Lincoln Unbound

by Rich Lowry

  45revolutionary economic potential: Levine’s Half, 54, explains why.

  46eighth out of thirteen: Donald’s Lincoln, 42-­46, and Neely, Best Hope, 8, describe his first campaign.

  46the local postmaster: Thomas’s New Salem, 94-­112, has many of the charming details in this passage about Lincoln’s early employment.

  47ran again for the legislature: Donald’s Lincoln, 52-­55, and Wilson’s Voice, 151-­71, report many of the facts and incidents in this passage.

  49“Grammar is divided into four parts”: Wilson’s Voice, 63-­67, is good on Lincoln’s study of grammar.

  50“all the teaching of grammar”: Thomas, New Salem, 69-­70.

  50“bustle, business, energy”: Brian R. Dirck, Lincoln the Lawyer (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 15-­17. He explains well the culture of the law at this time and what drew Lincoln to the profession. Wilson’s Voice, 101, and Burlingame’s A Life tell the story of Bowling Green. Donald’s Lincoln, 45-­54, describes how Lincoln began to take up the study of the law.

  52for hewing timbers: Burlingame, A Life, 6.

  52“He used to be a slave”: Burlingame, Inner, 36.

  CHAPTER 2

  54never elected a governor or senator: Eric Foner’s The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 33-­34, describes the Whig struggles in Illinois.

  55lampooned another party-switcher: Burlingame, A Life, 157-­58.

  56Whig during the entire existence of the party: Miller, Virtues, 106.

  57gentleman farmer from Kentucky: Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 2-­18, 123-­37, Gabor S. Boritt’s Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream (Memphis, Tenn: Memphis State University Press, 1978), 99, and Guelzo’s Redeemer, 53-­57, discuss Clay and the broader Whig attitude.

  57“self-­made man”: “Mr. Clay’s Speech,” Niles’ Weekly Register, vol. XLII (March 3, 1832), 11.

  59within the dominant Jeffersonian Republicans: Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 2-­3. His book is encyclopedic. I rely on its opening sections for the story of the emergence of the Whigs, as well as Daniel Walker Howe’s What God Hath Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-­1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

  64“refusals, rejections, and disengagements”: Miller, Virtues, 26.

  65couldn’t work for days: Burlingame, A Life, 36.

  65“Throughout the nation”: Holt, American Whig, 83.

  66“the vast majority of wealthy businessmen”: Ibid.

  66the slave owner and gambler: For the contrasting depictions of Jackson and Clay, I draw on Howe’s Hath Wrought, 248-­49, 329-­30, and Howe’s Political Culture, 125-­27.

  67“more civilized way of life”: Howe, Political Culture, 266.

  68an aid to labor: Thomas, New Salem, 48-­49.

  68“Those who have no vices”: Burlingame, A Life, 301.

  69“By jings”: Burlingame, A Life, 5.

  69a matter of honor: Wilson, Voice, 295. He is particularly instructive on the culture of fighting.

  73it is a temperate temperance address: Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-­Douglas Debates (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1959), 247-­48.

  74“self-­control, order, rationality”: Howe, Political Culture, 269.

  78“old” when he was still: Burlingame, A Life, 249.

  78At his law office: Donald, Lincoln, 101.

  78“Women are the only things”: Burlingame, A Life, 97.

  79who had learned French: Burlingame, A Life, 176.

  80impressive catalogue: Miller, Virtues, 95.

  81“then commenced the drinking”: Thomas Ford, A History of Illinois: From Its Commencement as a State in 1814 to 1847 (Carlisle, MA: Applewood Books, 1854), 104-­05.

  81hoopla and revelry: On the hoopla and revelry of the Harrison campaign: Holt, American Whig, 106-­07, and Wilson’s Voice, 212-­13. On the petty violence of politics: Burlingame, A Life, 95, 139-­42. On Lincoln’s “skinnings”: Wilson’s Voice, 206-­09, and Burlingame, A Life, 156. On the near-­duel with Shields: Wilson’s Voice, 265-­81 and Burlingame’s A Life, 191-­94.

  81“such a jollification”: Thomas D. Logan, “Lincoln, the Early Temperance Reformer,” The Standard newspaper, February 6, 1909.

  85hired French chefs: Holt’s American Whig, 107, and Howe’s Hath Wrought, 575, and Burlingame’s A Life, 149-­55, detail the assault on Van Buren.

  CHAPTER 3

  87fought desperately: Burlingame’s A Life, 138, 162, has the background to this episode. The Democratic newspaper’s ridicule of Lincoln is in Boritt’s American Dream, 55.

  90“the optimism of Western Civilization”: Boritt, American Dream, 71.

  90“to use it as he will”: For the economic thought of Carey and Wayland, I rely on Heather Cox Richardson’s The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies During the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 19-­23, Guelzo’s Redeemer, 107-­08, Boritt’s American Dream, 123-­24, and Eric Foner’s Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 36-­39.

  91“The importance of property”: Boritt, American Dream, 124.

  92“The next Sunday morning”: Olivier Frayssé, trans. Sylvia Neely, Lincoln, Land, and Labor, 1809-­60 (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 8.

  92a frustrated engineer: Burlingame, A Life, Vol. 2, 292-­93.

  94“grand moral struggle”: Howe, Political Culture, 69.

  94wholly inappropriate in the frontier context: On Thomas Lincoln’s trouble with land titles, there are details in Thomas Crump’s Abraham Lincoln’s World: How Riverboats, Railroads, and Republicans Transformed America (New York: Continuum, 2009), 13. Also, in Guelzo’s Redeemer, 29, Frayssé’s Land, and Labor, 10-­19, and Burlingame’s A Life, 20.

  96new links of transportation: The national debate over infrastructure in this period is catalogued in Adam J. White’s “Infrastructure and American History,” The New Atlantis 35 (Spring 2012), 3-­31. It is also discussed in Charles Sellers’s The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-­1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 77, and Howe’s Hath Wrought, 357-­60.

  97loomed large in his early life: On Lincoln’s early difficulties with transportation, I rely on Foner’s Fiery, 36, Neely’s Best Hope, Frayssé’s Land, and Labor, and Burlingame’s A Life, 128 and 325-­27.

  97chartering private transportation companies: John H. Krenkel, ­Illinois Internal Improvements: 1818-­1848 (Cedar Rapids, IA: The Torch Press, 1958), 61. This book provided helpful background on the Illinois infrastructure debate.

  98“the great depot and warehouse”: I draw on Sellers’s Market Revolution, 42-­43, and Taylor’s Transportation, 32-­49, for facts and figures about the Erie Canal. Boritt’s American Dream, 7, recounts the impact on Illinois.

  99Passed in early 1837: For the course of the System, I draw on ­Krenkel’s Illinois Internal Improvements, 75, 146-­55, 200-­16, Boritt’s American Dream, 8, 26-­31, Burlingame’s A Life, 92-­146, and Donald’s Lincoln, 61-­62.

  103the legislature created a state: George William Dowrie, The Development of Banking in Illinois, 1817-­1863 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois, 1913). This book is an exhaustive account of banking in Illinois in this period. I also rely on Boritt’s American Dream, 15-­21, 60. Louis M. Hacker, The Triumph of American Capitalism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1940), 334, discusses the state of currency in the country overall. So do John Steele Gordon’s Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American
Economic Power (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 184, and Richardson’s Greatest, 67. Howe’s Hath Wrought, 394, 506-­07, describes Jackson and Van Buren policies. Burlingame’s A Life has the story of the sale of the horse.

  106disregarding the interests of ­people: Howe’s Hath Wrought, 274, 395, 408, has the larger political context of the tariff debate.

  108His work as a lawyer: Dirck’s Lawyer, 37-­49, Donald’s Lincoln, 70, 145-­47, Guelzo’s Redeemer, 147-­48, and Burlingame’s A Life, 332-­33, all have colorful details on Lincoln as a lawyer. Henry Clay Whitney, Life on the Circuit with Lincoln, (Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1892), 178, had the ripped pants story. I drew on the searchable database of Lincoln’s legal work, http://www.lawpracticeofabrahamlincoln.org, for the early, inconsequential cases and also for the section on the railroad cases that follows.

  110a key advocate for the railroads: For Lincoln and the railroads: Guelzo’s Redeemer, 167-­72, Burlingame’s A Life, 336-­37, Donald’s Lincoln, 155-­57, and Crump’s World, 34, 81. Charles Leroy Brown’s “­Abraham Lincoln and the Illinois Central Railroad, 1857-­1860,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 36:2 (June 1943), 121-­63, tells the tale of the rise of the Illinois Central.

  113“with stock-­jobbers”: Neely, Last Best Hope, 10.

  113“lawyers and bankers”: Guelzo’s “Abraham Lincoln or the Progressives.”

  114his Junius Tracts: Calvin Colton, The Junius Tracts (New York: Greeley & McElrath, 1844), 104-­05, 111.

  116“within the reach”: Louis Hartz, “Government-­Business Relations,” Economic Change in the Civil War Era, eds. David T. Gilchrist & David Lewis (Greenville, DE: Eleutherian Mills-­Hagley Foundation, 1965), 84.

  116steadily vindicated in Illinois: I rely largely on Taylor’s highly informative Transportation Revolution in this passage, 48-­55, 74-­75, 84-­85, 102-­03, and 158-­64.

  118the Northern “enemy”: Boritt, American Dream, 167.

  119They reliably fed factories: The data about the larger economic effects of the railroads is derived from Alfred D. Chandler Jr., “The Organization of Manufacturing and Transportation,” Economic Change in the Civil War Era, 137-­51.

  119“there is more poetry”: Gordon, Empire, 218.

  119“counter to the pre-­existing order of things”: Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), xxii.

  119farmers needed cash: Levine, Half, 55. Levine has a very good run-­down of these trends in his chapter “Each Person Works for Himself.”

  120Chicago exploded: On these epic changes: Crump’s World, 74, Guelzo’s Redeemer, 168, Chandler’s Economic Change in the Civil War Era, 139, Foner’s Fiery, 83, Taylor’s Transportation, 9-­10, and Frayssé’s Land, and Labor, 137.

  121“The West is agricultural”: Boritt, American Dream, 126.

  121must have had contempt: Ibid., 166.

  121“dividing line in point of time”: Foner, Fiery, 83, and Guelzo, Redeemer, 47.

  CHAPTER 4

  127campaign strategy memo: Don E. Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850s (Palo Alto, CA.: Stanford University Press, 1962), 73. This is a trenchant and authoritative account of this phase of Lincoln’s career, and I come back to it throughout this chapter.

  129“more natural advantages”: Roy Morris Jr., The Long Pursuit: ­Abraham Lincoln’s Thirty Year Struggle with Stephen Douglas for the Heart and Soul of America (New York: Harper­Collins, 2008), 12. This book is useful on Douglas, as is Allen C. Guelzo’s Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates that Defined America (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2008), which I come back to often in this chapter. I draw on their opening sections here.

  134main chance: I benefited from Lewis E. Lerhman’s cogent discussion of all this in his valuable Lincoln at Peoria: The Turning Point (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2008), 73-­77. Also, I draw on David M. Potter’s The Impending Crisis: 1848-­1861 (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 165-­66. It is an impressive political history of this period and I come back to it several times in this chapter.

  135would emerge ascendant: On the role of the Know-­Nothings, I draw on Robert William Fogel’s Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 374-­78. William E. Gienapp’s The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-­1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 360, notes how Republicans tapped into anti-­aristocratic sentiment.

  136a Southern phenomenon: For the figures on slavery in America, I rely on Levine’s Half, 20–22, and Fogel’s Without Consent, 29–30. James M. McPherson’s Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 17, and Foner’s Fiery, 17, discuss the economic value of slaves. Nevins’s The Emergence of Lincoln: Prologue to Civil War, 1859–1861 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950), 59–60, 140–42, contrasts the South’s stalwart defense of slavery with slavery’s retreat elsewhere in the world. John McCar­dell’s The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern Nationalism, 1830–1860 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 231–36, 251–55, recounts the South’s expansionist impulse.

  137to spread slavery: McCardell, Southern Nation, 231-­36 and 251-­55.

  137a somewhat attenuated one: The first chapter of Foner’s Fiery, “ ‘I Am Naturally Anti-­Slavery’: Young Abraham Lincoln and Slavery” has an excellent summation of Lincoln’s early grappling with slavery and Frayssé’s Land, and Labor, 4-­15, discusses his youth in this context.

  139Even after Kansas-­Nebraska: Lehrman’s Peoria, 111-­12, discusses Lincoln’s skepticism of the natural-­limits argument. Fogel’s Without Consent, 401-­02, notes the political double-­edge of the non-­extension position.

  139became the focus of his public advocacy: Foner’s Fiery, 64-­65, notes how Lincoln’s advocacy kicked into a higher gear after Kansas-­Nebraska, and 97 recounts the rejection by some Southern thinkers of the Declaration. Douglas L. Wilson’s Lincoln before Washington: New Perspectives on the Illinois Years (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998) has an instructive chapter on “Lincoln’s Declaration.” Merrill D. Peterson, “This Grand Pertinacity”: Abraham Lincoln and the Declaration of Independence (Fort Wayne, IN: The Lincoln Museum, 1991) is a useful essay. Guelzo’s Redeemer, 4, is excellent on Lincoln and Jefferson.

  144“being all the workmanship”: John Locke, Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration (Stilwell, KS, Digireads.com, 2005), 73, 80.

  145“Free labor ideology”: Bradford William Short, “The Question of the Constitutional Case against Suicide: An Historiographical and Originalist Inquiry into the Degree to Which the Theory of the Inalienable Right to Life and Liberty is Enforced by the Thirteenth Amendment,” Issues in Law & Medicine, Vol. 26, No. 2 (2010): 91-­195.

  145“a dynamic, expanding capitalist society”: Foner, Free Soil, 11.

  145the development of pro­slavery: McCardell’s Southern Nation, 50-­86, informs the discussion of Southern proslavery ideology in this paragraph and the ones following.

  146the rise of wage labor: Foner’s Free Soil is the source of the material on the debate over wage labor and primarily its opening essay, “The Idea of Free Labor in Nineteenth-­Century America,” but also 66-­67.

  149Neither was quite right: The discussion of the economics of slavery is based on Fogel’s Without Consent, 24–28, 64–88, 91–92. Also helpful are McCardell’s Southern Nation, 91–127, Eugene Genovese’s The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 24–28, and Douglass C. North’s The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1961), 133.

  150one-­third as many public schools: North, Economic Growth, 133.

  151raged much more widely: Fehrenbacher’s P
relude, 100-­07, Guelzo’s Lincoln and Douglas, 75-­106, 153-­54, 164, 189, 213, and ­Burlingame’s A Life, 473, all have telling and vivid details about the pageantry and the circumstances surrounding the debates.

  158into the Gulf States: Foner’s Fiery, 72, spells out the mixed record after the Founding.

  159Louisiana generously passed a law: Nevins’s Emergence, 151-­52, and Fogel’s Without Consent, 398, describe the crackdown.

  162banned blacks: Foner’s Fiery, 8-­13, and Burlingame’s A Life, 104, recount the anti-­black laws of states where Lincoln resided.

  164More ­people voted: Fehrenbacher’s Prelude, 114-­15, describes the results.

  CHAPTER 5

  167wrote the first draft: Burlingame, A Life, Vol. 2, 738.

  168the South felt squeezed: McCardell’s Southern Nation, 23, Michael Lind’s Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 121–33, and Walter A. McDougall’s Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829–1877 (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 340, recount the demographic shift against the South.

  169“a cordon of free States”: Richard Franklin Bensel’s Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (­Cambridge, Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1990), 20–31, 65–­66, and Levine’s Half, 42–44, as well as Nevin’s Emergence, 334, and ­McDougall’s Throes, 397, spell out the South’s fear, vulnerabilities, and priorities.

  170King Cotton: Charles A. and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (New York: MacMillan Company, 1927), 55-56, and Mark Thornton and Robert B. Ekelund Jr., Tariffs, Blockades, and Inflation: The Economics of the Civil War (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Inc., 2004), 30-31, describe the nature and extent of the cotton economy, as do Taylor’s Transportation, 185-86, and Levine’s Half, 21.