Lincoln Unbound

by Rich Lowry

  Property was another Lincoln enthusiasm that, like patent law, might seem arid to someone less attuned than he was to its foundational value. For him, property was “a positive good in the world,” as he told workingmen from New York in 1864. Daniel Walker Howe writes that Lincoln believed, as the nineteenth-­century theologian Horace Bushnell put it, a “grand moral struggle centers in the holding and use and transmission of property.”

  He had seen that process impaired in his youth. An antiquated system of land titles in Kentucky had blighted his father’s attempts to hold and improve property. The state originally belonged to Virginia, which passed along laws it had inherited from English land tenure wholly inappropriate in the frontier context. On top of this, Virginia sold off more land than actually existed in Kentucky. Thomas Cooper, an early-­nineteenth-­century political philosopher, said that “a purchaser in Kentucky buys a law-­suit with every plot of unoccupied land he pays for there.”

  Thomas Lincoln lost money on two properties thanks to flawed titles, and then got chased off his last farm in the state by a lawsuit. He moved to Indiana, where the federal Land Ordinance of 1785 imposed more order and reliability on surveys and land titles. A British lawyer who visited Lincoln in the White House in 1864 said that the president talked to him about “queer” features of English land law. He then complained that “in the State of Kentucky, where he was raised, they used to be so troubled with the same mysterious relics of feudalism, and titles got into an almighty mess with these pettifoggin’ incumbrances turnin’ up at every fresh tradin’ with the land, and no one knowin’ how to get rid of ’em.”

  Lincoln the devotee of economic growth, the mechanically inclined amateur inventor, the defender of property and patent law applied himself first to realizing the potential of Illinois. In 1839, a resolution of the legislature written in his hand declared that Illinois “surpasses every other spot of equal extent upon the face of the globe, in fertility of soil,” and argued that it could sustain “a greater amount of agricultural wealth and population than any other equal extent of territory in the world.” The resolution urged “that all our energies should be exerted to bring that wealth and population among us as speedily as possible.”

  How? First of all: improvements.

  Arguments over infrastructure, and especially the constitutionality of federal projects, played an outsize role in early American politics. In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison celebrated the Constitution for creating the predicate for new links of transportation. As George Washington’s Treasury secretary, Hamilton celebrated transportation improvements in his justly famous Report on Manufactures. He wrote that the new interest in “improvement of inland navigation” could only “fill with pleasure every breast, warmed with a true zeal for the prosperity of the country.” He then quoted Adam Smith for the proposition, “Good roads, canals, and navigable rivers, by diminishing the expense of carriage, put the remote parts of a country more nearly upon a level with those in the neighborhood of the town. They are, upon that account, the greatest of all improvements.”

  Such projects became one of the grounds for the epic contention between Hamilton and Jefferson. The Virginian supported infrastructure, too, but objected to what he considered Hamilton’s overly expansive interpretation of the Constitution. ­Hamilton thought the Constitution granted the government “implied powers” to act on its specifically enumerated ones. Jefferson thought an extensive federal infrastructure program required a constitutional amendment.

  The debate dragged on over the decades, with the constitutional amendment never forthcoming. Amid presidential vetoes of various proposed projects, federal funding nonetheless increased, although in a haphazard fashion. As Adam J. White points out in an essay on the history of infrastructure, Jefferson himself didn’t let his constitutional scruples stop him from signing a plan for the National Road connecting the Potomac and Ohio rivers. So it went. Andrew Jackson vetoed the Maysville Road, which would have connected the National Road to other major arteries, yet he spent twice as much on transportation as all previous presidents and showered the country with pork-­barrel projects.

  As presidents and Congress argued over constitutional interpretation, much of the action was at the state level, where Lincoln was eager to pick up the baton. Transportation difficulties loomed large in his early life. His family’s Indiana farm had been a full sixteen miles from the thoroughfare of the Ohio River. As we have seen, his first venture with Denton Offutt was beset by poor roads and a barely navigable river. The mud of central Illinois was called “prairie gumbo” and made life in Springfield a miserable mess.

  The eighth circuit that Lincoln rode for so many years as a lawyer was known as the “mud circuit.” As the circuit-­riding Judge David Davis complained, “[b]ad roads, broken bridges, swimming of horses, & constant wettings, are the main incidents in Western travel.” Lincoln apparently took the lead in checking out the river fords on account of his height. He pranked his lawyerly entourage once by telling them a stream was so deep they had better strip before riding across and watched in amusement as the unnecessarily naked party forded the shallow water.

  From the first, Lincoln the politician fixated on improving transportation. By the second paragraph of his announcement of his initial candidacy for the legislature in March 1832, he was pronouncing on “the public utility of internal improvements.” When he made it to the legislature, he immediately introduced a proposal for a bridge: “That Samuel Musick his heirs and his assigns be and they are hereby authorized to erect a toll bridge across Salt creek in Sangamon county at or near the place where the said Musick is now authorized to keep a ferry.” At first, the legislature focused on chartering private transportation companies, but they couldn’t raise the necessary capital for projects at a time when small savers not interested in risky investments controlled much of the nation’s savings.

  Illinois decided it had to act directly. The state created a massive program of public works, and what might have been a prudential effort to fill a public need became a frenzy, fueled by a speculative mania.

  Everyone looked to New York State’s Erie Canal for inspiration. New Yorkers had conceived of it as a connection to the ­hinterlands farther west that would make New York, in the words of Governor DeWitt Clinton, “the great depot and warehouse of the western world.” When federal funding wasn’t forthcoming, New York determined to finance the project itself, a canal of more than three hundred miles connecting the Hudson River to Lake Erie. Begun in 1817 and completed in 1825, “Clinton’s Big Ditch” was truly grandiose. As recently as 1816, there had only been about one hundred miles of canal in the entire country, and only three of them longer than two miles.

  In its conception and execution, it represented the spirit of a fearlessly enterprising ­people in a hurry to meet the future. In the absence of trained professionals, lawyers and other talented amateurs acted as engineers. All told, the canal cost $7 million and proved worth every penny. Toll revenue on the Erie and the related Champlain canal hit half a million dollars in 1825, and rose from there. New York’s manmade waterway quickly outpaced the Mighty Mississippi as a commercial thoroughfare. The project paid off its construction debt in eleven years, and sent shipping costs between Lake Erie and New York City plummeting.

  The canal was an exuberant leap into the future, and seemed a cost-­effective one at that. No wonder it fired imaginations. A ­couple of Illinois counties were named after DeWitt Clinton, and Joshua Speed recalled how Lincoln told him how “in reference to Internal improvements & the best interest and advancement of this State, that his highest ambition was to become the De Witt Clinton of Ills.” Illinois wanted to keep up with the neighboring states of Ohio and Indiana, which were reaching for the glories of the new era of transportation, Indiana with what was called “the Mammoth Internal Improvement Bill.”

  Passed in early 1837, the resulting Illinois infrastructure pro
gram ran to about $10 million. It came to be known as the System, a statewide extravaganza encompassing 1,300 miles of railroad, including two trunk lines running north-­to-­south and east-­to-­west, and sundry other projects, from new roads to river improvements. For counties somehow not touched by this inescapable net of infrastructure, the legislature thoughtfully appropriated two hundred thousand dollars for areas that might otherwise feel left out. This was on top of the Illinois & Michigan Canal, funded separately.

  “Work on all these gigantic enterprises,” Herndon explained, “was to begin at the earliest practicable moment; cities were to spring up everywhere; capital from abroad was to come pouring in; attracted by the glowing reports of marvelous progress and great internal wealth, ­people were to come swarming in by colonies, until in the end Illinois was to outstrip all others, and herself become the Empire State of the union.” All of it was to be financed through borrowing. Illinois learned the lesson of the Erie Canal, that great ventures could be financed through state bonds, all too well.

  The scope of the Illinois program seems so fantastical in retrospect that a widely accepted explanation for its passage is gross log-­rolling undertaken by Lincoln and his colleagues from Sangamon County. Exceptionally tall, they were known as “the Long Nine,” a derisive moniker drawn from the name of a lousy cigar. The Long Nine supposedly traded their votes for the improvement scheme in exchange for support for moving the capital from Vandalia to Springfield, in Sangamon. There is no doubt that Lincoln and his Sangamon colleagues fought hard for the move in legislative trench warfare, and that Lincoln was nobody’s naïf. During his first term in the legislature, he learned at the knee of John Stuart, or “Jerry Sly.” Stuart later described how, in one instance, “Lincoln and I made a trade with [fellow legislator Sidney] Breese to the effect that we would help pass his railroad bill if he would help us secure the appointment of the Canal Comrs. [commissioners] by the Governor.”

  But at the end of the day the System passed because, in a classic bubble mindset, nearly everyone wanted it and nearly everyone believed in it. Members of both parties supported it, and the public welcomed it as a vehicle for increasing population and raising land values. One lawmaker predicted that the bonds “would go like hotcakes.” Such was the presumed glory of the legislature’s work that once it was completed, in the words of one anonymous witness who may have been Lincoln himself, “All Vandalia was illuminated. Bonfires were built, and fire balls were thrown, in every direction.”

  That was the high point. The Panic of 1837 and a subsequent depression crushed all the state’s vaulting hopes. Never a fan, Governor Joseph Duncan advocated repealing the System almost immediately. Lincoln persisted in his support, even as things began to unravel. He wanted to come up with the additional funds necessary to keep the System alive by having Illinois buy all the public lands in the state—­with the federal government’s cooperation—­and ­resell them at a profit. The scheme required borrowing ­another $5 million. It was a nonstarter. Washington wasn’t interested.

  Democrats took to calling the projects “Infernal Improvements.” At first, Lincoln refused even to rank projects in the System by their merit, lest it undermine political support for the plan in the areas with projects slated to get axed first. Stingy about other appropriations, he was willing to spend more money to try to get over the hump to better times. He thought, “We had gone too far to recede, even if we were disposed to do so.” If Illinois simply quit, it would incur massive losses with nothing to show for them. A Democrat mocked him in Lincolnian fashion for proposing more of the disease as a cure. “A drunkard in Arkansas,” he related, “took so much of the cretur, that he lost his reason and remained for some time in a state of insensibility. His wife tried every experiment to cure him; but it was of no avail, until a neighbor came to the house and recommended some brandy toddy. The insensible man rose at the word toddy, and said ‘that is the stuff.’ ”

  Lincoln realized what was going to happen. He wrote to John Stuart, then a congressman, at the beginning of 1840 that the “Internal Improvement System will be put down in a lump, without benefit of clergy.” He supported raising taxes rather than repudiating the state’s debt, and it didn’t help the cause of the System that it became associated with taxation. There was an awful lot of debt not to repudiate. The state ran up more than $10 million of it, without completing anything except a fifty-­nine-­mile stretch of railroad between Springfield and Meredosia that proved useless.

  In 1841, the state defaulted on its interest payments. Former governor Thomas Ford wrote in his history of Illinois that the state “became a stench in the nostrils of the civilized world.” It sold off the property on which it had planned to build the system and its railroad iron and timber. The Springfield and Meredosia line, which cost $900,000 to build, was sold for all of $21,100. ­Illinois didn’t manage to pay off its debt until 1881 (it still outpaced Ohio, which didn’t pay off its own improvement debt until 1902).

  The disaster didn’t shake Lincoln’s faith in the correctness of his ultimate goal. When he made it to Congress in 1847, he argued for transportation projects on a national scale. In a speech responding to Democratic criticisms in 1848, he acknowledged that when a legislature takes up such projects there is a tendency toward—­ahem—­“undue expansion.” But he was unconvinced by the objection that Congress would necessarily end up approving projects with benefits too localized to justify their funding by the nation. Consider the navy. It indisputably benefits the nation, yet “is of some peculiar advantage to Charleston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New-­York, and Boston, beyond what it is to the interior towns of Illinois.” Conversely, consider the Illinois & Michigan Canal, which, when it was eventually completed, had become a conduit for sugar to get more cheaply from New Orleans to Buffalo—­“a benefit resulting from the canal, not to Illinois where the canal is, but to Louisiana and New-­York where it is not.”

  He advocated determining through statistical analysis the worthiest projects. In his conclusion, neatly summarizing his lifelong attitude to improvements, he said: “Let the nation take hold of the larger works, and the states the smaller ones; and thus, working in a meeting direction, discreetly, but steadily and firmly, what is to be made unequal in one place may be equalized in another, extravagance avoided, and the whole country put on that career of prosperity, which shall correspond with it’s extent of teritory, it’s natural resources and the intelligence and enterprize of it’s ­people.”

  As central to Lincoln as infrastructure was banking, particularly federally controlled banking to produce a sound paper currency and widespread availability of credit. He could deliver “a very sensible speech” in opposition to specie currency—­money coined from gold or silver—­as early as 1832, according to his early law partner Stephen T. Logan. In his first published speech in January 1837, Lincoln vigorously defended his views on banking and cheekily praised his adversary for his “decided superiority”—­especially in “the faculty of entangling a subject, so that neither himself, or any other man, can find head or tail to it.”

  Illinois replicated the national drama of the Bank War on a smaller scale. The legislature created a state bank in 1835, and chartered two others. The state bought bank stock and figured, wishfully, that it could fund improvements with the inevitable dividends. Intertwined in other ways, the banks and the improvements were fated to meet the same bad end. The state bank itself became the occasion for partisan war and a proxy for clashing economic visions. The Jacksonians attacked, Gabor Boritt writes, “not only the most blatant symbol, but also one of the most effective instruments, of the undesirable new world of growing commercial-­industrial capitalism.” Characteristically, Lincoln rallied to its defense.

  The bank’s stockholders were supposed to be residents of the state, but Eastern financiers ended up with much of the stock, opening the bank up to populist attack. In that January 1837 speech, Lincoln worked to forestall an investiga
tion by opponents of the bank. He brushed off the question of stock ownership as a dispute among capitalists who “have got into a quarrel with themselves.” The controversy had been stirred up by politicians, who “are, taken as a mass, at least one long step removed from honest men.” “I say this,” he added, “with the greater freedom because, being a politician myself, none can regard it as personal.” Laying it on thick at the end, he argued that the legislature lacked the authority to launch the investigation. “I am opposed,” he said, stretching his case well beyond the point of credulity, “to encouraging that lawless and mobocratic spirit, whether in relation to the bank or any thing else, which is already abroad in the land.”

  The core of Lincoln’s argument for the bank came down to economics. Ordinary, enterprising ­people needed credit and a safe, widely available currency (and specie alone wasn’t adequate). In short, you can’t have a cash economy without reliable cash. To this end, the state bank issued notes, backed by specie, that circulated as currency. “By injuring the credit of the Bank,” Lincoln argued, “you will depreciate the value of its paper in the hands of the honest and unsuspecting farmer and mechanic.” If the enemies of the institution could go all the way and “wipe the Bank from existence,” he warned, they would “annihilate the currency of the State” and “render valueless in the hands of our ­people that reward of their former labors.”

  This is the line that would consistently run throughout Lincoln’s advocacy on banking. Prior to the Civil War, currency in the United States was a riot of confusion. All around the country, state banks issued notes as paper currency of widely varying quality. The notes in the East tended to be reliable, but elsewhere it was a crapshoot. In the West, wildcat banks were situated in remote locations “out among the wildcats,” so no one could find them to try to redeem their notes for specie.