by Rich Lowry
This state of society can’t apply, though, if foolish anticapitalist policies suppress economic vitality. “It has been a prevalent and fatal doctrine in this country,” he wrote, “with a certain class of statesmen, that it is always a safe policy and a duty in the government, to fight against moneyed capitalists, in whatever place or shape they lift up their heads, whether in banks, or in manufactories, or in any and all other forms and enterprises requiring associated capital.” This is so foolish because “it is not considered, that the employment and thriving of the people depend on the profitable investment of the moneyed capital of the country.” Therefore, “that policy which destroys the profit of money, destroys the profit of labor. Let government strike at the rich, and the blow falls on the heads of the poor.”
Lincoln would make this case with great power, especially as his emphasis on aspiration dovetailed with his case against slavery and as he transitioned from Whig to Republican. “So while we do not propose any war upon capital,” he explained in a stirring riff in a speech in New Haven, Connecticut, in March 1860, “we do wish to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else. When one starts poor, as most do in the race of life, free society is such that he knows he can better his condition; he knows that there is no fixed condition of labor, for his whole life.”
He continued in a personal mode, “I am not ashamed to confess that twenty five years ago I was a hired laborer, mauling rails, at work on a flat-boat—just what might happen to any poor man’s son! I want every man to have the chance—and I believe a black man is entitled to it—in which he can better his condition—when he may look forward and hope to be a hired laborer this year and the next, work for himself afterward, and finally to hire men to work for him! That is the true system.” He wanted a country where “you can better your condition, and so it may go on and on in one ceaseless round so long as man exists on the face of the earth!”
Lincoln—and his like-minded Whigs and Republicans—engineered a momentous shift. He democratized Whiggish economics. He took an economic point of view descended from Alexander Hamilton—with all the elitist baggage that implies—and baptized it in the great, rolling Jordan River of American democracy. In Lincoln, the banks and the log cabin met. In Lincoln, the laboring man became the master of his own economic destiny. The storied political scientist Louis Hartz explained that economic power came to be defined “as within the reach, within the legitimate ambition, of all. The old gentilities are gone, and by an ironic paradox, the Hamiltonian Whig economic goal is attained amid enthusiasms wholly un-Whig in character.”
For all the frustrations and fits and starts of Lincoln’s policy initiatives, his broad economic vision was steadily vindicated in Illinois, and in the country—improved transportation and commercial networks, more people and more innovation, a spiraling upward economic rush. The improvements eventually came in the state. The Illinois & Michigan Canal had never been completely abandoned. It opened its locks in 1848, twelve years after construction began, and traffic boomed throughout the 1850s. But canals were no longer the future. The amount of railroad track jumped a hundredfold in the state—from 26 to 2,799—in the two decades after 1840. By 1860, Illinois had the second-largest amount of track of any state in the country.
Illinois reflected national trends. The country went through a canal-building boom that saw more than three thousand miles constructed by 1840. But then cost overruns and disappointing toll revenues on many routes and the dawning of the age of the railroad sent canals into retreat. The railroads were more reliable and practical than even the best canals. Americans embraced them with a fervor. At more than three thousand miles, the United States already had more railroad track than the entirety of Europe in 1840. New England and New York led the way in the 1840s, when another five thousand miles were added nationally, and then the Midwest rapidly began to catch up in the 1850s, when another twenty-two thousand miles were added.
Through the new, cheaper means of east-west transit, the Atlantic Ocean reached out and touched the rivers and lakes of the Midwest. Technology conquered distance. To use Lincoln’s term from his lectures on discoveries and inventions, the “mines” of the middle of the country—the land capable of producing a stupendous agricultural bounty—were unlocked to markets on the East Coast and beyond.
Previously, dragging goods over land by horse had been incredibly cumbersome and expensive. Historian George Rogers Taylor quotes a United State Senate committee report from 1816: “A coal mine may exist in the United States not more than ten miles from valuable ores of iron and other materials, and both of them be useless until a canal is established between them, as the price of land carriage is too great to be borne by either.” According to the report, getting a ton of goods across the ocean from Europe to the United States cost $9. The cost of getting a ton of goods thirty miles within the United States on the ground? Also $9.
The Allegheny Mountains had been a nearly insuperable obstacle to the development of an extended market. As Taylor relates, to get to Eastern markets, bulky Western goods had to circumvent the mountains by moving in a great arc, down the Mississippi, then up along the coast to Philadelphia, Boston, or New York. To get to the West, Eastern goods had to make it across the mountains or come upriver from New Orleans (a trip facilitated by the advent of the steamboat). The rise of the canals made a direct East-West route possible. Eastern manufactured goods headed directly west, and agricultural products in the opposite direction in great abundance.
The railroads instantly made ground transportation cheaper, and as they improved, it got cheaper still. From around 1815 to the Civil War, the cost of shipping bulky freight on land dropped 95 percent (some of this drop could be attributed to an economy-wide decline in prices). And it got there faster. Whereas earlier in the century it had taken more than fifty days to get goods from Cincinnati to New York, the railroad could get them there in as few as six days. Commerce on the Mississippi continued to grow, but Eastern manufactured and Western agricultural goods made up a smaller proportion of it. Human ingenuity was trumping sheer geography. The North increasingly cemented the Midwest to itself and its economic system, and effectively detached the region from the South.
The South noticed. In 1852, DeBow’s Review, a proslavery journal that advocated Southern economic independence, blamed the Northern “enemy” for the decline of New Orleans: “Armed with energy, enterprise, and an indomitable spirit, that enemy, by a system of bold, vigorous, and sustained efforts, has succeeded in reversing the very laws of nature and of nature’s God—rolled back the mighty tide of the Mississippi and its thousand tributary streams, until their mouth, practically and commercially, is more at New York or Boston than at New Orleans.”
The railroads had a revolutionary impact not just by connecting markets but through their very operation. They needed more capital than had any business venture before, and therefore drove innovations in finance. They had to oversee vast, highly complex operations spanning greater distances and involving more workers than in any business venture before, and therefore led the way in new methods of corporate management. They had a hunger for iron, and therefore contributed to advances in iron-making. They reliably fed factories with raw materials and carried their finished products to the wide market, and therefore supported the development of mass-production manufacturing.
If Thoreau warned that “we do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us,” Lincoln saw in the railroad the heroic extension of human potential. He might have agreed with the poet Joaquin Miller, who maintained that “there is more poetry in the rush of a single railroad across the continent than in all the gory story of the burning of Troy.” Or with the economist Joseph Nimmo, who later in the century noted that “the railroad with its vast possibilities for the advancement of the commercial, industrial, and social interests of the world ran directly counter to the pre-existing order o
f things.”
The nature of farming changed. To buy the goods now coming from the East, farmers needed cash and to get cash they had to grow for the market. Subsistence farming gave way to commercial farming, and specialization. The population of the free states west of the Alleghenies boomed and by 1850, the Midwest had caught the Northeast in population. To feed ever-increasing demand, manufacturing grew and the factory system took hold. Productivity soared. According to historian Bruce Levine, from 1840 to 1860 value added in agriculture grew by 90 percent and in manufacturing by 350 percent. Urbanization proceeded at an astonishing clip.
In Illinois, Chicago exploded. The Illinois & Michigan Canal and the railroads fed its growth. Within four years of its incorporation in 1833, it was the largest town in the state. The city went from one minor railroad line in 1849 to an intricate and far-reaching network just a few years later. Travel time getting there from New York collapsed to three days whereas it had previously taken more than three weeks. Chicago was on its way to surpassing St. Louis as a transportation hub. The extensive countryside connected to it became one of the greatest breadbaskets on earth, and Illinois produced more corn and wheat than anywhere else in the country. Exports of grain jumped from 10,000 bushels prior to 1840 to 31 million twenty years later. On top of this, the city was a rapidly industrializing juggernaut.
It used to be that settlement had to be concentrated near rivers, but the railroads cleared the way for more people to live in the state’s interior. As Eric Foner notes, Illinois boomed, becoming the fourth largest state in the country after its population doubled in a decade, to 1.7 million by 1860. The urban population increased three-fold, rising to almost a quarter of a million from 64,000. Immigrants from eastern states and from abroad settled at a rapid clip, overwhelming settlers from the south. The Republican stronghold of the North benefited most from the economic and demographic transformation. Illinois was becoming an ever more thoroughly Lincolnian state.
Changes that many deemed impossible had come to his adopted home. It hadn’t been long ago that Jacksonians could insist: “The West is agricultural; it has no manufactures, and it never will have any of importance.” To the contrary, by the 1850s Illinois was a rising manufacturing power. Gabor Boritt notes that Lincoln must have had contempt for the argument that inherent economic constraints would preserve the status quo in Illinois. Lincoln might call to mind, he writes, “the old British free trade argument that Americans could no more have complex manufactures than orange crops. Within his lifetime the United States had not only developed complex industries but, after acquiring new territories, was producing oranges. The lessons of the first half of the nineteenth century were plain. Natural limits could both be surmounted and outflanked.”
Milton Hay, uncle of John Hay, Lincoln’s White House secretary, described the epochal changes in life brought by the railroads. It was, he maintained, the “dividing line in point of time between the old and the new. Not only our homemade manufactures, but our homemade life and habits to a great measure disappeared. . . . We farmed not only with different implements but in a different mode. Then we began to inquire what the markets were and what product of the farm we could raise and sell to the best advantage. The farmer enlarged his farm and no longer contented himself with the land that himself or his boys could cultivate, but he must have hired hands and hired help to cultivate his large possessions.”
Lincoln knew the homemade world all too well and exulted in its eclipse. Returning in 1859 to Indiana, near where he had been raised, he elicited laughter when he said “he grew up to his present enormous height on our own good soil of Indiana.” But he noted that the former “unbroken wilderness” had given way to “wonderfully different” conditions. In his New Haven speech in 1860, he celebrated development in the Northeast: “Up here in New England, you have a soil that scarcely sprouts black-eyed beans, and yet where will you find wealthy men so wealthy, and poverty so rarely in extremity? There is not another such place on earth!” In an undated fragment for himself perhaps composed circa 1858 or 1859, he wrote: “We proposed to give all a chance; and we expected the weak to grow stronger, the ignorant, wiser; and all better, and happier together. We made the experiment; and the fruit is before us. Look at it—think of it. Look at it, in it’s aggregate grandeur, of extent of country, and numbers of population—of ship, and steamboat, and rail.”
Lincoln didn’t just thirst for his country’s glory; he also sought his own. Joshua Speed told Herndon that after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, they had a conversation where “he alluded to an incident in his life, long passed, when he was so much deppressed that he almost contemplated suicide—At the time of his deep deppression—He said to me that he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived—and that to connect his name with the events transpiring in his day & generation and so impress himself upon them as to link his name with something that would redound to the interest of his fellow man was what he desired to live for.”
Linking his name to something great must have seemed a far-off prospect when he returned to Springfield in 1849 from his single term in Congress, having failed to secure a patronage appointment from the incoming administration of Zachary Taylor. According to Herndon, Lincoln “despaired of ever rising again in the political world.” He had been the lone Whig in the state’s seven-person congressional delegation, and he couldn’t attain any higher office given the partisan terrain in Illinois. His restless upward march had been checked.
Lincoln had been left far behind by his political rival, Stephen Douglas. In the mid-1850s, Lincoln wrote a private note about Douglas that was unsparing in its honesty and its envy: “Twenty-two years ago Judge Douglas and I first became acquainted. We were both young then; he a trifle younger than I. Even then, we were both ambitious; I, perhaps, quite as much so as he. With me, the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure; with him it has been one of splendid success. His name fills the nation; and is not unknown, even, in foreign lands. I affect no contempt for the high eminence he has reached. So reached, that the oppressed of my species, might have shared with me in the elevation, I would rather stand on that eminence, than wear the richest crown that ever pressed a monarch’s brow.”
The final sentence makes reference to the intrusion of slavery in a central, unavoidable place in the nation’s politics. It raised questions much deeper than economic development, questions about the country’s meaning and its very survival. Douglas had an outsize role in the coming crisis. He became the inadvertent architect of, and foil for, Lincoln’s rise to destiny.
Chapter 4
“Our Fathers”: The Lincoln-Douglas Debates and the Purpose of America
They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence. . . .
—ABRAHAM LINCOLN, SPEECH IN SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS, 1857
In June 1858, Lincoln was about to accept the Republican nomination for Senate. Parties usually didn’t endorse candidates until after the election of state legislators, who, in the days before the Seventeenth Amendment provided for direct election of senators, decided who would represent their state in the U.S. Senate. But Illinois Republicans wanted to make a point. The party’s power brokers back east had been flirting with Stephen Douglas after he broke with Southern Democrats. The state party made its zeal for Lincoln unmistakable at an enthusiastic convention in Springfield. It declared him “the first and only choice of the Republicans of Illinois for the U.S. Senate, as the successor of Stephen A. Douglas.”
Lincoln knew this moment was coming, since support had been steadily building for him in county conventions. He spent a month preparing his speech, according to Herndon. He wrote notes on “slips, put these slips in h
is hat, numbering them, and when he was done with the ideas, he gathered up the scraps, put them in the right order, and wrote out his speech.” A few days before the event, Springfield Republican John Armstrong recalled, Lincoln gathered some friends “in the Library Room in the State house in the city of Springfield, for the purpose of getting their opinion of the policy of delivering that Speech.”
Eight or twelve of them sat at a round table and Lincoln read what would become its immortal House Divided opening passage: “ ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.” He read the beginning “slowly & cautiously so as to let Each man fully understand it.” The reaction around the table was cool, to say the least. “Every Man among them,” Armstrong told Herndon later, “Condemned the speech in Substance & Spirit,” and the House Divided language “as unwise & impolitic, if not false.”
About it being impolitic, they were indisputably correct. Stephen Douglas came back to Lincoln’s House Divided language again and again during the campaign as proof Lincoln was a radical bent on disunion.
One interpretation of the speech is that Lincoln was playing chess when everyone else was playing checkers, and already had his eye on the presidential race in 1860 rather than the lowly Senate race in 1858. Historian Don Fehrenbacher notes how fanciful it is to believe Lincoln was anything but deadly intent on beating Douglas in the race at hand. He points to a campaign strategy memo Lincoln wrote categorizing and breaking down the 1856 vote by each legislative district. After pages of tabulation, Lincoln writes:
By this, it is seen, we give up the districts numbered 1.2.3. 4.5.7.8.10.11.15.16.17.18.19.20.23.28.29.&30, with 22 representatives—