Letter from August Willich to Friedrich Engels
17th of July 1862
Olathe, Kansas
Dear Friedrich,
My old comrade and friend, I write to you in the most profound delusion at the blow to the cause of freedom which has occurred in the state of Missouri. I have not felt such desperation at that which could have been since we were in arms together in those heady days of 1848, when the tyrants of Europe reasserted their dominion, writing the terms of our surrender in the blood of the proletariat.
For the last year I have led a band of our countrymen, both born here and in the German lands, in the cause of liberty and the end to that most primal and pure form of capitalist exploitation, chattel slavery. We have ridden the length and breadth of Missouri, fighting against the militias seeking to cause the secession of the state and its incorporation into the slavers’ Confederacy. We have fought bravely, and freed many a slave, some of whom we took back to freedom in Kansas, others choosing to continue the fight as members of our band. While my own motivations in the struggle are to further the goal of Communism, many of my men felt they were doing the work of the American Republic.
My comrades have learned a bitter lesson in the perfidy of the bourgeois. This February, their swinish president, Hamblin the Accidental, ordered the army of the United States of America to ensure the “property rights” of Missouri citizens, in order to placate the very men who would have handed the state to the Confederacy! The property he speaks of is that which no man may own, the lives and labour of free men called slaves, and the land itself, which must be held in common. We are now as bandits, at war with all but the proletariat, striking and burning in the night, we eat what we find, if we find it, we lie down to sleep with the wolves in the wilderness. And yet we fight on…
The Springfield Daily Democrat - 1st September 1862
Three Squarehead Jayhawkers Lynched at Roscoe
Three murdering Jayhawkers of German origin, including the infamous negro-lover Augie Willich, have been
hanged by enraged civilians, after their capture by the Auxiliary Missouri Militia. Now integrated into the
US Army of Missouri under General Grant, the militia….
Pamphlet entitled ‘Slave and Proletarian’, by Friedrich Engels, dedicated to August Willich - 1862
…it is therefore now clear that the slave is not a primitive proletarian in potential but is actually the purest form of proletarian. Slavery and wage labour are not separate historical stages but simultaneously evolve as part of the inevitable development of capitalism, indeed, the slave-driving sugar planters of the Atlantic Islands flourished just as the manufacturers of England began to appropriate surplus value through wage-slavery. The logic of capitalist production means that, wherever sufficient labour can not be attained from free workers who have no means of self-sufficiency, the capitalist will seek to impose slavery. We should not be surprised to see slavery, declared or de facto, expand as the new goldfields, cotton-fields and tea and rubber plantations that will open up as Africa, Asia and South America are integrated into the capitalist mode of production.
The slave is not merely a wretch awaiting manumission, he, or she, is a revolutionary subject, confronted daily by the naked fact of capitalist exploitation and violence. We must place or hopes not just in the factories of Europe, but in the plantations of the Americas for the genesis of world revolution, our movement shall look not merely to the European barricades of 1848, but to the burning plantations of Haiti in 1791. Of course, the slave, like all proletarians, must gain political consciousness; not of the fact of his exploitation, as the social relations of production mean he could not ignore this even if he should be foolish enough to wish so, but of its nature…