a sarcastic pamphlet, The
Knight of the Noble Mind. There the quarrel stopped. Willich became a
journalist in Cincinnati, reviewed Marx's later writings favourably and
studied Hegel. He was decorated during the Civil War, marched with
Sherman to Atlanta and left with the rank of Major General. He finally
settled in St Mary's, Ohio, where he became one of its most active and
respected citizens, his funeral being attended by more than 2500 people.
Marx was not a man to pursue a quarrel interminably. He hesitated before
including the section on the Willich-Schapper faction in the second
edition of the Revelations in 1875 , and wrote in the Preface that 'in the
American Civil War Willich demonstrated that he was something more
than a weaver of fantastic projects'.^94
Although the leaders of the different national refugee groups did (in
contrast with the rank-and-file) mix quite freely with each other, Marx's
contacts with them were very sparse. He had been in close touch with
the Blanquists in 1850 but they sided with Willich when the Communist
League split. Louis Blanc, whom Marx considered more or less an ally
after 1843 , had also gone over to Willich on the occasion of the February
banquet. Marx did receive an invitation to a similar banquet the following
year, but sent Jenny in his place. He was not impressed by her report of
the 'dry meeting with the trappings of tea and sandwiches'.^95 The Italian
refugee leader Mazzini was dubbed by Marx 'the Pope of the Democratic
Church in partibus,<>6 and he criticised his policies in a letter to Engels as
follows:
Mazzini knows only the towns with their liberal aristocracy and their
enlightened citizens. The material needs of the Italian agricultural
population - as exploited and as systematically emasculated and held in
stupidity as the Irish - are naturally too low for the phraseological
heaven of his cosmopolitan, neo-Catholic ideological manifestos. It
needs courage, however, to inform the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy
that the first step towards the independence of Italy is the complete
emancipation of the peasants and the transformation of their semi-
tenant system into free bourgeois property.^97
As for the other prominent refugee leader, the Hungarian Kossuth, Marx
considered him a representative of 'an obscure and semi-barbarous people
still stuck in the semi-civilisation of the sixteenth century'.^98
The only national group with which Marx had any prolonged contact
were the Chartists. By 1850 the slow process of disintegration that had
affected the Chartist movement after its climax and failure in 1848 was
already well advanced. At the same time repressive government measures
had radicalised Chartism; and among the two most influential of its radical
leaders in the early 1850 s were George Julian Harney and Ernest Jones.