True, only the British government had taxed its people to compensate slave-owners for the loss of their property in human beings after the freeing of slaves throughout the Empire from August 1834. The expiation did not extend to compensating the slaves from whom masses of surplus value had been expropriated to underpin the triumph of wage-slavery. The expansion of capital went on being buttressed by indenture as an alternative system of slavery and by peonage as debt slavery. The Britain that freed its chattel slaves in 1834 supported the slave-owning South to defend Lancashire cotton millers who were busy exploiting their wage-slaves.
That Darwin did not confront these facts is no more surprising than that his biographers do not ask where the money came from the support his lifetime of research and writing. He never had a paying job. On the Beagle, he was a ‘volunteer’ gentleman, not the official botanist. He had abandoned his studies in medicine where he might have earned a competence hastening patients to their graves. Had he been ordained as a clergyman, he would have joined Parson Malthus as a ‘gluttonous drone’, to quote Marx. Darwin earned next to nothing from his writings. In marrying his cousin, he consolidated their portion of the Wedgwood fortune, accumulated by the exploitation of wage slaves in the pottery works. In a class society, every act of civilisation is paid for by acts of barbarism.
Abraham Lincoln’s reputation as a liberator distorts the historical record. He looked forward to gradual and total abolition, with compensation, but did not go to war to free the slaves. He entered the Civil War in April 1861 to maintain the United States as a single nation-market-state, as he wrote in August 1862:
My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union … If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that … I have here stated my purpose according to my views of official duty and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.
As head of the executive committee of the bourgeoisie, one of Lincoln’s official objectives was to hold onto the Mississippi Valley as a trade route for the mid-western States; a parallel aim was for the mill-owners of New England to retain dominance over their suppliers in the cotton-growing South. On New Year’s Day 1862, Lincoln accepted military necessity by signing a Proclamation to emancipate the slaves in order to defeat the Confederacy’s war for independence.
Obama has adopted the Lincoln logo to attach himself to the descendants of slaves. He mimicked Lincoln’s whistle-stop train from Illinois for his inauguration. He points to Lincoln’s example when giving cabinet posts to war criminals among both the Republicans and the Democrats. The parallels are even stronger between Lincoln’s ‘official duty’ to save the Union and Obama’s rescue of Wall Street.