by Rich Lowry
171The grass didn’t grow: I draw on the comparative statistics in Richard N. Current’s “God and the Strongest Battalions,” in Why the North Won the Civil War, ed. David Herbert Donald (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1996), 21. Also, those in Levine’s Half, 41, 70, the Beards’ American Civilization, 55, Crump’s World, 127, and Kennedy’s Rise, 180.
172“a free-labor empire”: McDougall, Throes, 399-400.
172“widen and defend”: Hacker, Triumph, 336.
172a transcontinental railroad: Although I draw on others, the most important source in this passage is Heather Cox Richardson’s Greatest, chapter six, “ ‘It Was Statemanship to Give Treeless Prairies Value’: The Transcontinental Railroad.”
174the nation’s banking: Bensel in his chapter, “Gold, greenbacks, and the political economy of finance capital after the Civil War,” and Richardson in her chapter, “ ‘A Centralization of Power Such as Hamilton Might Have Eulogised as Magificent’: Monetary Legislation,” are important sources for this section. I also found helpful Richard H. Timberlake, Monetary Policy in the United States: An Intellectual and Institutional History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993).
175a sweeping protective tariff: Again, Richardson is an important source in this section, this time in her chapter, “ ‘Directing the Legislation of the Country to the Improvement of the Country’: Tariff and Tax Legislation.”
176a land-grant college bill: Richardson’s chapter “ ‘A Large Crop is More Than a Great Victory’: Agricultural Legislation” is a source of this passage, as well as Dennis W. Johnson, The Laws That Shaped America: Fifteen Acts of Congress and Their Lasting Impact (New York: Routledge, 2009) and his chapter, “The Promise of Land: The Homestead Act of 1862 and the Morrill Land-Grant College Act of 1862.”
177the Homestead Act: The same chapters of Richardson and Johnson apply here, too. Burlingame’s A Life, 51, makes the point that Lincoln was never a great enthusiast for the reform. Fogel’s Without Consent, 350-52, and Bensel’s Yankee, 73, are good on the Southern opposition.
179ran free of government controls: Bensel’s Yankee makes a persuasive case, 94-98.
179bureaucratic control and government expropriation: Bensel’s Yankee describes this in detail in the chapter, “War Mobilization and state formation in the northern Union and the southern Confederacy.” It is also a thread in the Richard Current chapter “God and the Strongest Battalions,” and Thornton and Ekelund’s, Tariffs.
180“One of the great ironies”: Bensel, Yankee, 13-14.
180as well as could be expected: McDougall’s Throes, 445-46, describes the calamitous state of the Confederate economy. Thornton and Ekelund’s Tariffs discusses the inflation, 59, 74-75. Phillips’s Cousins, 477-78, and McPherson’s Second, 38, catalogue the devastation wrought in the South by the war, as does Gordon’s Empire, 202.
181The North’s advantages: Kennedy’s Rise, 179-81, and McDougall’s Throes, 455, 494, catalogue the continued growth of the North.
182alternative future of a Slave South: Fogel’s Without Consent has a fascinating counter-factual analysis of what Southern victory would have meant, 413-16. Phillips’s Cousins, 462-63, and McDougall’s Throes, 454, detail the disastrous political consequences of the war for the South.
184began to retreat: Gordon’s Empire, 194, 272, has many of the facts and figures about government receding after the war.
184“the nation’s credit base”: Hacker, Triumph, 361.
184to the head of the class: In this latter part of the chapter I draw extensively on Walter Licht, Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). Licht’s Industrializing, xiv, 102, 127, the Beards’ American Civilization, Vol. 2, 176, 206-08, and Phillips’s Cousins, 466-69, describe the extent of the country’s post-war growth.
185drew people to the land: Johnson’s Laws, 94, 100-02, reports the effects of the Homestead Act and the Land-Grant College Act.
185to conquer the continent: White’s Railroaded is a contrarian take on the growth of the railroads but is extremely well-informed. This passage draws on material from the first 60 pages or so. The Beards’ American Civilization, Vol. 2, 136-37, details the lavish government support, as does Hacker’s Triumph, 371. Phillips’s Cousins, 469, Bensel’s Yankee, 252, 308, and Licht’s Industrializing, 82, describe the growth of the network during the latter half of the century. White’s Railroaded, 393, and Lind’s Promise, 154, tell the tale of the bust later in the century. Finally, Lind’s Promise, 153, Licht’s Industrializing, 82, 152, McDougall’s Throes, 555, and Gordon’s Empire, 235-36, report the economic benefits of the new railway network.
187“the western front out on the Pacific”: Beard, American Civilization, Vol. 2, 135-36.
187A revolution swept: For many of the facts in this passage I turned to Licht’s Industrializing chapter “The Rise of Big Business.” Bensel’s Yankee, 249-53, and Gordon’s Empire, 232, cover the rise of American finance.
188the new breed: Hacker’s Triumph has a terrific treatment of Carnegie, 413-24. I also draw on Gordon’s Empire, 249, and Lind’s Promise, 163.
189outside the mainstream: My main source for the discussion of the travails of the post-war South is Licht’s Industrializing, 118-23.
191The top 1 percent: Licht’s Industrializing discusses income distribution, 183-85. Charles R. Morris’s The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution (New York: PublicAffairs, 2012) discusses mobility, 285.
191“not consciously aware”: Hacker, Triumph, 339.
192“prodigious industrial expansion”: Frayssé, Land, and Labor, 184.
192“the triumph of the northern bourgeoisie”: Howe, Political Culture, 297.
192certainly thought and said so: David Herbert Donald, “Getting Right with Lincoln,” The Atlantic, 1956, http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/95nov/lincoln/lincrite.htm.
194a natural enlistee to progressivism: Krannawitter’s Vindicating debunks the progressive case for Lincoln, 294-304.
CHAPTER 6
199Foreign visitors in: Morris’s Dawn has a good rundown of these quotes, 159-72.
200Striving is desirable: Charles Murray, In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government (San Francisco: ICS Press, 1994), 140-243, and Arthur C. Brooks, Gross National Happiness: Why Happiness Matters for America and How We Can Get More of It (New York: Basic Books, 2008), chapter seven.
201the sunny uplands: James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) has much of this data, 61-77.
201couldn’t and didn’t last: Luigi Zingales, A Capitalism for the People: Recapturing the Lost Genius of American Prosperity (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 110, makes this argument. Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better (New York: Dutton, 2011), makes the case for the “low hanging” thesis in chapter one.
202all advanced economies: Cowen, Stagnation, 64.
202all has not been wrack and ruin: Scott Winship, “Making Sense of Inequality,” National Review, August 13, 2012.
203trends in the middle and the bottom: Winship parses the data for male high-school graduates, “All Sorts.” Zingales’s Capitalism, 110, and Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill’s Creating an Opportunity Society (Washington D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 2009), 35, note the growing income gap between high-school and college graduates.
203most tendentious explanation: Winship’s “All Sorts” notes the income trends hold in other advanced countries. Wehner and Beschel in National Affairs note the same, as well as our steeply progressive tax system.
203attributed to globalization: Zingales’s Capitalism, 23, observes the effects o
f globalization. So does Haskins and Sawhill’s Creating, 33, pointing out that male college graduation rates have been stagnating.
204as fluid as we think: Scott Winship, “Mobility Impaired.”
204Out-of-wedlock childbearing: The New York Times reported on the new illegitimacy figures on February 17, 2012. The study When Marriage Disappears marshalls the evidence for the importance of marriage for the outcomes of children and demonstrates how old norms are increasingly the exclusive province of the college-educated. Brink Lindsey’s Human Capitalism: How Economic Growth Has Made Us Smarter—and More Unequal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), chapter six, and Zingales’s Capitalism, 163, note the divergent child-rearing practices by class.
206dropping out of the labor force: Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960–2010 (New York: Crown Forum, 2012), 170-81, and Haskins and Sawhill’s Creating, 43, discuss the decline of work among low-skilled males.
206The starkest indicator: “Differences in Life Expectancy Due to Race and Educational Differences Are Widening, and Many May Not Catch Up,” Health Affairs 31:8 (August 2012), 1803-13.
206photograph of Lincoln in 1846: Baker, “ ‘Not Much of Me.’ ”
209“the blue model”: Walter Russell Mead, “The Once and Future Liberalism,” The American Interest, March/April 2012.
211 “the banner State of the Union”: Burlingame, A Life, 95.
211escalator of educational attainment: Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, The Race between Education and Technology (Cambridge, MA: President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2008), document the slow-down in economic progress in their book-length study, 4-8, 324-26. Zingales’s Capitalism, 143, and Cowen’s Stagnation, chapter two, note the ineffectuality of the jump of education spending in recent decades. Finally, Lindsey’s Human, chapter seven, recounts the inadequacies of the current model of college.
212Funding should follow: Frederick M. Hess, “Does School Choice ‘Work’?” National Affairs 5 (Fall 2010), 35–53.
213“forestalled social dynamism”: Guelzo, Redeemer, 9.
213expanded inexorably: Nicholas Eberstadt, A Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement Epidemic (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2012). The information on food stamps is from one of my own columns, “The Rise of Food Stamp Nation,” National Review Online, July 10, 2012. Murray’s Coming Apart, 170, and Lindsey’s Human, chapter six, discuss the rise in usage of Social Security Disability Insurance.
214advent of the welfare state: The pensions for widows and orphans of the Civil War dead and for disabled veterans are sometimes interpreted as a precursor to the welfare state. They indeed became incredibly expansive in the decades after the war. But they applied to a class of people who had served the country, and they faded out with the passing of the veterans and their families.
215makes it impossible to build: White’s New Atlantis essay addresses this point.
216creating the Department of Agriculture: The language in the act creating the department can be found at the USDA National Agricultural Library, http://www.nal.usda.gov/lincolns-agricultural-legacy. A report by the non-profit The American Association for the Advancement of Science notes the decline in research funding, http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/fy2013/hist13pGDP.pdf.
217“By increasing total wealth”: Howe, Political Culture, 9. Sellers’s Market Revolution has the nineteenth century income-distribution numbers. The labor quote is from Taylor’s Transportation, 264.
217the occasional Irish joke: The count is from P. M. Zall, ed., Abe Lincoln Laughing (Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, 1995), index. Burlingame’s A Life, 413, Foner’s Fiery, 78-133, and Foner’s Free, 198, 257-59, are the sources of much of the information regarding the nativist and immigrant votes.
222same odor of elitism: Howe’s Political Culture, 37, has the Emerson put-down. Haskins and Sawhill’s Creating, 71, sets out the data on the effect of adherence to bourgeois norms. The Susan Mayer book is What Money Can’t Buy: Family Income and Children’s Life Chances, 2-12. The alcohol numbers come from Sellers’s Market Revolution, 259-65. The Yuval Levin quote comes from his excellent review of Murray’s Coming Apart in the Weekly Standard, March 19, 2012. Lindsey’s Human, chapter seven, discusses prescriptive parole, and any number of papers by Robert Rector make the case for work requirements across welfare programs and for a campaign of public suasion on illegitimacy. Finally, Baker’s “ ‘Not Much of Me’ ” notes the contrasting rustic and bourgeois cultures during Lincoln’s day.
225A vast apparatus of cultural uplift: Warren’s Youth, 79, 106, 167, describes Lincoln’s readers and quotes from them extensively. The dyspeptic quote is from Sellers’s Market Revolution, 365.
227bordered on the worshipful: I’m indebted here to the wonderful discussion of Lincoln and the Founders in Allen C. Guelzo’s Abraham Lincoln: As a Man of Ideas (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), chapter six.
232last spasm of the Civil War: I previously published this paragraph making this argument about the Civil Rights Act elsewhere. Gerard Alexander, “The Myth of the Racist Republicans,” Claremont Review of Books, IV:2 (Spring 2004).
Index
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Abe Lincoln Laughing (Zall), 217
Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Burlingame), 19n
“Abraham Lincoln and the Self-Made Myth” (Hofstadter), 14
Academically Adrift (Arum and Roksa), 212
Adams, Charles Francis, 8
Adams, John, 20
Adams, John Quincy, 60, 61, 85
agriculture, 21; Department of Agriculture, 216; Homestead Act, 177–79; Lincoln and, 91–92, 193; specialization, 45, 119–20, 121; subsistence farming, 21, 45, 119
Alexander, Gerard, 232–33
Alger, Horatio, 7
American Dream, 5, 16, 129, 198, 205–6, 240
Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Guelzo), 12n
American North: banking/currency reform, 174–75; as capitalist republic, 145, 168; Civil War and prosperity, 181–82; economic rise of, 120–21; immigration and, 168–69; industrialization, 168, 171–72; as laissez-faire haven, 179; manufacturing in, 171; population of, 168–69; railroads in, 171; slaves in, 136; strength in 1864, 167–68; wage labor in, 146–47
American Revolution, 73
American South: caste system, 5; Civil Rights Act and, 232; Confederacy income tax, 12, 180; Confederate Army, 181; cotton crop, 136, 170–71, 190; Declaration and, 11, 140–41; decline of New Orleans, 118–19; economic effect of war, 181, 189–90; economy of, 149–50; expansionist goals, 137, 159–60, 170; fear of free states, 169; federalism in, 11; filibustering, 137; homestead bills opposed, 178; industrialization, 169–70, 190–91; inflation, 180–81; manufacturing, 171; on Northern capitalism, 146; political power, 136, 182; population, 168–69; post-bellum decline, 189–90; racial oppression in, 190; reconstruction, 183, 190; rejoining mainstream, 201; romantic image, 148–49; secession, 5, 11, 170, 181, 198, 228, 237; sharecropping, 190; slavery, 5, 11, 136–37, 145, 147–51, 158–59, 169, 182; Southern Democrats, 11; Tariff of Abominations, 106–7; transportation in, 150, 181; war socialism, 179–81
Armstrong, John, 126
Arnavon, Cyrille, 192
Arum, Richard, 212
Baker, Jean, 30, 206, 225
banking, 15, 59, 105; Bank of the United States, 61–62, 91, 105; Bank War, 103, 105; Jacksonian opposition, 60–61, 87–88, 105, 175; Legal Tender Act and, 174–75; Lincoln and, 103–6, 114, 174–75, 193; national banks, 175, 187–88; Whig party support, 61–62, 91
Basler, Roy P., 2n
Beard, Charles and Mary, 187
Bell, Alexander Graham, 191
Bensel, Richard Franklin, 174, 179, 180, 187
Benton, Thomas Hart, 114
Biddle, Nicholas, 62
Birch, Jonathan, 152, 153
Black Hawk War, 3, 46, 70
Blackstone, Sir William, 51, 75
Bliss, J. S., 236–37
Bloomberg, Michael, 222
Boritt, Gabor, 90, 91, 103, 121
Breckinridge, John, 170
Breese, Sidney, 110
“Broadway Pageant, A” (Whitman), 167
Brockman, John, 75
Brooks, Arthur, 200
Brownson, Orestes, 146
Bryan, William Jennings, 193–94
Buchanan, James, 178
Buckley, William F., Jr., 239
Burlingame, Michael, 19n, 40, 78
Bush, George W., 209
Bushnell, Horace, 95
Butler, William, 48, 78
Calhoun, John C., 53, 54, 140
Campbell, James, 176
Canisius, Theodore, 219
capitalism, American, 87–123; Declaration as foundation, 143; industrial capitalism, 191–92; infrastructure and, 96; labor theory of value, 90–91; Lincoln and, 103–7, 111–13, 145, 148, 168, 198; in the North, 145, 168; as opportunity, 114–16; post-bellum America and, 185–87, 191–92; railroads and, 119; South and, 146–47, 168; Wayland’s ideas, 90–91; Whig party and, 90–92, 114–15
Carey, Henry Charles, 90, 91
Carnegie, Andrew, 15, 188–89
Chapman, A. H., 29, 37
Chase, Salmon P., 168, 174
Chicago, Illinois, 120, 135, 185
Churchill, Winston, 228
cities, 21, 118–19, 120, 185
Civil Rights Act, 232
Civil War: Anaconda Plan, 168; bond drives, 188; casualties, 181; Confederate Army, 181; federal spending, 184; industrialized North triumphs over agrarian South, 168; Lincoln on purpose of, 2; Lincoln’s address to 166th Ohio Regiment, 1–3; Northern prosperity and, 181–82; Southern economic-political power and, 179–81, 182; tariffs levied for, 176; tax levied for, 11–12, 176