Lincoln Unbound

by Rich Lowry

  As many as seven thousand different kinds of bank notes circulated. A contemporary observer complained that “the ­frequently worthless issues of the State of Maine, the shinplasters of Michigan, the wildcats of Georgia, of Canada and Pennsylvania, the red dogs of Indiana and Nebraska, the miserably engraved notes of North Carolina, Kentucky, Missouri and ­Virginia and the not-­to-­be-­forgotten stumptails of Illinois and Wisconsin are mixed indiscriminately with the par currency of New York and Boston.”

  Lincoln wanted to move toward something more uniform and sensible, while pushing back against the simplistic and impractical hard-­money gospel of the Jacksonians. He excoriated President Martin Van Buren’s “independent treasury” plan, which was the latest iteration in the Bank Wars at the national level. After Andrew Jackson had pulled funds out of the Bank of the United States, he deposited them in what were dubbed “pet banks” around the country. This ironically contributed to the rising speculative spirit in the land. It gave states even more incentive to charter banks in the hope of getting federal deposits and pumped the banks with money. Van Buren proposed to remain true to the Jacksonian antibanking faith by severing the government’s relationship with banks altogether and keeping federal funds in an independent treasury.

  Lincoln thought this was tantamount to ensuring that “the money is performing no nobler office than that of rusting in iron boxes.” He insisted that “money is only valuable while in circulation.” This is why the country needed a national bank of the sort the Democrats had just destroyed. “We do not pretend,” he said, getting to the crux of the matter, “that a National Bank can establish and maintain a sound and uniform state of currency in the country, in spite of the National Government; but we do say, that it has established and maintained such a currency, and can do so again, by the aid of that Government; and we further say, that no duty is more imperative on that Government, than the duty it owes the ­people, of furnishing them a sound and uniform currency.”

  Such a currency was another logical step in forging a unified commercial network in the country. It wasn’t going to happen, though—­not yet. Lincoln kept at it anyway, even if not all his points hit home. At one campaign stop in 1840, he said he had witnessed a constable selling a horse for just twenty-­seven dollars that very morning, in an unmistakable sign of the ravages of the deflation wrought by the Democrats. The constable happened to be listening and objected that the horse sold for that amount only because . . . it was blind in one eye.

  In Illinois, he was going to lose the fight over the state bank. The battle went through various permutations, including “the jumping scrape,” until finally, in 1842 the state bank gave up the ghost. Governor Ford, along with many others, concluded of banks, “we must be satisfied, that we in the State of Illinois, are better off without them than with them.” Everything Lincoln had fought for had collapsed in a heap, at least for the time being.

  The tariff constituted a third mainstay of Lincoln’s economics. It was, of course, the subject of deep contention. The South had felt aggrieved by the “Tariff of Abominations” of 1828. Martin Van Buren crafted it to elect Andrew Jackson by disregarding the interests of ­people who wouldn’t be or didn’t need to be won over to Old Hickory, including the Cotton South. Lots of heavy breathing and a nullification crisis later, the tariff was revised in 1833 as a gesture to that region. It was scheduled to fall over the next decade, but it wasn’t changed fundamentally. In 1842 it went up again, in a victory for the Whigs, and then was reduced in 1846, in a victory for the Democrats.

  Southerners had good economic reason to oppose the tariff. It meant they had to pay higher prices for manufactured goods, and they didn’t like the idea of the federal government accumulating more funds that could then be spent on a Whig agenda of improvements. (In the absence of an income tax, the tariff was far and away the nation’s main source of revenue.) Lincoln went to pains to try to prove that the tariff reduced the price for goods, although not persuasively. The price of protection is borne by the consumer, both in higher prices for imports and for the protected domestic products. Lincoln’s best case for protection came down to their role in a nationalistic vision of an industrializing America fostering its own internal market on the way to taking its place among the world’s foremost nations.

  The tariff gave American industry the space to robustly grow despite the competition of a far more advanced industrial behemoth in Britain. In a fragment written for himself in 1847 while working out his thinking, Lincoln waxed poetic about an allegorical blacksmith whose operations were devastated by the end of the protective tariff: “all is cold and still as death—­no [sm]oke rises, no furnace roars, no anvil rings.” In the story, a farmer wants to sell flour to the blacksmith (“Vulcan”), but can’t because of his reduced state. For Lincoln, the point is the tariff’s contribution to an economy with a diverse internal market that ultimately isn’t merely a commodity producer for Britain. A Whig campaign circular that he signed in 1843 deemed the tariff “indispensably necessary to the prosperity of the American ­People.” “Give us a protective tariff,” he said, according to one recollection of a speech around this time, “and we will have the greatest country on earth.”

  Lincoln’s policies aimed to create a thriving commercial republic. His work as a lawyer, though much more varied, leaned in the same direction. The offices of Lincoln & Herndon didn’t look like much. One lawyer said they appeared “innocent of water and the scrub-­man since creation’s dawn.” Upstairs in a building near the capitol in Springfield, they had smudged windows and run-­down furniture, including a large, cluttered pine table and a couch on which Lincoln would lounge and read.

  Disorganization ruled the day. Lincoln apologized to Richard Thomas in 1850 for not replying to a letter from him in a timely manner, but “when I received the letter I put it in my old hat, and buying a new one the next day, the old one was set aside, and so, the letter lost sight of for a time.” Herndon recalled one feature of the office filing system, a bundle of papers in which Lincoln would slip anything he wanted to refer back to: “Some years ago, on removing the furniture from the office, I took down the bundle and blew from the top the liberal coat of dust that had accumulated thereon. Immediately underneath the string was a slip bearing this endorsement, in his hand: ‘When you can’t find it anywhere else, look in this.’ ” It only got more chaotic when Lincoln brought his boys to the office. Herndon complained that they “would tear up the office, scatter the books, smash up pens, spill the ink, and [piss] all over the floor.”

  John H. Littlefield wanted to study law with Lincoln & Herndon. When he met Lincoln in the office, the lawyer said he hoped Littlefield wouldn’t be as zealous in his study of Blackstone and Kent as two prior students had been. He pointed to an ink stain on the wall: “Well, one of these young men got so enthusiastic in his pursuit of legal lore that he fired an inkstand at the other one’s head.” Immediately upon his acceptance, Littlefield began tidying up a bit. He found that some seeds Lincoln as a congressman had for distributing to constituents had fallen out and sprouted in dirt collected on the floor.

  Life out on the circuit wasn’t any more glamorous or comfortable. Lincoln rode in a buggy pulled by his horse Old Buck, with books and a change of underwear in a green carpetbag. He could be out for three-month stretches, getting good business. Lawyers tended to share beds, although Judge David Davis—­weighing some three hundred pounds—­got one all to himself (and needed a two-­horse buggy). Discomforts didn’t bother Lincoln. “If every other fellow grumbled at the bill-­of-­fare which greeted us at many of the dingy taverns,” Davis recalled, “Lincoln said nothing.” Still, Davis did remember that “He once Said at a table—­‘Well—­in the absence of anything to Eat I will jump into this Cabbage.’ ”

  Circuit life was a festival of storytelling and joshing male camaraderie. Henry Whitney, a fellow lawyer who wrote a book on circuit life with Lincoln, recounted how another lawy
er got a rip in his pants that exposed his underwear when he gestured during his arguments before the court. His colleagues started a penny subscription to patch his pants. Lincoln refused: “I can’t contribute anything to the end in view.”

  Lincoln’s cases often weren’t worthy of a budding statesman. In 1851, there was the case of McKinley v. Watkins that arose after a horse trade between Joseph Watkins and William McKinley went bad (the horse received by Watkins died within two months). There was the case of Rarey v. Swords arising from the failure of Samuel Swords to follow through on building a house for William Rarey in payment of a debt. The case of Watkins v. Gale began when Hankerson Watkins sued Jonas Gale for cutting down one hundred swamp oak trees and four burr oak trees on his property without permission. And Walker v. Morrison concerned a $5.76 promissory note John Morrison gave William Walker.

  Most of the time, Lincoln made a point of his affordability. In 1856, when a client sent Lincoln twenty-­five dollars for his work drawing up some papers, Lincoln wrote back, “You must think I am a high-­priced man. You are too liberal with your money. Fifteen dollars is enough for the job. I send you a receipt for fifteen dollars, and return to you a ten-­dollar bill.” (For context, this was about year after Lincoln’s first attempt at winning a seat in the U.S. Senate.) In one instance, he took only twenty-­five dollars after winning a large judgment for his client. In another, when the recipient of his legal advice wanted to pay him, or failing that, give him something, ­Lincoln recommended that “when you go down stairs just stop at the stationers, and send me up a bottle of ink.”

  For all that, Lincoln was an accomplished but by no means great lawyer, with a notable practice before the Illinois Supreme Court and in the federal courts. He became a key advocate for the railroads, which became more and more important in the state despite the collapse of the System. The Illinois Central arose from the ashes of that fiasco after Congress granted Illinois land to give to the railroad, making it the first of the land-­grant roads. It was incorporated by the state in 1851. By 1856, it ran more than seven hundred miles from north-­to-­south and was the longest railroad in the country. ­People now fought to take credit for it. Illinois politician Sidney Breese, an advocate of the railroad, had inscribed on his tombstone, HE WHO SLEEPS BENEATH THIS STONE PROJECTED THE ILLINOIS CENTRAL RAILROAD.

  Lincoln lobbied for the railroad’s incorporation and it put him on a retainer. He represented it, far and away the foremost corporation in the state, in dozens of cases in the mid to late 1850s. The growth of the railroads was a boon to lawyers, involving an area that was new and murky and therefore held great potential for litigation. The fees involved could be substantial. “Billy,” Herndon recalled Lincoln saying of the Illinois Central, “it seems to me that it will be bad taste on your part to keep on saying the severe things I have heard from you about railroads and other corporations. The truth is, instead of criticizing them, you and I ought to thank God for letting this one fall into our hands.”

  Although he also took up cases on the other side, in keeping with his lawyer’s ethic of taking whatever business he could get, in his most notable cases Lincoln eased the way for the transportation revolution he had done so much to promote in office. He represented the Alton & Sangamon Railroad in an important 1851 case. A few years earlier he was a signatory on a report promoting the railroad “as a link in a great chain of rail road communication which shall unite Boston and New York with the Mississippi.” Now, one James Barret, who had subscribed to thirty shares of stock of the railroad to be paid in installments, wanted to renege. When the route of the railroad was shortened to bypass his property, it made the project less lucrative and appealing to him. But if Barret could back out, it would encourage others to stop payment, too, and deplete the railroad’s capital. It would make it more difficult for railroads in the future to change and improve their routes. The case went up to the Illinois Supreme Court, where Lincoln prevailed in a decision that relied on his reasoning and became widely cited.

  In another case in 1853 involving a threat to the interests of the railroads, McLean County tried to levy taxes on the Illinois Central’s 118 acres in the county. It sought to do this despite the exemption the state had granted to the railroad from exactly such local taxes. The railroad had to contemplate, in addition to its state tax, getting taxed by every county it touched. As Lincoln put it in a (not entirely grammatical) note spelling out the potential magnitude of the additional tax liability, “The Company own near two million acres; & their road runs through twentysix counties.” The case also went to the state supreme court and Lincoln won, in another victory for the march of the roads. (He had to sue the Illinois Central to get his five-­thousand-­dollar fee—­an astronomical payment for that time that led Stephen Douglas later to attack him for “taking the side of the company against the ­people.”)

  Still another consequential case involved a spur off the Illinois Central, run by the Rock Island Railroad, that headed west to the Mississippi. It built the first railroad bridge over the river, from Rock Island, Illinois, to Davenport, Iowa, a significant opening of the farmland west of the Mississippi to market forces from the East. When two weeks after its opening the steamboat Effie Afton crashed against the bridge and destroyed it, the steamboat’s owners sued to remove the bridge. In a lawsuit pregnant with economic and sectional implications, Lincoln represented the railroad.

  The steamboat operators hated the bridge as an obstacle to navigation and as a herald of a new world. When it was destroyed in the wake of the crash, steamboat captains blew their whistles in joy, “a greater celebration than follows an excited election,” as Lincoln would put it before the jury. If there couldn’t be bridges across the Mississippi, the railroad network would have a premature Western terminus and stunt the growing railroad network. Would the Mississippi remain the main artery of commercial traffic, with its inevitable connection with Southern interests, or would the railroad create an opening to the East? Or put another way, would St. Louis and the river, or Chicago and the railroad, win out as transit hubs?

  Lincoln dove into the details of the crash, the current, the wind, the speed and condition of the boat, the depth and width of the channel, the angles involved, and so on. But before the jury he also addressed the larger question. He said that he “had no prejudice against steamboats or steamboatmen, nor any against St. Louis, for he supposed they went about as other ­people would do in their situation. St. Louis as a commercial place, may desire that this bridge should not stand, as it is adverse to her commerce, diverting a portion of it from the river.” That couldn’t be the overarching consideration, though. “There is a travel from East to West,” he continued, “whose demands are not less important than that of the river. It is growing larger and larger, building up new countries with a rapidity never before seen in the history of the world.” Eventually, in a drawn-­out case, Lincoln and the bridge prevailed.

  Lincoln the lawyer for railroad interests doesn’t jibe with his image as the tribune of the common man—­at least it doesn’t on the surface. Historian Mark Neely notes Lincoln’s association “with stock-­jobbers and note-­shavers, boosters and developers.” The early twentieth century poet and Lincoln biographer Edgar Lee Masters complained of his identification with “lawyers and bankers and traders and merchants.” As early as 1840, Lincoln had to defend himself from charges of elitism with invocations of his humble origins that once would have gone without saying.

  Ninian Edwards told Herndon of a campaign stop in 1840. One Colonel E. D. Taylor charged Lincoln “with belonging to the aristocracy.” Lincoln replied that “whilst Col. Taylor had his stores over the country, and was riding in a fine carriage, wore his kid cloves and had a gold headed cane, he [Lincoln] was a poor boy hired on a flat boat at eight dollars a month.” That wasn’t all. As Edwards continued to relate (rendered in run-­on fashion by Herndon), Lincoln said back then he “had only one pair of breeches and they were of buckskin
now . . . if you know the nature of buckskin when wet and dried by the sun, they would shrink and mine kept shrinking until they left for several inches my legs bare between the top of my Socks and the lower part of my breeches—­and whilst I was growing taller they were becoming shorter: and so much tighter, that they left a blue streak around my leg which you can be seen to this day—­If you call this aristocracy I plead guilty to the charge.”

  If his agenda was vulnerable to attack as favoring the well-­off, Lincoln conceived of it entirely differently. It wasn’t for—­as he wrote dismissively in 1858 of the Whigs whom he couldn’t win over in his Senate contest with Stephen Douglas—­the “exclusive silk-­stocking whiggery,” “the nice exclusive sort.” It was for the man on the rise. In the 1830s, the Sangamo Journal, with which Lincoln was closely associated, put the argument for improvements and banks in terms of aspiration. Without them, the poor would have no prospects except working as “hewers of wood and drawers of water” for the rich. Without access to capital, the “industrious poor” had no hope of lifting themselves up onto a higher economic plane.

  The Whig polemicist Calvin Colton developed the argument at greater length in his Junius Tracts making the case for his party in 1844. He defined the country as one of mobility and striving: “Ours is a country, where men start from an humble origin, and from small beginnings rise gradually in the world, as the reward of merit and industry, and where they can attain to the most ­elevated positions, or acquire a large amount of wealth, according to the pursuits they elect for themselves. No exclusive privileges of birth, no entailment of estates, no civil or political disqualifications, stand in their path; but one has as good a chance as another, according to his talents, prudence, and personal exertions. This is a country of self-­made men, than which nothing better could be said of any state of society.”