by Rich Lowry
In Barack Obama’s stump speeches, Lincoln is often boiled down to his support for infrastructure projects. His fellow Illinoisan, he insists, would have been an enthusiast for subsidies for green energy and high-speed rail and the like. Lincoln did indeed back infrastructure “improvements” throughout his career. His beloved railroads, though, genuinely represented the economic future rather than a fashionable lark. Even so, the results of the subsidies he supported for transit were decidedly mixed.
One of the more egregious examples of getting Lincoln wrong while “getting right” with him is a little book called Why Lincoln Matters, by the liberal lion Mario Cuomo. His Lincoln is all in favor of sharing, inclusion, diversity, and whatever else Cuomo deems valuable and important. He ends the book with an imaginary 2004 State of the Union address by Lincoln that intersperses Lincoln quotes with Cuomo’s predictable policy positions. Lincoln comes out against the Bush tax cuts and in favor of more spending on education, job training, health care, and foreign aid. Lincoln opposes the Iraq War because he would have given United Nations weapons inspectors more time to work. He argues that attacking terrorists creates more terrorism. And he counsels against letting wartime exigencies impinge at all on civil liberties despite his very own wartime example. In short, Cuomo’s Lincoln is John Kerry with a beard. As an interpreter of Lincoln, Cuomo is a great former governor of New York.
Not everyone feels a need to get right with Lincoln. A school of conservatives excoriates him for the same reason Cuomo embraces him: He was allegedly a proto–New Dealer. An intellectual giant of mid-twentieth-century conservatism, Willmoore Kendall, averred that modern liberalism “is Lincoln’s legitimate offspring.” Another major thinker of the right in that period, Frank Meyer, seconded this verdict: “Were it not for the wounds that Lincoln inflicted upon the Constitution, it would have been infinitely more difficult for Franklin Roosevelt to carry through his revolution, for the coercive welfare state to come into being and bring about the conditions against which we are fighting today.”
Kendall and Meyer think Lincoln should have let the South merrily go its own way in 1861. Contemporary libertarians take a similar tack. Rejecting praise for Lincoln as “one of our greatest presidents,” Ron Paul wonders why Lincoln didn’t forestall the war by simply buying up all the slaves and freeing them—a market solution to the sectional conflict. With his usual sense of realism, Paul ignores the fact that Lincoln repeatedly advanced schemes for just such a compensated emancipation. Lincoln argued for these proposals as “the cheapest and most humane way to end the war.” Except in the District of Columbia, they went precisely . . . nowhere. The border states weren’t selling, let alone the South. Even little Delaware, which was selected as a test case because it had only 587 slaveholders out of a white population of 90,500 in 1860, couldn’t be persuaded to cash out of slavery. One plan proposed by Lincoln would have paid four hundred dollars or so per slave and achieved full abolition by 1893. A version of the scheme failed in the state’s legislature.
The Lincoln-hating libertarian Thomas DiLorenzo expands this line of criticism in a rancid book-length prosecution of Lincoln as the Whore of Springfield. In his telling, Lincoln was a racist dictator who didn’t care about ending slavery so much as aggrandizing the central government and crushing federalism and states’ rights. Lincoln, DiLorenzo concludes with his typical judiciousness, “was an even worse tyrant than George III was.”
Where to begin? These critiques from the right amount to the contention that the Constitution was so precious and inviolate that half the country should have been permitted to exit from it, and write a new explicitly proslavery one. In contrast to the U.S. version, the foundational governing document of the Confederacy didn’t tiptoe around the issue. It was full of explicit references to slavery, or as Article IV, section 2 put it, “slaves and other property.” It accorded the so-called peculiar institution high, protected status: “No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.” It guaranteed slavery in new territories.
The South seceded to protect human bondage, not to vindicate liberty. Prior to the Civil War, it didn’t even honor that most elemental political freedom, free speech, which it trampled to suppress the expression of abolitionist opinions. Its commitment to federalism was highly situational. It insisted on a federal Fugitive Slave Act to tighten the screws on anyone in the Northern states who was insufficiently zealous about returning runaways. Southern Democrats walked out of the 1860 Democratic convention, in a foreshadowing of secession, when the party couldn’t forge a consensus on a platform demanding federal protection for slavery in the territories.
The ensuing war necessarily entailed the growth of the state, but this hardly makes Lincoln a forerunner to FDR or LBJ. The income tax to fund the war, instituted in 1861 and soon made into a progressive tax with higher rates for the wealthy, was eliminated in 1872. (The Confederacy had its own income tax, with highly progressive rates.) In 1860, the federal budget was well under $100 million. By the end of the war, it was more than $1 billion. Wars are expensive. The budget dropped back down to about $300 million, excluding payments on the debt, within five years of the end of the war.
To see the makings of the modern welfare state in any of this requires a leap of imagination. In the midst of the war, the State Department had all of thirty-three employees. The famous instances of government activism not directly related to the war—the subsidies to railroads, the Homestead Act—were a far cry from the transfer programs instituted in the twentieth century. The railroads got land and loan guarantees. The Homestead Act, as Lincoln historian Allen Guelzo argues, can be viewed as a gigantic privatization of public lands, which were sold off at a cut rate to people willing to improve their plots.*
The surges in government that presaged explosions in its growth later in the twentieth century first arrived during the Progressive Era, in the Teddy Roosevelt and the Woodrow Wilson administrations. The New Deal represented a true rupture within the American tradition, and the Great Society—born of the post-1964 liberal ascendancy and of the particular hubris of post–World War II America—doubled down on it. Lincoln never would have imagined a cradle-to-grave welfare state, or expansive government programs to support the able-bodied who aren’t war widows or orphans.
The likes of Mario Cuomo hang much of their case for ownership of Lincoln on a statement he wrote for himself circa 1854, in what may have been a draft note for a lecture: “The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves—in their separate, and individual capacities.” In this he was referring, on the one hand, to policing and the prosecution of crimes, and on the other, to “public roads and highways, public schools, charities, pauperism, orphanage, estates of the deceased, and the machinery of government itself.” In other words, functions of government that are thoroughly uncontroversial. And when Lincoln talked of government, he didn’t necessarily mean the federal government.
In the same document he writes, “In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere.” He elaborated in a 1858 speech, “I believe each individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruit of his labor, so far as it in no wise interferes with any other man’s rights—that each community, as a State, has a right to do exactly as it pleases with all the concerns within that State that interfere with the rights of no other State, and that the general government, upon principle, has no right to interfere with anything other than that general class of things that does concern the whole.”
Obviously, Lincoln is not an exact fit with either of our two competing political ideologies. He was more favorable to government activism than conservatives are today. But progressives do him the gravest disservice by attempting to c
onscript him for their cause, a project that dates back to Teddy Roosevelt. Lincoln had more faith in the market and an up-by-the-bootstraps individualism; a greater tolerance for economic inequality; a deeper commitment to bourgeois moral norms; a more realistic view of human nature; and a keener sense of constitutional limits and of natural rights than liberals do today.
Lincoln’s policies sought to create more robust markets, with more people better equipped to pursue their own advancement, without government interference or guarantees. Lincoln warned a delegation of workingmen during the Civil War of the peril of a “war on property, or the owners of property”: “Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.” In March 1860, he said, “I take it that it is best for all to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can. Some will get wealthy. I don’t believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good. So while we do not propose any war upon capital, we do wish to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else.”
It is a trope to say that Lincoln never could have foreseen the post–Civil War age of large corporations and industry and would have rued its onset. In his influential essay “Abraham Lincoln and the Self-Made Myth,” the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote that, had Lincoln lived, “he would have seen the generation brought up on self-help come into its own, build oppressive business corporations, and begin to close off those treasured opportunities for the little man.” Booth’s bullet was almost a mercy, as “it confined his life to the happier age that Lincoln understood.” This is condescending to Lincoln and willfully disregards his lifelong aims.
Of course, Lincoln couldn’t have predicted the exact parameters of the American economy in the decades after the Civil War. No one is clairvoyant. Nor, we can safely assume, would he have welcomed Gilded Age corruption. But the entire point of his politics was to hasten the end of the world as he had known it. He was a man utterly unburdened by nostalgia. The America that emerged in the wake of the war was different in degree, certainly, but not necessarily in kind from the one he had envisioned throughout his adult life. Nothing in what he ever said or did suggests that he would have been outraged by the rise of railroads, corporations, and financial capitalism. By the onrush of epoch-making technological changes. By big industry and big cities.
The unified country that Lincoln restored became a clamorous, unstoppable dynamo of economic development that eclipsed every other nation on earth. In 1800, its share of world manufacturing output had been .8 percent. By 1900, it was the highest in the world, at 23.6 percent. It produced by far the most iron and steel of any country. Andrew Carnegie alone produced more steel than Britain. It consumed the most energy of any nation. As a percentage of its population, it was the second-most urban country in the world, and in absolute numbers it had a greater urban population than Britain. Lincoln’s optimism about the country’s prospects—provided it embraced industry and banking, and fostered individual initiative—was vindicated several times over.
This growing economic might naturally led to more assertiveness abroad. Over time, our influence on the international order began to justify the grander statements Lincoln had made about the spread of liberty to all men: “The theory of our government is Universal Freedom.” He forged the country that went on to win World War II. And in that war’s wake, America blossomed into a broad-based middle-class society that was the envy of the world and—looking back on it from the vantage point of our current economic and social discontents—is the envy of us, too. The conditions of that mid-century moment in time, with most of the industrialized world on its back and national cohesion at a high here after we passed through the forge of World War II, can’t be replicated.
The question now is what we can do to check our drift away from our status as a Lincolnian republic, with the middle struggling, the lower end left behind, and dependence on government growing. What can we do to maintain the ethic of equality of opportunity, with its attendant respect for work, self-reliance, and success? What can we do to remove obstacles to mobility, and reassert the virtues conducive to it? In short, what can we do to live up to the ideal that Lincoln rightly identified as the true center of America? And what does his Republican Party have to contribute to this project?
This book tells the story of Lincoln’s rise so as to underscore those qualities most relevant to his politics, which will remain of significance to America so long as it is recognizable as America. It examines his economic policies, not because their details are exactly relevant in our different circumstances, but for their thrust. It recounts his devotion to the Founding, and especially the Declaration, as a pillar of his worldview. It traces the consequences of his achievements, and considers his lessons for addressing today’s crisis of the American Dream.
The miracle of Lincoln isn’t that he was a railsplitter who became president. It is that he opened the way for the upward march of those behind him and left a legacy to be honored by ensuring that, in America, the way always stays open. What was true when Lincoln spoke to those troops from the 166th Regiment is just as true now: The struggle for a free society defined by individual aspiration is not merely for today, but for all time to come.
Chapter 1
“An Ambition that Knew No Rest”: Young Man on the Make
Good boys who to their books apply / Will make great men by & by.
—COUPLET WRITTEN BY ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 1829
For the young Abraham Lincoln, a dollar opened up a new vista on the world.
When he was about eighteen years old, Lincoln had built a little boat that idled at a landing on the Ohio River. Two men approached in carriages with trunks. They wanted to meet a steamboat coming down the river. Seeing Lincoln’s conveyance, they asked if he’d take them out to meet the steamer in the middle of the river (the practice when there were no wharves). Lincoln obliged and, when they were about to steam off, yelled out that they had forgotten to pay him. To his astonishment, they each tossed a silver half-dollar onto the bottom of his flatboat. Lincoln had, as he put it, “earned my first dollar.”
“In these days it seems to me a trifle,” he recalled, according to a White House visitor who heard him tell the tale, “but it was a most important incident in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, a poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day—that by honest work I had earned a dollar. The world seemed wider and fairer before me. I was a more hopeful and confident being from that time.”
The story of this fleeting incident captures many of Lincoln’s lifelong concerns. Here is Lincoln on a commercial throughway, the Ohio River. Here is Lincoln rejoicing in earnings from his labor. Here is Lincoln fired with ambition by the sight of those half-dollars—all his own, a token of services rendered and rewarded in a free and fair exchange.
If we want a symbol that is true to the youthful Lincoln and what he was to become, it shouldn’t be the axe (or maul) of Lincoln “the railsplitter”; it should be those half-dollars. His political boosters settled on the axe for obvious reasons. As a populist statement, redolent of earthiness and hard work, it’s hard to beat a trusty old axe. But it missed the point of the man entirely. The axe represented what Lincoln wanted to leave behind; the half-dollars what he wanted to create. The axe represented the frontier; the half-dollars the commercial economy. The axe the past; the half-dollars the future.
“Lincoln the railsplitter” ranks as one of the greatest mythogenic acts of political image making of all time. His supporters at the Decatur, Illinois, Republican convention in 1860 came up with it while making him the state’s favorite son for president. Two rails he had supposedly split decades earlier were hauled out in an inspired bit of stagecraft, together with a placard reading, “Abraham Lincoln, The Rail Candidate fo
r President in 1860. Two rails from a lot of 3,000 made in 1830 by Thos. Hanks and Abe Lincoln.” (They got the first name of Hanks wrong, but that’s a quibble for another day). The New York Tribune reported that Lincoln told the ecstatic gathering that, whether or not he had split these rails, “he had mauled many and many better ones since he had grown to manhood.” According to a witness, Lincoln joked: “I used to shirk splitting all the hard cuts. But if those two are honey locust rails, I have no doubt I cut and split them.”*
Without a doubt, Lincoln split more than his share of rails. In an autobiographical statement provided to the journalist John L. Scripps in 1860, Lincoln said that when his father moved the family from Kentucky to Indiana in 1816, he settled them “in an unbroken forest.” There was hardly any other kind in Indiana at that time. “Tall trees covered the whole country,” one description of the state relates, “with their wide-spreading branches, depending to the ground, and the shrubbery below arose and united with the branches of the trees.” Traveling to the new spot, Lincoln’s father had to “[c]ut his way to his farm with the Axe felling the forest as he went,” according to a neighbor.
The eight-year-old Lincoln “had an axe put into his hands at once,” he told Scripps, referring to himself in the third person, “and from that till within his twenty-third year, he was almost constantly handling that most useful instrument.” First, the family built a cabin out of logs, and then Abraham and his father cleared the land—the boy working on the underbrush, the father on the trees. By some accounts, what Ted Williams was to the baseball bat, Abraham was to the axe. “My how he could chop,” marveled a witness to his later work in the woods. “His axe would flash and bite into a sugar tree or sycamore, down it would come. If you heard him felling trees in a clearing, you would say there were three men at work, the way the trees fell.”