Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (4 page)

POLITICAL VISION

Behind Lincoln’s appetite for political power lay much more than the drive for personal recognition. His ambition was nourished by a vision of what the nation should be. Lincoln issued no early, comprehensive statement of political faith; but his election addresses and his performance in state and national legislatures offered what amounted to a largely consistent political program, reflecting a clear philosophy and ethical stance. At its heart was a belief in meritocracy: in the right of all individuals, through their industry, enterprise, and self-discipline, to rise in an increasingly market-oriented society. Essential to his hopes for the poor were the nation’s economic development and material advance. These were to be promoted and nurtured by an interventionist, forward-looking government, doing “for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do,
at all,
or can not,
so well do,
for themselves—in their separate, and individual capacities.”
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The logic of Lincoln’s economic thought was a social and moral order at odds with slavery. It was an order whose well-being, he believed, was protected and enhanced by a Union of states loyal to the Founders’ vision of republican liberty.

Well before the family trekked from Indiana, Lincoln’s experience of personal struggle had fused with the political prescriptions he read in the
Louisville Journal
and other anti-Jacksonian newspapers to give definition to his thought. In Henry Clay’s “American System”—comprising a national bank, a protective tariff, and better roads and waterways (“internal improvements”) for transporting goods—Lincoln identified the essential means of the young republic’s economic development. Taken as a whole, the program of the emerging Whig party would speed the transition from a subsistence to a market economy and draw ever more farmers and mechanics into the newly emerging commercial and industrial order. When Lincoln arrived in central Illinois he saw in the richness of the soil, the abundance of the state’s natural resources, and the burgeoning immigration of southern-born and Yankee settlers the potential for formidable growth. His earliest political speech, at Decatur, dwelt on the need for improved waterborne transportation. In his first bid for office, two years later, the main burden of his address to Sangamon County’s electors was the need to improve the region’s poor communications: How else could they sell their surplus meat and cereals, and acquire the manufactured goods they needed? Presenting himself as a knowledgeable river pilot and adopting a tone of financial prudence, Lincoln commended the plan of clearing the Sangamon River, by which New Salem’s commercial future might be assured.
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Over the next decade ambitious internal improvements sat at the heart of Lincoln’s political agenda, the means by which he expected Illinois as a whole to achieve new levels of prosperity, increase its land values, and pull in new settlers. He told Joshua Speed he wanted to be “the DeWitt Clinton of Illinois”: the New York state governor’s celebrated Erie Canal could surely be copied further west.
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The special session of the state legislature during the winter of 1835
–
36 proved a watershed. Legislators, faced with a plan to build the Illinois–Michigan Canal, to link the Mississippi with the Great Lakes, the Erie Canal, and the Atlantic, authorized a $500,000 loan. Previously Lincoln had called for such projects to be supported by federal aid, raised by the sale of public lands; others had insisted on private funding alone. Now, carried along on the swelling speculative tide of the 1830s and alert to the grandiose projects under way in other states, and with private capital unforthcoming, they not only agreed to the principle of state-level funding, but in the subsequent Assembly sanctioned a massive railroad and river scheme to supplement the canal project. Two trunk roads, six spurs, and a variety of smaller projects—intended to secure the broadest possible base of political support—elicited a government loan of over $10 million. All was agreed without detailed estimates or proper surveys. Roads not only would be run at a debt-clearing profit, but would increase the price of land, allowing the state to sell off its domain, not least to foreign capitalists. As the party with most of the votes in the Assembly, the Democrats (notably Stephen A. Douglas) were the prime legislative movers, but Lincoln, the Whig leader, and his Sangamon colleagues gave support at every turn.

Then came the financial panic of 1837, the collapse of land sales, falling prices and wages, and bankruptcies. The so-called Illinois System shuddered as revenues fell. Lincoln, determined to prevent its collapse, considered new ways of financing it. In particular, he came up with an imaginative if unrealistic plan to buy all federally owned land in the state at a discount and sell it at a profit to settlers, using the proceeds to pay off the debt: he secured the Assembly’s support, but Washington was not interested. He also endorsed a graduated land tax to replace the current levies, which were quite unrelated to land values. He thought the measure would be acceptable to the people “because it does not increase the tax upon the ‘
many
poor
’ but upon the ‘
wealthy
few.
’ ” The Illinois public, however, facing a deepening depression in 1839, turned increasingly against the system, and many previous political supporters jumped ship. Lincoln, though, remained steadfast, steeled by economic conviction and a sense of moral obligation. Even when it was plain that the plan must sink, he persisted in trying “to save something to the State, from the general wreck,” particularly the canal project. But he failed to convince the vast majority of legislators, who knew their constituents had no stomach for adding to the state’s financial obligations. It would take Illinois forty years to pay off the debt on a project of which almost nothing except the canal was saved.
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Lincoln’s advocacy of internal improvements was interwoven with his staunch defense of banks. Like Clay, he championed federal control of the banking system. However, after President Jackson’s successful assault on the national bank, the Bank of the United States, Lincoln put the banking needs of his state before party loyalty. When Illinois legislators considered the incorporation of the State Bank in 1835, Lincoln cast his vote with pro-bank Democrats to secure what he judged an essential mechanism of the new capitalist order. A well-regulated bank would provide a sound, elastic currency, protecting the public against the extreme prescriptions of the hard-money men on one side and the paper inflationists on the other; it would be a safe depository for public funds and provide the credit mechanisms needed to sustain state improvements; it would bring an end to extortionate money-lending. These advantages, he believed, would benefit all Illinoisans. While nostalgic agrarians, mainly hard-money Democrats, saw banks as a symbol of an avaricious new order, serving only politicians, bankers, and their rich friends, Lincoln was convinced that the “honest . . . farmer and mechanic” benefited as much as the plutocrat. In a speech to the Illinois House in January 1837, responding to the anti-bank forces’ call for an investigation into the management of the Springfield corporation, Lincoln deftly represented the attack on the bank as “exclusively the work of politicians; a set of men who have interests aside from the interests of the people, and who, to say the most of them, are, taken as a mass, at least one long step removed from honest men. I say this with the greater freedom because, being a politician myself, none can regard it as personal.” By contrast, ordinary Illinoisans found no fault in the bank. “It has doubled the prices of the products of their farms,” he claimed (with more political than economic acuity), “and filled their pockets with a sound circulating medium.”
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Westerners’ animus against bankers turned more deadly when the banks suspended specie payments after the panic of 1837 and when temporary resumption was succeeded by a further suspension in 1839. Lincoln fought as tenaciously to defend the State Bank as he did the improvements scheme, whose fate was bound up with the credit system. But the further devaluation of its paper, mortgage foreclosures, and the calling in of loans only reduced its political chances. The Democrats sought to make the bank resume specie payments to its suffering note-holders. Lincoln and the pro-bank Whigs knew as well as their enemies that compulsory resumption could prove mortal, for the insatiable specie demands of all the western states would devour its coin. A moment of embarrassing theater offered a measure of Lincoln’s determination. To stop the Democrats prematurely adjourning the House, which would bring to an end the period of suspended specie payments agreed upon by the previous Assembly, Whigs stayed away to prevent a quorum. Lincoln and a few colleagues watched as the arrival of halt and lame Democrats made the body quorate. To take the numbers under the voting threshold again, the clutch of Whigs tried to leave. When the doorkeeper prevented their exit, they jumped out the window. But their presence had been recorded. Adjournment, credit resumption, and Democratic ridicule followed. Lincoln, the respecter of law and constitutional order, who “deprecated everything that savored of the revolutionary,” always regretted the action.
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This was not Lincoln’s last effort for the State Bank, but he could be in little doubt about the strength of popular prejudice against the banking system. The electoral experience of 1840 offered little encouragement. Much of the Whig effort for William Henry Harrison in the effervescent Log Cabin campaign aimed to cloak, not delineate, policy positions; but Lincoln, by contrast, set out to address and clarify a substantive issue: federal banking. In speech after speech, he tirelessly argued that a national bank would be a better fiscal agent for the Washington government than the system of independent federal depositories proposed by Jackson’s Democratic successor, Martin Van Buren. Despite a few populist touches, he took a reasoned and technical, if essentially derivative, approach, stressing the hazardous, deflationary impact of the reduced money supply that would follow the Democrats’ scheme, the disabling effect on the purchasing power of poor farmers and laborers, and the superiority of a central bank in maintaining “a sound and uniform state of currency.” Lincoln’s paltry reward for taking banks seriously, however, was defeat for the Whig ticket of presidential electors, as well as a drop in his own personal vote for reelection to the Assembly.
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The State Bank finally failed in 1842. But neither that nor the clattering debris of the Illinois System could shake Lincoln’s faith in the potential of the credit system and the “transportation revolution” to transform the lives and hopes of ordinary Americans. He blamed not a flawed Whig vision for the hard times after 1837, but the misguided policies of the national administrations. Even so, by 1843 improvements and banking had become electoral liabilities. When setting out the Whigs’ position, in his “Address to the People of Illinois” and in his campaign speeches in 1844, he gave priority instead to the third element of the presidential candidate’s American System: the protective tariff.

Once more Lincoln’s preoccupation with American economic development and opening doors of individual advancement shines through. So, indeed, does his deeper commitment to the commercial-industrial future than to the agrarian past and present. Tariff walls would encourage nascent and potential manufacturing industries, whose growth would provide Americans with cheaper goods and whose employees would increase domestic demand for agricultural produce, to the benefit of farmers. Lincoln the political campaigner of 1843–44 gave his arguments a populist, even chauvinist, spin. As a revenue-raising measure, the tariff, he maintained, was cheaper than the proposed alternative, a direct tax system, which would cover the land “with assessors and collectors, going forth like swarms of Egyptian locusts, devouring every blade of grass and other green thing.” It was chiefly the foreign manufacturer who suffered from tariff duties, along with the wealthy consumer of foreign luxuries (“those whose pride, whose abundance of means, prompt them to . . . strut in British cloaks, and coats, and pantaloons”). The ordinary farmer, on the other hand, “who never wore, nor never expects to wear, a single yard of British goods in his whole life,” would benefit.
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A writer to the Democratic
Illinois State Register
drolly represented Lincoln as floundering when he was asked why the “high pressure tariff made every thing . . . cheaper” for the farmer. Lincoln probably judged it a palpable hit: after the election he took stock, read more deeply (notably the writings of the high protectionist Henry C. Carey), and conceded, in a set of private notes, that the burden of the tariff was equally felt by the consumer, the producer, and the merchant. Even so, Lincoln argued, the policy of protection was the one best placed to achieve what he saw as “a most worthy object of any good government,” namely to secure “to each labourer the whole product of his labour, or as nearly as possible.” Scripture fused with classical economics (the labor theory of value) to persuade Lincoln that it was “wrong” to tolerate economic arrangements where “
some
have laboured, and
others
have, without labour, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits.” Only “
useful
labour” deserved reward; “
useless
labour,” which included the unnecessary transporting of cotton, wool, iron, and other American raw materials to overseas markets and their return as manufactured goods, was a “heavy pensioner” upon it. Removing protection would increase the parasitic impediments to righteous labor and proportionately “must produce want and ruin among our people.”
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Lincoln’s own experience of getting on in life tended to sharpen rather than to blur his meritocratic vision, though the process was complex. He was subject to various influences which, unrestrained, could have estranged him completely from the constituency of farmers and ordinary folk on whom his political progress depended. In association first with John T. Stuart and then with Stephen T. Logan, perhaps the foremost lawyer in the county, he sharpened his professional skills, won prestige on the judicial circuit, and acquired financial stability and status. Marriage to Mary Todd in 1842, connecting him with one of eastern Kentucky’s most glittering families, confirmed his ascent into the respectable middle class. He paid off his debts and moved with his wife and infant son from rented accommodation into a modest house of their own, one which ten years later they were able to develop into one of the most substantial and handsome houses in Springfield. Through his law practice and political standing, Lincoln the solid burgher became the associate of bankers, large landowners, cattle kings, speculators, and the professional elite. His determination to meet the interest on the growing state debt after 1836 led him to subordinate the interests of pioneers and ordinary workingmen, who wanted cheap land and low taxes, to the needs of the creditor class and the developers of public works. By endorsing the policies of distribution (of the proceeds of the public domain) and increased taxation, and by defending the State Bank, he exposed himself to the charge of turning his back on his own kind. When he contended for the Whig nomination for the congressional seat in 1843, he discovered that, whatever his circumstances when he arrived in the state (a “friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working on a flatboat—at ten dollars per month”), he was now “put down . . . as the candidate of pride, wealth, and arristocratic family distinction.”
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