On Sun, 18 Apr 1999, Michael Hoover wrote:
> Joseph Weydemeyer was one of about 5,000 German "48er" emigres to the US
> who fought in the Union army...
Weydemeyer is also worth recalling as the occasioner of The Eighteenth Brumaire and as the addressee of the letter in which Marx (in his mid-thirties) set out an account of what he took to be new about his work:
"... And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of the class struggle, and bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of the classes. What I did that was new was to prove (1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production, (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society ..." (5 March 1852; MESC Moscow 1935).
--C. G. Estabrook